What do you think of imitation and lab-grown meats? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago by monovergent@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn't meat, I'd have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of "meat" I could have for the rest of my life.

Well, maybe I'd miss bacon.

I've yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don't see much wrong with it as long as it's sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn't have anything you wouldn't expect in a normal piece of meat.

Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I'd no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I'll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Lab grown meat still requires live animals. You still need to collect stem cells to start a culture and you also need fetal bovine serum (blood plasma from baby cows) to keep the cells healthy.

We currently DO NOT have a way to culture mammalian cells without animal blood plasma. We currently DO NOT have a way of infinitely culturing mammalian biomass from a single cell sample. So lab grown meat still needs animals to be raised in captivity and slaughtered, just fewer. It's not vegan for that reason and won't be for the foreseeable future unless massive breakthroughs happen in multiple different fields.

IMO a better path to explore would just be to figure out which exact chemicals give meat their flavour and directly synthesize them from raw materials. Have something like a completely artificial bacon powder you can add to a vegan protein source and completely cut out anything to do with animals. We can make every other scent and flavour artificially, why not meat? And it's not even that hard, a science YouTuber can do it.

this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025

60 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

50297 readers

279 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS