[R2D2]

Voted no. I gave up eating meat early this year. My diet is now restricted to eggs. I won't consume meat only because it is lab grown.

[GTO]

Due to personal beliefs & reasons, I am a strict vegetarian (no eggs either). I would 100% give lab-grown meat a shot. If it's tasty and no animals are killed, I'll dive deep into it as I'm a big foodie.

That said, the problem with Indian restaurants - especially the shady ones - is you don't know who to trust. Many of them will pass off real meat as lab-grown meat. Hence, I will either just eat it at trustworthy restaurants (e.g. Taj, Copper Chimney, McDonalds) or buy it myself for home cooking.

Such news really excites me. Now, can someone come out with something similar for eggs? I would really love a lab-developed egg omelette on Sunday!

Originally Posted by Cessna182

I have tried Beyond Meat and it tastes like meat.

Originally Posted by ValarMorghulis

I've tried three plant based fake meats:
1. Impossible food burger
2. Beyond meat burger
3. Moving mountains burger

Oh man, this is so good to read! I LOVED, devoured, cherished & relished the "impossible" burger at Burger King. It is easily one of the Top 5 meals I have had anywhere on the planet. Hope it comes to India soon . I loved it so much that before catching my flight home, I drove to a Burger King and gobbled two of them down.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Sheel

The feed which is provided to broiler chicken is not healthy to say the least. Those who can, do not prefer to eat broiler and always prefer country chicken, for eggs too.

Taste is different and once you have country chicken, it is difficult to eat broiler, especially if it is your normal curry type dish.

I am above 50 and grew up around farms, which means I mostly ate naati (country) chicken in the first 20 years. As a kid I often had to chase and catch the chicken and handover to elders to kill it.

However, most of us switched to broiler by the 90s because it has much tender meat and quick to cook. These days I avoid country chickens as I find them harder to chew. Then there is fighter chicken meat, which is an acquired taste, as they are grown on special diet of rice and ghee and have too much muscle.

The chicken breeds vary a lot across states, so it is pointless comparing. My own state has special breeds of heavy weight chickens that weigh 3-5 kgs. But I avoid them while buying and stick to white broiler chicken breed within 1.7Kg only.

[Vid6639]

For a vegeterian like me this is a real conundrum. The main reason for not eating non veg was killing of animals. I was ok with eggs but could not cross that barrier.

Now, with lab grown meat, that line has been blurred. When no animal has been killed and it is grown in a lab, the reason to not eat is very weak.

Though there will be a mental barrier still when eating , it's going to be a smaller hurdle to cross.

Damn, this really puts veggie folks in a fix.

[Cessna182]

I think it is important to mention that there are two kinds of products in this vegetarian meat category.

1. Stuff like Impossible meat is purely vegetarian with synthetic molecules to match the texture.
2. Stuff that's grown using meat cells in a lab. The kind of meat being reported in the article comes from cells originally harvested from an animal. Hence, it cannot be vegetarian. It is surely synthetic but I don't think even one cell being from an animal can allow it to be vegetarian.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Cessna182

It is surely synthetic but I don't think even one cell being from an animal can allow it to be vegetarian.

I think you are splitting hair if you start going in this direction. Plants and human have common ancestors, if you go back in the evolutionary tree. Most draw the line at killing/cruelty, which is a sensible line.

[tsk1979]

Reminds me of this story. Long read, but worth it in this context

>> The food of the Gods

It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects of human nature that are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a congressional committee. But I am afraid that they have to be faced; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped away, and this is one of them.

You and I, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of carnivores. I see from your expressions that most of you don't recognize the term. Well, that's not surprising - it comes from a language that has been obsolete for two thousand years. Perhaps I had better avoid euphemisms and be brutally frank, even if I have to use words that are never heard in polite society. I apologize in advance to anyone I may offend.

Until a few centuries ago, the favorite food of almost all men was meat - the flesh of once living animals. I'm not trying to turn your stomachs; this is a simple statement of fact, which you can check in any history book....

Why, certainly, Mr. Chairman, I'm quite prepared to wait until Senator Irving feels better. We professionals sometimes forget how laymen may react to statements like that. At the same time, I must warn the committee that there is very much worse to come. If any of you gentlemen are at all squeamish, I suggest you follow the Senator before it's too late....

Well, if I may continue. Until modern times, all food fell into two categories. Most of it was produced from plants - cereals, fruits, plankton, algae, and other forms of vegetation. It's hard for us to realize that the vast majority of our ancestors were farmers, winning food from land or sea by primitive and often back- breaking techniques; but that is the truth.

The second type of food, if I may return to this unpleasant subject, was meat, produced from a relatively small number of animals. You may be familiar with some of them - cows, pigs, sheep, whales. Most people - 1 am sorry to stress this, but the fact is beyond dispute - preferred meat to any other food, though only the wealthiest were able to indulge this appetite. To most of mankind, meat was a rare and occasional delicacy in a diet that was more than ninety-per-cent vegetable.

If we look at the matter calmly and dispassionately - as I hope Senator Irving is now in a position to do - we can see that meat was bound to be rare and expensive, for its production is an extremely inefficient process. To make a kilo of meat, the animal concerned had to eat at least ten kilos of vegetable food - very often food that could have been consumed directly by human beings. Quite apart from any consideration of aesthetics, this state of affairs could not be tolerated after the population explosion of the twentieth century. Every man who ate meat was condemning ten or more of his fellow humans to starvation....

Luckily for all of us, the biochemists solved the problem; as you may know, the answer was one of the countless by-products of space research. All food - animal or vegetable - is built up from a very few common elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, traces of sulphur and phosphorus - these half-dozen elements, and a few others, combine in an almost infinite variety of ways to make up every food that man has ever eaten or ever will eat. Faced with the problem of colonizing the Moon and planets, the biochemists of the twenty-first century discovered how to synthesize any desired food from the basic raw materials of water, air, and rock. It was the greatest, and perhaps the most important, achievement in the history of science. But we should not feel too proud of it. The vegetable kingdom had beaten us by a billion years.

The chemists could now synthesize any conceivable food, whether it had a counterpart in nature or not. Needless to say, there were mistakes - even disasters. Industrial empires rose and crashed; the switch from agriculture and animal husbandry to the giant automatic processing plants and omniverters of today was often a painful one. But it had to be made, and we are the better for it. The danger of starvation has been banished forever, and we have a richness and variety of food that no other age has ever known.

In addition, of course, there was a moral gain. We no longer murder millions of living creatures, and such revolting institutions as the slaughterhouse and the butcher shop have vanished from the face of the Earth. It seems incredible to us that even our ancestors, coarse and brutal though they were, could ever have tolerated such obscenities.

And yet - it is impossible to make a clean break with the past. As I have already remarked, we are carnivores; we inherit tastes and appetites that have been acquired over a million years of time. Whether we like it or not, only a few years ago some of our great- grandparents were enjoying the flesh of cattle and sheep and pigs - when they could get it. And we still enjoy it today....

Oh dear, maybe Senator Irving had better stay outside from now on. Perhaps I should not have been quite so blunt. What I meant, of course, was that many of the synthetic foods we now eat have the same formula as the old natural products; some of them, indeed, are such exact replicas that no chemical or other test could reveal any difference. This situation is logical and inevitable; we manufacturers simply took the most popular pre- synthetic foods as our models, and reproduced their taste and texture.

Of course, we also created new names that didn't hint of an anatomical or zoological origin, so that no one would be reminded of the facts of life. When you go into a restaurant, most of the words you'll find on the menu have been invented since the beginning of the twenty-first century, or else adapted from French originals that few people would recognize. If you ever want to find your threshold of tolerance, you can try an interesting but highly unpleasant experiment. The classified section of the Library of Congress has a large number of menus from famous restaurants - yes, and White House banquets - going back for five hundred years. They have a crude, dissecting-room frankness that makes them almost unreadable. I cannot think of anything that reveals more vividly the gulf between us and our ancestors of only a few generations ago....

Yes, Mr. Chairman - I am coming to the point; all this is highly relevant, however disagreeable it may be. I am not trying to spoil your appetites; I am merely laying the groundwork for the charge I wish to bring against my competitor, Triplanetary Food Corporation. Unless you understand this background, you may think that this is a frivolous complaint inspired by the admittedly serious losses my firm has sustained since Ambrosia Plus came on the market.

New foods, gentlemen, are invented every week. It is hard to keep track of them. They come and go like women's fashions, and only one in a thousand becomes a permanent addition to the menu. It is extremely rare for one to hit the public fancy overnight, and I freely admit that the Ambrosia Plus line of dishes has been the greatest success in the entire history of food manufacture. You all know the position: everything else has been swept off the market.

Naturally, we were forced to accept the challenge. The biochemists of my organization are as good as any in the solar system, and they promptly got to work on Ambrosia Plus. I am not giving away any trade secrets when I tell you that we have tapes of practically every food, natural or synthetic, that has ever been eaten by mankind - right back to exotic items that you've never heard of, like fried squid, locusts in honey, peacocks' tongues, Venu- sian polypod. . . . Our enormous library of flavors and textures is our basic stock in trade, as it is with all firms in the business. From it we can select and mix items in any conceivable combination; and usually we can duplicate, without too much trouble, any product that our competitors put out.

But Ambrosia Plus had us baffled for quite some time. Its protein-fat breakdown classified it as a straightforward meat, without too many complications - yet we couldn't match it exactly. It was the first time my chemists had failed; not one of them could explain just what gave the stuff its extraordinary appeal - which, as we all know, makes every other food seem insipid by comparison. As well it might. . . but I am getting ahead of myself. Very shortly, Mr. Chairman, the president of Triplanetary Foods will be appearing before you - rather reluctantly, I'm sure.

He will tell you that Ambrosia Plus is synthesized from air, water, limestone, sulphur, phosphorus, and the rest. That will be perfectly fine, but it will be the least important part of the story. For we have now discovered his secret - which, like most secrets, is very simple once you know it.

I really must congratulate my competitor. He has at last made available unlimited quantities of what is, from the nature of things, the ideal food for mankind. Until now, it has been in extremely short supply, and therefore all the more relished by the few connoisseurs who could obtain it. Without exception, they have sworn that nothing else can remotely compare with it.

Yes, Triplanetary's chemists have done a superb technical job. Now you have to resolve the moral and philosophical issues.

When I began my evidence, I used the archaic word "carnivore." Now I must introduce you to another: I'll spell it out the first time: C-A-N-N-I-B-A-L....

[digitalnirvana]

@GTO & @Vid6639 - regarding your ethical dilemma of lab grown meat being actually "vegetarian" or not, @Cessna182 has explained it perfectly.

The only difference between lab grown meat and farm reared meat is that you don't have to kill a fully formed living animal. So it is not a "meat-like" vegetarian substitute, its actually meat. But because no animal is killed, it makes it ethically okay for even vegetarians to consume... I think.

Also, if being vegetarians you (like me) eat cheese, that too involves killing of baby calves to procure the rennet. I hope this too moves to a lab grown substitute soon.

I think going forward lab grown or cultured meat will become the primary source of cheap and easily accessible protein. There is really no other way to feed the huge population explosion we're heading towards.

Real fish & meat will become an expensive fine dining option. To be consumed as a delicacy at a 5 star restaurant. Like caviar perhaps.

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by GTO

I would really love a lab-developed egg omelette on Sunday!

I don't know about India, but here the eggs you get are unfertilized. So its like having milk. Infact better than milk. No calf is starved of their mothers milk

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by tsk1979

I don't know about India, but here the eggs you get are unfertilized. So its like having milk. Infact better than milk. No calf is starved of their mothers milk

Its the same in India. So we're eating hen periods essentially.

I think the problem is that battery farmed hens have a very poor quality of life, stacked in cages one on top of the other, covered in poop and unable to move. They resort to pecking themselves which is why their beaks are blunted.

Free range eggs are a myth in India.

Still, its most definitely better than meat or dairy.

[mazda4life]

Originally Posted by Vid6639

Damn, this really puts veggie folks in a fix.

I would still be wary to eat as the original cells for the lab grown meat is still from an animal , quick extract from the article on Guardian 'The Singapore Food Agency has given regulatory approval to Eat Just’s “chicken bites”, grown from the cells of a chicken that’s still flapping its wings...'more at https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ltured-protein

[Oxy]

Now we have artificial meat from human feces. What has the world come to?

https://youtu.be/lXrrrZ3llNw

[AnandB]

If it becomes as good as the chicken we eat, sure.

[srishiva]

Originally Posted by Cessna182

I think it is important to mention that there are two kinds of products in this vegetarian meat category.

1. Stuff like Impossible meat is purely vegetarian with synthetic molecules to match the texture.
2. Stuff that's grown using meat cells in a lab. The kind of meat being reported in the article comes from cells originally harvested from an animal. Hence, it cannot be vegetarian. It is surely synthetic but I don't think even one cell being from an animal can allow it to be vegetarian.

I dont think you could add the word synthetic to everything. Is growing cells in lab synthetic ? not sure. For me synthetic is harvesting the common elements (carbo, hydrogen etc) and creating something.

I agree meat grown using animal cells is not as pure as vegetarian meat burgers. I think if they can provide the nutrients that meat provides but with same taste and texture as meat for the people who eat meat, it will take care of our environment.

[dragonfire]

In meat what matters is the texture. Texture and taste differ from which part of the carcass it is harvested from. If the lab created meat is going to feel like sausage or ham, then no. For ex, a shoulder cut is different from a shank. Eating a rib-eye steak is different from eating a sirloin steak.

If we are talking about making Indian beef curry, yes, the difference between the cuts are fairly insignificant as we anyway mask most of the taste with our masalas.