• Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I mean there’s a difference between normal steak and wagu too.

    Like at my Walmart steak is selling for ~$10/lbs, and ground beef is like $6 or $7 per pound. Right now beyond ground beef is selling for ~$11/lbs.

    And it doesn’t taste the same. So you will actually have to hit that $3/lbs mark your talking about before it becomes a good option. Because pork chops are already only $4/lbs

    • yunxiaoli
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      2 days ago

      But it inevitably will become that cheap, as your steak and pork become infinitely, exponentially more expensive over time.

      We’re already massively subsidizing meat production and we’re entirely ignoring the majority of meats costs in calculating prices.

      Those costs are going to keep getting higher, however, and those subsidies won’t be able to last even in a wealthy monetary issues country like the US. Unless you completely abandon capitalism, real beef isnt going to be a thing for middle class or poor people within 20 years, and it won’t be a thing period within a hundred.

      However the tech to print meat will get smaller and cheaper over time and the seed ingredients are already cheaper than the land maintenance and feed for real livestock. Hell it’s cheaper than most inputs for anything except corn and wheat. There will be a time in the next few decades where middle class people in smart countries will have a meat printer at home to make whatever they want for dinner and shopping for meat will be too prohibitively expensive for anyone but the rich.

      Climate change is already causing crop failures and water distribution fights, and quite frankly the meat industry doesn’t have enough money to fight the climate on this issue.

        • FatCrab@lemmy.one
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          1 day ago

          First, that article literally says the process engineering analysis that paints a very dire picture of the scalability of cultured meat is difficult to find, so maybe cool it on “you should have known better.” However, it also is clear that there are A LOT of technical hurdles to overcome for lab meat, but it’s no more dead end than fusion research. It’s an important, arguably vital, area of study and research that needs to be seriously invested in so that we can one day introduce it to the toolkit of sustainable support for human society and life. While your sources have convinced me that lab meat is currently nowhere near scalable and likely will take significant developments in the culture process and even meat cells, I think your aggressive and extremely skeptical take on its value at all is more than a bit silly.

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 day ago

            fusion at least doesn’t require breaking laws of thermodynamics to work and has stable funding from militaries of nations that field nuclear weapons. funding for synthetic meat depends on what bad scifi current oligarchs were fans of 30 years ago

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I’m not so sure; I seem to remember lots of things that were dismissed as not worthy of thinking about, won’t have any effect on culture, etc.

          I’m not saying the claims of “techbros” are to be taken without evidence, I’m saying going maximalist “it will never happen” is quite a take. I’ve heard that about self-driving cars and AI. These things are also not all the way there yet (certainly not AGI), but to dismiss them out of hand? I would never bet on that, and the fact is both are already seeing their impacts.