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by cheese_please
1883 days ago
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While I definitely understand your concern, I also think we can see this as a fascinating opportunity to improve the nutritional value of meat. These muscle cells in culture will generally speaking continue to produce the proteins, ECM components, etc. that they normally do, but we can also take advantage of genetic manipulation, metabolic engineering, and nutrition engineering to make them achieve more. A paper came out last year (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671762...) in which mammalian cells (bovine primary and immortalized murine muscle cells) were modified to produce plant proteins without loss of phenotype. From the abstract: "... to endogenously produce the antioxidant carotenoids phytoene, lycopene and β-carotene. These phytonutrients offer general nutritive value and protective effects against diseases associated with red and processed meat consumption, and so offer a promising proof-of-concept for nutritional engineering in cultured meat." It may also be worth mentioning that cultured meat offers other potential gains in the arena of human health -- no need for antibiotics in a sterile manufacturing setting (so not contributing to antibiotic resistance), vanishingly low risk of foodborne illnesses and novel viruses like covid-19, etc.. |
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"Improving the nutritional value" is exactly what I am railing against. The idea that we understand human nutrition in any quantitative way is not realistic. It involves attempting to reduce complex systems to a small set of things that we can understand (making the system more "legible") is dangerous and represents a huge failure of what James C. Scott calls "high modernism".
By the time that we figure out that one of the nutrients presented is harmful unless it is accompanied by mediators naturally present in real foods it will be too late to fix these processes.