[lockhouse]

If we weren’t meant to eat animals then why are they made of meat?

Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition. The problem is that a lot of human diets go to heavy on the animals. I know that you can replace animal protein in your diet with several plant based supplements, but that is far from ideal or natural.

[zvmaz]

> Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition

There are millions of vegetarians and vegans around the world.

[adrian_b]

I happen to be a vegan and I have no intention of ever switching back to eating animal food, but being vegan comes with significant disadvantages.

I do not consider that buying plant protein extracts that are five times more expensive than chicken meat is an acceptable way of being vegan.

If that is excluded, then very few possibilities remain for ensuring an adequate daily protein intake without a simultaneous energy intake that would make me gain weight very quickly.

The consequence is that a fraction of my daily food menu is pretty much fixed, with little variation from day to day. The remainder of the food, which is chosen from various vegetables and fruits with little energy content, can be very varied, but nonetheless, on average what I eat as a vegan is noticeably less varied than before, because in comparison with a diet that includes animal food there are many constraints for ensuring enough proteins, vitamins and minerals, which limit the free choice of food and which require some planing of what to eat.

While this does not really bother me, there are many people who, especially when young, would not find acceptable to have to deal with such constraints.

[zvmaz]

Interesting, thanks. Lab grown meat has been authorized in the U.S. and already served in a restaurant in San Francisco [1]. If you have the chance to consume lab grown meat, would that be an option for you?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cultivated-meat-grown-in-a-lab/

[adrian_b]

In theory, I would find lab grown meat as a perfectly acceptable food.

In practice, it would very hard for any company which makes any kind of highly processed food to make me trust their products, unless they would be extremely transparent and they would disclose their production process with a lot of details.

Obviously, for a new kind of food the producer might want to keep secret many details, but that would not be acceptable for me. There are many things that I buy without caring much about how they are made, but for anything that I introduce in my body I have to know the exact chemical composition and also the manufacturing process, to be able to assess its safety. If I could afford my own analytical lab, I would not care much about what the producer publishes, but as it is I need to see credible disclosures about everything that influences what ends in the sold product.

The second problem, after having adequate information about any kind of food, is that I would not buy any kind of staple food unless it is either produced locally or else it can be imported from many different countries. The rules for something essential like meat are obviously not the same as for a candy bar or for an exotic fruit, which are optional food items.

For a non-US citizen, to become dependent on some food produced in USA would be extremely stupid, because in recent years USA has demonstrated repeatedly that they can stop exporting any product at any time, despite any prior commitments or declarations, whenever they feel like it.

Before successfully switching to a vegan diet I would have been much more interested in news about lab-grown meat, but now, after managing to completely substitute meat, even if with the price of less varied menus, I would be much less enthusiastic about it.

I am skeptical that lab-grown meat will be produced with acceptable efficiency in the near future, by using the current methods. Acceptable efficiency implies a cost similar to chicken meat.

On the contrary, I believe that some kind of lab-grown food will become dominant in the future, but in a more distant future, perhaps a century from now.

The most efficient way to make food would be to capture the solar energy with photovoltaic cells and use it to reduce the carbon dioxide and dinitrogen from air, using water, and make a simple organic compound, e.g. a simple amino-acid.

Then this organic compound could be used to feed, together with minerals, some cultures of genetically engineered living beings derived from fungi or from parasitic plants, hybridized with various genetic material of vegetable or animal origin, and which would grow harvestable parts equivalent with the meat, seeds, fruits, roots, leaves etc. that are used now for food.

I have little doubt that this is the final solution, but we are still very far from it. The greatest obstacle is that we are far from being able to predict how changes in the DNA modify the growth of a multicellular living being. We need to be able to predict what genetic changes are needed in order to make a modified plant that will grow either beans or apples or muscles or whatever else is the intended product of the culture.

Until then, I prefer to eat only food that I cook myself, from raw ingredients, so I can be certain about its content.

[JackMorgan]

Just checked, and a study from 2018 estimates 450 million vegetarians

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...

[lockhouse]

For perspective, the 2018 world population was 7.6 billion people. [1]

Also, vegetarian encompasses a wide range of diets, some of which include eating animal proteins such as fish, dairy, or eggs. [2]

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

[2] https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-exactly-is-a-vegetarian-3...