Islamic scholars consulted by a leading producer of cultivated meat say that the newfangled protein — which is grown from animal cells and doesn’t require animals to be slaughtered — can be halal, or permissible under Muslim law.
And the Jewish Orthodox Union this month certified a strain of lab-grown chicken as kosher for the first time, “marking a significant step forward for the food technology’s acceptance under Jewish dietary law,” as the Times of Israel put it.
It always amazes me people think this being that created the universe cares what meat they eat.
A lot of food handling instructions in religion are rudimentary sanitation practices. For example, food must be consumed same day, not left out. Don’t eat raw shellfish. Don’t drink blood. Wash your hands.
Pretty much all religious texts at their core are “how to not die,” “how to make more of you,” and “how not to be an asshole,” with an overarching guilt system to enforce it.
Everything else is either people misconstruing things because they can’t make sense of their own existence, either through mental illness, misguidedness, or plain old ignorance.
Hey there’s also hallucinations in there
You’re telling me this enormous being with 6 wings surrounding flaming wheels covered with eyes that God is speaking to me through isn’t real?
Hey sometimes the mushrooms in the desert hit different
I’d never thought of religion as a form of Darwinism before.
Is is, in many interesting ways. In the sense of Dawkins (“the selfish gene”), who coined the term ‘meme’, religions are complex memes. Ideas which need hosts to survive and spread. This puts evolutionary pressure on these ideas to become good at convincing brains that:
“This idea is worth listening to. This idea is worth remembering. This idea is worth spreading.”
Naturally, religions became good at these things or went extinct. In many cases, their evolution converged to extremes. A powerful god is obviously beaten by the all-powerful God. A stronger incentive than living a decent life on Earth is obviously receiving eternal bliss in heaven.
Religions take great efforts to emphasize they are very important - sorry: the most important - ideas. And some which emphasize how important it is to spread them happened to spread, driving others extinct in the process.
To this day, religions evolve in the attempt to adapt to their changing environment of culture, politics and technology, lest they go extinct. New denominations form and rise in the process.
I agree to @capt_wolf@lemmy.world’s observation. Does the frequent inclusion of these very existential ideas (“how to not die”) hint at how early in the human evolution religions started playing a role? If so, if religions helped early humans survive, that would make being susceptible to religious ideas an evolutionary advantage for early humans. So maybe there was a synergy between genetic evolution and memetic evolution. And maybe that’s also why conspiracy theories are such a pest, piggybacking on the same mechanics.
I absolutely love your brain. What are you up to for the next 20-30 years?
Heh, thanks! I plan to eat loads of delicious food, and get laid at least twice. Maybe I’ll die. Also many other goals, projects and ideas.
Why did you ask? The question was oddly specific. What are your plans?
I’m on the lookout for a long-term, platonic adjacent relationship with a contemplative person!
The reason these practices are in place are historical
Think about a time before modern sanitation. You eat THIS meat, you fucking die. So obviously God doesn’t want us to eat it because otherwise he wouldn’t have made it a dirty, deadly meat. Even today, these meats kill people occasionally.
I’m an atheist, but I think it’s still worthwhile to understand the perspectives.
People didn’t have modern sanitation elsewhere as well. That’s not the reason, the reason is that these religions were followed by people who lived “like pigs”. And since the pigs live like their owners, they were dirty and nasty as well. This religious ban is a mirror of people who followed these religions.
This is dumb as fuck
And highly antisemitic.
Pigs in no way live like their owners. They live in big pile of mud and eat anything to this day lol
…huh?
Cares about the meat you eat and the meat you beat
Always have!
If you read through the stories that define them, it makes a lot more sense. Blood and sacrifice are intertwined with life and righteousness. God is holy and set apart, and can’t be in the presence of less – so their lives and habits are built around remaining in relationship to their God.
So the careful handling of death, food, and blood makes perfect sense from that worldview, whether you personally agree with it or not.
That makes even less sense.
No, no it does not. Like, not at all.
And isn’t it funny how the gods are always concerned with the same things their worshippers are? It would be odd to care deeply about regulating the sexual and dietary habits of the ants in our backyards. If god(s) were real I’d expect their interests to be wild and beyond our understanding, and not about what hats humans can wear and what meat is acceptable.
The in-lore explanation is that we are created by the god(s) in their own image. Much like if you made a toy to play with other toys, you’d probably make something humanoid, or at least anthropomorphic.
Unless you want to talk about Lovecraftian horror gods, but in that lore, humans weren’t created by the gods (as far as I know).
Created in their image perhaps, but generally not in their own capability, understanding, and therefore one would assume, interests. Gods are like us because we imagine them like us, because humans draw from what we know and what we are concerned with when we imagine and dream and hallucinate. Religious writers cannot accurately fathom the interests of those with superhuman knowledge and capability, and so the gods typically want what the people who claim to speak for them also want, and offer solutions to whatever the worshippers are concerned with. Lovecraft was brilliant for acknowledging this limitation in his own way, he was known for not describing the horror because it is far too horrible and beyond our comprehension.
Yes, but when communicating to these minions, it makes sense to translate your intentions into what they can relate to.
If I want a way to control my ants so that they stay away from some places but go to others, I might teach them to avoid soap and seek sugar.
They might not understand what my bed is because it’s too big and alien for them, but if I put some soap around it, they will avoid going there. They might not understand what I mean by “go to my neighbor’s garden”, but they will be able to follow a trail of sugar to that place.
So especially if the interests of the gods are wild and beyond our understanding, I’d expect them to give us some relatable proxies instead.
organized religion is and always has been about using laws to control people and take their money through brainwashing backed with death threats where and whenever they can get away with it
Just wait till you find their opinions on the oppsite hole.
It’s also Vegetarian.
Arguably. I think a lot of lab meat currently uses massive amounts of FBS instead of alternatives. Though I guess many vegetarians don’t have a problem with renet.
What do these three glyphs signify in this particular sequence
Fetal bovine serum. It’s used as a supplement for for cell cultures.
Some of the cows slaughtered for meat are pregnant. Fetal bovine serum comes from the blood extracted from these cow fetuses.
Since it is used to produce lab grown meat, it is not vegetarian
Pretty sure it’d still be vegetarian, just not Vegan then right? At least how I generally have heard it defined, vegetarians are OK with eating food made from animal byproducts (though it’s preferable to avoid) and only vegans refuse to consume anything with any animal byproducts
For some vegetarians, it makes a difference wether an animal had to die in the process. It’s one thing to continously harvest milk or eggs from an animal which otherwise lives on
happily. It’s another thing to eat something which could only be obtained by slaughtering an animal.In the same sense, many hard cheeses like Parmesan or Gran Padano aren’t vegetarian either, because they use rennet.
Isn’t the vast majority of cheese now made with bacterial rennet instead of calf rennet? I remember reading that something like 95% of cheese now was made with that instead.
Would be nice to know, I’d like to read a source. On wiki, I got the impression the driving incentive is not to kill less calfs, but to produce more rennet, to ultimately produce more cheese. The German wiki quotes “Nur ca. 35 % der weltweiten Käseproduktion können mit Naturlab produziert werden.”, roughly “Only about 35% of worldwide cheese production can be produced with rennet from animals”. Technically still a vast majority.
There isn’t really a central authority for deciding if it’s vegetarian or not though.
Technically is not an animal product so I guess it is vegetarian but also at the same time it’s still meat so it isn’t.
I guess it depends on what your objection to meat is. If your objection is based on animal cruelty then I guess it’s probably vegetarian but if your objection is based on dietary restrictions (religious or otherwise) then obviously it’s not.
Hello, it is I the pope of vegetables. On behalf of the interests of all plants I do ordain this diet
I think as long as the meat was slaughtered by a combine vegetarians can eat it
I think vegans are completely against any meat because they think it’s unhealthy, and vegetarians think it’s immoral.
I just think it’s tasty.
Vegans have more to do with morals than vegetarians. Vegans may refrain from using animal based products like leather, which can be completely unrelated to health. A vegetarian diet is just that, a diet without meat. Can be for health or moral reasons, unspecified.
Many things are tasty, many of which don’t have the detrimental implications of animal products, especially meat.
Vegans are the ones that think it’s immoral. It’s like the joke goes, how can you tell if someone is vegan, because they will tell you.
Vegetarian is just a dietary preference.
Vegetarianism can be on an ethical basis too.
Vegans eat no animal products, vegetarians drink milk and eat eggs. The reasoning for their choice doesn’t define the terms.
Ethically it’s dubiously vegetarian, culinarily it’s meat. Mostly depends on how they harvested the cells tbh.
I’m glad to see lab-grown meat clear another hurdle. The better and more common this technology is, the closer we’ll be to finally getting rid of the meat industry and factory farming.
It is a bit weird to think though that the eradication of factory farming is going to lead to a decrease in global cow populations. So based on raw numbers alone this is actually a bad thing for the species.
We should at least factor in how natural or pleasant their existence is. Or else a maliciously engineerd creature which spreads like crazy but is genetically bound to suffer immensely all their life is somehow preferrable over a local population of happy birds.
The species we use to harvest their products and body parts are often unable to survive naturally, some suffering from accumulated genetic defects, like being unable to support their artificially increased body weight.
If we don’t need to reserve pastures for human-cows, there might be a chance for natural species to grow their numbers again.
i dont care about the species, i care about individuals
Glad the OU certified this as kosher. This has been a big question in Jewish communities.
How could it not be? It’s not real meat.
But it is. It just didn’t come from slaughtering anything.
From the outside it seems to fit well with religious laws that intend to reduce the suffering of the animal being slaughtered. If there is no animal that needs to suffer at all in the slaughter it seems like a win if it can be understood but the believers.
I always think that lab grown meat is a weird idea why don’t they just do something interesting why don’t they do lab grown velociraptor. I want to eat a velociraptor please.
Or better yet go through the fossil record and find the tastiest animal, and then grow that.
Yeah I wanna try some Dodo bird, must have been good if it was hunted to extinction.
I think the Galapagos tortoise was also almost hunted to extinction for being so delicious.
Ooh - i would love to do that!
There was once a thought experiment about whether a hypothetical potato containing a pig gene (to make it tastily fatty) would be halal and/or kosher. IIRC, because of the different philosophical bases of the two taboos, it would have been one but not the other, though I can’t remember which.
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Applying religious ideology to scientific advancement is idiotic
So many rules and hurdles to overcome just to stubbornly avoid eating plant-based foods.
To be fair, plant based food can be good, but it’s a different food, not an alternative. I’ve tried a few and none of them got close to tasting of feeling like meat.
If we can manage to produce lab grown meat at a large industrial scale, it could solve the animal suffering, pollution and water consumption problems caused by current production
Also to be fair, it only tastes “different” when you know it’s different. I remember seeing a blind taste test with a panel of trained chefs and none could tell they were eating plant-based meat.
Of course, meat doesn’t taste like meat once you’ve seasoned it, salted it, put sauce and other condiments on it, and otherwise made it taste anything like meat. LOL
So, we can eliminate a great amount of the “it’s not the same” factor simply by not marketing plant-based food as “gross” and “different”. Let the taste, texture, versatility, and cost speak for itself.
Second, yes, on an industrial scale lab grown meat is better than factory farms. They likely come with the same detriments to human health as real meat, but that aside, I think lab grown meat would make a fantastic alternative to farmed meat used in pet food.
On the climate front, lab grown meat might not be better than beef. It would honestly be a shame if the world all went to lab grown meat, only to find out decades later that it caused more harm than good.
But, in the meantime, we have plants :)
I agree with almost everything you’ve said, but God I wish there was a way vegans could come across as anything other than preachy and annoying.
It’s tough changing minds in general, especially when the topic entails labeling your past and likely present self a serial animal abuser. Something most vegans went through already and had to overcome.
If you agree with almost everything, would it be worthwhile to find a wording which preserves the good content while ditching the bad form?
I also wonder how much of the annoying part is the speaker, and how much of it is the reluctance of listeners to question themselves.
These “experts” are crazy. How can it be kosher when it’s not a naturally occurring meat?
This would be what the Bible calls an abomination. I’m not touching that stuff, it’s gross!
It is naturally occurring though; it’s just cultivated artificially.
You’re not as knowledgeable as you think you are.
Any meat can be halal and kosher as long as the person eating believes it is. The difference between halal meat and non-halal meat is nothing. It’s all in the deranged persons mind.
