this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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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
@agoseris @fred you’d think since it’s meat it’s 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.
It was from Wikipedia, and I was misremembering slightly - not 95% of all cheese, but of cheese made in the US. Which could be saying a lot about cheese in the US.