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Lab-Grown Salmon Hits the Menu at an Oregon Restaurant as the FDA Greenlights the Cell-Cultured Product
(www.smithsonianmag.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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And how can the salmon give free, prior, informed consent for this? This is still exploitation. This is not vegan.
EDIT: This could be done ethically if the company collected still-living cells from the bodies of recently deceased salmon in spawning season or if they collected genetic material from male gametes that did not end up fertilising an egg, but I've not found anything to suggest that this company does it this way.
Are you serious about this? If so that standard seems pretty insane to me.
Like, we essentially can't do anything with animals with that...
Yes. That's the point. Animals are sapient beings with rights, not objects to "do things with".
That being said, I recognize how far out of the Overton Window that attitude is.
Positive thought: if cultured meat goes mainstream, I expect there will be demand for "ethically sourced" cell lines - or some ad campaign will use it as a selling point - and shift the idea of not exploiting animals just a tiny bit closer to the mainstream :)
I mean that essentially all human interactions with animals seem like they'd be unethical under that standard. Like obviously no pets, but I assume that's way further up the chain of thoughts (and while I don't agree, I think that's a reasonable stance to have). But also it seems like we wouldn't be able to do things like tagging certain species for tracking purposes, something we do primarily for conservation. Or like moving animals out of spaces made for humans (I.E. buildings.) My problem is that an animal cannot consent to anything, so informed consent as a standard means that all human-animal interactions seem to be exploitative. IDK, maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, or maybe I've interpreted it as more extreme than it is.
I should state that I'm trying (and possibly failing) to examine it as an idea on its own terms, not argue that you shouldn't believe it.
I think of it this way: in what situations can we act on a human's body without that human's informed consent?
And one of those times is when an action needs to be taken for that human's own good, and the human is unable to comprehend the situation enough to give informed consent. When a young child or an unconscious person needs medical treatment, for instance.
I think tracking or relocating wildlife would fall under that category. Does a bear understand why it's not safe for it to break into people's cars and eat their McDonald's wrappers? No. Does the bear want to leave its territory and be shipped somewhere without cars full of delicious McDonald's wrappers? Certainly not. But we can't convince the bear to leave those delicious McDonald's wrappers alone, so instead we relocate the bear, to protect both it and us.
On the other hand, harvesting a human's cells for medical experiments? Does require informed consent, even if, as the history of Henrietta Lacks painfully shows, that requirement has often been ignored.
And harvesting cells to clone for food falls more on the medical experiments side of things than the "for their own good" side.
Probably less important when dealing with animals, where it's usually more cut and dry, but I've got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is "in something/one's best interests."
I see the point. I won't say I necessarily agree with it. I think the ethical considerations are much stronger in the "in favor of" column for this development than in the "against." Which TBH, I don't know if that's a statement Jim East was disagreeing with. I do think that in the future we could probably improve the ethics of this kind of process by applying more rigorous standards, but in the near term its probably better to focus on stopping killing animals for food in general.
Either way, it doesn't really matter for my actions, as I don't have access to lab-grown meat anyway.
Yeah, me too :/ It's like every human (or animal) right - it has to be enforced by people, and people are pretty shitty. I don't think that means we reject the principle, it means we put guardrails around it to try and prevent errors and abuses.
And I certainly agree: lab grown meat is far less heinous and morally offensive than factory farming. It involves a moral compromise for vegans, but, well, so does almost everything else. We can recognize both aspects.