Some people are willing to pay more for quality food period. If this meat turns out to be better quality by some metric having nothing to do with "ethical meat" memes, there will be a market for it.
Most mass produce meat are loaded with antibiotics and live in pretty terrible and unhygienic environments. Having meat that's not loaded with antibiotics and mixed with unsavory parts of the animal during butchering too.
Just visit a factory farm sometime. They are pretty cruel. Even if it's removing that cruelty for the sake of our own humanity makes sense to me. It's interesting to me that the Old Testament prohibition on "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk" appears to be intended to avoid this sort of wrongness/cruelty. As in taking something that's fundamentally meant to provide sustenance and perverting it to cook the child it's meant to nourish seems pretty messed up right? Even if the goat itself doesn't care (though I think they do have some level of sentience). The effect isn't huge, but you can imagine that it produces a bit of desensitization to things that are important to our own humanity.
One thing with traditional family farms is that you gain a connection with the animals. Yes, you'll eat them but you know the cost of doing so. Modern factory farms completely remove that.
Of course, I'll continue eating regular meat due to convenience. That said, I do eat more substitute as it becomes more available.
This is the answer I think. My partner is vegetarian and sometimes I'll eat the Beyond Chicken Nuggets because they are just that good, often better than what I can make or buy store or otherwise.
One look at the ingredients in these things puts me off ever eating them:
“ INGREDIENTS: Water, Wheat Flour, Wheat Gluten, Faba Bean Protein, Modified Corn Starch, Natural Flavors, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Pea Starch, Methylcellulose, Salt, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Flour, Corn Starch, Yeast Extract Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Pea Protein (Peas Are Legume, People with Severe Allergies to Legumes Like Peanuts Should Be Cautious When Introducing Pea Protein Into Their Diet Because of the Possibility of a Pea Allergy, Contains No Peanuts or Tree Nuts), Titanium Dioxide (for Color) Sugar, Dried Yeast Spices, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Sunflower Oil, Canola Oil, Paprika, Dextrose.”
It's unlikely we can virtue-signal our way out of any problem.
If something costs more, that's a good proxy for that product being more energy-intensive. And where thst isn't the case, the higher cost is likely lining someone's pocket, who will then go on to consume more, thereby generating more pollution.
If something costs more, that's a good proxy for that product being more energy-intensive.
New products that come from new tech always cost more and early adopters tend to be people with money to spare. Unless you can come up with a source showing the higher energy usage -- one with a comprehensive lifetime comparison, not cherry picked -- this is a baseless comment.
I mostly agree with you. But it seems clear that mammals do have a lot of the same emotions humans do, as those emotions evolved long before humans took the stage. We just inherited them from our earlier ancestors.
Watch Dominion and tell us these animals are not being mutilated, mangled, tormented, slaughtered and murdered.
Animals do not want to die. The will ALL naturally cry, scream, run, fight and generally do anything possible to avoid getting killed. Killing them is murder. Discrimination or unjustified treatment of animals based on an individual's species membership is called Speciesism. The belief that humans alone possess intrinsic value or are the central entity in the universe is called Anthropocentrism.
On one hand, you have a highly artificial process in labs with high-tech equipment, probably all patented and proprietary. On the other hand, you have a process that occurs completely naturally, that man has understood for millennia, that is open-source and public domain.
Which one to justify to consumers, farmers, and developing nations? Hmm.
You fail to mention that the second options causes immense amounts of suffering to both animals and slaughterhouse workers and absolutely destroys our environment due to GHG and manure runoff. It also completely fucks up the biodiversity on this planet as now 80% of mammals by weight are livestock.
It doesn't have to. None of that is an intrinsic property of animal husbandry. All of what I mentioned seems to be intrinsic to cultured/manufactured meat, though.
It is intrinsic to the animal production in the quantities we consume, though.
If we returned to 1950s levels of meat consumption (my parents and grandparents regarded eating a chicken as a treat), or grew chickens or cows in our own backyards, maybe. But in a world of 8 billion people with our diets, cruelty, pollution, carbon impact etc are all intrinsically tied to our meat consumption.
So lab-grown, cruelty-free, without the carbon impact especially for highly polluting animals like cattle -- it's a wonderful idea.
