I have a feeling that in a hundred years’ time or so we will all be vegan* and I tend to support this idea. Once we can grow meat in a jar that’s as good as proper meat (and extend this argument to “growing” leather, insulin, etc - all animal byproducts basically) can we possibly justify the huge amounts of animal curelty, as well as arguably the waste of space (not to mention greenhouse gas emissions and other massive environmental impact) of meat production?
Will there be people who, even if the meat in a jar is objectively better in every way than “real” meat, want the “real stuff”?
Is the biggest impediment here religion?
(Exclude elderly people from that who will die out, I have no doubt whatsoever that they will exist)
*OR 80% of us will be humanist and vegan, and 20% some kind of nasty religion (not necessarily that resemblant to one now but probably with a similar name) which dictates the one true meat comes from animals
If it’s cheaper to grow stuff in jars, why would you buy farm raised meat? The only reason would be a difference in real or perceived quality. There is also the natural food angle.
Furthermore, I can still justify wildlife management.
Certainly. Or, to put it another way, how can we justify eating pork when we have all this beef? Or eating chicken when we have all this fish? Or eating frog legs, goose liver or other nasty foreign stuff when we have all this good American food to scarf down?
Even if we someday figure out how to grow meat in jars (something that, afaik we are pretty far from being able to do on any sort of scale), unless we can grow every kind of meat to every sort of taste, then that will be justification enough for us to continue animal farming, though perhaps at a smaller scale.
What do you suppose happens to animals in the wild? What do you suppose will happen to all the domestic species we currently use for food and other animal products if we stop needing them? What would be more cruel…turning them loose into the wild to die, or allowing them to go extinct or at the minimum reduce their populations to next to nothing, or feed them, care for them, and then eat them? I’m guessing that if the animals could choose (which they can’t), they’d choose that nice trough, shelter and a quick clean death to constantly scrounging for snacks in fear something large will leap out at them and make a snack out of them, while fending for themselves in the cold and heat of the wild. Neither that nor extinction seems a good deal.
BTW, why would we all be vegan if we were eating meat grown in jars??
Of course they some will. Depending on how it tastes, a lot of people might prefer the real stuff to the stuff grown in jars. Even if it tastes exactly the same, and you could somehow magically produce all of the same tastes and textures of every sort of meat people like you’ll have some rich people who will be willing to pay extra for the ‘real stuff’, simply because they can. It’s human nature.
Personally, I doubt we’ll ever get to the point where we can grow meat in a jar that has all the taste and texture of the real meat we can get today…at least it’s unlikely to happen in my life time.
Huh? I have no idea where you are getting this from. It won’t be religion that’s the impediment, but the consumer. You will have to prove that jar grown meat IS a better, cheaper and safe product in order to get people on board. And you will probably never get everyone on board…just think about the continual Pepsi verse Coke wars to get an idea that people have different tastes in things.
How can you justify plant farming – in the soil as is traditional - when hydroponic technology is available? Nothing damages the environment like farming – reducing vast plots of land to one-crop monoculture and covering them with pesticides and fertilizers.
Undoubtedly there will be religious people who assert that growing meat in a vat is a perversion of god’s plan, and unChristian/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/whatever. I doubt anyone will be so bold as to point out that factory farming probably isn’t what god had in mind either.
Also, there will be “creative anachronists” who will want to keep the old skills alive, and will be able to subsidize this by selling their products at artificially high prices, to “gourmet hobbyists.” We still have people who build and maintain steam engines, or competitively row Polynesian-style canoes.
One good thing about this is that the standards of care would climb. The typical 4-H student takes very, very good care of his or her animal(s.) The issue of “factory farms” and “frankenchicken” and so on will vanish away.
I’m not sure where you’re getting in a hundred years from now we’ll be 80% vegans.
Hasn’t meat consumption gone nowhere but up in the last hundred years?
I don’t think ‘we’ will have to justify anything.
This will be completely in the hands of manufacturers and market demand.
I don’t think the manufacturers give two shits about the humane aspects of farming live critters. All they care about is the bottom dollar.
If the bottom dollar tells them to go ‘meat in a jar’ or farmed animals; only time will tell.
If you’re asking as a question of morality, I accept the fact that we humans are at the top of the food chain. I’m at peace with that. Even if it means killing Bessy the cow.
[QUOTE=Shakes]
Hasn’t meat consumption gone nowhere but up in the last hundred years?
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It’s probably fairly flat in most developed countries (where it’s a high percentage of the population that eats meat, though obviously the amounts vary…Europeans eat a lot less meat in their meals than Americans do, in my experience), but yeah…world wide the demand for more meat has certainly gone up.
I did a science-fiction treatment of this problem recently.
Premise;
Most everyone eats vat-grown meat in the future, but some people (especially sentient carnivores) prefer meat from animals. But most people decline to kill animals that are capable of suffering, even non-sentient ones.
Answers I came up with include -
animals that are genetically tweaked so that they don’t suffer when you kill them;
animals with robot heads and living bodies;
animals with immortal, living, swappable heads;
animals which can be partially eaten without killing them;
animals with integrated neurotechnological systems that permit their consciousness to be downloaded and re-installed in new bodies.
The treatment is here
Douglas Adams once imagined an animal that actively wants to be eaten (the Dish of the Day - ‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’)
The simplest answer might be a reliably humane way of killing the animal that everyone agrees causes no suffering at all - but I suspect that getting everyone to agree on such a system would be the main difficulty there.
[QUOTE=eburacum45]
Douglas Adams once imagined an animal that actively wants to be eaten (the Dish of the Day - ‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’)
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To paraphrase, I’ll just nip off and shoot myself…and don’t worry, I’ll be very humane.
How can we justify hunting when we have farming? I’m sure that hunting will disappear within 100 years of the invention of farming/raising livestock. You heard it here first!
If you read “Meat: A Benign Extravagance , by Simon Fairlie “ you will understand that raising some small amount of animals for their meat is actually better for the environment and the economy.
And, if you have ever lived on a small far, you will also know that the life of most farm animals (even those raised for meat) is a rather happy one -until the end, but don’t all things die?
There’s a lovely word for the former: carniculture. Like Cordwainer Smith’s 50 ton sheep. You just carve off a hunk, and let it heal up. We already sort of do this with the guys who hunt a particular kind of lobster, heck off one claw, then throw the critter back into the sea to regrow.
And good old Al Capp came up with the Schmoo a dickens of a long time ago, opening a never-to-be-ended moral debate.
Philosopher and ethicist Jonathan Glover also wrote about this, mentioning three kinds of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, Mark I, is condemned to roll a rock uphill as punishment. Sisyphus, Mark II, doesn’t take it as punishment; he simply does it, robotically, much the same way we go about breathing. And Sisyphus, Mark III, actually enjoys it.
If slavery were so positively enjoyable that people sought to become slaves, and resisted being emancipated, would it be morally wrong?
Well, there are some people who crave that lifestyle, even if it is from a legal stand-point just role playing. Is it morally wrong to treat them as slaves?
