If it tastes as good and is cheaper, only a real jerk would prefer killing actual animals.
I eat meat today because I like the taste more than I dislike killing animals. I’d switch to vat-grown meat even if it were twice as expensive, if it were available.
Most people today don’t like to think about cutting a cow’s throat. When perfect artificial meat comes around, I think most people will suddenly realize how pro-animal rights they are. I think living animal meat could eventually become illegal if it society starts to see it as barbaric.
If Jews or Muslims are prohibited via dietary law, I suppose they’ll get to keep on cutting throats.
Smallholding-scale production may still be quite viable, desirable and justifiable - if I want eggs, I’d have the option to buy them from the supermarket, or keep a few chickens in my garden.
And specialist products would probably just not be available in a mass-produced vat meat market (just like they can be hard to find now) - there will be stacks of beef, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, etc, but what if I want to eat guinea fowl, pheasant or snipe? What if I want to eat squirrel, dormouse or rat?
Cite? I think it’s entirely the opposite. I think most people around the world have no problem at all killing animals for food, and it’s a very tiny minority who are pro-animal rights when it comes to meat.
The benefits of lab grown meat over animal grown meat are
No animal suffering
Lab grown meat will be cheaper
Lab grown meat will taste better since the growers will have more control over the cellular structures than they do with actual animals
Lab grown meat will be healthier for the same reason as #3
Lab grown meat requires less raw material and creates less environmental pollution
I don’t see why anyone would prefer farm grown meat when in vitro meat is easily available. The only ones who would want it are people who are amish-esqe (kindof like the people who pay $5 for hand sculpted things when walmart sells the same thing for a dollar). But even they won’t be too popular because they will be admitting they think unnecessary suffering of conscious animals as well as environmental degradation is a worthy price of their philosophy (imagine if the people who bought hand sculpted knick knacks for 500% more money knew they were made by children living in slavery and that the byproducts were dumped in a river. I don’t see the appeal). Most people abandon philosophies based on suffering once they are no longer needed. Slavery wasn’t just abolished in many places because it was immoral, it was abolished because technological advances in the 19th century and early 20th century made slavery irrelevant because machines were more productive.
Plus lab grown meat should undergo rapid price deflation because it is based on biotech and manufacturing, both of which undergo a lot of productivity gains. By the middle of this century steak that tastes like Kobe beef that is full of omega 3s and CLA fats may cost $0.10 a pound. Because that’ll push farm grown meat out of business the scale of manufaturing of animal meat will go down and prices will go up on animal grown beef. A steak that tastes worse and is worse for your health will cost several dollars a pound.
No; they have no problem with someone else doing it where they don’t have to look.
I know that personally I don’t like to think too much about where any food comes from, meat or vegetable, and would much prefer if it was all grown in a nice clean vat somewhere.
Good? That said, look how people lost their shit over dog fighting. I was thinking primarily about the US and other first-world democracies. Obviously if you slaughter animals for dinner, you have to deal with that.
And what I said was that once there is a cheaper alternative that tastes as good or better, people will side more with animal rights. Because then they will have the luxury to do so.
Most animals aren’t grown on small farms, the CAFOs they are raised in are pretty miserable places where they are locked into small cages. The animals have to have their teeth and tails pulled out so they won’t go crazy and kill each other.
Most likely we just won’t breed as many and the population will go down as it is eaten or ages. It’s unlikely that any switchover from animal-grown to vat-grown meat will happen overnight.
Why do so many of you seem to think that vat-grown meat will inevitably be cheaper and more efficient than animal-grown meat? As a biologist I’m aware that from a thermodynamic perspective living animals aren’t particularly efficient (a 90% loss per trophic level is a good rule of thumb), but will we be any better? The vat-meat will still need nutrients, oxygen, etc, but instead of just throwing grass at it and letting it outside, we’ll need to formulate and manufacture nutrient-rich artificial blood and circulate it through the tissue. And without the benefit of an immune system, we’ll have to keep it all perfectly sterile. And we’ll need to get rid of waste products, so we’ll need a dialysis machine and some sort of artificial liver to cleanse the artificial blood (keeping it sterile the whole time). It’s a daunting task, and while it may be possible in 100 years, I think it will be far easier and cheaper to just genetically engineer faster-growing, more efficient cows.
I think the closest analogues we currently have to vat meat are hydroponic vegetables. Many of the same hypothetical benefits apply: hydroponic systems allow greater growth efficiencies, much less wasted water and fertilizers, less environmental degradation from land use and nutrient runoff, greater control over growing conditions and therefore the taste and nutritional quality of the finished product, etc. Yet the lettuce I buy at Food Lion for 99 cents is still grown in a field and the hydroponic lettuce at Whole Foods costs $4 a head. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that growing hydroponic veggies is WAY easier than growing muscle tissue from scratch in a lab.
I think only a tiny minority of people would be willing to pay 2x for test-tube meat.
Well, that’s sort of a tautology. The key issue is whether or not people will see killing animals as barbaric. If we didn’t raise livestock, then those species would probably go extinct. There is nothing barbaric about killing an animal raised for food.
How many cows (Auroch] do you think would be alive if we didn’t raise them for livestock?
Certainly. I was saying I’d switch, unless it approached the same price it would have no chance of supplanting natural animals for most people. But I can afford to spend twice as much for meat. So I’d do it to have the luxury of living closer to my beliefs.
In your opinion. Causing unnecessary suffering is morally wrong, in my opinion. Not wrong enough for me to not eat meat though.
About as many as buffalo. Not that this means anything. It doesn’t matter that more of them exist than would if we didn’t eat them. If I breed people as slaves, that doesn’t make it okay, since they’d wouldn’t exist if I didn’t need slaves.
In any case, I eat meat. But the market will speak when vat-grown foods are cheaper and better. Once no one eats live animals, the cruelty will seem more outlandish. Humans used to fuck in the same room as their children. But that seems grotesque by modern standards. We used to execute people in public. We used to throw shit out of windows onto the street. We used to have rivers that could catch fire.
I suspect when animals are (mostly) no longer killed it will seem terribly cruel.
Nah. There are too many carnivores like me, who have no problem blowing Bambi’s brains out for venison and shit like that. If having a hamburger means popping Elsie between the eyes with a sledgehammer, then get out of the way, because bovine brains be a-flyin’.
My post is predicated on the idea that artificial meat is cheaper and tastes as good or better. Why would you pay more for meat that tastes no better? The only difference would be the suffering of the provider animal.
I can see not caring about animal suffering, but preferring it seems outlandish.
I’m sure hunters will still exist, unless Obama takes your guns.
But once eating animals becomes a thing largely of the past, hunting will probably have a larger stigma than it does now.
The point is that mass production will often fail to cater to minority tastes - just like it does at the moment - if I want chicken, I can get one that’s been industrially farmed - if I want squirrel, I won’t find it in the supermarket.
Now, maybe vat-grown meat technologies would bring about a broadening of the palette of available products, but until we get to Star Trek replicator levels of technology, there are still going to be boundaries between what is in production, and what ain’t.
And even for the things that are in production, vat-grown won’t necessarily be a viable commercial competitor. I can eat wood pigeon more or less for free, if I accept that I have to kill pigeons to put that meat on the table.
I guess that where haute cuisine comprises ground beef, HFS, spray-on cheese and other forms of crumbed fat on a stick, then the prospect of cassoulet flavoured agar agar could only be an improvement.
The hypothetical here is that the vat-grown meat will be equal or superior to the very best quality natural meat, but I just don’t believe this will happen.
Vat meat could be suitable for making hot dogs within a reasonable future timeframe, but that probably ends up meaning the real meat byproducts that we currently process into hot dogs become useless trash.
And even if it doesn’t, that still leaves the great majority of meat as a target for replacement. Most natural meat isn’t equal to the “very best quality natural meat” either.
