For many, there are few ways of consuming a balanced diet without meat. Take low-FODMAP diets [1] for example, which are becoming very popular with people with IBS, a condition some ~15% of the U.S. population suffers from [2]. For many, coming up with enough sources of protein while satisfying their dietary restrictions is not easy without meat.
On an individual level, picking the "harder" way for its ethical advantages is definitely the right thing to do.
For the scientist working on fake meat, their work is probably essential here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irritable_bowel_syndrome#EpidemiologyI'm not sure this is true. I know it's a pretty common argument, but in reality, it's not particularly difficult to hit your protein requirements on a plant-based diet. Even if you take a relatively low protein food, like brown rice, and eat your required daily calories worth of it in a day, you'll hit your protein requirements for the day.
Consider that most people don't eat just rice all day, and toss in some beans, spinach, nuts, seeds, etc., and it should be clear how easy it is to get enough protein (assuming you're eating enough calories).
It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.
E.g. 1 - 'free range' chickens have almost no extra space per chicken compared to battery-farmed chickens, and many die after being trampled by the others. They are at least a breed which can stand on its own legs - battery chickens can't even walk.
E.g. 2 - 'organic' animals must not be fed antibiotics (which means their general conditions must be good enough for not too many to die from disease, which is otherwise avoided by routine antibiotics in feed). This means sick animals are generally left to die rather than be treated, since allowing antibiotics would lose organic status.
E.g. 3 - For eggs: no matter how good the conditions are for the hens, egg-laying chickens are a different breed to chickens-for-meat. Ergo, all male layer chicks are redundant, and are killed immediately on hatching (normal method is to grind the chicks en masse).
Eating animals is not a pleasant thing. Definitely worth reading up on.
(FTR: I eat animals, eggs, and dairy. I'm struggling to find out how to do so ethically, given the current 'ethical' labels are so close to meaningless.)
After we left our hobby farm I decided to not eat anything smarter than a fish. (I don't eat octopus)
I like being Pescatarian.
I do try to avoid wild fish for ethical/environmental reasons. Food animals should always come from a farm, obviously.
I am a vegetarian, and I disagree with this. I feel that it is more ethical to kill and eat an animal that has at least been given a chance to live a free and natural life, vs. confining it to a prison from birth.
Of course, it would be impossible to maintain humanity's current level of meat consumption without animal farms. I would prefer that people dramatically reduce their meat consumption, and eat only hunted/caught animals.
The level of intelligence I will eat, between chicken and fish, is totally arbitrary.
I think this is true for anyone who is not actually vegetarian.
The next level down is insects and oysters, I suppose.
Don't eat octopus because they are smart
Eat fishes, even those able to detect, hunt, defeat and eat octopus (therefore smarter than them)
Same thing a sad or lonely chicken makes: food.
Since happiness is generally associated with good health I'd wager happier chickens are healthier, ergo, tastier.
Is it? Isn't human happiness associated with human good health?
Forcing (?) billions of people to change their eating habits is a far more difficult task than a quaint little Civil War to settle slavery.
If enough people in, for example, the US felt as strongly about not eating animals as they do/did about not having human slaves, they could have another "quaint" civil war (or maybe a political argument that could achieve the same thing without bloodshed) and get to a point where it would be illegal to eat animals just as it's illegal to have slaves.
(I'm neither American, nor a vegetarian, FWIW.)
I don't buy or eat cheap chicken because I know how it is bred/produced and it's both miserable for the animal as well as for anyone who eats it. I prefer paying twice as much for chicken and having it less often, which is what I do.
Speciesist and anthropocentric mentality that is reinforced by world's most popular ideologies - shallow postmodernism, christianity and other religious ideologies - is what keeps this stuff alive.
It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world. At least we in first world countries have all the time to make the change and be the role model, but we seem to be doing business-as-usual, at least the majority of us.
Yeah, there's nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea of making the world a better place through mass slaughter. You know, while we're talking of ideology keeping terrible ideas alive.
As to "why have empathy for non-human animals?": I don't know, but I guess having a somewhat-arbitrary rule of which animals it's ok to eat, and which not, can lead to a certain amount of congnitive dissonance.
There are also health issues with meat, that don't exist (or don't exist to the same extent) with a vegetarian diet.
That's just it it isn't a biological incentive, it's a moral one.
If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together.
I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.
I'd rather use the less-strong statement I need to make a point. It is still a common belief that not eating meat is in some way less healthy, because plants have lower-quality proteins.
ProTip: we don't need meat.
Cultured meat would be grown from animal cells without developing an entire, independently viable animal. This is what "vat-grown" meat would be.
Synthetic meat would be processed polymerized amino acids that are chemically and structurally similar to animal meat. This is the holy grail of meat substitutes for vegans. No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
"Fake meat" would be imitation or synthetic. Cultured meat wouldn't exactly qualify as "real meat" to me, but it isn't quite "fake meat", either.
Hi, vegan here! I already get all this from plants.
> No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
Where do they come from, then? There is already enough plant diversity to not need to manufacture cells this way. In fact, fermentation of foods brings us many nutritional gifts, and I do actually kill these organisms when I eat them, but I'm ok with killing some yeasts over cows (grey line, I know! :)
As such, they could come from full organic synthesis from ethane feedstock, or from cultured microorganisms, or from plant protein, or from animal protein. They could by produced as a by-product of some other industry. If the company producing the synthetic meat is not particularly cautious with respect to sources, the vegan pedigree of its product could be questioned.
From the HN conversations about Soylent and Soylent-like products, I have been made aware of religiously-motivated vegans that even feel vaguely guilty about having to kill plants for their food. Those and the vegans motivated by supposed health benefits would not give a fig about the "meatiness" of any synthetic meat, caring more about its nutritional qualities. Those motivated by ethics would likely only care insofar as the existence of a full-synthetic meat could help encourage others to give up animal-harvested meats. If you don't proselytize veganism, you wouldn't care (nor should you).
From my own shallow study of nutrition, the height of my bar for going vegan is the chicken egg. If anyone wants me to stop eating animal products, they must necessarily produce something of equal nutritional convenience to a chicken egg, at a lower price. By my "holy grail" statement, I meat that specifically for proselytizing ethical vegans (i.e. PETA members), as an "Aha! With this, the meat-eaters can no longer argue in favor of their destructive lifestyles based on nutrition or culinary experience!"
1. They look very similar! Both have a large egg/seed in the middle of the white/fruit. Look is important for a substitute, e.g. all of the faux meat products.
2. Nutritionally they're also very similar in terms of fat and protein.
Are there any other salient variables for classification which come to mind?
In my opinion, structured growth of 'muscle tissue' disconnected from any animal is still "fake meat". Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, it is either still science fiction or too expensive (otherwise I'd have heard about it from places that aren't scifi).
Once we solve the minor engineering issues, we're good.
As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death.
Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."