My first thought was that some company will immediately start pumping this fake meat full of growth hormones because ... why the hell not?
"We can make it cheaper, more readily available for the many, for the poor, with the same growth hormones we use on real meat"
And they'll lobby that through ... and people like cheap ... and people will get used to eating absolutely fake meat ... and they'll forget what the real thing actually tasted like.
It'll "taste like chicken" ... but they won't really know what chicken (real, healthy, decent chicken) tastes likes ...
And ... there's a Matrix offshoot here somewhere ...
Attempting to impose control over where people get their food is the sort of thing that starts wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha is the holiday
1) Is there a way for lab-grown meat to become prevalent without it leading to such a clash?
2) Are there things we can do to prevent such a clash from becoming violent?
3) Are there ways for lab-grown meat to be developed in a way that small-scale poor herders in mountains with moderate infrastructure can own its means of production?
4) Is there a way to go into a culture which currently eats meat with every meal[1], take away their means of producing meat, and have it not result in a violent backlash agains whichever organisation is trying to do this?
[1] source: two separate conversations with Moroccan men in March of 2019, one of whom was helping teach a cooking class in Fez and another of whom was leading a food tour of Marrakesh
ngold's post was ambiguous about whether he expects meat production to become illegal, so I don't think you were wrong to bring legality into the picture and I didn't downvote you, but I can see how someone could think your reply fit the above pattern.
That's the thing - when I eat cuts of meat, I prefer "bone in". If I have the choice, I'll take a chicken drumstick over a nugget, and a bone-in rib-eye over a fillet.
That said, I do like prime rib - but that's actually closer to a slice of roast beef than anything else.
Oh - and bbq brisket - no bones there.
They will also have to figure out how to grow the fat in with the muscle, too. That's where most of the flavor in meat comes from, not to mention texture and tenderness.
As far as organs...well, I do enjoy some tripas every now and again in a taco or burrito...
Roast chicken with crispy skin seems a while away though.
Quorn tastes nothing like an actual chicken. On the other hand I have never tasted fast food chicken nor frozen schnitzels.
I am not saying it is bad, but it has a very particular taste that is definitely NOT related to chicken.
I haven't found any "meat-like" product that would taste even remotely like the real thing. ANd I have tried all the ones available in France and Sweden, which is already quite a lot (my girlfriend is vegetarian so we eat mostly vegetarian).
Most "ground beef" vegetarian equivalents are super dry and taste much more soy than meat, which is OK in itself but when you cook meatballs well.... it is really not the same.
IMO we are not at all at stage 1, and I am not sure we will get there anytime soon. It is not so dramatic though as there are still plenty of things to cook without it, but I'm a bit tired of some people insisting about how vegan alternatives are equal or better than non-vegan product.
I'm not at all convinced it's healthier either given the length of the ingredient list, but I'll leave that to the experts.
Well, that shouldn't matter in my view. Do we need to keep human slaves around to compare their effectiveness with that of modern robots? If enough people in society see something as "wrong," then the alternative doesn't need to be superior in every way.
But not enough people do, and I'm not convinced that will change. Also, I would say there's a great difference between human slavery and animals being killed. There are a whole lot of people who probably won't want to switch over to fake-meat, because it's perceived as creepy and weird. Lab grown food (and the idea thereof) just rubs people the wrong way. It's like the people who promulgate insect consumption in the West: it's a cultural issue, and demonizing people because of their culture is not right.
Safer because it can be grown in sterile conditions, which greatly reduces the risk for contamination by pathogens.
Tastier because it can be more directly engineered for flavor, with fewer constraints. Take a look at how crazy things have to get in order to produce foods with the flavor and texture of veal or foie gras using current technology. Not having to worry about how you're treating an actual animal, or even having to do what it takes to keep the whole animal alive, isn't just going to improve those processes, it's going to open up a lot of other options as well.
Cheaper because it'll be infinitely easier to engineer waste out of the process.
Most agriculture is still done in the field, not indoors, because that's the most efficient way to do it. A large part of the inputs is "just there". Waste doesn't really happen in production, almost everything is put to some use. Real waste happens on the store shelves.
You really have to ask yourself, what are the inputs to the "lab grown" process and what are the requirements towards purity etc. It's an open question.
Except for the poop lagoon crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/151242/behind-hurricane-flor...
the dangers of cow farts https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-cow-farts-c...
Or the "waste" baby male chicks who are ground alive when they are a day old (graphic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5qAfyUuWE
Or the rain forests wasted to make room for more cows https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/beef-product...
Or that it takes 100 calories inputs to beef production to get 3 calories out. (Beef is 3% efficient). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
There are externalized costs to these things, but they don't really affect the prices that people are going to pay for the produce, at least not directly. I guess you can charge a small markup for being "green" (or pretending to be).
Now maybe a cow is only "3% efficient" in terms of calories, but the calories it takes in are really cheap and the calories it puts out are prized. It's a profit deal! In engineering, higher efficiency generally is more expensive and the economic optimum is never the efficiency optimum.
It seems like your argument is "if there are lots of companies making fake meat it will be bad" but that doesn't make much sense to me on the surface.
The world around you is rife with people pushing the quality of goods to the point the market will accept, and then moving the market to accept even worse.
Because fundamentally, morals don’t exist in a market. They are imposed.
And good / bad are subjective. People buy cheap protein. This will be cheap protein.
And even if it is tasteless, texture less and nothing any human will call meat, it will sell as long as it’s opportunity cost is lower than the alternative.
I think the whole point of GP is that lab grown meat makes it cheaper to produce much higher quality meat. That would actually mean at every price point, you get better quality than you do today. Your comment comes off as aimless pessimism rather than anything actually related to this thread.
Some people had a culture of eating other people. Do you think that's wrong?
Hunting is as not much the issue as the billion-plus animals we kill everyday for food. If more people had to look an animal in the eye as some hunters do, perhaps more people would connect the animal flesh they eat with the sentient beings the flesh came from.
https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-fo...
In the United States, I suspect that a combination of the 1st amendment and at least one religious tradition[1] would prevent any federal or state prohibition on killing animals for meat. Therefore, there will be people who have the experience to compare the two.
[1] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha
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EDIT: Actually, I'm probably wrong, based on the precedent that a state may institute a generally-applicable ban on peyote and the 1st amendment doesn't protect individuals who use it in religious rites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith#M...
I doubt livestock farming will be banned, but if this works out well it may be economically unviable.