> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.

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.

> If enough people in society see something as "wrong"

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.

I don't dare guess about a specific schedule, but I'd expect the end state to be meat that is safer, tastes better, and is less expensive.

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.

"Grown in sterile conditions" and "cheaper" are two completely contradictory features.

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.

> Waste doesn't really happen in production

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...

You are mixing up "waste material" with "material waste". The parent was making a point about cost. It's cheaper not to feed male baby chicks. It's cheaper to raze the forest. It's cheaper to let cows fart.

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.

Most large-scale food processing, like baking, or sausage / bacon / ham production, or dairy production, is happily indoors. When you don't need to work with entire large organisms, like a cow or a corn plant, things become easier to turn into a factory environment.

Can you elaborate or provide some rationalization?

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.

Because technically meat paste is packaged and sold as burgers, depending on how you legally define burgers, meat, and paste.

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.

Yeah, you can definitely buy some real cheap, garbage "meat". But you can also buy really high quality, really good meat. It's not like "markets" means everything is of horrible quality.

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.

What about hunting for meat as a method to responsibly manage deer populations for example? Austin, Texas is having a huge wild boar population explosion because the county instituted a no-kill policy. Also, hunting is a big part of some cultures. Why does one person outside that culture get to decide that's wrong?

People don't hunt to eat today. They hunt for sport!

Some people had a culture of eating other people. Do you think that's wrong?

We pull two deer a year if we're lucky on my farm, we don't grip and grin but we relish in the ability to eat something that shares the land around us.

You're wrong. When I was growing up if we didn't hunt in the winter it means we didn't eat in the Spring.

re: managing deer populations. There will always be some harm. We can strive for outcomes with the least harm.

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...

Do we really need to rehash the issues with moral relativism on HN?

> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.

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...

Almost all the safety issues with actual meat are around the fact that, well, animals are involved. Contamination on slaughter, which is the big one, wouldn’t be an issue. It should be far easier to make this sort of process safer.

I doubt livestock farming will be banned, but if this works out well it may be economically unviable.