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Notes -
Lab-grown meat one step closer to sale in the US
I'm neither a vegetarian nor an EA animal suffering activist, but I consider this largely a good thing. If we can produce lab-grown meat that costs the same or less than traditionally-raised or industrial-produced meat and is equally tasty and nutritious, I see very little reason not to do so. I've tried the various meat substitutes and, frankly, they just don't taste like meat or have the same texture. This isn't to say they aren't tasty in their own way, they just clearly aren't meat. The best ones I've had barely rise to the level of "gas station sausage patty" in terms of flavor and texture. Likewise cutting down on cattle ranching in the US would alleviate a lot of environmental pressure and gives us the opportunity to rebuild healthy habitat for native wildlife populations.
What does give me pause is the further connotative removal of people from food production. A farmer I know has an anecdote about a well-to-do customer who pulled up to his farm stand to buy some produce and was appalled to find potatoes sitting in a pile on a pallet. The farmer swears the customer, without any trace of irony, asked for "potatoes that hadn't been in the dirt". I'm hunt deer and small game and the bulk of my urbanite coworkers normally react to this somewhere on the spectrum between bafflement and outright disgust, all the while munching on ham-and-cheese sandwiches or a fish taco. (I work in a pretty blue area, so that's probably coloring things.) I can see scenarios in which PETA and other animal suffering activist organizations use lab grown meat as an attack surface to further restrict hunting and fishing activities.
There are different kinds of meat alternatives,
Actual lab-grown meat from animal cells, this could theoretically taste close to meat in texture but I suspect the taste will be off for a while. Worse than the taste, we're very far off from producing this at a wide scale.
Growing animal proteins using yeast. This does not taste like meat but can be done cheaply. I believe milk proteins is actually cheaper than dairy farming. I'm excited to see this gain popularity.
Impossible/beyond type of meat substitutes. These usually don't have the same nutrition profile, but they probably taste the closest to meat.
I'm hoping we can combine the yeast technology with the artistic skills from beyond/impossible for something that tastes and nourishes identically. On the other hand, there's something that feels wholesome about eating natural food, even if a ton of suffering goes into it. I do have minor concerns about the level of processing that goes into the beyond/impossible tier foods. Hopefully the lab-grown stuff will one day be economically viable and feel "paleo" enough.
Hmmm not sure 'natural' food is the source of most of the suffering.
The argument would surely be that factory farming is just as unnatural as growing the stuff in a vat, if we compare to the state of nature.
If factory farming is unnatural, is 19th century farming also unnatural? Where do you draw the line? Seems to me you could argue all food, being a product of agriculture, is unnatural, which kind of makes the label pointless.
At the very least, lab-grown meat is a big deviation from the status-quo. I'm not sure it would even count as raw/unprocessed food.
Yes, but I guess that depends on how much you think the "domesticated" animals in question differ from their wilder ancestors.
A lot of the animals we eat were 'bred' for captivity. But not the mechanized, energy intensive, close quarters type that typifies the factory farm.
I think an intuitive spot would be around when we started to inject chemicals into the animals to ensure their survival. That's a clear introduction of 'artificial' products of civilization as I can imagine.
That is, when the conditions change such that the animals would no longer be able to survive in the environment we've set up for them without human intervention.
We could of course have a decent discussion about this, or whether the natural/artificial' divide is even a meaningful thing.
I mean yes, but see the point above. If the products of agriculture would be unsuited for survival in the wilderness environment that their ancestors thrived in, that's a decent indication we've moved pretty far from the conditions of nature untouched by man.
And applying this to lab grown meats, if the meat can't survive outside of the very specific conditions set up for it by humans, that's also indicating that it is pretty far from the conditions of untouched nature.
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