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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.
I've continually said "I'll become a vegetarian when chicken wings grow on trees."
And I mean it. So if they can match the nutritional profile of the real thing and cost within 50% of it, I will readily switch. Indeed, I'd probably start raising chickens myself to make sure they don't abruptly go extinct due to collapse of demand. Half-joking.
What society may not be ready for and will really have to grapple with is when some really exotic fare becomes available.
Is there literally any real objection to eating 'human' meat that has been lab-grown other than "that's fucking weird, dude." That objection can be sufficient, mind, but ethically speaking I can't find any reason to condemn it. I'd just want to not hang out with the person who made it a part of their daily meals.
I respect that but I believe that ending animal agriculture just means a further separation of man from nature and, in some sense, reality.
Agriculture is, itself, pretty separated from nature, and has only become more so over time (assuming you don't consider the entire notion to be incoherent because humans are a part of nature, and so are the things we do, like how beaver dams are part of nature). If you want to be connected to or part of nature, then hunt and forage.
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Under the right conditions this wouldn't be a negative thing.
Under our current conditions, yeah probably just going to make people become even MORE unmoored.
Hence, raising chickens would be one of those, at the very least, symbolic reminders of where we came from. One of several little reality tethers, if you will.
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