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Notes -
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
And a staple of SF for longer than that... but in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior.
It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.
It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario. In most soypunk the farmland is all poisoned nuclear waste, not that scifi writers have enough understanding of economics to make the alternatives realistic.
Meat might be the most capital+labor/calorie efficient food ever. Vegan nerd fantasies of vertical soy farms powered by millions of acres of solar panels can't match up to species that turn sunlight and rain into steak all by themselves.
Animals don't turn sunlight and rain into meat. You need to feed them plants. Which you have to grow first. Possibly on vertical farms run by hippy vegans.
Some animals can graze but I think this could sustain only than a small fraction of current meat production (after a quick googling, I saw the figures of 10% of beef production and 30% of sheep and goat meat production being sustained by grazing).
Can you link a study on that from any group that isn't openly pushing to abolish meat? Because I'm familiar with the propaganda tricks: classifying all rain that falls on grazing lands as "water used for animals", etc.
I know what my inputs and outputs are, and the inputs are extremely minimal. It's likely that the US wastes a lot of grain fattening up cows and even sheep (US carcass weights for "lambs" are double the UK's, which hurts quality for zero benefit), but those are inefficiencies due to our historically cheap feed prices and lack of innovation in decaying markets.
If you have specific counterfactuals that you want considered, I think we'll be better off doing the study ourselves. We should be able to get numbers on acreage and on gross industry input and output and run napkin math.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Reports_By_Date/
Hmm. Yep ok. I can see why most people just let someone else do the several days of data science this is going to take. I still think gwerning it yourself is going to be your best bet at coming to a reasoned opinion you can trust though.
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