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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.
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
The issue is that we can't have 10 billion peole living a western lifestyle on a finite planet. The amount of water, artificial fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics required for 10 billion people eating meat twice a day is simply not feasible. I don't think anyone is really enthusiastic over bug meat, it is simply an adaption to over population. Personally I would go for fewer people living on less industrially produced meat.
Apparently
we
can.
Food has been getting cheaper, we're growing more of it on less farmland since the 1990s, and malnutrition is declining rapidly. There's no reason to expect that all of the trends that have been occurring since the industrial revolution will suddenly reverse, especially since global birth rates (gross) peaked in 2016 and global TFR is about to fall below replacement (if it hasn't already).
While consuming far more diesel than ever, far more artificial fertilizers, degrading soil faster than ever and using enormous amounts of antibiotics. Modern agriculture isn't sustainable, it is built on using slowly replinishing resources at a high rate.
Good news! The price system has your back! As we continue using up all these finite resources, prices will rise, and people will naturally shift to alternatives out of their own self-interest. The bonus is that you don't even need to do anything. You don't need to say anything; you don't need to argue online for a position; you don't need to ban/subsidize anything; you don't need to organize any rallies or political movements. You can just be happy in your own personal knowledge that the future will give you your preferred reality and your own personal confidence that the prices of your selected set of finite resources will certainly rise in the future. You might even make some speculative wagers in futures markets that could make you a bundle of money with which you can extra enjoy the future world. After all, that's why prices of hydrocarbons just kept ramping up from the early 2000s and there was no technology change whatsoever that reversed that trend. One thing is for sure; we're absolutely not heading to a world where we get more value out of using less stuff (on an absolute scale, not marginal).
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