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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.
Probably just lobbyists? Farmer lobby is big money and Fetterman seems very willing to go to bat for his donors even if it goes against progressive dogma.
Seems like an accidental good thing though. Lab meat© would have a lot of the same issues GMOs have, not so much health impacts, but legal impacts that put control of the food supply increasingly in the hands of our would be masters. With our climate too delicate to handle cow farts lab meat© becoming competitive would give authoritarian centralizing forces a better argument to ban meat. Or maybe just put carbon taxes on cows and subsidize meat© to the point no one can make a profit on meat and all the farms go under. Then an entire section of the food pyramid will require specialized clean rooms and labs to even exist. Things that the average person will not have access to.
I don’t think it does. You can actually grow your own food. And you can make black bean burgers and so on or cook with chickpeas or something.
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