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Lab-Grown Meat Is In Your Future, and It May Be Healthier Than the Real Stuff (smh.com.au)
An anonymous reader shares an article on The Sydney Morning Herald:Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef? In August 2013, a team of Dutch scientists showed off their lab-grown burger (cost: $435,000) and even provided a taste test. Two months ago, the American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball (cost: $23,700 per pound). Those who have tasted these items say they barely differ from the real deal. The Dutch and the Americans claim that within a few years lab-produced meats will start appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. And these are not the only teams working on cultured meat (as they prefer to call it). Another company, Modern Meadow, promises that lab-grown "steak chips" -- something between a potato chip and beef jerky -- will hit the stores in the near future, too.
Like anything else, you want to stay away from the overhyped nonsense. Since vegetarianism is a current fad, I would expect it to be unnecessarily expensive when compared to sensible omnivorism. Things like Kale aren't cheap. The produce sections of places like Whole Foods can drain your whole wallet.
Even if you are eating the low stress free range stuff, it's still likely cheaper than many of the other things that a prissy vegan would end up needing to buy.
A "plant based diet" is far more bothersome than they will admit to.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're comparing to a nonexistent zero base state. 99% of animals left alone by humans die a painful, tortuous death - usually in the jaws of a predator. I've seen them swallowed alive and struggling inside the belly of a predator, cut in half, skinned alive, limbs gnawed off while still alive, attempting to flee with entrails hanging out, all without any human nearby. It is extraordinarily rare for a wild animal to die of old age. The methods humans have developed to slaughter livestock do not purport to be peaceful or painless, they just needed to be less painful than the death most wild animals would experience naturally to justify the killing as an improvement (from the animal's perspective) from a wild death.
I've killed (and continue to kill) my share of animals for meat. It is not the cold, emotionless process we've developed in slaughterhouses hidden from view of the supermarket shelves. You become intimately aware that this is a living thing struggling to survive, and you're ending its life so you can eat. You gain a tremendous respect for the creature that gave its life to become your dinner, and are less likely to do things like dump a half-eaten burger into the trash.
That's the question I raise to people (non-vegetarians) I meet who are offended that I "enjoy killing wild animals" for meat (fishing). The animals I catch spend their entire lives free in the sea to do as they wish, except for the last 5 minutes before I kill them and make a best effort to eat as much of the meat as I can. The animals they eat spend their entire lives penned up in captivity, basically as part of a meat assembly line, until they're slaughtered, and they probably throw away unused meat simply because it's inconvenient or doesn't taste good anymore. Yet somehow in their minds, I am the bad guy because I make the animal suffer more?
,br> If "cultivated meat" becomes affordable, I will probably eat it most of the time for convenience and to decrease my environmental impact. But I will still catch the occasional fish and eat it myself, to remind myself what the natural ecosystem is and to respect it, and not live completely isolated from it within the artificial biosphere that modern humans have created.