[antepodius]

I reckon that eventually, there'll be 'lab-grown' meat that tastes better than animal-grown meat, while being healthier.

Humans are omnivorous; we're presumably adapted for some amount of animal protein. Even if meat-eating goes out of style, once there's no moral hazard involved we'll gravitate back to it.

[1_player]

This is the solution. Hiding our heads in the sand saying meat is bad means ignoring our biology. Give me meat, give me vegetables, don't give me artificial mixtures filled with flavor enhancers and preservatives because we've decided human bodies don't need meat and animal protein.

The only way is find out how to grow an indistinguishable piece of muscle meat (and organ) in a lab, without animal suffering. Though in an ideal world sustainable animal husbandry would be best, but would never work in our hyper-capitalistic hyper-consumeristic reality, so let's find a compromise.

[antepodius]

It's not so clear to me that the abbatoir of nature is that great, inherently. You could probably make a decent moral case for wiping out all life on earth, should there be no prospects for it to transcend the bloodbath and disease and botflies and rape and knocking the gazelle to the ground, pinning it as you rip out its living entrails.

[Mediterraneo10]

There are however a few vegan activists who oppose lab-grown meat (and things like the Awesome Burger) on the grounds that we will never truly love our animal brothers and sisters and treat them justly, until we have lost the very appetite for meat.

[_5659]

They're missing an opportunity. We've had jackfruit for a while now and synthetic meat is nothing new in some sense. This is like policing the aesthetics of the Maillard reaction.

Framing the argument strictly in terms of consumption without inspecting the conditions of production also betrays a wider perspective on how we can achieve ethical or sustainable practices. And certainly it's inimical to the reality that there needs to be reform at the institutional and corporate tier of practice with higher priority rather than castigate individual and cultural consumption.

[senkora]

People who have made a difficult personal sacrifice for their ideals often react poorly to that sacrifice becoming obsolete, and transform the now unnecessary sacrifice into a social marker.

In this case: meat is enjoyable, but eating it is unethical, so I will make the sacrifice not to eat it. If it becomes possible to eat meat while still being ethical, then I still won’t because it marks me as someone who is willing to make a sacrifice to be ethical.

[JoeAltmaier]

That sounds a little desperate. I 'truly love' few things. I'll give that one a miss.

[_5659]

Not even eventually, I prefer the taste of certain synthetic meat because it tastes more charbroiled and bloody than meat in some cases. Not only is it already good enough is what I'm saying, I think there's a preference in taste to have it overcome some of the disadvantages in freshness that meat poses.