I don’t eat much meat these days, not out of any moral objection, but mainly for health reasons. I also prefer food of better quality and good quality meat costs. If I had no choice of meat but for the water-injected mass-market dross that emerges from supermarket shelves, then I might even object to meat on ethical grounds but it would have to be really bad.
This got me thinking. What kind of price pressure would it take for someone to start developing a real meat substitute. Not quorn, or soya but real, laboratory-grown meat. Imagine if we could cultivate artificial pigeon breasts, lamb shanks or fillet steak. You could specify the quality in terms of how long it had been ‘hung’. There would be no cruelty, no environmental damage, even the medical effects could be minimal by, for example, controlling for fat content or making red meat such that we digest it better. The third world could have a cheaper and better source of protein. We might even make strides in the global warming battle by reducing the amount of methane in the air.
This stuff wouldn’t be ‘meat’ in the sense that it actually came from an animal, or was even harvested from an animal, but would be a purely artificial construct. It would be a bit like the artifical Kryptonite created by Richard Pryor in Superman 3, except it wouldn’t give you evil tendencies.
The obvious downside is that we’d have no need to keep cows, chickens or sheep and so they might go extinct. However, we could keep a few in zoos, and presumably it might be useful to keep some in captivity for various reasons.
So the question is, would the benefits described above be worth the costs of near extinction of several species? I’m ignoring the loss of employment in the farming industry and will take it as given that this is made up for in the new artificial meat sector.
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