i hope the tech will one day make slaughtering animals for meat a social taboo
like remembering the times before we had toilet paper...
However, the tech alone isn't even close to what's needed, remove mead subsidies. make it so it's a one every few days meal (like it used to be), not the core part of every meal.
also increase animal welfare regulation, so animals suffer less.
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
I would argue, for the US, we should not rewild, but rematriate. Return the land to the tribes we stole it from and let them decide what to do next.
After all, Native Americans were the keystone species in every biome in North America for tens of thousands of years. Restoring the pre-Colombian ecology requires humans to occupy and manage the land. The myth of human-free American wilderness is settler colonial bullshit.
I'm on board with this, but, and I'm totally willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, abandoning our farm animals en mass seems like a bad idea. Especially pigs. Cows might fill the niche left by bison or aurochs, chickens are fucking suicidal and find unique ways to die whenever possible, but farm pigs turn into giant ass boar that aren't native and can genuinely harm people, property, pets and just generally wreak havoc. I'm not sure what a good alternative is, to be honest, since their current conditions are utterly cruel, but just turning them loose by the millions seems like something we'll regret a lot a decade later
A quick and dirty internet search says that a typical farm pig lives around 7 months. So you could ban every meat pig product in a year, stop breeding new pigs and just murder the old ones for meat and you would have no problem at all. So a grace period of less than a year is needed and you wouldn't have this problem. (I also seriously doubt that most farm pigs would be able to survive in the wild, but for that i am not knowledgeable enough. But e.g. modern chickens have a huge calcium deficiency which makes them not very suited for wildlife, there was an study that the average chicken at any given time has three broken bones.)
Or to put it in another way, we have to replace all farm pigs almost twice yearly anyway, so let's just stop replacing them.
To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon
And how can the salmon give free, prior, informed consent for this? This is still exploitation. This is not vegan.
EDIT: This could be done ethically if the company collected still-living cells from the bodies of recently deceased salmon in spawning season or if they collected genetic material from male gametes that did not end up fertilising an egg, but I've not found anything to suggest that this company does it this way.
Like, we essentially can't do anything with animals with that...
Yes. That's the point. Animals are sapient beings with rights, not objects to "do things with".
That being said, I recognize how far out of the Overton Window that attitude is.
Positive thought: if cultured meat goes mainstream, I expect there will be demand for "ethically sourced" cell lines - or some ad campaign will use it as a selling point - and shift the idea of not exploiting animals just a tiny bit closer to the mainstream :)
It's the same standard that I use for young children. If doing the thing is not clearly in their best interest, I don't touch them without their consent.
So yes, just leave other animals alone. Pretty simple.
Awesome! I'm currently pursuing a biochemistry degree with the goal of working in the cultivated meat industry, so this is super exciting to me! It seems the process is still too clunky for effective mass production, unfortunately. But hey - maybe that's a problem I'll be able to help solve!