rich assholes paying for “the true experience”

See also: "actually lab diamonds are too perfect, the subtle imperfections and discolorations really enhance the je ne se quoi of blood diamonds"

Honestly, that's almost a perfect win. If farming animals for meat becomes something for the 0.01%, imagine how much better things would be. How much less strain we'd put on the planet, and how much animal suffering would be prevented.

And we'd be only a few guillotines away from a full solution.

Well it differs per country but in Europe the meat industry holds quite a foot in the door to keep profiting and growing. And tbh large cheap cattle farms have been showing obvious signs over overcrowding and diseases. And I'm not the type to buy more animal ingredients or else meat farmer gets loose. We got to think beyond our bonus.

I swear to god the month that I embraced TVP and started using it in my cooking, it all got pulled from Safeway and Fred Meyers store shelves. It's like they fucking knew. It's like.... Come on you motherfuckers it's literally a basic and highly available food product. Please just stock it.

Textured vegetable protein, so basically bacobits. Nothing wrong with that, I buy frozen veggie burgers that taste better then the ground beef ones.

They sell bags of TVP here in the US for not that much if you buy it in the Hispanic section of the grocery store. I’m a little surprised to hear that’s not available in (assuming based on your instance) Germany.

"perfectly acceptable"

You stay know the answer to this 🤣

Anything is delicious if all you ate was bread and pickled cabbage on long voyages.

Wait a minute, what do dodos have to do with this??

We even see a Long Pork food stand in the background in one issue. If I remember correctly, it was even advertising that they use 100% cloned meat.

They would be killed, plain and simple. But that's their fate anyway and in this scenario, at least we'd stop breeding more of them.

It's sad to think about, but we've bred most of these animals to a point where their very existance includes suffering and their only path in nature would be extinction.

They'd be slaughtered right on schedule and just not replaced. It'd be like when cars took over for horses.

Um the same thing would happen to them that already happens to them: They'd be killed within a few years for people to eat. The only difference is that they wouldn't be forcibly inseminated to have more babies. I must say though, yours is not at all the first time I've heard someone ponder this and the confusion over the scenario always baffles me. You know that we raise cows specifically to kill them and we have complete control over how many are born, yea? No they wouldn't wander aimless into the ecosystem, they'd stay on the farm until slaughtered and we just wouldn't raise more of them.

There would still be a market for "authentic, grass-fed" meat. It would become the fancy stuff, despite not tasting any different. There will also be a market for milk.

Yes - it is that way for normal people. Notice the amount of qualifiers in my original statement.

There is a disturbing undercurrent to some people’s understanding of meat - to the point where people like Jordan Peterson (others too) have made themselves sick on “carnivore” diets.

I am talking about the kind of people mentioned in the OP that are upset that fake meat options exist. Part of the reason these people are upset - because any rational meat eater would be like cool, more food options - is that they view synthetic meats or even people choosing not to eat meat as an attack on their personal identity, which for these individuals is constructed around this weird patriarchal nationalist thing.

When I get a honey butter chicken biscuit from Whata, I’m doing it because I’m hungry and those things taste like crack. For some men, eating meat is something they have this complex about - you eat a steak because you aren’t a weak little soy boy.

If you start to look a lot of the advertising is highly masculinized. Meat is definitely masculine in Western culture.

No Farmers No Food looks to be one of these right wing conspiracists outfits associated with this phenomenon.

“NO FARMERS NO FOOD: WILL YOU EAT THE BUGS?” is an Epoch Original documentary exposing the hidden agenda behind global “Green Policies,” the untold stories of farmers forced out of business, the disruption this will have on our food supply, and why edible bugs are suddenly being pushed to the fore as a "Global Green Solution."

EpochTV program “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov travels around the world to investigate this next global food crisis that is being ignored by the world’s media.

Edit: the guy who runs it isn’t even a farmer.

I think that specific account strengthens my argument even more.

I will always upvote a reference to Nima and Adam's fantastic work.

100% it is artificial and socially constructed. I don’t think Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat has it all right but it has some interesting ideas about cultural messages about meat and masculinity and got me started thinking about it. (It was written for a Daly class, and Daly is the reason there’s a strain of radical feminism that things womyn are magical spirit beings that are tainted by being in any form of contact with an XY chromosome. There’s a reason Limbaugh attacked Dworkin and not Daly and Raymond cough)

Eating meat, especially steak, is very clearly a part of masculine identities in many western nations. That's self evidently true. It's well represented in media and if you've ever had to eat with men you must have noticed it.

I do don't understand what there is to object to in OPs pointing out of a fact of our culture.

Edit: don't

What? What am I a straw man of? I currently eat meat. This is a clear phenomenon that exists.

It does no favors for anyone to have and openly express this opinion.

But is the opinion wrong? Do these people on the right you mention not have a slur for effeminate men based on the preference of meat and dairy alternatives?

What part bewilders you? The "sexual politics of meat" part, or that fact that they chose a conservative stereotype to demonstrate an example? Because their theory is absolutely a thing in our society, meat is unarguably and demonstrably tied into masculinity for a lot of men as the result of advertising and social conditioning. If their example is what bewilders you though I think I can empathize, because this phenomenon is not at all something exclusive to conservatives or the right. Maybe just more pronounced on that side of culture. Plenty of liberal men conflate meat eating with masculinity, to degrees.

There’s also no way the growing environment, which seeks to create an artificial “animal”, is energyefficient.

Why not, could you elaborate on this?

You won't get much iron from spinach. I agree in general, though. But I think the point was we need fruits and vegetables and a bit of lab grown meat, and that's it. We don't need the huge animal-harming industry we have now.

All of these supplements can be added to other products, which already happens. Same with meat. Animals get fed loads of supplements so the meat or dairy will contain whatever us humans need. Loads of vitamins, metals and minerals. Weather we put it in meat, tofu, lab grown meat, soy milk, peanut butter or whatever else you consume, it doesn't matter what the form is you get it from. In all cases it's added.

Vitamin D

If only there was some sort of easy and cheap way to get Vitamin D without supplementation...

In summer and spring, with 22% of uncovered skin, 1000 IU vitamin D doses are synthesized in 10-15 min of sun exposure for adults.

I do take vitamin D supplements, but that's because I live mostly in darkness most of the year.

My dude you are making this sound like it's way harder then it is. In the absence of a medical condition or other limiting factors it's really not that hard to eat a balanced diet, there are tons of fortified foods which can help you hit your goals and worst case you pop a single multivitamin per day.

Lab meat though. I’m struggling to understand this. Unless the meat industry shuts down most people aren’t going to eat lab meat. And like you said it doesn’t offer a good enough reason to switch for most people. Some people might switch but it will have no impact on the meat supply chain.

There's a pretty large amount of people who are vaguely uncomfortable with the animal cruelty in the meat and dairy industries but can't get over themselves to completely change their diet to a plant-based one.

I also expect lab grown meat to be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly once the technology is more advanced and mature. It doesn't really make sense to compare an immature technology like this to conventional food right now.

Economics of scale, simple. If a sausage with lab grown meat is 75% of the regular sausages, or cheaper a big portion of the populous will switch.

The more people that switch the bigger the scale gets. Till it gets to the most efficient input -> meat like product.

Not usually, though I've been in situations where I'm at a bar and that's literally the only vegan option on the menu. I've joked in the past that bean burgers are such a crumbly disasater that they fail to replicate the aesthetics of meat entirely, whereas impossible patties do it so well that I'm paranoid and examining the pattie over and over again and asking the barkeep if he's sure this is the vegan one. Either way they're not my idea of fun.

Those are aesthetics

When I got a playstation 2, my stepfather was amazed it had a blue led. They were crazy expensive just a few years earlier and this console just used one for no real reason other than it looked good.

I'll bet dimes to dollars that it's not that hard to turn grass into labmeat-consumable nutrients. Cows use bacteria to digest grass, anyway, and enzymes are usually pretty easy to make in a lab, too.

They'll still sell regular meat, the lab meat burger will just be ten times the price

Lab grown meat is so expensive and small in quantities that it is inconsequential alright

From what I’ve read lab grown meat is mushy, like a chicken nugget, because it’s basically a paste that’s extruded into a steak like shape. Been a few years since I’ve read up on it though so maybe they have a new way of dealing with it

Lab grown chicken is apparently fantastic, taste and texture wise

I think when most people talk about "processed food", they're referring to ultra-processed food, and just grinding beef would not be enough to classify it as an ultra-processed food

“Processed” is anything that goes into a machine. You want your beef ground up? It’s now processed. What’s added in the processing is what you need to isolate and be weary of.

I don't disagree necessarily, but food that's been ground up into a paste is essentially pre-chewed. It definitely makes it easier to gulp down more before your brain catches up to your stomach and you start feeling full. This goes for apple sauce as much as it does chicken nuggets.

I also miss your wife

Agree - but i personally think there's a huge qualitative difference between selective breeding over long periods of time -- and then producing a fully artifical beef in a lab. One is a slow natural process with human intervention and the other is a fully synthetic process.

Nope, agriculture has existed for a looong long time. With that said, i try to limit my intake of food grown in conventional agriculture with pesticides and all that shit.

I'm not anti-technology on food per se. But i'm very sceptical whenever we introduce new foods or stuff to put into our bodies. It feels like 30 years passes and then the article "X is super fucking bad for you actually" comes out. So i try to limit myself to ingesting stuff that have existed for a long time - because at least then we know the long term effects of them.