Excerpts from the book, The End of Food by Paul Roberts beautifully describes the "moral dilemmas" (euphemism for cognitive dissonace) of IVF meat (earlier post here and here):
"We even have ways to make meat without livestock at all. Inspired by NASA research into solutions for long-term space travel, scientists are advancing with in vitro meat: Seeded on thin membranes or small three-dimensional beads, muscle tissue stem cells can be grown into animal-free beef, chicken, or pork. Scalability remains the major barrier to this avant-garde approach, but if implemented, it would simultaneously address environmental, food safety, and animal welfare concerns, if not those surrounding biotechnology. For people not quite ready to embrace cultured hamburger, there is always milk and eggs, which gram for gram yield more protein with less environmental impact than even chicken.
Clearly, these alternatives won’t be an easy sell to a species that not only evolved on meat, but which still regards meat as a just reward for economic success. And yet, as the true economics of meat become apparent, it’s clear that our ancient appetites will need to be balanced against modern limits, and that we won’t be able to address other issues, like deforestation or climate change, without first addressing our relationship with meat. The bad news is that any attempts to transform our meat culture will raise the same kind of moral storm that surrounded such controversies as second-hand smoke and seatbelt laws. The good news is that we won’t be arguing for change on moral grounds alone. As our scientific understanding of meat becomes more complete, we can point with increasing confidence not only to the costs of meat, but toward ways to reduce those costs—information that will not only make our arguments more persuasive, but will ensure that our vision for the future is more plausible. In the end, the same scientific methods that showed us just how important meat was in our species’ spectacular rise must now help ensure that meat doesn’t contribute to our fall."
"We even have ways to make meat without livestock at all. Inspired by NASA research into solutions for long-term space travel, scientists are advancing with in vitro meat: Seeded on thin membranes or small three-dimensional beads, muscle tissue stem cells can be grown into animal-free beef, chicken, or pork. Scalability remains the major barrier to this avant-garde approach, but if implemented, it would simultaneously address environmental, food safety, and animal welfare concerns, if not those surrounding biotechnology. For people not quite ready to embrace cultured hamburger, there is always milk and eggs, which gram for gram yield more protein with less environmental impact than even chicken.
Clearly, these alternatives won’t be an easy sell to a species that not only evolved on meat, but which still regards meat as a just reward for economic success. And yet, as the true economics of meat become apparent, it’s clear that our ancient appetites will need to be balanced against modern limits, and that we won’t be able to address other issues, like deforestation or climate change, without first addressing our relationship with meat. The bad news is that any attempts to transform our meat culture will raise the same kind of moral storm that surrounded such controversies as second-hand smoke and seatbelt laws. The good news is that we won’t be arguing for change on moral grounds alone. As our scientific understanding of meat becomes more complete, we can point with increasing confidence not only to the costs of meat, but toward ways to reduce those costs—information that will not only make our arguments more persuasive, but will ensure that our vision for the future is more plausible. In the end, the same scientific methods that showed us just how important meat was in our species’ spectacular rise must now help ensure that meat doesn’t contribute to our fall."
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