Animal Welfare - The future

CB19Kevo

Curious if many of you would change to ''lab grown'' meat or plant based alternative meats if taste was closely matched and any concerns around health were addressed.

Personally i eat meat as i feel the alternatives at the moment just are not either readily available or just dont 'taste' right.
However i feel we as a species are very wrong for our treatment or mistreatment of livestock and i feel that in the future our current views on animals will be seen as brutal and morally repulsive.

Am i part of the problem - yes, But i would be hopeful that we as a society can come up with suitable alternatives.

banie01

When lab grown meat becomes cost effective at scale, it will almost certainly replace a huge swathe of the meat industry.

It will snowball into a huge economic shock though.
If meat producing farms are no longer viable, every aspect of employment supported by that industry also becomes unviable.

Feed and rusk producers, agricultural equipment, animal husbandry, vets, animal transports, slaughter, processing and butchery, supermarket supply chains, shops and a swathe of other industries that rely on meat, meat processing, retail, and meat byproducts.

There is an inflection looming in food production IMO that will lead to a seachange and it will need an imaginative approach from the agri-food sector to manage it.

Animals for food will likely quickly move to a "luxury" item and high quality real meat will always have a market.
But the ease of production and distribution when lab grown reaches scale will lead to a paradigm shift in consumption patterns.

Ubbquittious

banie01 wrote: »

When lab grown meat becomes cost effective at scale, it will almost certainly replace a huge swathe of the meat industry.

It will snowball into a huge economic shock though.
If meat producing farms are no longer viable, every aspect of employment supported by that industry also becomes unviable.

Feed and rusk producers, agricultural equipment, animal husbandry, vets, animal transports, slaughter, processing and butchery, supermarket supply chains, shops and a swathe of other industries that rely on meat, meat processing, retail, and meat byproducts.

There is an inflection looming in food production IMO that will lead to a seachange and it will need an imaginative approach from the agri-food sector to manage it.

Animals for food will likely quickly move to a "luxury" item and high quality real meat will always have a market.
But the ease of production and distribution when lab grown reaches scale will lead to a paradigm shift in consumption patterns.

Lab grown meat still needs food to grow. Maybe not as much but you can't create it from thin air. Land use will change, there will be more forestry and probably biofuels.



You're appear fairly convinced it will happen. I'm not so sure myself. They have been trying for a very long time now and most people still eat normal meat

banie01

Ubbquittious wrote: »

Lab grown meat still needs food to grow. Maybe not as much but you can't create it from thin air. Land use will change, there will be more forestry and probably biofuels.



You're appear fairly convinced it will happen. I'm not so sure myself. They have been trying for a very long time now and most people still eat normal meat

It will, I'm not a vegan, I'm a full on barbecuing carnivore and I'm certain it's on the way.

The people trying have in the main succeeded in their product development.
What they need to do now is scale an industrial process to deliver that product.
It will take time, and I do believe it will happen.

Land use will of course change, and the move from animal agriculture to any crop farming in the western world will require far less human input and processing than animal agriculture currently does.
It will be a huge systemic shift IMO.

No, I think it's a stupid technology. Why would you go to all the trouble of trying to recreate something as inefficient as a cow's biology, when you could just make synthetic burgers that recreate the taste and appearance of a beef burger through a chemical process?

There are lots of companies doing this, some with very impressive reviews.

I'm very keen to try the "impossible burger", I don't believe it's available here yet but it's all over America.
https://www.impossiblefoods.com/burger

lab grown meat wont take off......the world is headed towards more tradional type cuts/food such as free range eggs,less processed meats etc


Vegans are broadly correct in their arguements as regards envirnomental impact and ethics/practices in meat factories......


But i dont think this lab grown meat is the answer and will struggle to take off and a single bad report/reaction to it,will kill it in its tracks

Bigbooty

Good post op. People will be quick to forget that it's grown in a lab when they taste it for themselves and see no real difference. Generally speaking people buy cheap and by extension don't care about animals at all unless its their dog. It pains me to admit that being a vegan and all.

A good start would be all the industrially produced meat like chicken, pork, shrimp and salmon. It's so poor quality who would even care if it came from a fermentation tank? Where they come from now is so much worse. Big huge disgusting factory farms riddled with disease and a giant incubator for the next pandemic or in the case of shrimp riddled with systemic slave labour/human trafficking.