@pferal
Thanks for the unlocked article.
Let's see the relevant bits...
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It’s a vision of hedonism — but altruism, too. A way to save water, free up vast tracts of land, drastically cut planet-warming emissions, protect vulnerable species. It’s an escape hatch for humankind’s excesses. All we have to do is tie on our bibs.
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TGTBT
My prediction has been, for years, that they can't scale up. Tissues are complicated and if the tech was viable, it would've already been used for medical needs. My concern was mostly about how the "lab" will replace the immune system, which is a very complex system in animals. This kind of differentiation and maintenance of "identity" in tissue systems, recognizing who they are, is very complex and downright philosophically challenging.
Of course, my overall problem with this "future" is that it's morally lazy and culturally problematic. We do actually need to end meat foods *culturally*, as a form, it's a culture war. There's absolutely no reason a lifetime vegan would need to eat such forms. For ex-carnists, like most of us here, the cultural "meat food" forms are eroding over time and I think it's fairly obvious that these are products for novices used as a psychological crutch to maintain some type of cultural normality unnecessarily.
Lab meat is the purest form of this cultural swap, it's almost ideal ecomodernism: swapping only the production and everything else is "normal". As the author says:
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The answer has to do with much more than a new kind of food. For all its terrifying urgency, climate change is an invitation — to reinvent our economies, to rethink consumption, to redraw our relationships to nature and to one another. Cultivated meat was an excuse to shirk that hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was all about nostalgia, a way to pretend that things will go on as they always have, that nothing really needs to change. It was magical climate thinking, a delicious delusion.
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In reality, I think that it will still be relevant in the future. But not because it scaled up. Rather, because the energy crisis and climate crisis will reduce agricultural productivity a lot and will make "free range" animal pharming non viable. This scarcity would lead to huge prices for animal products, which will make the "lab meat" cheaper by comparison. Plus, with the loss pressure on the animal sector, they'll push for more deregulation which will lead to contaminated animal products, and people will be looking for "lab meat" for that reason too.
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With that framing, cultivated meat always seemed like a story about optimism. It was about the way people came together and solved big problems in the nick of time. It was about the infinite potential of human ingenuity, our ability to make the impossible possible.
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That's the hype of the green capitalists, the ecomodernists. It's all about not changing anything meaningful while tweaking the technology. The moral philosophy version is called "effective altruism", and it's also plagued by scammers.
Again, I do think that this technology will have some results eventually. And I'm looking forward to human tissues, not to eat, but because I'd like to see humans getting tissue and organs from labs instead of waiting for someone to die in traffic carnage (the car system needs to be replaced too with something nicer and safer).
My favorite depiction so far is in the show "Billions", where there's a vegan character, a genius hedge fund CEO type and they're supposedly trying to get super wealthy in order to have $$$$ to spend on charity and Plant-Based Capitalism.
As @Sentientism says, and I'm paraphrasing, we need people to do the work, as opposed to taking moral shortcuts.
#cleanMeat #labMeat #ecoModernism #greenCapitalism #growth #effectiveAltruism just #goVegan already.
For the organ donor aspect: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-organ-donation-a-curious-connection-202301042870
