billtowson1982 t1_j1yav5q wrote on December 28, 2022 at 7:57 AM

Reply to comment by KelBowie in What would food look like if we could scale up lab grown meat? by sandcrawler56

The problem is that the type of farming you recommend is very labor intensive - which translates to expensive. It also can't be scaled up to feed 8, then 10, then 12 billion people, etc. unless people start wanting to eat a lot less meat, and probably not even then. Finally, and I mean no offense because you seem like a good and well-intentioned person, but you really shouldn't tell vegans (or anyone else) how they should feel about something. Some people oppose meat because of the vast majority of it being factory-farmed. Some have an ethical opposition to taking a mammalian life for food, some have a religious-based opposition to meat, etc. etc. Plenty of those people might oppose any animal-based agriculture, and that's fine. Just as its fine for you to eat animals if you like.

Also, having worked on sustainable farms where animals are treated pretty decently, I can say with a certainty that most are still not treated as "pets." That's just not a realistic view of how this sort of thing is right now, let alone how it could ever, under any circumstances, scale.

happy_bluebird t1_j220exz wrote on December 29, 2022 at 2:03 AM

I think the idea is this *could* be a possibility- if we have lab grown meat readily and cheaply available, we can and should absolutely drastically scale down our animal farming

billtowson1982 t1_j223j2v wrote on December 29, 2022 at 2:26 AM

Maybe. But I think the basic flaw of that sort of agriculture being extremely labor intensive and therefore expensive remains. It's hard (and unlikely) for us to scale up a very expensive labor intensive way of doing things in a world where most people in even well off countries neither want, nor can afford, to spend a lot more on food than they currently do. And while labor is cheap in poor countries, another important goal is helping poor countries become better off.

Also we reap a ton of environmental benefits by having most people live in or around cities. Move a ton of people back to rural areas so that they can work on labor intensive farms and we'll pay a big environmental cost for doing that too.