You keep saying lab meat is “healthier” in this article. You have any good resources on this? Given its novelty, I don’t see how this could be established yet.
Factory farms are breeding grounds for new diseases. The animals are often immuno-compromised by their conditions. They're often dosed with antibiotics, which helps create antibiotic resistant bacteria. And of course they're packed into close quarters, so anything that develops can immediately jump to many new hosts.
I'm not sure if that's what the author was referring to, but factory farms definitely are one of the gravest threats to human health.
Do you think lab grown beef can come with prions? Lab grown chicken can give you salmonella if undercooked? How many worms can hook on lab grown porn tissue? How many antibiotics does something growing in a sterile environment need?
I think in a lot of discussion, we compare the best case for meat to something else, but that's by definition a rigged comparison. You have to consider all the risks involved in actual meat.
The idea would probably be that it'd be essentially zero-fat.
When you get stem cells you can get them to produce one type of tissue, such as muscle, fat, liver, whatever. "Meat" as most people conceive it, like steaks etc, is mostly muscle tissue. The parts of the animal it uses more tend to be lower-fat, and tougher to chew on. Lower-fat is considered by many to be "healthier".
But to make zero-fat meat palatable you have to cook it with lots of other fats (which of course doesn't have to be animal fat, but can be olive oil or whatever) or else slow-cook it. So it comes to the same thing, really.
I don't think there are any claims anywhere that lab-meat will be "zero fat". Also, fat is incredibly healthy and is an essential component of healthy diets. Animal fats are good for you. You can literally starve to death eating only protein, because your body needs fat. I don't think anyone would make the argument that entirely fat free lab-meat makes it automatically healthy.
Wait that last sentence you wrote is crazy. You think eating lab-grown fat-free meat but with added seed oils, and eating naturally animal-fat rich meat "comes to the same thing"??
I didn't say they were claiming that lab-grown meat would be zero-fat. I said that was the physical reality.
They begin with stem cells, which are the cells you have as an embryo. These cells later differentiate, becoming different kinds of cells. Some bone, some heart, some brains, some gut, some liver, and so on. In the case of lab-grown meat, they turn them into muscle cells.
Muscle cells are not fat cells. Natural meat contains a mixture of muscle cells and fat cells, as well of course as having some nerves, blood vessels and so on. So they're not creating meat, they're creating pure muscle cells. Which will not be palatable.
They'd have to either create other cell types as well, or bring them in from some other source, to make a product which is palatable.
By "comes to the same thing", I mean their health claims. In order to make the pure muscle cells taste like regular meat, either the lab or the consumer would have to add something to them - the same something which we nowadays already consider to be "healthy" or "unhealthy", rightly or wrongly.
So the "health" claims are a nonsense. It's like saying "flour is healthy!" Nobody eats flour by itself.
Yummy lab tissue is immortal but totally not cancer because the experts say so! Don’t look at those downregulated tumor suppression genes behind the curtain! p53 has nothing to do with it!
Not if you eat it but the cells are immortalised through genetic mutation. Normal cells become senescent and stop dividing after a certain number of generations.
you are aware that the point of the discussion we are having is that there is in fact now an entire state, the third most populous in the country, where you are NOT "perfectly welcome to eat it"? putting aside my strident disagreements with this kind of crunchy granola mindset that is also behind other horrible anti-science mind viruses like the anti-GMO movement, it seems ludicrous to take the position that people have a choice and you are merely disgusted by one of them when the entire discussion centers around governments taking away the freedom to make that choice
You have your priorities and I think it's good that you bring attention to this topic. I don't think lab meat ought to be banned and wonder how many votes (or campaign dollars) people in the cattle ranching industry represent.
That said, I still prefer the Republican party and at this point I think progressives are making good progress destroying the underpinnings of civilization.
Democracy as a method of government has enormous flaws because politicians must do whatever garners votes.
Can you recommend some reading materials that delve into the subject of animal pain and suffering, with a specific emphasis on its magnitude? Great article!
Meat should come from an animal that lives a normal life. This imparts vital essence into the meat as well as a more pleasing and healthy nutritional and chemical balance.
Lab meat and factory meat are both empty and poisonous, the former more so.
Science will not give you a cheat code for animal welfare.
Currently, all lab-grown meat is grown in a culture of foetal bovine serum.
That is, they take an unborn calf (sometimes when female cattle are brought to slaughter, a foetus is found in them), kill it, drain its blood (you get an average of 500ml), and use that as the culture to grow the meat. This foetal bovine serum is not self-replicating outside the foetus, and thus you get only hundred grams or so of lab-grown meat from the blood of one foetal calf.
It would seem simpler and more efficient to wait and let the calf be born at its normal birth weight of 30-40kg (about half of which would be edible meat), slaughter and eat it. Or even better, let it grow to adulthood and do so.
Thus, while the health and climate change aspects of lab-grown meat may be an open question, lab-grown meat is a worse choice from an animal welfare perspective than ordinary farming and slaughter practices. It's simply wasteful.
There is a Dutch company claiming to have a non-animal tissue growth serum, but that claim was made in 2022 and we've heard nothing since, suggesting it didn't work very well.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals, then don't eat meat. But don't pretend that science will give you a cheat code.
Well first of all, beef is one of the less bad animal products. Lab meat that replaces chicken with beef would be good! In addition, as the tech gets better, it will need less stuff.
Those who are concerned about climate change are generally more worried about beef than chicken. Likewise, if you're an animal welfare advocate then you can't really be in favour of tens of thousands of chickens crammed together in a barn, debeaked and declawed to prevent them from fighting, and pumped full of antibiotics to prevent disease spread.
"As the tech gets better, it will need less stuff" is not a scientific statement, it's a statement of faith. You may likewise believe the Messiah will come tomorrow. It may happen, it may not. We don't know.
But it seems unlikely in this case. We run up against physical and biochemical limits. Whereas there is no physical law preventing the Messiah from coming tomorrow.
The ban is ridiculous, and factory farming is horrific, but grasping for the emotional salience of human babies lost me. I'm no childfree utilitarian; I would massacre herds of bovine baby intellects to save one of mine!
Well I gave an argument for why it was that bad, namely it was the same amount of total agony and there wasn't a morally relelvant difference given that the beings suffering had similar cognitive capacities.
> Even if you think that animal suffering is only 1% as consequential as human suffering—a totally unjustified prejudice—factory farming is still easily the worst thing in the world.
It’s not that I disagree with you, necessarily. But what about insect suffering? Plant based diets also involve killing many many billions of insects every year (hundreds of billions? Trillions?). I’m afraid my intuitions about moral harms break down here. Don’t yours? It makes me pull back from the problem and makes it hard for me to take it entirely seriously.
Yes, exactly. Life is pain and suffering. Eating means killing. And not just a little — a lot. Constant, relentless killing. Facing this grim reality tends to numb one to utilitarian arguments. I will continue to live, and I want my loved ones to continue to live, therefore I harden myself to the suffering of those who must suffer if we are to live.
I'm not that great at math. Are you sure that chicken suffering is worth more than 1% of cow suffering or whatever? I have a hard time taking utilitarianism seriously when it falls back on this kind of calculus of utils. Which is more important, a mountain or a cow? I'm pretty much a panpsychist, which seems to me the most parsimonious explanation for the existence of phenomenal consciousness. And since discussion of animal consciousness and feelings pretty much always boils down to "this animal's behavior/anatomy reminds me of my own behavior/anatomy as a human", I'm skeptical of moral claims about animal suffering.
Look, like I said: I have compassion for animals, I support lab grown meat (of course!), and I agree that factory farming is bad. I just tune out when people start trying to quantify harms based on qualitative phenomena that, by definition, cannot be quantified.
I'd like to understand the arguments against lab grown meat. Anything to decrease animal suffering and improve human life should be considered. Likely it's a marketing thing, "lab grown meat" isn't attractive.
Serious question- Under this framework, wouldn't wild game(venison, wild boar, bison, turkey, pheasant) or seafood(fish, lobsters, clams, oysters, etc) be ethically more desirable?? I don't think meat eating will ever go away completely, but the scale and quantity of consumption today necessitates factory farming to satisfy demand. Eating less meat would be great, but I don't see people ever doing that, unless they're prohibited by cultural norms or faith(old-school Catholics not eating meat on Fridays, Jews n Muslims not eating pork, 7th Day Adventists eating very little meat).
The most serious argument I've seen against eating lab meat is that even if it seems functionally identical to meat it may not be as nutritious. The comparison I've seen is to vitamins, which look on paper like they should be capable of sustaining healthy people but tend not to be. Some people are generally averse to artificial food, which doesn't seem like a crazy prejudice to have. It's generally the types of food we've eaten over the longest periods of time that are healthy for us and that our bodies are best equipped to digest.
That still doesn't lend any credence to the idea of banning lab grown meat though. There are many less than perfectly nutritious, and artificially tampered with, foods that we allow people to sell.
Nobody is confusing peanut butter with real butter, but given the recent history of the food industry, it's likely to try to pull every trick in the book to keep customers from realizing the "meat" they sell is lab grown.
No one is going to confuse lab grown meat with meat from a dead animal! That's like saying "given the recent history of the food industry, the peanut butter industry will pull every trick in the book to keep customers from realizing the "butter" they sell comes from peanuts."
Both parties pander to lobbyists and use issues like this to establish their populist bona fides.
I take some comfort in the widespread outrage over Kristi Noem. At least we have bipartisan agreement that shooting a misbehaving puppy in the face is bad. Let's start there.
Yes. But the reverse is true. You get 500ml of foetal bovine serum from one calf foetus, and this becomes around 100g of lab-grown meat.
A newborn calf weighs 25-40kg, depending on breed and feeding, and around half of this is edible meat. So 12-20kg of meat per animal, vs 0.1kg. That is, 120-200 times more meat can be got from the normal process of letting an animal grow than killing it unborn and using it to make lab-grown meat.
And of course you get much more if you let it grow to become a cow or bull.
Ordinary old science is always much less exciting than Science! The capitalisation and exclamation mark denote the breathless thoughtlesss grasping at the nonsense claims of grifters, and our desperate need to believe that we can get a free lunch. Thus all the blather about fusion power, cities on Mars and lab-grown meat.
We can add too other costs. Foetal bovine serum is currently in use for making vaccines and scientific research; each year worldwide around 1 million calves are harvested for 500,000 litres of blood.
If it’s diverted for lab-grown meat, we’ll have less access to vaccines and other more useful research.
I would posit an argument along these lines. Some believe that killing a fertilized human embryo is an evil as great as killing a 5 yo child, and yet have no compunction about the suffering of factory farming inflicts on creatures far more capable of feeling pain than a single cell organism. Why? Because the embryo is endowed by God with an immortal soul whereas animals are not. Inflicting harm to animals affects zero souls, while harming humans does. Thus, no amount of suffering inflicted on soulless animals outweighs the economic harm done to ensouled ranchers.
Note I am not endorsing this, I am simply trying to answer John's question.
That is a crazy amount of conspiracism. It's unlikely that, just because lab meat is legal it will be secretly fed to people, and no one other than you has raised that concern. Also, only a small share of people who support banning lab meat have my particular weird views, being convinced by the argument from marginal cases.
Most politics is already driven by taking the opposite position of people you dislike. My argument amounts to "I don't like x, x likes y, therefore I don't like y". That's how normal people think, rational or not.
There's nothing conspiratorial about what I'm suggesting either. This conflict already happens with GMOs. Food producers lobby the government to limit the labeling they have to do on their products, whereas others lobby to have GMOs banned or at least prominently labeled on packaging
I question your point 1. That doesn't seem to track. It is conservatives who want to ban lab meat. Therefore, liberals are going to be pro-lab meat. But liberals are usually seen as supportive people with disabilities and conservatives as less so. So, support of lab meat and belief in a lower status for disabled people don't seem to go together.
I think it's dumb to ban cultured meat and broadly agree factory farming is an unethical equilibrium we've set up...just don't have high hopes it pans out in the next decade to a point where it can replace factory farming. Longer term I think it eventually will though.
I don't expect I'll take up this rhetorical line, but I agree. Banning cultured meat to support ranching is morally repugnant.
"We should never have made automatic elevators - think of all the elevator operators that lost their jobs!!"
Strong claim, but it seems supported by strong arguments. The analogy is helpful.
You keep saying lab meat is “healthier” in this article. You have any good resources on this? Given its novelty, I don’t see how this could be established yet.
Factory farms are breeding grounds for new diseases. The animals are often immuno-compromised by their conditions. They're often dosed with antibiotics, which helps create antibiotic resistant bacteria. And of course they're packed into close quarters, so anything that develops can immediately jump to many new hosts.
I'm not sure if that's what the author was referring to, but factory farms definitely are one of the gravest threats to human health.
Do you think lab grown beef can come with prions? Lab grown chicken can give you salmonella if undercooked? How many worms can hook on lab grown porn tissue? How many antibiotics does something growing in a sterile environment need?
I think in a lot of discussion, we compare the best case for meat to something else, but that's by definition a rigged comparison. You have to consider all the risks involved in actual meat.
The idea would probably be that it'd be essentially zero-fat.
When you get stem cells you can get them to produce one type of tissue, such as muscle, fat, liver, whatever. "Meat" as most people conceive it, like steaks etc, is mostly muscle tissue. The parts of the animal it uses more tend to be lower-fat, and tougher to chew on. Lower-fat is considered by many to be "healthier".
But to make zero-fat meat palatable you have to cook it with lots of other fats (which of course doesn't have to be animal fat, but can be olive oil or whatever) or else slow-cook it. So it comes to the same thing, really.
I don't think there are any claims anywhere that lab-meat will be "zero fat". Also, fat is incredibly healthy and is an essential component of healthy diets. Animal fats are good for you. You can literally starve to death eating only protein, because your body needs fat. I don't think anyone would make the argument that entirely fat free lab-meat makes it automatically healthy.
Wait that last sentence you wrote is crazy. You think eating lab-grown fat-free meat but with added seed oils, and eating naturally animal-fat rich meat "comes to the same thing"??
I didn't say they were claiming that lab-grown meat would be zero-fat. I said that was the physical reality.
They begin with stem cells, which are the cells you have as an embryo. These cells later differentiate, becoming different kinds of cells. Some bone, some heart, some brains, some gut, some liver, and so on. In the case of lab-grown meat, they turn them into muscle cells.
Muscle cells are not fat cells. Natural meat contains a mixture of muscle cells and fat cells, as well of course as having some nerves, blood vessels and so on. So they're not creating meat, they're creating pure muscle cells. Which will not be palatable.
They'd have to either create other cell types as well, or bring them in from some other source, to make a product which is palatable.
By "comes to the same thing", I mean their health claims. In order to make the pure muscle cells taste like regular meat, either the lab or the consumer would have to add something to them - the same something which we nowadays already consider to be "healthy" or "unhealthy", rightly or wrongly.
So the "health" claims are a nonsense. It's like saying "flour is healthy!" Nobody eats flour by itself.
How dare you question the holly and infallible experts.
Yummy lab tissue is immortal but totally not cancer because the experts say so! Don’t look at those downregulated tumor suppression genes behind the curtain! p53 has nothing to do with it!
Lab tissue is immortal?
Not if you eat it but the cells are immortalised through genetic mutation. Normal cells become senescent and stop dividing after a certain number of generations.
Are you claiming that consumption of lab meat is more cancerogenic than consumption of regular meat? Otherwise why raising this concern?
This is what it looks like in vivo. You’re perfectly welcome to eat it.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fars.els-cdn.com%2Fcontent%2Fimage%2F1-s2.0-S0021997521000232-gr1.jpg&tbnid=KFjmruPgRF1oSM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS0021997521000232&docid=h-5tJo3yfecb3M&w=580&h=652&itg=1&hl=en-jp&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F3&kgs=8d478bfe9e74540d&shem=abme%2Ctrie
So no substantial argument, simply appeal to disgust. Got it.
You admit that consuming mutant tissue is disgusting?
Wait, isn't that just a cow tumor?
Yes. Selling meat from a cancerous animal is a federal offence. Now, imagine cultivating the actual neoplasm in a dish and passing it off as meat.
you are aware that the point of the discussion we are having is that there is in fact now an entire state, the third most populous in the country, where you are NOT "perfectly welcome to eat it"? putting aside my strident disagreements with this kind of crunchy granola mindset that is also behind other horrible anti-science mind viruses like the anti-GMO movement, it seems ludicrous to take the position that people have a choice and you are merely disgusted by one of them when the entire discussion centers around governments taking away the freedom to make that choice
What’s wrong with people banning what they find disgusting? You don’t complain when Muslims do it.
> Lab meat offers a healthier alternative to the current meat industry
Sure, just like processed foods were supposed to be "healthier", and the COVID vaccine was supposed to be "safe and effective".
You have your priorities and I think it's good that you bring attention to this topic. I don't think lab meat ought to be banned and wonder how many votes (or campaign dollars) people in the cattle ranching industry represent.
That said, I still prefer the Republican party and at this point I think progressives are making good progress destroying the underpinnings of civilization.
Democracy as a method of government has enormous flaws because politicians must do whatever garners votes.
Can you recommend some reading materials that delve into the subject of animal pain and suffering, with a specific emphasis on its magnitude? Great article!
The linked post from rethink priorities is good. Also huemer in dialogues ok ethical vegetarianism.
Meat should come from an animal that lives a normal life. This imparts vital essence into the meat as well as a more pleasing and healthy nutritional and chemical balance.
Lab meat and factory meat are both empty and poisonous, the former more so.
I think banning lab grown meat is dumb, and it lowered my opinion of the Republican Party.
But reading this article made me go in the complete opposite direction.
If we take what you’ve written seriously, you would vote for Hitler if he promised to get rid of factory farming.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
Science will not give you a cheat code for animal welfare.
Currently, all lab-grown meat is grown in a culture of foetal bovine serum.
That is, they take an unborn calf (sometimes when female cattle are brought to slaughter, a foetus is found in them), kill it, drain its blood (you get an average of 500ml), and use that as the culture to grow the meat. This foetal bovine serum is not self-replicating outside the foetus, and thus you get only hundred grams or so of lab-grown meat from the blood of one foetal calf.
It would seem simpler and more efficient to wait and let the calf be born at its normal birth weight of 30-40kg (about half of which would be edible meat), slaughter and eat it. Or even better, let it grow to adulthood and do so.
Thus, while the health and climate change aspects of lab-grown meat may be an open question, lab-grown meat is a worse choice from an animal welfare perspective than ordinary farming and slaughter practices. It's simply wasteful.
There is a Dutch company claiming to have a non-animal tissue growth serum, but that claim was made in 2022 and we've heard nothing since, suggesting it didn't work very well.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals, then don't eat meat. But don't pretend that science will give you a cheat code.
Well first of all, beef is one of the less bad animal products. Lab meat that replaces chicken with beef would be good! In addition, as the tech gets better, it will need less stuff.
Those who are concerned about climate change are generally more worried about beef than chicken. Likewise, if you're an animal welfare advocate then you can't really be in favour of tens of thousands of chickens crammed together in a barn, debeaked and declawed to prevent them from fighting, and pumped full of antibiotics to prevent disease spread.
"As the tech gets better, it will need less stuff" is not a scientific statement, it's a statement of faith. You may likewise believe the Messiah will come tomorrow. It may happen, it may not. We don't know.
But it seems unlikely in this case. We run up against physical and biochemical limits. Whereas there is no physical law preventing the Messiah from coming tomorrow.
Will it be labelled «Lab meat » or beef? We know the answer as the industry will try to hide their frankenmeat…
The ban is ridiculous, and factory farming is horrific, but grasping for the emotional salience of human babies lost me. I'm no childfree utilitarian; I would massacre herds of bovine baby intellects to save one of mine!
Well I gave an argument for why it was that bad, namely it was the same amount of total agony and there wasn't a morally relelvant difference given that the beings suffering had similar cognitive capacities.
> Even if you think that animal suffering is only 1% as consequential as human suffering—a totally unjustified prejudice—factory farming is still easily the worst thing in the world.
It’s not that I disagree with you, necessarily. But what about insect suffering? Plant based diets also involve killing many many billions of insects every year (hundreds of billions? Trillions?). I’m afraid my intuitions about moral harms break down here. Don’t yours? It makes me pull back from the problem and makes it hard for me to take it entirely seriously.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/debunking-half-a-dozen-ridiculous?utm_source=publication-search
Breeding animals requires growing even more plants, causing even more insect deaths
Yes, exactly. Life is pain and suffering. Eating means killing. And not just a little — a lot. Constant, relentless killing. Facing this grim reality tends to numb one to utilitarian arguments. I will continue to live, and I want my loved ones to continue to live, therefore I harden myself to the suffering of those who must suffer if we are to live.
But you should kill fewer people and cause less extreme suffering rather than more. The problem isn't so much the killing as the life of torture.
I'm not that great at math. Are you sure that chicken suffering is worth more than 1% of cow suffering or whatever? I have a hard time taking utilitarianism seriously when it falls back on this kind of calculus of utils. Which is more important, a mountain or a cow? I'm pretty much a panpsychist, which seems to me the most parsimonious explanation for the existence of phenomenal consciousness. And since discussion of animal consciousness and feelings pretty much always boils down to "this animal's behavior/anatomy reminds me of my own behavior/anatomy as a human", I'm skeptical of moral claims about animal suffering.
Look, like I said: I have compassion for animals, I support lab grown meat (of course!), and I agree that factory farming is bad. I just tune out when people start trying to quantify harms based on qualitative phenomena that, by definition, cannot be quantified.
I'd like to understand the arguments against lab grown meat. Anything to decrease animal suffering and improve human life should be considered. Likely it's a marketing thing, "lab grown meat" isn't attractive.
There are no serious ones
Serious question- Under this framework, wouldn't wild game(venison, wild boar, bison, turkey, pheasant) or seafood(fish, lobsters, clams, oysters, etc) be ethically more desirable?? I don't think meat eating will ever go away completely, but the scale and quantity of consumption today necessitates factory farming to satisfy demand. Eating less meat would be great, but I don't see people ever doing that, unless they're prohibited by cultural norms or faith(old-school Catholics not eating meat on Fridays, Jews n Muslims not eating pork, 7th Day Adventists eating very little meat).
Yep
The most serious argument I've seen against eating lab meat is that even if it seems functionally identical to meat it may not be as nutritious. The comparison I've seen is to vitamins, which look on paper like they should be capable of sustaining healthy people but tend not to be. Some people are generally averse to artificial food, which doesn't seem like a crazy prejudice to have. It's generally the types of food we've eaten over the longest periods of time that are healthy for us and that our bodies are best equipped to digest.
That still doesn't lend any credence to the idea of banning lab grown meat though. There are many less than perfectly nutritious, and artificially tampered with, foods that we allow people to sell.
How about a compromise, you can sell your lab-grown tissue culture as long as you don't fraudulently call it "meat". Deal?
How about a compromise, you can sell your peanut juice as long as you don't fraudulently call it butter?
Nobody is confusing peanut butter with real butter, but given the recent history of the food industry, it's likely to try to pull every trick in the book to keep customers from realizing the "meat" they sell is lab grown.
No one is going to confuse lab grown meat with meat from a dead animal! That's like saying "given the recent history of the food industry, the peanut butter industry will pull every trick in the book to keep customers from realizing the "butter" they sell comes from peanuts."
> No one is going to confuse lab grown meat with meat from a dead animal!
Then you should have no problem with not allowing it to be labeled "meat".
Although the recent history of GMOs shows that the food industry will do its best to fight labeling laws.
For a funny take on what's behind the ban - see Jeff Maurer's post entitled "Ron DeSantis Wants Us to Know That He Is a Big, Tough Beef Boy"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144349643?r=6yrxj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That's hilarious!
Thanks for posting. Funny and a lot of good points but disappointing to read about Fetterman’s comment.
Both parties pander to lobbyists and use issues like this to establish their populist bona fides.
I take some comfort in the widespread outrage over Kristi Noem. At least we have bipartisan agreement that shooting a misbehaving puppy in the face is bad. Let's start there.
Lab-grown meat is produced using foetal bovine serum. You have to kill an unborn or newborn calf to get that. So animal welfare can't be an argument.
If it still requires killing some animals, but much less than are currently killed, the OPs argument still holds.
Yes. But the reverse is true. You get 500ml of foetal bovine serum from one calf foetus, and this becomes around 100g of lab-grown meat.
A newborn calf weighs 25-40kg, depending on breed and feeding, and around half of this is edible meat. So 12-20kg of meat per animal, vs 0.1kg. That is, 120-200 times more meat can be got from the normal process of letting an animal grow than killing it unborn and using it to make lab-grown meat.
And of course you get much more if you let it grow to become a cow or bull.
Ordinary old science is always much less exciting than Science! The capitalisation and exclamation mark denote the breathless thoughtlesss grasping at the nonsense claims of grifters, and our desperate need to believe that we can get a free lunch. Thus all the blather about fusion power, cities on Mars and lab-grown meat.
We can add too other costs. Foetal bovine serum is currently in use for making vaccines and scientific research; each year worldwide around 1 million calves are harvested for 500,000 litres of blood.
If it’s diverted for lab-grown meat, we’ll have less access to vaccines and other more useful research.
I would posit an argument along these lines. Some believe that killing a fertilized human embryo is an evil as great as killing a 5 yo child, and yet have no compunction about the suffering of factory farming inflicts on creatures far more capable of feeling pain than a single cell organism. Why? Because the embryo is endowed by God with an immortal soul whereas animals are not. Inflicting harm to animals affects zero souls, while harming humans does. Thus, no amount of suffering inflicted on soulless animals outweighs the economic harm done to ensouled ranchers.
Note I am not endorsing this, I am simply trying to answer John's question.
I think "normal" people (i.e. the vast majority of people who already dont care about factory farms) would look at it like this:
1) the people who want me to eat lab grown meat think that people with disabilities are about the same as animals
2) therefore those people are amoral, insane, and evil
3) I can't trust them, and they are probably lying to me about the health risks of lab grown meat.
4) how will I know whether the meat I'm eating is lab grown or "real"? Won't I be lied to about that also?
5) therefore for my own safety I want lab meat banned
That is a crazy amount of conspiracism. It's unlikely that, just because lab meat is legal it will be secretly fed to people, and no one other than you has raised that concern. Also, only a small share of people who support banning lab meat have my particular weird views, being convinced by the argument from marginal cases.
Most politics is already driven by taking the opposite position of people you dislike. My argument amounts to "I don't like x, x likes y, therefore I don't like y". That's how normal people think, rational or not.
There's nothing conspiratorial about what I'm suggesting either. This conflict already happens with GMOs. Food producers lobby the government to limit the labeling they have to do on their products, whereas others lobby to have GMOs banned or at least prominently labeled on packaging
I question your point 1. That doesn't seem to track. It is conservatives who want to ban lab meat. Therefore, liberals are going to be pro-lab meat. But liberals are usually seen as supportive people with disabilities and conservatives as less so. So, support of lab meat and belief in a lower status for disabled people don't seem to go together.
I think it's dumb to ban cultured meat and broadly agree factory farming is an unethical equilibrium we've set up...just don't have high hopes it pans out in the next decade to a point where it can replace factory farming. Longer term I think it eventually will though.