1. Most people consider animals to be food, so there's not really a moral need to develop lab meat.
2. Most people don't consider lab meat to be food (you discuss this in the article). If that's the case, then it simply can't replace meat as there's no equivalence in the eyes of the consumer, and it might be unethical to even try.
Oh, lol, sorry for misinterpreting. I'm glad that the context you provide gives me some excuse for deploying otherwise the worst response in the world to missing satire: there are people who actually do say this stuff earnestly!
Why would it be unethical to even try? Lots of things weren't considered food by typical (American/Western) consumers until someone sold it to them, and eventually minds changed.
The fact that so many conservatives want to make lab meat illegal just shows that these people are literally evil. If a Disney film had a villain like that, then people would probably say that the villain is too unrealistic because no normal human being would be that morally depraved.
I think this is absolutely right, I’ve also noticed a weird cognitive dissonance with some environmentalists about stuff like this, it seems like a natural way to both reduce animal suffering and destruction of nature while giving us what we want in terms of diets. But a lot of people in that space also seem to have the reaction of wanting to protect farmers. Which I understand, but it still seems dissonant.
The anti-lab-meat people I’ve personally interacted with have a somewhat different set of concerns. Their argument, not that I agree with it, is more like: “Sure, they *say* lab meat is just an alternative that’s better for the environment and so on. But we all know that if we let lab meat become a thing, they’re going to use it as yet more leverage to ban the rest of us from eating real meat entirely. I refuse to yield a single inch to these people who care nothing for our culture and way of life simply because they personally find it gross—my ancestors ate meat and so I will continue to do so. We cannot let the activists get a foot in the door.”
Such people can be partially reached with the fact that factory farmed meat is quite different to what their ancestors (some of them maybe at any rate). However, it should be noted that for many of them, that's not the real reason, insofar as it's not distinguishable from pretending, when some such people double down that they're eating the same way their ancestors did since forever.
I feel for most people who give such reasoning, it's simply because they're trying to justify convenient preferences, and conformity to social pressure. So we can expect this to naturally be a shrinking hurdle as lab meat becomes cheaper.
Though those analyses were by assumption not incorporating into account significant R&D acceleration due to AI, and these things are, as you say, hard to forecast anyway.
"But in any case, my aim in this article is to defend the claim that once lab meat is cost-competitive, there won’t be any serious objections to it. Exactly when that will be is hard to forecast"
Suppose I take that as a given, I think it's still too strong to say there aren't any good arguments. I think the pandemic risk is still nontrivial. Basically meat vats are at optimal growth conditions for bacteria, viruses, and all sorts of nasty stuff (37 C, PH 7, lots of mammalian cells to eat, no skin, no immune system, tanks in close proximity to each other, etc, etc, )
The obvious rejoinder is that factory farming *also* has significant pandemic risk. I think this is true. But I don't think we can a priori rule out that lab-grown meat vats at scale will have higher pandemic risk.
I'm not saying this is the type of thing that you need a proof or even careful empirical testing to demonstrate, tbc. Just that afaik the existing public arguments are not sufficient that a reasonable person highly concerned about biosecurity ought to be confident in the conclusions. I expect a good enough argument looks like a multi-hundred page white paper with careful simulations, not the mostly handwavey things I've seen so far (even if the publicly debated arguments eventually would look like 1-5 page distillations).
So "I think there aren't any good arguments against lab-grown meat" is too strongly stated.
While I don't have theoretical aversion to lab grown meat that many seem to, and would prefer lab-grown to animal sourced meat if the switch were to be made, I think that this is an oversimplification of the difficulties it faces.
How will you replace all the leather, organs, bones, hooves, and horns that our meat industry currently produces, and are critical inputs for a large variety of products?
1) Fetal bovine serum, the blood of unborn cows, has historically been used as the growth medium. It is not even vaguely vegan, is grossly cruel, and is the single most profitable item factory farms sell. The research itself has been a massive cause of animal suffering and a financial giveaway to factory farms.
2) Even in the future when they decide to use a different growth medium (which they will, not because of ethics, but because of cost), there is no guarantee it will be vegan. They are exploring horse blood, ocular fluid, etc. Lab-grown meat is not suitable for vegans now; there is every chance it will never be.
3) Even if some brands do develop and use a plant-based growth medium, we have no idea if everyone will. Can you imagine the advocacy work of trying to explain to consumers which version of lab-grown meat is grown on ocular fluid and which isn't?
4) It is worse in terms of climate change than even factory farms. It is not sustainable now; it is very unlikely it will ever become sustainable. This makes it utopian and pointless. We can't scale it because it emits more greenhouse gas emissions than even factory farms, and we can't increase the rate of emissions from animal agriculture—already the second leading cause of emissions.
5) The publicly stated goal by some of the venture capitalists is to sell the technology to the factory farms themselves. Even if there were, theoretically, some kind of ethical or sustainable way to do lab-grown meat (solar-powered, plant-based growth medium, etc.), we'll never see it because the goal—the publicly stated goal—is to be bought out by Cargill, Tyson, etc. (who, in turn, are already invested in the technology). We would have to believe that Cargill will use this technology to help animals and the planet. I very much doubt this will occur.
These arguments are not mine, I am copying them from Vasile Stănescu. I post it here because I'd like to see others' perspectives.
Let me clarify in more detail what I was arguing. I think lab meat is a clear improvement over regular meat, not over eating plants.
Re :
1-3. The industry has been trying to move away from FBS. But I agree that if they're using FBS in large quantities, you shouldn't eat it. And in any case, uses a lot less of it than standard factory farming.
4. Disagree for the reasons I explain.
5. I don't see why you'd have to sell the tech to the factory farms, rather than just sell the product.
This article is from 2023, so I don't know if there have been further developments since then. To summarise: all of the constituents of fetal bovine serum can be produced using recombinant technology. The problem we have at the moment is that we don't yet have a way of producing recombinant proteins at low cost on a large scale.
I think there's two problems with your article:
1. Most people consider animals to be food, so there's not really a moral need to develop lab meat.
2. Most people don't consider lab meat to be food (you discuss this in the article). If that's the case, then it simply can't replace meat as there's no equivalence in the eyes of the consumer, and it might be unethical to even try.
lmao!
For context: someone was explaining to VLI and I that the reason it's alright to eat animals is that they are just considered food.
Oh, lol, sorry for misinterpreting. I'm glad that the context you provide gives me some excuse for deploying otherwise the worst response in the world to missing satire: there are people who actually do say this stuff earnestly!
Why would it be unethical to even try? Lots of things weren't considered food by typical (American/Western) consumers until someone sold it to them, and eventually minds changed.
VLI is kidding.
The fact that so many conservatives want to make lab meat illegal just shows that these people are literally evil. If a Disney film had a villain like that, then people would probably say that the villain is too unrealistic because no normal human being would be that morally depraved.
I fully agree with the article; thanks for writing it.
You know who else did mitosis? Hitler.
I think this is absolutely right, I’ve also noticed a weird cognitive dissonance with some environmentalists about stuff like this, it seems like a natural way to both reduce animal suffering and destruction of nature while giving us what we want in terms of diets. But a lot of people in that space also seem to have the reaction of wanting to protect farmers. Which I understand, but it still seems dissonant.
(Though nature is most probably very bad)
Seems legit. I think that taste is also a factor, though one closely related to cost.
The anti-lab-meat people I’ve personally interacted with have a somewhat different set of concerns. Their argument, not that I agree with it, is more like: “Sure, they *say* lab meat is just an alternative that’s better for the environment and so on. But we all know that if we let lab meat become a thing, they’re going to use it as yet more leverage to ban the rest of us from eating real meat entirely. I refuse to yield a single inch to these people who care nothing for our culture and way of life simply because they personally find it gross—my ancestors ate meat and so I will continue to do so. We cannot let the activists get a foot in the door.”
Such people can be partially reached with the fact that factory farmed meat is quite different to what their ancestors (some of them maybe at any rate). However, it should be noted that for many of them, that's not the real reason, insofar as it's not distinguishable from pretending, when some such people double down that they're eating the same way their ancestors did since forever.
I feel for most people who give such reasoning, it's simply because they're trying to justify convenient preferences, and conformity to social pressure. So we can expect this to naturally be a shrinking hurdle as lab meat becomes cheaper.
I've historically disagreed with a focus on lab-grown meats due to feasibility considerations. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y8jHKDkhPXApHp2gb/cultured-meat-a-comparison-of-techno-economic-analyses
Though those analyses were by assumption not incorporating into account significant R&D acceleration due to AI, and these things are, as you say, hard to forecast anyway.
"But in any case, my aim in this article is to defend the claim that once lab meat is cost-competitive, there won’t be any serious objections to it. Exactly when that will be is hard to forecast"
Suppose I take that as a given, I think it's still too strong to say there aren't any good arguments. I think the pandemic risk is still nontrivial. Basically meat vats are at optimal growth conditions for bacteria, viruses, and all sorts of nasty stuff (37 C, PH 7, lots of mammalian cells to eat, no skin, no immune system, tanks in close proximity to each other, etc, etc, )
The obvious rejoinder is that factory farming *also* has significant pandemic risk. I think this is true. But I don't think we can a priori rule out that lab-grown meat vats at scale will have higher pandemic risk.
I'm not saying this is the type of thing that you need a proof or even careful empirical testing to demonstrate, tbc. Just that afaik the existing public arguments are not sufficient that a reasonable person highly concerned about biosecurity ought to be confident in the conclusions. I expect a good enough argument looks like a multi-hundred page white paper with careful simulations, not the mostly handwavey things I've seen so far (even if the publicly debated arguments eventually would look like 1-5 page distillations).
So "I think there aren't any good arguments against lab-grown meat" is too strongly stated.
While I don't have theoretical aversion to lab grown meat that many seem to, and would prefer lab-grown to animal sourced meat if the switch were to be made, I think that this is an oversimplification of the difficulties it faces.
While I don't agree with everything advocates for it's at least very informed as to many of the limitations in trying to replace animal meat with lab grown meat at a large scape: https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/the-many-foundational-issues-of-lab
How will you replace all the leather, organs, bones, hooves, and horns that our meat industry currently produces, and are critical inputs for a large variety of products?
1) Fetal bovine serum, the blood of unborn cows, has historically been used as the growth medium. It is not even vaguely vegan, is grossly cruel, and is the single most profitable item factory farms sell. The research itself has been a massive cause of animal suffering and a financial giveaway to factory farms.
2) Even in the future when they decide to use a different growth medium (which they will, not because of ethics, but because of cost), there is no guarantee it will be vegan. They are exploring horse blood, ocular fluid, etc. Lab-grown meat is not suitable for vegans now; there is every chance it will never be.
3) Even if some brands do develop and use a plant-based growth medium, we have no idea if everyone will. Can you imagine the advocacy work of trying to explain to consumers which version of lab-grown meat is grown on ocular fluid and which isn't?
4) It is worse in terms of climate change than even factory farms. It is not sustainable now; it is very unlikely it will ever become sustainable. This makes it utopian and pointless. We can't scale it because it emits more greenhouse gas emissions than even factory farms, and we can't increase the rate of emissions from animal agriculture—already the second leading cause of emissions.
5) The publicly stated goal by some of the venture capitalists is to sell the technology to the factory farms themselves. Even if there were, theoretically, some kind of ethical or sustainable way to do lab-grown meat (solar-powered, plant-based growth medium, etc.), we'll never see it because the goal—the publicly stated goal—is to be bought out by Cargill, Tyson, etc. (who, in turn, are already invested in the technology). We would have to believe that Cargill will use this technology to help animals and the planet. I very much doubt this will occur.
These arguments are not mine, I am copying them from Vasile Stănescu. I post it here because I'd like to see others' perspectives.
Let me clarify in more detail what I was arguing. I think lab meat is a clear improvement over regular meat, not over eating plants.
Re :
1-3. The industry has been trying to move away from FBS. But I agree that if they're using FBS in large quantities, you shouldn't eat it. And in any case, uses a lot less of it than standard factory farming.
4. Disagree for the reasons I explain.
5. I don't see why you'd have to sell the tech to the factory farms, rather than just sell the product.
This article is from 2023, so I don't know if there have been further developments since then. To summarise: all of the constituents of fetal bovine serum can be produced using recombinant technology. The problem we have at the moment is that we don't yet have a way of producing recombinant proteins at low cost on a large scale.
https://cen.acs.org/food/Inside-effort-cut-cost-cultivated/101/i33