I’m assuming you mean non-sapient, rather than non-sentient.
I suggest you actually try to work out your break even numbers. Here are mine:
1 human, born into factory farming conditions, killed after 16 years, is about the same as 100 times as many pigs raised in similar conditions until killed at 8 months, for N = 2,400. For chickens killed at 6 weeks, my multiplier is around 20,000, so N = 2,800,000.
Given how much I like meat, I’m willing to subject a perfect stranger to factory-farming conditions for M years in order to be able to eat pork/chicken (produced out of thin air by Omega) for the rest of my life. My M is maybe 3 days. Cruel, but that’s why I don’t get to be the FAI. Although, I might be willing to be tortured in that way for 3 days in order to get a lifetime of meat.
This numerically suggests that I am cruel enough to eat up to 1.2 pigs or up to 1400 chickens during my life, if I can count that as an entire life’s worth of pleasure from eating meat. If we can vat-grow meat within 40 years, this is more than 1kg / week (of chicken), more than I used to eat.
But wouldn’t it be better if I just stopped liking meat? I’ve mostly done that already, and these calculations are based on remembering how much I used to enjoy meat. I’ve eaten meat four times in the last year, and never enjoyed it, so this calculation might not be valid anymore. Still, it offers some excuse for eating chicken, if not pork.
I’m assuming you mean non-sapient, rather than non-sentient.
I suggest you actually try to work out your break even numbers. Here are mine:
1 human, born into factory farming conditions, killed after 16 years, is about the same as 100 times as many pigs raised in similar conditions until killed at 8 months, for N = 2,400. For chickens killed at 6 weeks, my multiplier is around 20,000, so N = 2,800,000.
Given how much I like meat, I’m willing to subject a perfect stranger to factory-farming conditions for M years in order to be able to eat pork/chicken (produced out of thin air by Omega) for the rest of my life. My M is maybe 3 days. Cruel, but that’s why I don’t get to be the FAI. Although, I might be willing to be tortured in that way for 3 days in order to get a lifetime of meat.
This numerically suggests that I am cruel enough to eat up to 1.2 pigs or up to 1400 chickens during my life, if I can count that as an entire life’s worth of pleasure from eating meat. If we can vat-grow meat within 40 years, this is more than 1kg / week (of chicken), more than I used to eat.
But wouldn’t it be better if I just stopped liking meat? I’ve mostly done that already, and these calculations are based on remembering how much I used to enjoy meat. I’ve eaten meat four times in the last year, and never enjoyed it, so this calculation might not be valid anymore. Still, it offers some excuse for eating chicken, if not pork.