A lot of animal welfare/rights organizations provide funding for in-vitro meat / fake meat, though they don’t do much to advertise it. The idea is that these meat substitutes won’t take off unless they create some demand for them. Vegan Outreach is one of the biggest funders of Beyond Meat and New Harvest.
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you’ve provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it “fooled me badly in a blind tasting”.
But reading Bittman’s piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don’t see the ethical problems with it don’t want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There’s demand for in-vitro meat because there’s demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.
Maybe it’s likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I’d assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes − 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn’t buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it.
I dunno—look at all the brouhaha about genetically modified food.
That there’s a population brouhahaing over GM food doesn’t preclude the existence of a population eager to buy cheap tasty-enough meat. Indeed, I expect the populations overlap significantly.
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells “natural cow meat.” One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially—the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing “meat in a bucket” whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.
A lot of animal welfare/rights organizations provide funding for in-vitro meat / fake meat, though they don’t do much to advertise it. The idea is that these meat substitutes won’t take off unless they create some demand for them. Vegan Outreach is one of the biggest funders of Beyond Meat and New Harvest.
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you’ve provided says:
But reading Bittman’s piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don’t see the ethical problems with it don’t want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There’s demand for in-vitro meat because there’s demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.
Maybe it’s likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I’d assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes − 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn’t buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.
It seems overwhelmingly unlikely that the optimal method of meat production is to have it walking around eating plant matter and going ‘Moo!’.
Especially for sheep. The training costs would be prohibitive.
I dunno—look at all the brouhaha about genetically modified food.
That there’s a population brouhahaing over GM food doesn’t preclude the existence of a population eager to buy cheap tasty-enough meat. Indeed, I expect the populations overlap significantly.
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells “natural cow meat.” One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially—the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing “meat in a bucket” whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.