We could potentially alter the animals into something that would be hard to recognize, but that'll be an evolution of animal husbandry, not something that will leave us bewildered at animals.
What do you see that indicates we're going to make massive leaps beyond what animal life has already provided in turning sunlight and air into useful lipids and proteins?
Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.
Great rant on humans eating grass, but what does that have to do with anything? No one is saying you need to eat grass. The article is about the direct human consumption of grain vs. production of grain, feeding and growing cows, slaughtering them, shipping them, then consuming them.
I suspect the real problem is closer to wasting arable land, water, shipping (with all of those environmental externalities), etc. on growing crops that aren't used to directly feed humans, and government subsidies that hide the true cost of corn-fed livestock from consumers.
Also if you want to use scrub land to feed your livestock you're going to need a lot of it like in Australia.
>For millennia, humans raised livestock on pasturing lands, seemingly without harming the environment too badly.
For millennia most people wouldn't be getting access to 200lbs of meat a year. There was also a lot fewer of us to feed that much meat to.
I've switched the majority of my caloric intake over to Soylent but I still end up craving meat, for example.
2. I'm stating the major hurdles that need to be crossed for mainstream adoption. We will not see major shift without an alternative that people want to embrace both ethically and in flavor. Bacon is obsessed over for a reason; people don't want to give that up. We simply won't see a major shift without meat substitutes tasting like meat.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...