> That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.
I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap.
We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics.
But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight.
The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.