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Comment by kharak | Hacker News Reader

The most significant gain for animal rights will be the day, when we can produce inexpensive lab-grown meat (including fish) that is indistinguishable from livestock based products.

We could also really use a framework for recognizing and categorizing consciousness in other lifeforms. And translate that into a law that automatically applies tiered protection to all other lifeforms. We probably need to figure out consciousness in ourselves first, though.

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Possibly, but this could also be the day that animals we now eat are considered useless to us and so not worth caring about. They could be driven to extinction if we decide to use the land for other purposes, such as building huge labs to produce the meat. So we'll need to think about keeping areas available for animals. And enough people will need to care.

This is true. Conservation and reducing animal suffering aren't perfectly coincident, and some times they are at odds with each other

The far simpler first step, while lab grown meat is being developed, is eating much less meat.

We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.

And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.

There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.

Point: we really don't have to wait for lab grown meat. Not if you are a meat lover, nor if you are a habitual meat eater.

> We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.

Define need.

I don't live to be a drone guided by some moral principles of other human who has the same rights as I do.

If I want meat - I will eat it regardless of whether I need it or not.

> And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.

I hear the same mantra for last 10 years.

> There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.

You forgot psychological factor. While the bucket of fried chicken is rarely as pretty before cooking as they display it, but in the end it is 100% meat. If we're talking about some plant surrogate, most people would probably puke at the thought of eating this. I certainly wouldn't enjoy it.

The 'need' part you're missing isn't some moral declaration - physically, it isn't healthy to eat as much meat as many people do

Lab-grown meat sounds dystopic. Imagine a giant machine shitting out nutrient bricks forever.

Plant-based meat substitutes are ridiculous. Americans, North and South, eat way too much meat (Europeans eat much less). To cut down on the extravagant amounts of meat consumed in the Americas is a great idea, but why do those need to be replaced with meat substitutes? Teach people to cook good food with plants, otherwise you're just keeping them dependent on the food industry that just wants to sell them cheap overprocessed shit that makes them sick and sad.

Systematic animal torture sounds dystopic.

Why not attack that from all angles? Convince people to eat less meat and more vegetables…sure. But you will still have holdouts saying that they prefer the taste of meat. Hence plant based meat alternatives and lab grown meat.

There can be multiple solutions to a given problem.

> Systematic animal torture sounds dystopic.

I agree on principle but I'm not sure what you mean by "systematic animal torture". For example, for me industrial farming is just that, but small-scale farming (where herds are no larger than a few dozen animals, for cows, more for goats and sheep) are not.

So I think we'll disagree on that. Basically, I think some people find eating animals dystopic regardless of how it's done, while I don't.

sorry i should have been more clear, my comment was referring to factory farming specifically. i agree that small scale farming can be done in a more humane, ethical way. unfortunately, it does not scale to meet global food demand.

lab-grown meat may be a net-negative if it takes too much energy to produce or requires other animal inputs (currently fetal bovine serum). It'll need a lot of improvement to beat chicken or insects in terms of feed conversion factor or carbon footprint.

The farms that grow the inputs to your lab goo will have permits to shoot wild animals on these properties… it’s called a “block permit” and farmers in my area are known to kill so many deer through these permits that bulldozers are needed to handle the disposal/burial of the masses of animals they kill… and why do they do this? Because feeding humans is actually a rather important task.

Step off the concrete sometime… the solutions to the worlds problems and injustices are often far more complex and nuanced than what is proposed by the modern left.

The scale of these "block permit" killings and the amount of suffering this would cause is incomparable to industrial farming. This is not worth worrying about

Okay, how do you feel about monocultures of soybean doused in glyphosate and multi-annual applications of synthetic fertilizers (which create radioactive leachate as a manufacturing byproduct)?

Obviously not great, therefore doing less of it holistically is useful. You do realize most of that soy goes to feeding livestock...

The primary ingredients in the fake meats being proselytized are plant proteins… meaning massive monocultures, pesticide and herbicide application, fertilizer application and manufacturing, and decimation of many thousands of acres of natural ecosystems. This doesn’t seem like a clear net positive change to me.

I would be interested to hear a comparison on this, but from what I’ve heard the resources that go into growing and feeding livestock is orders of magnitude more intensive than a plant based meal. I honestly don’t know if that would change with something like beyond but I would highly doubt it

Define “intensive” in this context.

Do you realize that much of American beef cattle actually graze on natural grasses for most of their lives… in largely natural settings that support complex natural ecosystem? That will not be the case for “Beyond/Impossible/Soylent” burgers; they will be composed of plant proteins that require toxic monocultures to produce.

You need 15 such farms to create the food for 1 equivalent of beef. So the argument would be for any those goo-creating farms, because we need far less of them, than we need when creating goo that feeds cows which we then eat.

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