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Comment by MrPatan | Hacker News Reader

Meat was a thing before government subsidies were a thing. Or before governments were a thing. Before most things were a thing, really.

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What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits despite subsidies) and that is not a vote winner.

> What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits) and that is not a vote winner.

But the context here is lab grown meat. If you removed all subsidies from traditional meat production, I really doubt meat would become more than ten times more expensive. From the OP:

> This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.

> That’s the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower.

It's worth noting that those numbers are estimates and the facility that is supposed to produce them hasn't been built to validate them.

Compare:

https://www.target.com/p/boneless-38-skinless-chicken-breast...

> Boneless & Skinless Chicken Breasts

> $1.99/lb

https://www.target.com/p/chicken-drumsticks-value-pack-4-28-...

> Chicken Drumsticks

> $1.29/lb

The country with the most expensive meat I know is Switzerland. The local chains Migros and Coop mostly sell meat produced in Switzerland. Here's the chicken you can usually find on the shelves in Migros:

https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-241001011000

> Whole chicken - $10/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-schenkel-241110100...

> Chicken drumsticks - $15/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/poulet-brustschnitzel

> Chicken breasts - $30/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/bio-pouletbrust

> Chicken breasts (I suspect this is free range) - $58/kg

Ah yes, but how much would lab-grown meat produced in Switzerland cost?

Given that Switzerland has a world class chemical engineering and pharmaceutical industry and production facilities already, hypothetical lab-grown meat from Switzerland will probably among the cheaper high quality lab-grown meat in the world.

My understanding of Swiss manufacturing industry is high-end, complicated things. I agree it's likely that Swiss lab-made meat would be the cheapest in the world, but only by virtue of being the only place where it's feasible to make it.

Are the Swiss vegetarians, or do they just have a high median income? Coming from the US, those prices are unthinkable.

They have a high income and are really good at ignoring the poor who do the dirty, low paid jobs and at best eat mortadella/baloney, cheese and eggs (doing their part for the planet, unlike everyone else lmao). Just like other western EU countries, tbh.

Switzerland does have poor people. ~10% of the population below the poverty line which is defined around 2.2k CHF/month per person. This definitely doesn't allow for a lot of high quality meat consumption.

Sure, a few times per week, at a cost of spending quite some hours hunting, for a much smaller population.

My grandmother had to raise the meat she ate herself. That meant that meat was fairly rare, usually only on Sundays you'd get an actual piece of meat on your plate. Today we eat way more meat than in the past because it's so cheap thanks to subsidies.

Not just subsidies though, also technology and organization.

Industrial farming is a real problem, for the environment, for the animals, for the climate and for us consumers.

Refrigeration is to blame as much as anything.

Raising a cow is only a part of the problem, and it isn't that much harder to raise 10 cows than 1 cow, if you have the acreage. O(log) at the worst.

Butchering and preserving the meat was the O(n) operation, and usually required O(n) resources to salt or smoke, which could be expensive resources depending on your time and place in history.

Refrigeration changed the game, to where we could preserve the meat as fast as we could butcher it. Now instead of spending days or weeks salting, canning, smoking or curing your meat, you can fill a freezer in an afternoon.

The scale is vastly different, is it not?

yeah, before capitalism was a thing, before the current human population of the earth was a thing, really.

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