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Comment by i_am_proteus | Hacker News Reader

Maybe some folks will enjoy this as a food product.

It's not clear to me that there's a real upside to this though, for folks who don't mind killing and eating birds.

Research I have seen (you can see it too: [1]) indicates that chicken, dairy, and legumes are all about as low-impact as it gets when it comes to protein sources for humans.

As other folks have mentioned, scaling up the meat lab causes a lot of headaches because the lab meat doesn't come with its own immune system the way a chicken or a cow does. Headaches in the form of increased operating costs and energy inputs.

[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0931-6

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There's a chart here with the carbon footprint of protein sources.

Nuts, Peas, Beans and Tofu come out ahead of fish, eggs, chicken, pork, cheese, shrimp and beef (the worst):

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat#:~:....

Chicken costs could be lowered a lot for example, since you can use them as pest control for your garden, compost from their waste, etc

Those things don't convert cereal grains into the protein that humans need. Poultry, eggs, cheeses are good ways to do that. Crops can't just be substituted for each other.

eventually shifting public opinion, and growing the subsection of people who "mind killing" seems like a major upside.

Everything you eat requires killing. We are only weird about killing for meat because as conscious life we are biased towards conscious life. Meanwhile, we don't blink an eye if we take down an entire field of corn, or even take town an entire forest to grow that field of midwestern corn, because its unconcious life and not valued by our moral principles.

The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be respectful of the animals you raise up, you can respect the land you sow. Unfortunately this world lacks a lot of that common respect towards life these days, but maybe this thinking will change in the future and we can live in a more balanced way.

?? We are not carnivores. We are literally some line between herbivores and omnivores. Carnivores have to kill or they will most likely starve to death. Vegtables and fruits are the natural foods of earth for herbivores and omnivores and some carnivores. You are not killing when you eat plants and fruits. Fruits and vegtables want to be eaten for their seeds to spread. It is not a question of concious vs unconcious. Killing animals when you don't need to is already morally unaccepted in society. Animal life and plant life are completely different. To combine them and act like it is the matter of concious vs unconcious bias is completely wrong. An animal will run till exhaustion to avoid being eaten. A fruit tree is there to be eaten. Plants and fruits don't have a central nervous system where they 'feel' pain. Humans are literally animals. Eat a fruit and plant the seeds and see what happens. Eat an animal and plant the bones and does a new animal come up?

You are killing when you eat plants and fruits. Are you foraging in the woods for these things? Or are you buying them from the supermarket, from an orchard where the farmer killed a thousand acres of native flora and all the fauna dependent on that flora to grow these fruits and nuts fit for shipping across a continent?

Everything has a cost, and we should be conscious of them so we can work on mitigating them, no matter if the cost is to intelligent or unintelligent life. Most of the biomass on earth comes from unintelligent life.

You are still conflating killing animals for food & growing plants/vegtables/grains as if they can be equivocated. These are 2 drastically different things especially when it comes to morality and ethics.

I'm no vegetarian by any means, but equating the life of corn to the life of a relatively intelligent animal like a pig is really, really disingenuous

But why is it disingenuous? Both are masses of living cells. Both die after damage or neglect. I'm just highlighting our species' biases. My cat for example is intelligent but has no such biases, eating rodents, insects, and catgrass with the same violent gusto. I'm just pointing out its a bit of a human fallacy to label some organisms as off limits and others for our harvesting, when no other forms of life do this.

It's best to be aware of this bias so you can treat these other ecologically important organisms with similar respect we reserve for intelligent life. Conservation efforts for example are often more successful if the animal is perceived as cute, which is kind of sad. I'm not saying don't cut down that corn field for harvest, chop it all, but be aware of what these and other behaviors of the farmer are doing to the rest of the organisms in the area, such as native flora, or microbial life that in turn contributes to your corn yields.

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/plants-are-alive

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too

Whether it's oxen in a slaughterhouse, deer pierced by a hunters' arrows, or herds that die off because their grazing lands get taken for crops, animal lives are sacrificed so that more humans can live.

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