I imagine it's not yet saving-the-world effective yet. The lab environment likely costs more environmentally than a chicken farm would.
But even now, there’s the benefit of producing less suffering. No need to breed animals that can’t even support their own weight and spend their entire short lives suffering in darkness, crowded in cages with other suffering beings, awaiting death.
I'm no expert on the matter, but it will likely never be competitive with real meat in either taste or price:
- You need a lot of expensive equipment and chemicals to grow fake meat. A chicken just needs food and water.
- You need extreme cleanliness to grow fake meat or else you're just growing bacteria. Animals have an immune system and can deal with minor threats.
- Cells don't exist in a vacuum. You need to deliver nutrients and remove waste. Animals have lungs, blood vessels, kidneys, and all the other organs needed to maintain the entire biological system which has been optimized over millions of years.
- Meat isn't just muscle cells, it's a very complicated structure. Growing separate cells and mushing them together will never give you the same taste.
The only real equivalent would be if you could grow a chicken without a brain.
> No need to breed animals that can’t even support their own weight and spend their entire short lives suffering in darkness, crowded in cages with other suffering beings, awaiting death.
If that bothers you, there are always more expensive ways to eat real meat.
I’ve been buying free-range chicken and eggs for a while, but recent reports have said that there is basically no actual free-range chicken or eggs on the market. There’s no oversight, so almost everything labeled as free-range isn’t really free-range, so it’s just more expensive, with no benefit.
They actually have inspections of facilities and generally enforce better baseline standards for animals, like minimum spacing. Not perfect, but probably the best you'll get in a grocery store.
Everything else is just marketing terms, and effectively unregulated:
'cage free': a bunch of chickens packed into a large room, effectively a cage. Just not individual/tiny cages.
'free range': they have access to an outdoor area in theory, but it might be a tiny cage, no guarantee the chicken was ever able to use it.
'pasture raised': animals generally spend more time outdoors than indoors, but no guarantee.
The chicken at your typical grocery store needed a lot more than food and water. They needed vast amounts of land, housing, and staff. Covered in shit and full of open sores, burns, and wounds they're constantly pumped full of antibiotics because their immune systems could never keep up, beaks have to be removed, the corpses of birds that don't survive to slaughter age have to be collected and removed regularly. Factories filled with machines are used to kill and process them (https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c53840a3d44fcb1766161a2f37257...). Even after all that the chickens are soaked in or sprayed with chlorine and other chemicals before packaging.
What we have right now is so far removed from healthy chickens living and growing in the sun that we might as well be growing the meat in labs and sparing a living thing all the suffering we subject them to.
It's expensive to house, feed and butcher regular chickens too. They get an infection, it runs thru the whole plant, millions slaughtered and burned and they have to regrow them. Not free either.
Time will tell.
Or, you know, just stop eating meat.