Yes, I do not want to eat genetically engineered fungus or crickets. I prefer a steak.
In the United States, we don't have a real market in water; hence, the cost of water in food isn't really represented.
Worse, we "export" a whole lot of water for artificially cheap. Countries with insufficient water to grow crops they would like buy water-intensive crops from the US where water is artifically cheap; hence the massive exports of alfalfa to China. In turn, US aquifiers are ending up depleted and catastrophe looms.
Fixing this, though, will have other effects like perhaps doubling the price of steak. We'll still eat more of it and at a lower cost than we did 75 years ago, but not as much or as cheaply as today. Quality will also probably rise, too, as the measures that produce higher quality beef will be a smaller proportion of the price.
Secondly, the only reason "the common man" can afford meat in the quantities he can now is because of massive amounts of subsidies and incredibly damaging practices.
So frame your overly-emotional argument however you want, but there are realities you aren't addressing and they don't go away because of your feelings.
Make people miserable at your own peril. The simple fact is nobody really wants to be reduced to eating worms and bugs. No one really gives a shit about how "scalable" it is either. Whoever finds a way to provide what people want will have enormous power.
> If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat
Pretty big if you got there. The "alternatives" so far don't really fulfill any of those criteria. They also have the added bonus of offending a person's basic dignity with the knowledge that they're eating insects. There are literal animals out there who receive better treatment.
"they graze on semi-arable areas where crops can't be grown"
That may or may not be where your steak comes from, but it is not, as a rule, where most steak comes from. Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn, and an increasing amount come from cattle who graze on Brazilian rainforest land clear-cut just for that purpose.
93% of cattle's caloric intake (whether grass or grain finished) does not compete with human suitable food sources.
Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives:
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/print-publications...
>While the diet provided to finishing cattle in feedlots relies on some human-edible inputs (i.e., corn grain), the forages and byproducts fed to cattle throughout their lives are largely inedible to humans. For example, once the entire lifetime feed intake of cattle is accounted for (meaning all the feed they consume from birth to harvest), corn accounts for only approximately 7 percent of the animal’s diet. The other 93 percent of the animal’s lifetime diet will consist largely of feed that is inedible to humans, thus not in direct competition with the human food supply.
You seem to be arguing against something other than my comment. "Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives"...yes...as I stated "Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn"
There are certainly large swaths of the world where cattle production can be regenerative to the ecosystem, but not enough to support the demand. Meeting the world's increasing appetite for beef as developing nations adopt the dietary habits of wealthier nations is turning into an environmental catastrophe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon...
Just because feed is inedible to humans does not mean it doesn't compete with the human food supply or lead to environmental and resource problems. Take alfalfa, which is one of the most popular feed crops for cattle:
>How much of California's water goes to alfalfa? About 1,000,000 acres of alfalfa are irrigated in California. This large acreage coupled with a long growing season make alfalfa the largest agricultural user of water, with annual water applications of 4,000,000 to 5,500,000 acre-feet.
https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigat...
Without livestock agriculture, most of our farmland in the US would not be farmable. Also, most of the "grain" we feed cows is waste from ethanol production, not corn humans eat.