As someone who doesn't eat meat for ethical reasons, I couldn't be more excited by the potential of this.
First this stuff will be an inferior meat substitute.
Then it'll be an equivalent meat substitute.
Then it'll improve upon nature itself, and we'll be eating things that taste ten times better than bacon, and fifty times better than steak, and it will all be without a twinge of guilt.
Aspartame is a more complex molecule synthesized to mimic certain properties of monosaccharides. Many would say it is inferior in taste to what it purports to replace.
Cultured beef, however, should be more or less the same cocktail of organic compounds that make up a dead cow. How these compounds are mixed, the proportions to which they appear, and what shapes they take are the interesting variables here, and could, with enough control, make something "better than real."
I'd draw instead the comparison to synthetic diamonds. Same stuff, potentially unnaturally flawless results.
I suppose meh-tasting-guilt-free bacon is something, but, well... meh. TT
A quick search did not bring up any evidence that sugar substitute have known negative longterm effects.
The fallacy has everything to do with your insistence that this is anything but fantasy. Artificial sweeteners are not worse off for you than sucrose/fructose.
If this winds up being cheap, great. Regardless, I still prefer an interesting spicy black bean burger to anything made with ground beef.
But yes, a nice spicy black bean burger sounds interesting!
For instance, I've found vegetarian Indian restaurants vastly more interesting than Indian restaurants that rely on meat. It's not that I hate meat (I don't, and I'm not a a vegetarian), but the former sort simply seem to offer more interesting food, with a much wider range of flavors.
Note the stereotypical Airplane-meal question (where the actual dishes are quite different): "Chicken or beef?" I know they're just trying to be efficient, but this question seems to capture society's attitude: that once you know the type of meat involved, eh, the rest is just pointless detail.
So while meat can be a wonderful and interesting part of a meal, I think it would be better if it lost some of its overwhelming dominance, and became just another ingredient.
I wonder how meat came to be so dominant though. Funnily enough, when the Old World found the New World they found a land so plentiful in meat, instead of jumping up in joy certain parts of society actually started to find meat disgusting. So maybe it's not really just a Western thing, but meat's dominance is mostly a New World thing: According to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visual..., USA, Canada, Australia and NZ are far ahead of everyone else in per-capita meat consumption. And it doesn't seem to be correlated with per-capita GDP either. This might also means that meat's dominance is also very recent, and not universal even in modern Western culture. Maybe it's simply a matter of who has an older history of eating traditions, traditions that are responsible for toning down the meat-mania?
I think for some people meat, and pretty much of all food, is fairly uninteresting it is pretty much just a way to fuel their body. They take fairly little joy in their meals - which seems a bit incomprehensible - but it seems to be the way it is.
Free range chickens still die, which is often the ethical reason for vegetarians/vegans.
Agree.
> Free range chickens still die, which is often the ethical reason for vegetarians/vegans.
Disagree. For me at least the death itself is comparatively insignificant. What's far more significant is horrible conditions in which many mass produced meat animals spend their lives, i.e. Factory farming.
Often the only difference is that a free range barn will have a small outside area, which the chickens may not access because all the food is inside [1].
I think most vegetarians/vegans would agree that Halal meat is ethically worse than the 'bolt to the brain' alternative. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation.
[1] http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-difference-between-free-r...