I'm the opposite, I love meat, but hate the animal suffering. Even if it tastes half as good and costs around the same, I will switch.
If more people would do that, a lot more incentives would be there, to not let animals suffer just for human consumption.
Since I switched to only eating animal products, where I know, how the animals lived, I do eat a lot less meat. i do pay a lot more (and I do that consciously). And I have the benefit, that it also does taste so much better, that I really enjoy this in more then one way, when I eat it (sometimes pork-steak, sometimes ham, sometimes goat-salami). We buy at a local farm, that raise, slaughter and process the meat all by themselves, and produce at least 50% of the food that is needed for raising the animals on the farm itself. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioland#Certification)
So for me this was a viable alternative - but I could understand, if this is not possible in other circumstances of life.
This is very hard to do in most of the "first world" places because agriculture or raising animals doesn't scale that well unless you do it on an industrial scale.
Now, you and me and a couple of others maybe can afford to pay extra for meat products, but for the vast majority of people who expect a shawarma not to cost more than 2-3 euros the reality is bleaker.
This basic misunderstanding of how food gets to your plate was featured prominently in a recent NY Times piece claiming the McDouble was the "cheapest, most nutritious" food ever.
The upfront cost reflects the way the food economy is structured. The food economy could be, and is being, restructured in small steps to bring the price in line with industrialized agriculture, if people would make the rational choice for health and lower long-term cost over convenience.
I can buy local pork for the same price as industrialized grocery store pork if I buy in bulk, but that does require a chest freezer. (Patchwork Farms, Columbia, MO)
† e.g. lower nutritional value, centralization, fewer jobs, lower wages, taxes for subsidizing fast food, questionable human rights and environmental practices, reduced biodiversity, etc., etc.
This is almost impossible to do unless you have great connections and a lot of time and money to spare. Somewhere around 75% of beef and 99% of turkey and chicken farming is industrial factory farming. Organic and free range mean almost nothing in regards to animal suffering. Props to you for finding one of the few good farms.
If you're concerned about animal suffering not eating meat is the cheap and easy solution at this point. That's why developments like this actually make me excited.
The benefits to ending animal suffering, the environment, and maybe even human health could be amazing if they could produce molecularly identical artificial meat, but the one interesting aspect of it is that as a consequence of our wanting to avoid animal cruelty, billions of animals will never exist.
I know it might be silly to question whether a chicken or cow would prefer existence with a cruel end to nothing, but it's still kind of an interesting thought.
As usual, Louis CK put it best:
That's a noble goal, in my opinion.
Don't get me wrong, soy products are great and I eat a ton of them, but they aren't meat. They are a different food in their own right.
Besides, there are a hundred vegetarian dishes I'd be glad to eat before I'd want to eat a fake hotdog.
Some do taste alright, I admit.
Another problem is price. You would think soy products would be cheaper than meat. Nope. So freaking expensive.
Chicken meat simply doesn't have the ability to be enjoyed on it's own like beef. Eggs on the other hand...
Probably makes it a great candidate for vat growth.
Why would I think that highly processed products of the isolation and retexturing and reflavoring of soy products would be less expensive than meat, which is usually pretty minimally processed? The raw materials cost of the soy product might be lower (depending on what else is added for flavor and texture, even that might not be true), but you can't really ignore the processing cost.
Now, lots of corn is great and all (well, not really), but if you grow corn all the time you are going to kill your soil (for one, depleting the nitrogen in the soil). Soybeans have the neat property of putting atmospheric nitrogen back into the soil. So if you want to grow lots of corn without breaking the bank on fixing your soil all the time, then changes are you spend some of the time growing soybeans. (Usually two seasons of corn then one of soybean, or one of corn then one of soybean).
Since soybeans are not the primary crop but are grown relatively in proportion to massively overproduce corn, I would expect soybeans to be pretty damn cheap. I don't have the market breakdown but my understanding is that the bulk of soybeans are just used as cattle-feed. I would expect this to depress the price of soybeans leading to very cheap soy products, even with the large amount of processing that needs to be done to them to make them human edible.
The large amount of processing might be the cause of the high price of soy products, but with supply of soybeans so high my suspicion is that low demand causes soybean product prices to be high. Soybean based food is still relatively niche and there are not all that many companies in that field so prices stay high.
High supply and low demand are both factors that lead to low prices, not high prices.
I posit that there is a low supply of soy-products caused by a low-demand for soy-products. Only a fragment of consumers are interested in soybean products, and demand is unlikely to change much as price drops. Worse, the vegetarians I know tend to be pretty loyal to particular brands of soy product. Basically, demand for soybean products is pretty inelastic and low. Not many people are interested in soy products, but the people that are interested will pay what they have to.
Premium soy products are the Bloomberg Terminal's of food. Almost nobody wants a Bloomberg Terminal, but a few people need a Bloomberg Terminal. Worse, the people in that market need a Bloomberg Terminal specifically. Bloomberg is unlikely to lease more terminals by dropping their price. If there were more demand for that sort of product, we would probably see more companies making suitable products for far cheaper. That's not the case though, so it is a shitty market to break into.
Nobody denies there are tasty non-meat things out there, but we're discussing meat and its alternatives.
It seems someone hasn't visited their local asian food market ;)
Awkward typo!