I disagree. While there will no doubt be friction, people should be confronted with the reality of their choices; long term we can't preserve their bubble of ignorance, might as well address it now
Um... Now you sound like the one who is ignorant. Not everyone thinks killing an animal for food is some terrible blight on the world. I have zero issues with it and no amount of "but they're living things and so cute" is going to change that fact.
It's exactly this type of nonsense that gets people to turn away from meat like products. We don't need a lecture about sad little animals every time we order a delicious smash burger.
I think it is useful to distinguish between 'killing an animal for food' and 'rearing billions of animals each year in factories in conditions in which they suffer, and subsequently killing them for food'.
Factory farmed animals does look like a terrible blight on the world to me - what makes you think it isn't?
I like the idea of gene editing to remove brain stems, although that still leaves us with the input/output issues (feed, methane etc), which perhaps we can also engineer away.
If animal suffering doesn't bother you, does human suffering?
Victorian factory owners might use a similar argument to support using child labour to make cheap goods which the common man can afford; that doesn't mean that child labour is good.
I mean, its not always ignorance. I understand meat has massively more impact on the environment in many metrics. I still enjoy meat products and tend to eat them from time to time. There's things I enjoy about those products, even though there are externalities. If there's a product out there which can offset most of those externalities and still satiate that same kind of experience, I'll pay a few more bucks for it. Hopefully, many more similar people to me will as well, and maybe we'll even make it cost effective to offset most of that highly impactful meat eating with something that more people find agreeable.
Its way better for the environment if I never purchased a car or even a bicycle and I just walked everywhere. My environmental impact would probably be lower. But in the end I'm going to buy some kind of vehicle, because I enjoy what buying a car gets me.
Its way better for me to never eat meat, but in the end I enjoy what eating meat gives me. I can massively reduce my impact on the Earth living naked foraging berries and roots and never traveling farther than I can walk but in the end there are things I enjoy and will end up doing them despite the externalities. I'm going to own an air conditioner and I'm going to run it. This has externalities and would be better for the environment if it was never made and was never run. I'm going to own a refridgerator and run it. This has externalities and would be better for the environment if it was never made and never run. I'm typing this on a computer which will eventually go into a landfill and probably become some trace amount of toxic waste. In the end, I still managed to get usage out of it and find value from it while its useful. The only way to have no impact on the Earth is to never exist.
Its nice having the option to do things which give most of the same experience while reducing the externalities. I'll buy the refrigerator which is more efficient. I'll buy the right size AC system for my home to cool it as effectively as possible I'll maintain all my appliances to give as long as a serviceable live as possible. And I'll buy what gives me similar experiences to what I enjoy for food that reduces my impact on the Earth.
Mate, you're the one who lives in a bubble. Natural food eaters have no problem killing animals for food. We've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years and we're not going to stop now because you live in a first world country where you have time for imaginary problems.
It's exactly this type of nonsense that gets people to turn away from meat like products. We don't need a lecture about sad little animals every time we order a delicious smash burger.