[agentsaran]

A complete waste for $250,000. Lab meat? Why? Why would any one want to buy artificial, lab processed meat? Why do people insist on complicating food? Our supermarkets all already filled with things that can be barely classified as "food" and now we have this.

[clicks]

Well, it's a good indication you chose to make a throwaway account for that post, as it suggests that you yourself are aware to some extent how uninformed and ignorant the question is.

But, to answer: These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom. The whole process is unsustainable, what happens when the world population reaches above 10 billion and demand for meat keeps getting higher? Do we have enough space to keep these animals, enough food to sustainably feed them without having bad environmental implications?

It turns out there are alternative methods, and they may prove to be well worth the cost of investigating them. So here we are, doing science, in the hopes of a brighter future. Experimenting with food, to make it taste better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly.

[runarberg]

I'm going to make political remark because the issue by its nature is very political.

We are wasting time and energy investigating solution to a real problem from the wrong end. Doing science is not enough to solve this problem, we need to do politics too (or social science for that matter). Infact doing science might ultimately lead us to enhance the problem.

Now we are looking for a way to make a very wastefull behavior more economy friendly. Meat consumption at the current mass scale is unpresidented and there is no reason to enforce it. Alternatives include alternative diet, less waste, better usage of the food we already grow. We have found brilliant ways to cultivate food at minimum cost, but it is not securing the majority of our species food intake. And the western meat marked might be the biggest factor for this injustice.

Now trying to solve it by further saturating the western marked with meat -- a product that is to blame for this mal-distribution of food -- is not going to solve any problem. It is going to shift the attention away from the real issue at hand and further stabilizing a marked that is currently really unfair and damaging.

[agentsaran]

Its not a throw away account. So a better future is lab produced meat? I'm not saying that the current demand for meat is not bad for the environment. All I'm saying is food is something that is best not experimented with. Nothing good has come up with food scientists tinkering with food. We live in an age where food is seen as a combination of nutrients. We keep track of calories, we read a new study everyday about the benefits for this food/that food, each study contradicting the one before it. Surely, the ultimate solution to making food "better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly." is a pill, which will have everything that the body needs. right? Thats what all this experimenting will ultimately lead to. Maybe your scientific mind finds artificial meat appealing. Ask you grandmother how she feels about it.

[corresation]

These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom.

It isn't accurate to paint an entire, very diverse industry with the paints of the worst offenders (e.g. Texas factory fattening houses).

[clicks]

That's missing the forest for the trees. There are probably lots of factories that treat animals more humanely than others but we still should be investigating alternative methods of creating meats. Ultimately you're going to have to meet problems of scalability down the road in some years, and/or other unforeseen problems with antibiotics and such. It's probably best to start heavy research/experimentation in preparation now than later.