Originally shared by Steve S
Until Elon Musk’s Tesla automobiles, electric vehicles were for people who cared more about the environment than having a performant car. What Musk did completely right is that he turned electrics into something those with money to spare would want to drive, even if they didn’t care about the environment. He made them a luxury item and used those big bucks to produce cheaper cars that regular people could afford, like the Tesla 3’s now rolling out of his production lines.
I say all this in the context of “clean meat”, which is muscle grown in vats instead of cut out of the corpses of farm animals. If the new meat tastes better than the old, early adopters will pay extra for it, and that will finance competition and economies of scale to drive prices down. The end goal would be for faceless meat to become much cheaper than the whole-animal kind, driving the latter effectively out of business.
This is plausible because growing meat is inherently more efficient than farming it. As Churchill predicted back in 1932, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”. The article explains that “clean meat production could also result in 78% to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, use 7% to 45% less energy, 99% less land, and 82% to 96% less water than traditional methods”.
Essentially, you’re just growing the part you want to eat, not the bones or other supporting organs. You don’t have a GI tract, so you don’t have methane production, either. And, fundamentally, it avoids all of the cruelty inherent in raising animals for meat.
It’s economically, ecologically, and morally right.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/01/health/clean-in-vitro-meat-food/index.html