I am not advocating universal vegetarianism, but the fact that Americans eat insane amounts of meat is proof in and of itself that something is not right. There is a healthy level of meat intake and we far exceed it. Just think of how many meals have some form of meat in it. It's probably approaching 100% for most Americans that are not vegetarians.

Are you actually having health problems due to eating meat?

Edit: Another good thing to watch is the canadian documentary 'My Big Fat Diet' on youtube. Talks about the canadian indians (first nations) people having a ton of diabetes due to being on carbs and not their traditional fish based diet.

Really? Neither myself, nor 99% of the people I associate with are vegetarians, but I'd say I AT MOST 50% of my lunches and 25% of my dinners actually contain meat (and maybe 7% for breakfast). Granted, I do consider myself a heath conscious eater, and thus eat lots of veggies and beans and veggies. But still, I'm nowhere near having meat in 100% of my meals. (Although I did enjoy a delicious flank steak with mango salsa last night.)

In my travels though, I have found that specific diets tent to be geographically dependent as well. Ie, I find rural areas in the US to be heavy on the meat and potatoes, with an almost irrational/religious fear of vegetables and anything spicy/with a little different flavor/texture, whereas in cities it's easy to get lost just trying all sorts of the different cuisines available. People who must have meat in their meals also miss out on lots of the fantastic flavors of non-carnivorous main courses available to them.

Why do you think that? I definitely eat a lot of meat, but I've never really seen any reason to think it was an inherently bad thing.

I don't remember the source, but I remember reading how back in the 60s there were two divergent schools of thought on the increasing obesity epidemic from two prominent researcher, one researcher heavily backed the saturated fat theory and one heavily backed the sugar theory. For some inconsequential reason, the latter got discredited personally which led us down decades of ill-proven assumptions about how bad saturated fat was.

Why don't we start with an easier lab-grown animal product than something we ingest?

How about lab-grown fur coats (EDIT from evilduck's comment: or lab-grown leather for clothing, furniture, shoes, etc)? Who wouldn't want to wear a "mink" coat created with no animal pain?

Develop the technology on something we don't have to eat, along with the associated health risks and sensitivity of our palates, but still useful. Then transfer the technology to the harder areas.

I wrote about in-vitro fur before -- http://joshuaspodek.com/vegetarian-entrepreneurs-test. I'd love to see it but haven't heard of anyone working on it. Is anyone doing it?

Another application easier than in-vitro meat for humans -- in-vitro meat pet food.

There is also a very limited market for these products, as there are many satisfactory substitutes to leather and fur. Synthetic materials have replaced or augmented natural materials in most of the textiles industry, because they can offer superior properties.

I think a far more interesting development is Beyond Meat, who make a wholly plant-based chicken substitute that is remarkably realistic.

PS: I suspect you could sell a few thousand 100k coats a year under the 'Animal Free' idea. Which pays for a fair amount of R&D.

    Why don't we start with an easier lab-grown animal product than something we ingest?

I'm just happy that there is a humane alternative to blood diamonds. If there wasn't a lab-made option, I wouldn't have purchased a diamond at all.

The prices would be a lot lower if not for the identical owners.

While I normally try not to judge corporations, DeBeers looks, to me at least, like the ultimate prototype for "evil monopolist manipulating the masses".

I considered this too, but then I thought of buying a stone from another company, but realized that paying the same inflated prices for an essentially worthless (worth less anyway) rock would still contribute to keeping the margins and profits up for DeBeers and/or any company that might engage in questionable practices, then I thought about buying a non-diamond, but found that most semi-precious stones for sale were still offered by companies that also traded in diamonds.

To be honest, it was a bit exhausting (especially combined with the planning of a wedding). I just chose to draw the line at buying a stone that was created in a laboratory and not pulled from the Earth by a slave.

I would not be honest if I didn't admit that cultural expectations also came to bear on the decision not to just do something completely different.

I take your point. I feel like this is one of those areas where my purchase decisions could change drastically the more educated I become on the subject of the precious stones trade. Just in the span of buying the engagement ring to the wedding band, we decided to have zero stones of any sort on the wedding band itself.

I have a tube of diamond lapping compound somewhere in my basement shop. Dirt cheap because its full of inclusions and not clear.

They generally don't use jewelry grade diamonds for industrial work, although to manipulate the market I suppose anything could happen.

I was motivated enough to check amazon for the stuff I have and you're probably doing something wrong or weird if you're paying more than $3/gram delivered. One problem with buying a 5 gram plastic syringe of diamond lapping paste for $5 is the plastic syringe and shipping and handling probably cost a significant fraction... I would bet on industrial 55 gallon barrel scale its under $1/gram.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294205/Billionaire-...

The idea is generally that growing leather involves solving many of the same problems as growing meat, but lets you bootstrap the business on something that doesn't involve the FDA clearing you as a food (nor does it have the same cognitive effects on people wearing something lab-grown vs eating something lab-grown).

Also, historically speaking, when it comes to fashion, pain and suffering of animals has never been anywhere on the list of concerns of those involved. It took many, many decades for it to become an issue.

As suggested elsewhere, lab-grown leather might be a more laudable goal, particularly if a way to avoid using the myriad of toxic chemicals could be found. Lab-generated milk would also be a win, but that might undermine the "breast is best" campaign which again took a long time to wage, but the idea probably has merit.

Also, not a huge fan of mink. Other furs, perhaps. But not mink.

As a second aside, if we could produce fur, what about human hair, for wigs? But you'd likely have more regulatory issues with human hair than otherwise.

Once more nutritious than natural, the artificial meat will allow to overcome the current energy limitation on our brain.

Once artificial meat becomes mainstream and eating natural meat become obsolete, the human race will be able to overcome obsolete concepts wrt. human/animal intelligence, which will have profound effect on social ethic and intelligence (the share of human civilization resources going into issues of violence, enforcement (of bad rules onto good people and good rules onto bad people), wars, etc... is staggering - more than half), and, in particular, as a side effect, will open our mentality to outside contact as well.

I think you could rather drink a mixture of a protein, vitamin, oil, enzymes, etc, shake today - and get the same effects, than wait for your enhanced meat product.

The energy limitation was also a leap, when apes (or whatever) started eating meat, and later humans (or whatever) started using fire to cook their foods. And then bigger, more thoughtful, brains could be sustained.

There really is nothing more to improve on that will give you better than marginal results from this point in time. And even then, you'd have to wait for evolution to take its course and produce (well, perpetuate) whatever DNA is required to produce a bigger brain over a millennium or even longer... Assuming that's even a trait that is capable of producing more offsprings than in those that don't have that trait.

the previous 2M were spent on this extensive option - increasing the size (that was enabled by meat eating), and i think we pretty much exhausted that venue. The next step is increasing the intensity of using that big brain. We use only small portion of it, and prolonged sustained thinking activities are very exhausting to our bodies in particular because it consumes a lot of energy. Evolutionary biological changes increasing brain efficiency would take long time (btw, it is very educational to read about specifics of Enstein's brain). This is why in historical short term only increasing of energy intake seems to be a viable option.

I know that there is development around it but with all the talk about energy, privatized space, mobile computing, clean environment, etc., I think synthetic meat will be the dark horse for next big business.

UN seems keen too. Apparently there are prototype factories growing insects to be crushed and used in a powdered form, and/or used as feed for livestock.

One of the synthetic meat companies switched to leather products as they found out no one wants to eat bio-engineered lab grown steak (also it didn't taste very good)

It's possible to feed the cells a synthetic culture medium, or something that doesn't come from the cow. I don't know what was done in this case.

We also don't need to continually re-harvest stem cells from the cow. Depending on when they differentiate, there would no doubt be a bunch of growing pluripotent cells, including enough backup cells to start over if batches are somehow contaminated.

I'm no expert in growing meat, but I'm sure the vision is beef without reliance on cows, and the vision seems scientifically possible.

I know about a dozen vegans, and none would complain about small samples being taken from a cow somewhere - potentially thousands of burgers - down the line. Those vegans who have a problem with ANY sample are an unattainable and insignificant target group.

However, there is a trap in this. Right now, there are cows and pigs wherever there are humans.

Fast forward 200 years when we can grow our own meat in the lab. Who's going to keep around livestock? For what reason?

Pigs and cows would exist in a wild state in a small fraction of their former "territory." If at all.

Why would that be a problem?

The people who want to eat actual animals.

>For what reason?

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that cloning muscle cells is the same as meat and it will replace all animal products. What about (almost) raw pig skin [1]? It's delicious and people in this post say skin isn't so easily synthesized.

Pasteurization was invented a long time ago yet people still make natural milk products. If I'm not mistaken these are illegal in the USA.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=șorici

It initially won't be sold as "synthetic meat". It will be sold as "sausage", "hamburger" and countless other products of which the labeling isn't protected and which are basically "mystery meat" anyway.

It has been done before, just look at the wide range of fake dairy products which we now consider perfectly normal.

Getting it through regulation will be the biggest challenge.

The idea that the government and corporations should decide what consumers need to know is repugnant to me. The consumer should be the boss, not the food industry, and certainly not the government. Knowing what you are buying is, in my mind, a basic right in modern society.

This is similar to rBST in cows (note that I am only comparing the provable human health impact as a comparison between these two products). I'm quoting from Wikipedia here (you can follow their references to make your own opinion): "The Food and Drug Administration[33], World Health Organization, the American Dietetic Association, and National Institutes of Health have independently stated that dairy products and meat from BST-treated cows are safe for human consumption." [1]. Yet even though the major health agencies around the world agree that there's no provable difference to human health when consuming milk A vs milk B, but I've yet to see milk in my supermarket that does not have the label "from cows not treated with rBST". The impact of that label was so significant that the FDA had to push to get them to add an additional disclaimer, "FDA states: No significant difference in milk from cows treated with artificial growth hormones".

You might argue that people go with rBST-free milk because of the health implications to the cows, but I would need to see some statistics to believe that. If people were that concerned over the cow's health, they would not buy factory-farmed hamburger meat in the same supermarket. I would wager that people are concerned for human health due to the contents of the milk. Not labeling milk as rBST-free or labeling meat as lab-grown has the same effect: it makes people question how healthy it is to consume. Unless those fears are based in reality, all you're doing is causing FUD in the consumer's mind. Unless all meat of the same health impact is labeled the same, you're going to be putting lab-grown meat at a significant disadvantage when, by the time it comes to market, it could be much better for cows than factory-farmed meat.

In short, more labeling on the production of meat is a good thing. But lab-grown meat should not be the line in the sand. It should be labeled on all meat or on no meat (if lab-grown meat is proven to have no significant difference from farmed meat).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_somatotropin#Hormones

You should have access to information about the cow that your beef was cut from. I'm not saying it has to be all listed out in plain English on the package, but there should at least be a code you can look up that tells you who raised the cow, who fed it and who slaughtered it.

Part of the problem is that no provable difference is not the same as proven to have no difference. The number of things with no provable health risks in 1950 that have provable health risks today is large. Go back to 1900 and it's staggering. The change in recommended diet is equally staggering over the last 100 years. Yet somehow, we always think that now we have it figured out and can say with certainty what the best way to eat is and what's safe and what isn't.

So, if it wasn't obvious, I come down on the side of nature. I want my food as un-fucked-around-with as possible. There is zero chance I would buy lab-grown meat, regardless what research shows. At least not for a few decades. I have no problem with people experimenting with lab-grown meat or even selling it. But I have the right to make my own choice on the issue, especially for such a dramatic change in the way the meat is produced.

But once it surpasses that point, no amount of bad marketing could keep it from being commercially successful.

But there are huge costs (monetary and energy) in scaling "breed, fatten & slaughter a lot of cows", and in intensive operations, they're largely fed on pre-prepared feed from corn or whatever.

Things like feedlot construction/maintenance, feed delivery, waste disposal, transport to slaughter/butchering all contribute above the feed costs.

I'm not sure how the artificial alternative would stack up, but most of those other factors can be eliminated or reduced, and (depending on feedstocks to the clone growing) bypassing the energy costs of growing, harvesting and processing of the vegetable feed.

From the very narrow perspective of energy efficient, the problem I see is that we are ditching a true and tested method of doing things with (up to a point) renewable resources and trying to create a substitute most likely based on petrochemicals, just at the same time as we're dragging our feet on finding and deploying a viable alternative to petrol based energy systems.

Historically speaking, one of the reasons[1] domestication of large herbivores for meat production makes sense is because those can be fed with agriculture byproducts not suitable for human consumption. In industrial terms, it is a sort of "rejects reprocessing" that partially recovers an investment that was already lost.

Nowadays, we feed our animals with human suitable food, which is possible due to the (cost) efficiency gains of the green revolution, which originally was mostly about petrochemicals.

[1] the other being that in nomad societies, they constitute a food store that can carry its own weight around.

And using the same kind of biotech we use to break down cellulose to make cellulosic ethanol, we might be able to create feedstock for this meat from agricultural waste or fast-growing grasses.

* Starches from corn or potatoes is pretty cheap (money, heavily affected by federal subsidies).

* Synthetic meat can use it more efficiently (the engineer in me wants to say "energy", but depending on the context it may mean higher utility margins, or lower labor costs, or what not).

* Same kind of biotech [as] cellulosic ethanol. I am not familiar with the state of the art on this field, but (corn) ethanol companies just engages in arbitrage tricks to make a bundle on yuppie's eco-guilt and government's largesse. Both the economy and the environment would be better of if people just shut up and directly burnt the diesel used in machinery used to rise and transport the corn used as raw inputs to make the ethanol.

Not that this particular argument is wrong, just that I do not have the facts and would like to see them discussed without all the hype!

http://chriskresser.com/the-real-environmental-impact-of-red...

Edit; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bPobs8T5w

I am not sure thats actually a bad thing. They are trying to get the same data thats widely available to Amazon like services.

  Capitalise as a noun, lower case as an adjective e.g. internet banking, internet cafe.

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/collegeofjournalism/how-to/news...

[3] http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=I#Internet

http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/c#id-3043710

I think that The Guardian is a very progressive paper in general, but I'm not sure that lowercasing "the Internet" is a progressive move.

The Internet is capitalized because it's a proper noun: not just any general network, but a specific global network of computers. [1] There is only one Internet. If an author is referring to a subset of the Internet, he or she should be specific and elaborate. E.g. Is the author talking about an intranet?

In other words, it seems that NOT treating the Internet as a proper noun perpetuates a misunderstanding about what it is and how it operates. It implicitly gives writers a license to be more vague in their description of computer networks.

But I'm curious to hear your take on this. What do you see as the advantages of lowercasing the word?

[1] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/capitaliz...

Also, I've seen conflicting U.S. style guides on it.

On one hand, it could quite possibly replace factory farming and eliminate a huge amount of waste, pollution, and animal cruelty.

On the other hand, it's GMO.

I love seeing True Believers in Movementarianism squirm.

I'm equal opportunity here. I like pointing out the philosophical inconsistencies of dogmatic positivism to your typical Reddit /r/atheist type, or pointing out the failures and corruption of the pharmaceutical industry to the rabidly anti-alt-med people you find in skeptic circles...

Ideology: n.: from the root words "idiot" and "ology," the science and art of becoming an idiot by confusing a model of reality with reality itself.

Maybe people will object because lab-grown meat is 'gross'. Maybe they will object because it removes such substantial barriers to GMO (the introduced traits don't have to result in a viable individual). Hopefully you'll get achieve some gratification for being an iconoclast when they bring up those objections, though.

PSA: no need to spend the second half you post explaining your contrarianism, it was implicit from the first half.

It really would be great to see a split between nautreopaths and vegitarians. I don't understand how the communities have grown so close together.

It's still the genetically identical counterpart to the pasture-raised variety without the pasture so how is it "dissonance"?

I think you mean conspiracy theorist circles. Very different sort of group, even when they attempt to mimic the language of skeptics.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21planck.html

Vegetarians can go ahead and argue that vegans are too extreme while vegans fire back that vegetarians are just vegans who lack commitment.

http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/20070523.html Crown Shakur did die because he parents didn't supply him with adequate nutrition, but there's no reason he couldn't have gotten what he needed on a vegan diet.

Plenty of children are raised on a 100% vegan diet and thrive just like children fed with animal products.

Citation? The only children I know [that I can recall] that are brought up in vegetarianism are noticeably "weedy". Shorter than average, low muscle tone, paler skin than their peers. That's completely anecdotal and a very small sample but it informs my demand to see your support for this claim.

Now it's probably quite possible to create a vegan diet with all required nutrients a child needs; but how practical is that and does it happen.

That said, you're right, with a properly-designed diet you can be healthy and happy. I don't believe you can ever be athletically optimal, however (aside from perhaps pure cardio sports).

http://www.ufc.com/fighter/Mac-Danzig http://www.mikemahler.com/online-library/articles/mma-traini...

"It is the position of the American Di- etetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian di- ets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, in- cluding pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."

Also, http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/yjada/art...

Just breastfeed! Breast milk is the ideal infant food after all. Crown Shakra was fed just apple juice and soymilk.

"Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development."

"It is suggested that vegans and vegetarians should use oils with a low ratio of linoleic to linolenic acid in view of the recently recognized role of docosahexaenoic acid [DHA] in visual functioning. If known pitfalls are avoided, the growth and development of children reared on both vegan and vegetarian diets appears normal." http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/59/5/1176S.short

And you would be completely, utterly, absolutely wrong:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12826028

"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.

"Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life-cycle including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits"

Full-vegan options include quinoa, beans, lentils, and nuts. But I agree it's hard. You have to eat a lot of these things.

You can also get hemp-based protein as well.

I get most of my protein from tofu, honestly. It isn't as protein-dense as beef, though.

Why can't these billionaires ever use some right brain thinking? Stop _fucking_ with our food. The more 'efficient' you have to be, the more vulnerable the entire system is to shocks.

You want to end animal cruelty, stop having more than two kids. Period.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Seriously though, that's always my first thought when I read a story about something like this. It's like my brain can't help but cringe of the thought of eating something made this way, even if it's irrational.

There was once a nice Eureka-Episode, regarding this "just a step further". And I just wouldn't want to be a human guinea pig for that kind of "non clinical trial".

If this could become a viable alternative to regular meat, it has the capability of reducing a massive amount of suffering.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23576143

> The latest United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report on the future of agriculture[0] indicates that most of the predicted growth in demand for meat from China and Brazil has already happened and many Indians are wedded to their largely vegetarian diets for cultural and culinary reasons.

While I think it would be a good idea because we should actually strive to reduce our production of greenhouse gases, the above paragraph indicates that it's unlikely to become economically viable.

[0] http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/ap106e/ap106e.pdf

To me, and to other vegetarians, it would probably just taste better than the weaker meat substitutes we're used to.

But your (and by extension, the public's) mental "cringe" is probably going to be a much bigger hurdle for them to jump over than the technology was.

Synthetic meat doesn't, at least, taste like screams.

Still trying to determine why they must replicate it exactly, taste and texture should be sufficient

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3c0THQbdDE

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!

The farm you imagine will never and can never be. If we can't used modern farming methods then we have to work with hard back-breaking labor 14+ hours a day from childhood and until we die, likely around 60 years old.

If you want to, keep your job but plant a garden and grow some food in it - then you will get the connection to nature that it appears some people need, without destroying your life.

I buy almost exclusively organic, local produce and meat. It's amazing how the savings begin to add up when you cook your own meals and buy in bulk when possible.

Sure, not everyone will want to do all this, but I think it goes to show how many assumptions about the current food economy/infrastructure are not true and how much could change thinking creatively, and prioritizing health, the environment, self-determination, etc. over convenience of industrialized and junk/fast foods.

Someone with mechanized equipment and a few acres could produce much more organic produce than I do in the same amount of time, and meat, cheese, and eggs. Enough to supply dozens or more families with food. And because internet access is available, they are not disconnected from the world and could even run a software business like I do (or be an artist, or accountant, or mechanic, or virtual assistant, chef, or any number of jobs).

There are dozens more creative ways to reduce or eliminate our dependence on industrialized food. Technology should promote life, not seek to replace it.

If you read all that, then thanks.

>Someone with mechanized equipment and a few acres could produce much more organic produce than I do in the same amount of time, and meat, cheese, and eggs. Enough to supply dozens or more families with food. And because internet access is available, they are not disconnected from the world and could even run a software business like I do (or be an artist, or accountant, or mechanic, or virtual assistant, chef, or any number of jobs).

People do this, they're called CSAs[0]. When I was younger, my family belonged to one, and I can guarantee you the [awesome] people running it did not have the time on their hands to run a significant side business on the internet.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...

Most CSAs grow food for considerably more people, are substantially larger than an acre, and may make deliveries, or raise crops to sell on the open market as well as sell shares, and this of course may necessitate multiple full-time workers.

That's my understanding anyway, rough as it is.

Also, it wouldn't take "most people" to support small-farm agriculture. Many would gladly raise organic produce and livestock, and sell locally if the food economy were not stacked against them. It also provides more financial independence than minimum wage jobs, and many full-time jobs. Not to mention it would create many jobs.

In the whole spectrum of human existence, farming sucks. It sucked so much that people remained hunter-gatherers as long as they could to avoid it, and it sucks so much that people leapt at the chance to become industrial wage slaves to avoid it. Turning more people into farmers out of some crazy left wing ideology sounds like a bad idea to me. I think Cambodia tried it once.

It wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now.

The fact is that industrialized agriculture represents a massive centralization of the production of a basic necessity of life. It is made to be perceived to be less inexpensive through subsidies on low-nutrition crops such as corn, sugar, and wheat, subsidies for import and export, state-funded research into literal Frankenstein's monsters built of corn, fish, and insect genes. Patents for the basic building blocks of life are issued and violations enforced, even cases of accidental spread of these genes by wind. Pollutants and hormones abound.

And what do we get? Lower nutrition when picked, lower nutrition because of shipping and storage, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, factory meat and egg production that makes a mockery of animal life, runoff that poisons our water supply and wildlife.

What is good about subsidizing junk crops? What is good about subsidizing the fuel used to ship food across the world when it can be grown literally in one's backyard? What if we funded robotics and technology for small agriculture instead of drones that kill Pakistani civilians and children? What is good about the conflation of money and value, to the point where money is lauded over health and freedom?

Your premise seems to be that people have decided they want industrialized agriculture because farming "sucks." To you this seems to imply that therefore industrialized agriculture is good and that there are not alternatives. We will and should become more and more materialistic, inert, disconnected from family and nature, because what people want must be good. We are not being manipulated by world government systems that have their own benefit at heart.

I reject this premise wholeheartedly.

All science is doing is making the problem bigger and bigger. Stop subsidizing population growth.

We have 1 billion undernourished today (note that there were only 1 billion in the whole world in 1804). And most of the rest of us are getting diabetes due to massive sugar and starch intake, promised by science as being 'good for us'. We also have mercury in our fish, hormones in our cows, insecticides in our veggies, fracking chemicals in our groundwater to get natural gas to make synthetic fertilizer, chemicals fed to pigs to make them grow faster (in the US anyway, china doesn't even allow that crap to be sold)...

So why exactly do some people still think malthus was wrong? How exactly can some people defend population growth?

How exactly are you going to prove this shit is 'SAFE'? When scientists for 50 years haven't even been able to prove if animal fat is healthy for us or not? And we have been eating that for a million years? Do you understand 'First, Do No Harm?'

Even if we're talking about staying at 7 billion vs. scaling to 10 billion, your first solution is to forcibly eliminate the reproductive rights of the browner-skinned half of the world population?

I was blessed with two sons and got myself fixed (note: 2 kids is below replacement rate), so I've done far more good for this planet than you will _ever_ understand.

When you start the discussion by saying we shouldn't even produce enough food to feed all seven billion people in the world and refuse to acknowledge the consequences of that, you're being dishonest. Maybe I should have asked: how many people should we produce food for, and how do we choose which people don't get food?

I'm in favor of reducing the ecological impact of agriculture, improving food quality, and reducing population growth. But you can't just ignore the requirements that we actually need to feed everyone who's already alive, and we shouldn't selectively implement coercive measures on people in other countries we are unwilling to impose on ourselves. It turns out there's a lot you can do within those constraints. That's the conversation worth having. I'm not going to entertain the notion that organic food is worth starving people and selectively depopulating entire continents over.

Firstly, to make it scale you'll need a lot of machinery. Then you'll need the right nutrients. It will need a lot of technology, because to make beef grow it will need to have everything maintained and provided for it. In nature, beef cattle can be run on reasonably unproductive land (feed lots notwithstanding). Cattle, as it turns out, are very effective and efficient factories of meat production all by themselves.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23576143

I'd really like to know how something that is 200,000 times more expensive could currently have less of an environmental impact. I just don't see how you move that much money and don't make an impact.

Potentially, it could be as simple as making soy protein or Smarties (that's an American candy btw) https://www.google.com/search?q=smarties&client=firefox-a&hs...

"early indications suggest"

Early indications suggest based on graphs, empirical laws, and irrational extrapolation that I can run a datacenter off a AA battery for a year.

I always find it hilarious when wild guesses are presented with multiple sig figs like 55% as opposed to 56% or 54%. I suspect an error analysis would show a standard deviation of a couple orders of magnitude.

In the short term, there's already a method of producing high quality protein and fats at around 90% efficiency: insects!

Now if only the Western world would get over the stigma attached to bugs...

So green energy is on par with trips to the moon?

Providing renewable energy on the same scale as fossil fuels is at least as hard a problem as the Apollo program. We've got a long way to go. Graph for the US: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec1_6.pdf

for say synthetic pork, would it be necessary to mechanically 'exercise' the muscle fibers in order for them to taste the same as pork from a pig?

Now, regarding artificial meat. It's weird. But people will not hangs their habits right now. It is possible, but it won't happen right now. Maybe the best startup or business idea that could ever exist is helping people to change. But the thing is, it is hard to change. And as many teachers and successful people say, you can only lead people to a door, you can't make them open it.

But with this artificial meat. So we can't make people change. We can't fight highly unethical current practice by charging the same or lower than them. We maybe can change legislation, but that is also very hard because these industries are very powerful.

So we can't change what people eat, can't convince them based on price, and can't change the way animals are treated.

But we can change the way the product is produced that we are already eating en-masse. And it might be weird. But who knows, it's a gamble. But artificial meat could work.

How on earth do people think with all the variables relating to individuals and environment, finding 'causation' or 'safety' in something like 50 year cancer and heart attack risk studies is remotely plausible? What about reproductive issues? How many generations are needed to 'prove' something is 'safe'?

Nutritional science is a bunch of quackery topped only by the pretend science 'economics'. Sure, find some correlation dots, or simply say 'it hasn't been proven UNSAFE' when you're peddling your chemicals via the FDA.

We'd all be a lot better if we followed the oath of 'First, Do No Harm'.