Meat eating is a possibility. I don’t see it being universal, but veganism is on the ride and it makes sense to a lot of people.
It’s just not sustainable. Lab-grown meat is here, it just needs to get to scale, get a bit cheaper and boom. Farming and killing animals for food will be obsolete.
That is, of course, providing it’s sustainable, which at the moment it isn’t.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef
This is the first thing that came to my mind, too. I’m a omnivore myself and admittedly love my meat, but it’s very bad for the environment and I can’t deny the ethical concerns are there. At the very least, I can see low key vegetarianism being the norm in 20 years, where the norm would simply be to not have meat products, and meat might instead be a more niche diet or simply not the norm.
If lab grown meat manages to become scalable enough, I can also see that nearly completely replacing “real” meat. Once it’s at least as affordable, I think “real” meat’s days would be numbered. It’d become a thing only for purists/elitists/exotic diners. I would even expect that lab grown meat would eventually become cheaper than “real” meat simply because it would be far faster to grow and take fewer resources than to grow an entire animal to adulthood.
As an aside, would labe grown meat be considered vegan? I think it would be since no animal is harmed in the making of it. I imagine many existing vegans wouldn’t want to eat something that tastes like meat, but it would be the thing that converts practically everyone else. I sure don’t see why I’d ever want to eat “real” meat again if I could get a comparable lab grown meat that doesn’t harm animals and is better for the environment. That’s just a win win.
Lab grown meat is grown from cell cultures that were taken from animals that were not capable of consenting to donate these cells.
Hardcore vegans will likely still despise it, but for a lot of less hardcore vegan people it might become an option, especially if marketing hides the origin.
IMHO it’s more important that the carbon footprint of growing cell cultures is bigger than that of growing animals. Unless this changes, lab grown meat is not an option to fight global warming.
This definitely. For ethical or cost-effective reasons. I think price is going to be the main incentive. If its a dollar less a pound for lab grown hamburger and options at fast food outlets - we’ll definitely be there. Real meat will become the new “fancy food” - wasteful and indulgent spending.
When the quality and cost of labgrown meat matches the real thing - we’ll see the tables turn. Especially if they’re able to produce various *cuts^ and styles.
Even beyond that, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of cultural change. From what I can tell, drugs, sex and clearly defined gender identities are all on the decline in the younger generations in the west. I’m not sure there’s any good or clear external force pushing this. I think it’s just change. When it comes to eating meat, it’s pretty easy to start thinking through why you don’t need to do it as much as the typical western diet does, which feels pretty ripe for some form of merely cultural change.
My theory is that drugs, excessive sex and to some extent petty crime are partly a result of boredom for teenagers.
Teenagers today have less reasons to be bored than a generation or two ago. Instead, they’re getting dopamine fixes from social media and gaming.
I’m not sure if that’s related to dieting.
If done right, the cultural climate to change from eating living things to lab grown meat will be as simple as ordering the same dishes at restaurants with substitute ingredients that nobody notices.
And cost. It’s hard to justify a diet change otherwise.
Americans went from eating sheep to cows in the 1800s because cows were cheaper per pound, more resilient to diseases and easier to maintain.
Veganism is popular because it’s still a cost effective diet. Mass farming is compatible with it.
I can easily see “Pepsi Challenge” style ad campaigns where people blindly guess which bite was the real meat - and which one they prefer.
Though, I also see a backlash. In a way that the proliferation of hybrid and electric vehicles created the anti-environmental practice of “coal rolling”, whereas asshats modify their truck engines to produce more pollutants to own the libs.
Traditionally grown meat will go the way of vinyl. Slowly fall out of popularity, then eventually become a status good, popular among aficionados, ignoring its actual inferiority in blind tastings. Calling it now, in 25 years, most US beef will be Kobe style, “we brushed our cows’ hair and sang it lullabies” and differentiated by marketing.
My money is on this one. Once we find a more sustainable way to get meat, and that scales to the globe, whatever that method is, I think the idea of keeping animals only to kill then will quickly be viewed as abhorrent.
Likely won’t be as quick as within 20 years, however. Lots of companies currently making a fortune selling meat who will stand in the way of that.
