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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Here's the thing, as I see it. Meat eaters don't genuinely care about the ethics of meat. They give no shits about factory farming. So lab grown meat won't be popular until it becomes significantly cheaper than standard factory farming. And even then conservatives will insist on eating real meat for ideological reasons, just like they do today.
(I mean, look at the impossible burgers. They were damn near identical to ground beef, and at a similar price point. But similar wasn't good enough - they didn't get it cheaper than actual ground beef so it ended up just a brief fad.)
And lab grown meat doesn't have the short supply chain of a live animal in a field. Even factory farming at its most factoriest is pretty straightforward - grow corn, feed it to pigs in tiny cages, pump them full of antibiotics, repeat. Lab grown meat doesn't have the cruelty factor but the complexity of its supply chain and the amount of artificial inputs it requires, not only make it antithetical to solarpunk philosophy in a different way, but make it highly unlikely it'll ever be competitive price-wise.
What we need is a pre-industrial-revolution attitude towards food. Our calories should be primarily vegetarian and vegan, grown naturally from the soil. Food shouldn't be an industrial product. And there's nothing more industrial than lab-grown meat.
There is an issue with the idea of pre industrial production. In ecoremediation we need to rewild large tracts of land to restore biodiversity. Most of this land is now used for farming and while a good portion of that land for half the crops in rotation goes to animal feed, it wouldn't be enough to simultaneously feed the population and rewild enough land if we stick to pre industrial methods. What we need is a clean, sustainable industry of agriculture. We are already on the fragile precipe of this new form. In the Netherlands we can find automated greenhouse operations that are increasingly becoming ecologically sane in their use of pesticides, fertilizers etc. They achieve an output almost double of traditional farming on a quarter of the space on method alone. In both the netherlands and singapore vertical farm projects are started to integrate city planning and farming, further reducing the need for space. In northern europe kelp farms are started to farm kelp and seaweed. There are probably many more examples but they are all post industrial practices which rely heavily on the scalability of industry. It really is the only way forward if we truly want to restore the plenty provided by a balance in nature. Restore the biodiversity, rewild the world, use less space.