As an ethical vegetarian for the past five years, I've very interested in cultured (lab-grown) meat technology[1]. FWIW, I'm very happy with my diet and probably wouldn't switch back even if this does become affordable, but I'm 100% supportive of the concept of cruelty-free meat.
30 year pescetarian here. I mean, mainly vegetarian but some fish every so often.
I gave up meat at 17 on the basis of no reason whatsoever, I was just a contrary teen who liked giving things up.
Down the line a few years I find so many compelling reasons to not eat meat. Each individually may be argued out of the room but collectively it's pretty compelling.
Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.
Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc
Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.
I totally support anyone making whatever decision they like about eating meat, but I'm completely unable to agree that it's a good idea.
Cultured meat in this context is a difficult one to parse. For people like me there's literally no point. I'm just not interested in eating steak, whether it's killed or grown. For your hardcore fleshy, a bloody slab of meat is all that's going to satiate them, so it misses that market too. I guess there's maybe a middle ground of people who could be convinced to stop eating killed meat if they see an alternative?
It'll be interesting to see where this one goes and how it is marketed...
I agree with a lot of the points you made, though:
> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
Ultimately every animal is going to die. If the moral hangup for you is the certainty of death, then wouldn't you consider any form of reproduction immoral? 'However good and rewarding their life may be, children are still going to die eventually, ergo noone should reproduce'.
Unless it's the act of killing with the intention to consume that's the issue?
I think there's a reductionist angle to your point which just doesn't chime with me. It's a bit like people arguing for anti-natalism. It's interesting, but morally redundant, somehow?
The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death ("relax, you're going to die" is a credo I try hard to live by - even though I fail much of the time and worry about death as much as the next person...). It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.
There is also something in there about the distance and hypocrisy of many meat eaters when it comes to facing up to what they are putting in their mouths. The thing you see at a supermarket is a million miles away from a hanging carcass; I know a whole bunch of people who don't even tell their young children that the thing they have on their plate is that thing walking around in the field over there - and that seems to me to also be quite disingenuous.
I'm failing to make a good point. But the broader thing for me is as I said - I'm genuinely not a rabid vegetarian (I used to get drunk at uni and sometimes end the night eating kebab along with everyone else...) - is that I'm interested in the combination of reasons which for me have built up into a fairly compelling case over the years. I should say as well - I actually do quite like the taste of meat even though it's been a long, long time - but I have no intention of going back, which is what interests me.
> The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death... It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.
Fair enough. I don't necessarily fully agree with that specific argument but I can certainly understand where you're coming from. It's one of those head vs heart things: the cold hard logic that all other things being equal, a life followed by death is equivalent to any other, vs the vague moral sense that life should have purpose, and the discomfort when that purpose is 'to be foodstuff'.
That said, I wasn't really arguing for meat consumption generally, I was more just pointing out -- nitpicking might be another word -- a flaw in OPs justification.
I'm in the process of reducing my meat consumption considerably (to 'a couple of times a week') and restricting it to be local and free range. Maybe in a year I'll be full vego, who knows.
Interesting point you raise about a willing blindness of some carnivores. I'm not sure I've really encountered the level of denial that you mention myself, possibly because of the semi-rural area I grew up in, but I don't doubt that it exists. Humans are highly skilled at avoiding the uncomfortable and maintaining delusions.
If you could grow and kill with a small fraction of the suffering that farmed animals endure today, then eating meat would be mostly fine (other than environmental issues, perhaps). Unfortunately that's impossible for all but a very small minority of people - those who can raise and kill animals themselves or have someone they trust very well to do it for them.[0][1]
Well over 95% of meat is factory farmed[2], and animals that are raised in factory farms do not live pleasant lives, to put it lightly.[3] This is coming from someone who grew up on a farm, and whose parents are still farmers.
[0] People think that buying from their local butcher or local farm must make their meat ethical. In fact, small abbatoirs often have very shoddy killing protocols compared to the large ones. You end up with farmers clubbing animals to death, or putting 5 bullets into a pig's head before it dies: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-14/tasmanian-abattoir-ac...
[1] Hunting isn't an ethical source of meat. Even professional hunters (e.g. those who kill kangaroos for farmers in AU) will let ~1 in 20 get away with a bullet in them. That could mean suffering for hours or even days if it clots but then dies due to internal bleeding or infection. I used to hunt and I would go to sleep thinking about the animals that got away wounded that day. Still, it took me far too long to realise that there is no need to eat animals.
>Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc
It took me 5 minutes of Googling to find articles that refute this from all kinds of credible sources.
Going vegetarian might be a step up from the average Americans diet, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find any research that demonstrates plant-based diets are any better than a balanced diet that includes meat protein.
I dunno what Google you're using but it took me half a minute to get to multiple sources suggesting vegetarians are on average healthier, have lower BMI, lower incidents of common cancers and more. Obviously balance probably trumps everything as it always does but there's imo fairly compelling evidence in the non meat direction, on average, for most people.
But once again may I stress that for me it's a whole range of factors that make this compelling, not just one.
Even without studies, ask yourself why you most likely have a relative or know someone who's died from heart disease or a cancer and that likelihood plummets when looking at those that eat less or no meat? Then look at populations where meat consumption has gone up in the past few decades and certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases have gone up in tandem?
Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!
I'm not American, so who cares. But some of the highest life expectancy in the world are European countries. I certainly don't see "Asia" (lol) as a standout.
>Even without studies, ask yourself...
Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.
>Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!
See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.
You can control for a bunch of lifestyle factors like smoking and exercise level, and the correlation still exists. It uncontroversial at this point - which is why every major national dietetics association (don't confuse them with "nutritionists") has a position statement on plant-based diets saying that they're as healthy or healthier than regular diets.
And with UFC fighters[0], NBA planers, national weightlifting champtions[1], world-record-holding powerlifters[2], and so on eating plant-based diets, it's getting harder to make the "okay, sure you live longer, but you probably sacrifice strength/vigor/etc throughout your life" claim.
My comment re: homeopathy/traditional meds was an attempt to contrast the wild wild west dumpster fire that is Big Pharma with traditional meds. Pill popping countries have an opioid crisis whilst less meat eating populations aren't heavily reliant on the pharmaceutical industry because they have far less diet related health issues. In hindsight, I could have phrased that better. Then again, you could have parsed what I was trying to get across.
The rest of this must be directed at OP because I too know and believe a plant based diet carries longer life expectancy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Didn't say you were. Never assumed you were American.
Of the provided links [1], [2] and [3], two of them show Honk Kong, Japan, Macau, Singapore and South Korea in the top 10. Europe gets 3 with Israel and Australia rounding out the 10. You're not incorrect by saying * some * but with Asian countries outnumbering European, lol at how wrong I am.
Your condescending tone is merely a eurocentric insecurity of the decline in your population. With birth rates plummeting, centuries, if not decades, from now, Europe won't be as white, as homogenous as it is (or was) so I understand your response of lashing out instead of accepting Asian countries might lead in anything of consequence.
I'll concede that what I meant by continent, I was actually referring to (specific) Asian countries, not the continent as a whole. Due to lifestyle and diet, Asian countries are more homogenous than other continents hence my lumping them together.
> Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.
Meat loving countries have higher obesity rates thus poorer health outcomes. No hocus pocus re: this observation. For someone not interested in anecdata, you miserably failed to do a simple query: https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=life+expectancy+by+continent
> See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.
Neither do I. I'm shaming Americans and any person who thinks it's okay to eat meat without acknowledging the consequences it has on our environment. Basically what I take issue with is how your diet affects climate change which affects all of us!
PS: I eat meat regularly. I could quit given the need to but don't see myself consuming 'meat' grown artificially.
The is no evidence that homeopathy is effective at treating anything. On the other hand there's a mountain of evidence that people who eat no meat, or less than once per week live significantly longer. See citations on this[0] wiki page. The studies control for a bunch of different lifestyle factors including smoking, exercise level, and so on.
Hardcore fleshy here. I have no ethical concern in killing an animal for food. But if someone can lab grow meat that tastes like meat sign me up. My only concerns would be taste, cost and food safety.
Out of interest, which would you choose on balance in a scenario in which the lab meat tasted the same, cost the same and came with the same food safety aspects?
I like the idea of lab grown as it is a promising way to increase our food production. If it costs the same that indicates it's no more efficient than growing animals for food.
"For your hardcore fleshy, a bloody slab of meat is all that's going to satiate them, so it misses that market too."
I think you're really painting people who don't follow your thinking with a pretty aggressively negative stereotype here.
I love a good steak. The fact that it came from a cow is irrelevant to me - I like it for taste/texture/etc. If you can give me the exact same product from a lab, I'll 100% buy it (especially if it's cheaper). This is how most people are (and not just about meat) - they care about the end product they're consuming, not its origins or how it got to them (otherwise, y'know, we'd be thinking about where our iPhones came from and whatnot). Give them the identical product they have now that's better along some line that matters to them (like cost) and they'll happily switch.
Ethical: cruelty is bad, so responsible production of meat is preferred but there’s no reason why killing animal for food should be bad, such that same argument can’t be applied to veggie production.
Environmental: grass fed meat is very much preferred to monoculturing the crap out of our planet. Animas are part of life cycle of the environment.
Health: crappy grains have done way more health damage than crappy meats. Also focusing on meat exclusively, skipping organs is unhealthy. Saturated fats aren’t as bad as you’re told (only in combination with sugars). Red meat doesn’t cause cancer (smoked foods do). Lots of myths around nutrition.
As I said, I'm not even vaguely tense about arguing the point - for me these have all emerged long after I made the decision to be vegetarian. I just don't think you're right :-)
> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
No, there are a lot of arguing about this. There is no ethical consensus on "killing animals" being the "wrong" thing. Hell there is not even consensus on whether an objective ethics is possible.
Organisms consume other organisms. This is part of the cycle of life. Declaring this objectively wrong without exceptions just because you feel bad for the poor animals is a weak argument at its best.
You can talk about the perils of the modern day animal farming which involves treating animals like vegetables and "growing" them in conditions indistinguishable from torture; but that doesn't have to mean "killing animals" is bad per se.
> Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.
Yes, but there is research supporting that grain and vegetable farming has a lot of problems as well. Farming in scale in general is a problematic thing. Some even go as far as to state that animal farming can be even less harmful environmentally, when done right. What I'm trying to say is that, this claim hasn't been proven yet. If you want to see counter arguments and relevant research, try following a couple of carnivore diet advocates on social media. I don't have any links to share off the top of my head at the moment and I'm sorry about it. But there is no real consensus here, not so easy.
> Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc
Yes, there are a lot past research about this. But as we can see today there are a lot of problems with those researches as well. A lot of them are being challenged today. Ketogenic and carnivore diets are on the rise and for good reason. USDA's food pyramid is reversed. Fat, eggs and animal protein are no longer the enemy according to many new researches. I suggest you to keep up with the new research as well.
> Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.
Yes, this may be the kicker for you. For many, animal based foods are still irreplaceable. Not much point talking about this as it's fairly subjective.
If ethics are a priority, then how can you be a vegetarian as opposed to a vegan? If as a vegetarian you acknowledge consuming animal products, which ethics are you compromising (just curious).
I'm interested in cultured meat as well, but also in cultured dairy. I follow an ovolactovegetarian diet, and I exercise heavily six days a week. I find it really difficult to take even the minimum 50 grams of complete (which is crucial) protein just from eggs, dairy, and plant-based foods. Having the chance of eating cruelty-free meat would save me from thinking so much about coming up with ways of fulfilling my nutritional requirements.
I am an ethical meat eater. I would rather eat grass fed beef and lamb than see the additional suffering of hundreds/thousands of rodents (let alone the tens of millions of insects) that me adopting a vegetarian diet would induce. Being poisoned or shredded in a harvester is not a cruelty-free way to die.
On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed. Given very few cattle and sheep would be born if it wasn’t for meat/dairy production then a case can be made that meat eating is the more ethical option. I do admit that this view is incompatible with my first opinion as there would be many more animals born if I adopted a vegetarian diet.
Massive amounts of grain are fed to livestock, and vast acreage is cleared for grazing livestock. If everyone went vegetarian, I'm fairly certain the amount of crops grown and land we use for agriculture would be significantly less. Turning grain into meat is highly inefficient.
When everyone stops eating meat and turns to "healthy" meals like corn based vegetarian burgers I think we are all worse off.
Variety, locally grown produce, locally raised animals is the best way to keep diversity and quality. The vegetarian food available now is good because it's not as mass produced.
There's a third aspect to that. Or maybe it's another ecology problem.
While I don't have the numbers, I strongly suspect there's not enough grass to feed all the humans the amount of meat they would like to eat right now. At least based on observing the prices of intensive vs grass fed, or watching the numbers for intensive production alone.
So if we want grass fed as the new normal, we're either going to have to intensify it back again, or we'll end up eating respectively less meat. That's near-vegetarianism or bust.
Yes this is true - there is not enough grasslands to feed the current demand for meat - actually there is not enough feedlots to feed the demand for meat on a global scale. Many poor people around the world would eat more meat if it was cheaper.
The solutions to let the market solve the problem - if there was only grass fed meat available the cost would be very high and meat would become a luxury again.
Assuming this is an honest question and not a lame attempt at a gotcha: as more people switch to a vegan diet we will gradually stop breeding them in the first place, so there are no animals for something to "happen to."
I like meat too and won’t give it up unless decent lab grown meat comes around but this comment is the most dissembling nonsense I have heard in a while.
It is no more nonsense that the OP’s argument. If you do an analysis on animals killed per calorie, grains kill many more animals than say grass fed cattle. I think many people are unaware how many rodents are killed every year growing and harvesting grains.
I don’t think this is a very good reason to eat or not eat meat.
This PDF is a flyer on pest control, presumably targeted at growers of grain. Nowhere does it contain anything resembling the "analysis on animals killed per calorie" you referred to.
I certainly do like eating meat and I don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat. The problem with trying to use ethics to justify a position is there is little agreement on what is ethical or not.
Some people are not comfortable killing an animal to eat it. To them it's not an ethical choice. I have no problem killing an animal for food. I also have no problem with someone else finding it unethical.
Each person has their own beliefs that govern their ethics. As long as we all find a way to live peacefully together there is nothing wrong with that.
Cattle eat more plant calories than the resultant meat. All those plant calories include the “vegetarian suffering.” Purely grass fed meats with no farming will be too inefficient to provide meat to everyone.
Sure meat might become more of a luxury than it is now, but in a calorie to calorie trade off grains have a higher animal kill rate than grass fed meat. I don’t many people are aware how many rodents are killed harvesting and storing grain.
> On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed.
Would that not lead to a desire to create as many "lives" as possible? I don't think I've met many people optimising for that, although I won't rule it out.
This incredibly stupid take is actually pretty common on HN whenever vegetarianism comes up. I don't know whether they're simply mocking the serious thought many people have put into the ethics of eating animals or what, but it's manifestly false and patently ridiculous to claim that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals.
Some people have a hard time engaging with ideas that might cast them in a negative, ethical light. I’ve had people abruptly stop me from explaining ethical vegetarianism, even though they initiated the conversation haha
On a side note, I never followed the project very closely but I was really hopeful for soylent. What happened? Is the technology just not there? Do we not know enough about human physiology? What is missing to take the soylent idea — which I understood as automate most (boring) meals — and make it a reality?
I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?
People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.
I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.
Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.
I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.
I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.
I really liked it as an occasional meal replacement, for much of the reasons above. But then they switched from rice to soy or pea protein. I have a peanut allergy. While I can eat soy/peas by themselves, the hydrolyzed proteins give me hives. Otherwise I'd still be eating it.
The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.
The soylent thing always struck me as a bizarre Silicon Valley fad with very limited appeal. I haven’t done a study but I would be very confident that most people simply enjoy eating food.
I’m actually in the middle of a bad GI flare-up, and soylent is a god send. I forget to eat, solid foods are hard to digest, I oversleep and miss meal times, etc. A bottled soylent helps me get back on track quickly.
Some people don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat and rather than get into an argument with a vegetarian prefer to end the conversation. I am not one of these people.
Take that number and at minimum ADD the cows to it. It's not like they feed of thin air while they live.
In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.
Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.
Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.
Vegans don't consume any animal products, whereas vegetarians typically eat no meat but may eat dairy.
Ethical vegetarians are vegetarians for primarily ethical reasons. For example, they may think meat-eating causes excessive suffering (I fall into this category). Most Western vegetarians are ethical vegetarians, but some people are vegetarian for medical or religious reasons.
People are vegan or vegetarian for various reasons, health, environmental or ethical. An ethical ovo-lacto vegetarian doesn't make much sense to me since the dairy industry is pretty cruel, egg production isn't great either.
I wouldn't call myself an "ethical ovo-lacto vegetarian" because it sounds pompous, but it's basically what I am. My position is that raising and killing animals for meat is unjustifiable by any reasonable ethical or environmental standard. However, it is possible for dairy and egg production to be ethical, even though it often isn't in practice. So, I try to source eggs and milk from producers who minimize suffering. For example, I could get eggs from a local smallholding where I can see for myself that the chickens live fairly good lives.
I had a similar mindset and was vegetarian for around 7 years. My girlfriend 3 years ago challenged me on some of my thoughts and I bit the bullet and stopped eating all animal products. The transition is a lot easier if you’re already vegetarian and the amount of options around now make it really easy.
Perhaps it's someone who doesn't think in absolutes: sees the value of the ethical argument, but allows that other factors may dominate depending on the circumstances.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat