I mean there is lab-grown meat. Once lab-grown meat gets adopted we can slowly turn away from the idea of "meat" being derived from animals and further abstract it. E.g. we could take the genetic code that allows for the creation of an animal's muscles, extract the most basic building blocks that create the texture and nutrients, change it, put that code into bacteria and literally have create a patty/slab of "meat" that has the form and thickness of a tortilla, but the flavour profile of whichever animals you can think of.
roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
That all makes sense.
But in practice people always describe the flavour as being like tortilla too.
And we still need to figure out the environmental impact. We don't know what it is, but it will certainly be far worse than meat.
Why the same form and thickness of tortilla? Is that a technical constraint?
Weyland@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
The tortilla analogy was just to sketch an abstraction to what meat might become.
How would lab-grown meat (one that doesn't make use of a biopsis) have a larger environmental impact? It's literally a cell culture to connect to a nutrient drip.
roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
Meats can be farmed in many ways. But in the best way (and it's a fairly common way) they are raised on useless land, practically wild, consuming grass and water that is also abundant. Think of mountainsides or floodplains in country with a lot of rain.
It had no negative environmental impact, and a very small positive one. Not compare with three impact of any large scale chemical or industrial process. It is necessarily vast. Mining and transporting exotic materials, manpower or specialised robots, etc. All these have huge ecological footprint.
Without even knowing the details (because the industry doesn't exist yet) it will certainly be an ecological disaster, compared against the best possible form of animal farming.
But that firm if animal farming needs to become the norm soon anyway.