@bencurthoys @argv_minus_one @danirabbit
May I be the joyless bastard and weigh in about synthetic meat? I hope not to crash the party (also, I am several hours late, lol)... :QueerCat:
The problem I see with synthetic meat is about the food system we want.
Synthetic meat is an industrial product, requiring global supply chains, large-scale (sterile) facilities and a stratified and complex (and stratified) social and economic structure.
A part from making the life cycle assessment quite complex (because e.g. the quantification of the environmental impact of a production system depends mainly from where you draw the system boundaries, so it is very easy to leave out processes and obtain a nicer picture than in reality), hyper-technological systems are not resilient (remember when during covid there was a global shortage of lab gloves because *all* of them are produced in Malaysia? there are many components in a lab that are not easy to source in a crisis).
On another note, it is also a question of organization. A food system based on small-scale, local and sustainable farms is in my eyes much preferable than megacorporations owning the food production chain. I am not sure that lab meat will be easy to grow in our basements like fungi or so...
Also, be aware that a lot of the lab meat bubble was because it seemed so attractive to investors. Technological, scalable solutions that seem even more sustainable than what we have actually. A very welcome investment opportunity and a good narrative for corporations that want to show that they will save the world (remember biofuels from algae?).
Don't get me wrong, I am not fundamentally against industry or technology, it's just that I think that it is a good idea to keep the influence of the corporate-industrial players out of the food system as much as possible.
It is correct that lab meat is probably way more ethical than the current system of industrial agriculture with factory farms. But we also easily tend to overestimate the contribution of industrial farming to feed the world, and overlook the millions of smallscale farmers that provide a way greater part of the foodstuff actually consumed by humanity. @viacampesina_en has more information about this.
#Agroecology #LabMeat #SyntheticMeat #AgroecologicalTransition #Diet #SustainableDiet #FoodSystem #WeFeedTheWorld
