35 minutes ago, gfweb said:I wonder what the "carbon footprint" (crazy term) of this stuff is, compared to a hen in the yard
Well, "hen in the yard" is as low as it can get, though it comes up a bit if you're feeding it store-bought feed and/or scraps from your kitchen. But that's not the point, or the target, because the cumulative number of hens in yards across the continent is less than a rounding error relative to the total number of chickens. If the lab-grown version can get its costs and carbon footprint below those of battery-raised, factory-farmed meat chickens, it'll be a net positive. (ETA: ...and of course chickens have a far lower carbon footprint than pork, lamb, beef, etc)
That didn't work out with vertical farming (as Tamar Haspel put it, "Lettuce is cheap and power is expensive, why did anyone think this would work?") but potentially the questions of scale could be resolved for lab-grown meat. And yes, "potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. 
On 6/22/2023 at 2:10 AM, palo said:How will this affect vegans?
I actually posed that question somewhere here on the board a number of years ago, because I was genuinely interested to hear some differing viewpoints on the subject, but it seems vegans are in short supply on eG. I suppose it would weaken the ethical argument somewhat ("No animals were harmed in the preparation of this dish!") though not the health-related arguments. To be clear, I'm personally an omnivore so I have no skin in the game, I was just curious.
Major players like Perdue are throwing significant funding into this research, on the basis that if it becomes "the next thing" they want to profit from it (just as, in an unrelated field, a Shell Oil subsidiary is the world's leading vendor of grid-scale battery storage for renewables). I'm just turning 60 this year, and have lots of nonagenarians on both sides of my family, so barring accidents I expect these products to come to market during my lifetime. As/if/when they do, I don't anticipate treating them any differently than I do "real" meats. I tend to shop opportunistically - looking for bargains and planning my meals accordingly, rather than planning a meal and then shopping for it - so, as always, I'll follow the deals.
For anyone who's interested in a nuts-and-bolts look at the technology from the industry's perspective, here's a link I'd posted elsewhere a few days ago.
