Inherently flawed imho. Like, obviously the current dominant methods, of grain-fed cows confined in feedlots or cutting down rainforests for grazing, are unsustainable and undesirable. That being said, lab grown meat has a huuuuge waste stream. Keeping cell cultures pure and sterile necessitates a lot of disposable pipette tips, petri dishes, plastic bags etc etc etc, not to mention antibiotics used in culture mediums.
Also like…what do they feed the cell culture? You can give cows minimally-processed grains and soybeans because they have a complex digestive tract to grind up, dissolve, purify and extract nutrients for themselves, and then a circulatory system to send those nutrients to every muscle cell more-or-less perfectly. If you’re growing only muscle cells, those cells still need all the same nutrients, only now you need to do all the work of the digestive tract and circulatory system. You’re creating extra work, with extra waste, that’s still gonna be dependent on cheap grains+soybeans. It’s the same problems I have with “vertical farms” growing lettuce in artificial lights and irrigation.
Ideally, you appreciate the cow not as a “protein producing unit” that can be replaced by muscle cells in a petri dish, but as a whole animal. Its hoofprints in the soil help improve the way water flows over the landscape (imprinting), its grazing improves nutrient cycling in pastures and grasslands, its manure provides fertility to gardens or is burned as fuel where trees need to be conserved. If you’re smart about designing systems, the natural behaviors and instincts of cows (or any grazing animal–ideally buffalo in “North America”) can become beneficial and act to improve the world around them.
When a cow is treated this way, it needs minimal labor and provides many benefits–food, leather, ecosystem stability, fertilizer, fuel, etc. Compare this to a petri dish full of muscle cells, which needs a lot of labor and provides only one benefit, food, while also producing many waste products that have no use.
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