RE: Steemit vegetarians, "deathless meat" is almost here...what do you think?
I think eating labgrown meat in exotic forms like kangaroo-, chimpanzee-, etc.-meat wouldn't be immoral. In the opposite.
If this process still needs cells from animals, it could even be more reasonable to use the cells from animals living in the region to grow meat than importing them from animals from other regions in the world. Using local animal-cells in combination with a decentralization of lab-grown-meat-production would save us a lot of logistic-costs and a lot of CO2-emissions.
This process would be more reasonable in my opinion then importing meat from all over the world, but likely we even won't need to extract cells from animals in the future. Even today there are already successful experiments to greatly extend, not just modify, the genetic code of E coli-microbes ( https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/23/organisms-created-with-synthetic-dna-pave-way-for-new-entirely-new-life-forms ) which could pave the way for completely newly created lifeforms possibly including completely artificial meat-cells.
If completely artificial meat-cells without the need to extract them from other animals should become produceable then moral questions about the form of meat won't matter anymore in my opinion.
very interesting take, thanks!
While it's true that countless genetic manipulations are possible with E. coli, I wouldn't use it as a basis for synthetic meat, mainly because it's a single-celled organism. You would need to put an unreasonable amount of effort into teaching E. coli how to build multicellular structures. I don't think it has ever been done before and I presume it would take decades if anyone even wants to pursue that path. It's much more practical to use cells that already know how to form multicellular structures. All you have to do is convince them to grow outside of an organism. And you could get the inital cells from biopsies that don't do much harm to the animals, so I don't think there would be any ethical problems.