Philosophical Vegan Forum

Recently, Florida has banned lab-grown meat, and a few other US States will probably do the same thing soon. The supposed reasons are that lab-grown meat somehow decreases our food security, and that we don't have long-term data to know whether it causes cancer.

I don't see how exactly lab-grown meat might decrease our food security. That's not how economy works. I especially don't see how lab-grown beef might decrease our food security, since it actually takes less resources to produce than real beef. You can perhaps make a case against lab-grown chicken on that basis, since it takes slightly more resources than real chicken, but you cannot make that case against lab-grown beef.

As for cancer... I feel like people think that cancer is some magical disease and that all kinds of substances cause it or prevent it. People don't think rationally about cancer, like they think about heart disease. Meat causes cancer via the heme iron. Lab-grown chicken, just like real chicken, contains very little heme iron, so it's unlikely to cause cancer. Now, as for lab-grown beef, I don't know how the heme iron content is controlled, or if it is at all. It's, at worst, just as bad as real beef.

What are your thoughts about this?

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2024 5:01 am Recently, Florida has banned lab-grown meat, and a few other US States will probably do the same thing soon. The supposed reasons are that lab-grown meat somehow decreases our food security, and that we don't have long-term data to know whether it causes cancer.

So they want to make sure it also causes cancer just like regular cruel animal torturing meat?

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2024 5:01 amI don't see how exactly lab-grown meat might decrease our food security. That's not how economy works.

It's complicated. Because animal meat is so incredibly inefficient, if our food production dropped to something like 10% of what it currently is, due to disaster or war, we could all just go vegan and remain well fed.
An efficient food system would likely see the land return to wild, and in the case of meteor or nuclear blast causing a global reduction in agricultural output, there would be a ramp-up period to start exploiting that land again.

It's a stupid last ditch argument, particularly because climate change caused largely by the wasteful exploit is most likely to cause natural disasters (of the non-astronomical variety) or war that would harm agricultural output.
"Let's do the thing that's mostly likely to threaten food security so we continue being so wasteful so we can stop being wasteful and have more food security in the event that the thing we're doing threatens it."