Cyanide & Happiness

I think it's a real shame too. I've had some fantastic veggie/potato burger. You gotta drop all pretense of the patty being meat, and instead just focus on making it tasty.

So you're saying for you to stop causing unnecessary suffering, solely for the pleasure of your taste buds, you'd need a perfect 1:1 replacement, because otherwise you're valuing a good meal more than not being a monster to animals?

Then let me ask, how many meat substitutes have you tasted so far? An estimate would do.

You've interpreted very different goal posts into my comment than I intended. My comment was deliberately unspecific, because I'm well aware that we all live in different situations. I can buy vegan meatballs in the shop, which taste like the real thing, but if I lived in a more rural region or in a different country, I might not be able to.

But what's essentially universal to the human experience is that there's some decent vegan protein source, which folks could be eating more of, if they wanted to. So, I'm not talking about switching over wholesale here. I'm saying most people could be eating more nuts, peas, beans, lentils, hummus, tofu, vegan meatballs, whatever. You're gonna find something.

Lots of folks don't even engage with that option, though. Either they're too lazy to learn something new, or they're psychopaths who don't care about morals in the first place, or they're caught up in identity politics of "I need to be strong, because I'm suffering from toxic masculinity, and to be strong, I need to be eating meat". And particularly in the last case, they often associate meat and manliness with their food having bled out.

As such, in terms of actual morality, lab-grown meat will

• maybe catch a few of the lazy folks, because they really don't have to exert even the slightest thought anymore, whether it's equivalent to what they usually eat,
• not get through to the psychopaths, because those never care about morals, and
• have a hard time with the toxic masculinity crowd. Maybe some of them will be rational enough that it's the same thing in the end, and so even though they're irrational in their belief that they need it for manliness, they might still accept it. But especially if the lab-grown meat isn't immediately perfect, I expect there to be persistent pushback, that it's not the real deal and whatever. The meat industry will gladly spread propaganda to reinforce that.

Your point makes no sense.