Oh brave new world!

Exactly.  And imagine a future in which meat-eating households can each culture and rear their own regenerating meat blob, and harvest it themselves.  While presumably the meat blob would need some sort of food stuff, it would have to be far more efficient at turning that nutrition into delicious meat than a proper animal, as it doesn't have to do all that breathing and moving and living and stuff.  Household meat-sufficiency, here at last.

Seriously, this would be a truly incredibly technology.

"we can have beef sans the deforestation and methane from cow farts"

Not to mention unnecessary suffering associated with factory farming.

I'd say the jury is still out on whether it'll be a nice development or indeed something repulsive, but I wouldn't slam it a priori.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

It's based on stem cells. It cannot be Abrahamically legal...

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

French far right uses halal accusation to woo voters | Reuters

at a congress of her National Front party in Lille, Le Pen returned to familiar anti-immigration territory, saying she had proof that all meat in Paris was halal - killed by cutting the animal's throat and letting its blood drain out.

"This situation is deception and the government has been fully aware of it for months," Le Pen said. "All the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority. We have reason to be disgusted."

News for Parisian Jews - their kosher meat is in fact halal.

(Le Pen was talking rubbish of course - except that the small abbattoirs in the Ile-de-France region are halal. They just don't provide anything like all the meat that is supplied to the region from other regions of France and Europe and elsewhere).

The way I see it, the following facts are pertinent:

First world civilisation consumes way more meat than can be sustainably harvested given contemporary technology. There are three basic ways to solve that problem:

1. Find alternatives to meat.

2. Make better technology.

3. Go without.

These are not mutually exclusive, so there is no need to recoil from 2) just because there is still low hanging fruit in 1).

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.