Except that the artificial meat substitutes we have right now, eg those fake burgers, aren't exactly better. They are worse than the meat they replace. Its not ethical or moral its just the market moving.

The vegetarian farming isn't more ethical either. Its usually mono-cropping at large scale. see also: corn.

If you want to improve a situation, at first you will make slow progress. But I'm willing to bet on artificial meat being an engineering problem and ultimately becoming better than the real thing.

My thing is the amount of processing involved. How much artificial junk is in there? Is it actually seen as food?

These aren't trivial questions. The food industry has a habit of lacing processed food with so much junk its barely recognisable.

You welcome a world where affluent elites eath high quality food and everyone else eats shit?

Well, you don't have to welcome it. That's the current world. Ask the lady who cleans your office toilets how often she eats organic, or even just fruit, other than tomatoes.

There exist dumb rich people who drink unpasteurized milk, and then get diarrhea or worse. It seems unimaginative of you to suppose that meat that comes from a live animal will always be necessarily higher quality than meat that comes from cultured cells. I, for one, would prefer a lab grown meat over a farmed meat whose tissues are infused with antibiotics and is generally covered with feces emitted from the slaughtering process

> I, for one, would prefer a lab grown meat over a farmed meat whose tissues are infused with antibiotics and is generally covered with feces emitted from the slaughtering process

For the time being you can find such meat in countries outside the Americas that still have small scale farms, particularly in the EU where the prophylactic use of antibiotics on farm animals is banned since 2018.

" It seems unimaginative of you to suppose ..."

What is it with the personal tone in comments in these sorts of discussions? I've had the absolute worst experience discussing these things on HN, as opposed to all other kinds of discussion. Other discussions are generally civil and polite. When it comes to meat eating and animals' rights, it's a free for all and everyone thiks it's fine to walk all over good manners and attack other commenters' intellect, their morality, anything. I mean, wtf?

Regarding the "unimaginative" comment: OP might have just meant that we are in the very early days of artificial meat and dismissing it now would be tantamount to dismissing the internet in the early 90s.

So a comment about my imagination is justified, because in the past someone other than me was wrong about something completely different?

You might be taking this a tad bit too personal. OP described how your argument sounded to them. They didn't condemn your entire personhood because of it.

It's a personal comment about my imagination. How else am I supposed to take it, if not personally? If the OP didn't want me to take it personally, they should have not made a personal comment.

> You welcome a world where affluent elites eath high quality food and everyone else eats shit?

That's a bit of a strawman there. Improving food tech does not need to be a zero sum game. Can it not be that food quality will in general improve? Much like how access to clean water (at least in the Western world) has improved a lot compared to past centuries.

This is as unethical as it can be. Animals are the last thing they think about, and I dread thinking what goes into creation of this artificial meat.

What's so unethical about it?

Because it puts economical interests over interests of people.