Italy bans cultivated meat products
Italy bans cultivated meat products
New law prohibits the production or sale of cultivated meat in Italy, with fines of up to €60,000
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
If lab grown meat can be perfected, taste and texture wise, then be scaled up on the production side, it would be a wonderful alternative to large scale animal husbandry. Benefits, no animals suffer, much much much less land required, much less air pollution, less ground water pollution. So far the only resistance to adoption is resistance to change, because it's new. But outside of the argument "Meat tastes better when it suffers", it looks like people just hating change.
The real reason it won't work and it shouldn't work: the procedures will be patented and they will be insanely expensive, then the countries owning the patent will co-opt the vegans' agenda to make eating meat illegal all over the world unless it's lab meat, and they will have a way to control countries by charging them through the nose for the use of the patents or by making them suffer hunger.
Let's not mince words here, if we have an alternative to the horrid conditions in slaughter houses, and a way to cut down massively on land usage for both raising and feeding cattle, AND reduce methane emissions due to less farting cows, those are all wins. The future you've painted just won't come to pass, what's much more likely is, if lab grown meat can scale up and solve the issues of texture, and industrial amounts able to be produced, then lab grown meat will become cheap, and there will be multiple companies competed to offer their take on grown meat. No country will own the patent, and if anything real animal meat will still exist, no outlawing, but it'll be a luxury, expensive, especially compared with how affordable grown meat could be.
These are a lot of ifs, it's possible that lab meat won't find a way to get the texture right, or it may be impossible to scale up production and make it affordable to produce. But you're assuming a lot of very not likely outcomes here.
procedures will be patented and they will be insanely expensive then the countries owning the patent will co-opt the vegans' agenda to make eating meat illegal all over the world unless it's lab meat
That's not how IP laws work..... First, were assuming something is going to be "insanely expensive", which doesn't exactly make sense when talking about food. If you invent a product that has that high of a production cost, no one is going to buy it.
Second, you are assuming that there is only one way to produce lab meats, or that one corporation is going to patent every single possible way to create lab meat. Patenting a process is a lot harder to enforce than patenting an end product, just slightly changing the process would be enough to invalidate most procedural patents.
Lastly, by what means would a corporation make meat eating illegal? We don't have a world government, we cant even prevent the mass slaughter of humans, let alone animals.
What a dumb fucking timeline we live in. I'm so tired.