The end of cows?

[Woodchopper]

That's going to be a weird one for alot of people. I consider myself veggie, and depending on how it was grown, I'd be open to eating vat grown meat. Not that I particularly liked red meat though.

Not my opinion but here’s something on why the Vegan Society objects to lab grown meat: https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/is-lab-grown-meat-vegan/

Seems to come down to a belief that eating meat is still wrong wherever it comes from.

Yeah, reading that, like I said, weird. Not so much the definition of vegan being "not derived from animals in any way", because words mean what they mean, but from the ethics point of view. They are more hung up on anything being consumed that is directly derived from animals as opposed to wider harms. It's not as if intensive agriculture of cereals, fruits and vegetables doesn't kill animals and affect ecosystems.

That said, whether lab grown meat actually produces less harms than raising live stock, let alone alternative vegan sources of protein, I have no idea.

It’s a while since I was a vegan or vegetarian, but it doesn’t seem so strange to me. There is a difference between them and wanting more generally to reduce harms. One is a statement of principle while the other is a utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits. For example, a vegan would still refuse to eat meat even if there were no direct harms caused by that (eg the animal hadn’t been farmed and died of natural causes).

[discovolante]

Not my opinion but here’s something on why the Vegan Society objects to lab grown meat: https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/is-lab-grown-meat-vegan/

Seems to come down to a belief that eating meat is still wrong wherever it comes from.

Yeah, reading that, like I said, weird. Not so much the definition of vegan being "not derived from animals in any way", because words mean what they mean, but from the ethics point of view. They are more hung up on anything being consumed that is directly derived from animals as opposed to wider harms. It's not as if intensive agriculture of cereals, fruits and vegetables doesn't kill animals and affect ecosystems.

That said, whether lab grown meat actually produces less harms than raising live stock, let alone alternative vegan sources of protein, I have no idea.

It’s a while since I was a vegan or vegetarian, but it doesn’t seem so strange to me. There is a difference between them and wanting more generally to reduce harms. One is a statement of principle while the other is a utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits. For example, a vegan would still refuse to eat meat even if there were no direct harms caused by that (eg the animal hadn’t been farmed and died of natural causes).

Yes I think it's worth making that distinction - you might personally feel that overall harm reduction is more important, and the Vegan Society position might seem a bit extreme, but it's not entirely invalid.

At the risk of sounding all hippy dippy wishy washy, the overall perspective I've shifted towards is that I have no more and no less right to live on this planet than anything else that's living. Which to me leads to quite a fulfilling feeling of mutual respect. It's very difficult to put into practice of course and leads to all sorts of contradictions, but as a basic way of thinking about things I think it's a reasonable place to start. My continued existence inherently depends on the killing of other living things (including plants) but I don't need to eat meat, so I shouldn't. My courgettes got absolutely destroyed by slugs last year which was pretty disappointing, but I didn't want to use slug pellets so so be it (it would've been different if I'd needed to grow the courgettes to survive...). Etc etc