McDonalds will eliminate cage-confined chickens from its supply chain

[APeacefulWarrior]

Firstly, I'm not sure if you realized that the McDonald's lab grown meat article was satire...

I wasn't even referring to that article specifically.  The prices on lab-grown meat are dropping rapidly.  The costs of growing a burger's worth of meat have already dropped 80% from the initial $300K price of the very first burger made from the stuff, just a few years ago.  I've seen estimates in the area of 20-30 years for commercial viability, at the rate research is going.

Assuming we live full lives, we will very likely live to see lab-grown meat become commonplace.

Is your argument really that eating McDonald's is a healthier alternative to the diets of 100 years ago? Are you confusing quality with quantity?  

Honestly, I'm not trying to be pretentious here, but I don't think you appreciate just how much it SUCKED to be a medieval peasant relying on nothing but locally-grown foods.  Or else you wouldn't be acting like what I said was absurd.  They lived their lives on the brink of starvation, pretty much constantly.  And like I said in the previous post, what they did have access to was very low quality, and highly reliant on the local weather cooperating because there were no alternative sources.

You don't actually want to see a return to the times where a drought meant widespread death, right? The large-scale food distribution systems are what make that a non-issue for most of the technologically-developed world. And they can only be in place if a large number of people are using them, or else their cost of maintenance would make them impossible to maintain.

So, yes.  The fact that most people outside of the most impoverished areas can now eat their fill every day, and have plenty of alternative sources for food in times of hardship, is a massive improvement over how things used to be. Chemical-laden food that's shelf-stable for years is better at keeping people alive than minimal food that's spoiled within a week.   That doesn't mean the situation today is perfect. Just that it's better than in centuries past, when looking at the population as a whole.

The best food I've ever eaten is food that I've grown on my own land and cooked in my own kitchen.

Local farming is not a realistic alternative for huge numbers of people around the world.  The global population is too big, and especially in metropolitan areas, there just is NOT enough land\rooftops\whatever to actually allow individuals to feed themselves full-time on a large scale.  And since the population is only projected to get bigger for the next 100ish years, that situation is only going to get more extreme.

Basically, it's great if you have the luxury of growing your own food.  Enjoy it if you can.  Billions of people in the century to come won't have that option.  

To me, the hedonistic "but we get so many different foods now!" argument is so off-base.... I mean, we're really talking about the comfort of living beings, are we not? But the system is good because it gives us tasty, exotic things?

Why are you acting like I'm defending the worst aspects of industrial farming?  I acknowledged there were problems in the first first line of that post.  I'm specifically talking about the ways these systems can be made BETTER so that the harm done can be minimized.  Focusing on one offhand line about the variety as though it was my main point makes me feel like you ignored everything else I said.

Ra: I am Ra. The technology your peoples possess at this time is capable of resolving each and every limitation which plagues your social memory complex at this present nexus of experience. However, the concerns of some of your beings with distortions towards what you would call powerful energy cause these solutions to be withheld until the solutions are so needed that those with the distortion can then become further distorted in the direction of power.

But that's exactly what I'm saying.  Our technology is making these things possible, whereas they weren't a hundred years ago. Ra's just saying we could be doing this stuff more quickly, if not for those in power wanting to slow down the adoption of disruptive technologies. But a regression back to pre-20th Century methods wouldn't work in the modern world, not without a massive die-off and a near-total abandonment of modern city life.  Unless the Zombie Apocalypse happens, we're gonna need large-scale global systems in place to keep everyone well-fed.

Either way, read that article about the lab-grown meat.  It's a lot closer than you think, and it's going to be a true game-changer that renders a lot of these arguments obsolete. If someone can buy a lab-burger for the same price as "real" meat, and with similar taste, that's gonna mean a whole lot of animals not being killed. Once the tech has time to spread and become commonplace, it could easily replace the current industrial-farming system by being both easier AND more humane.

And doesn't that pretty much solve the cruelty problem?