Lab meat: More hype than substance?
If you believe all the headlines, in a few short years or even less time, the way meat is grown will radically change. Brewing like tanks full of dividing cells will replace farms and factory farms raising livestock, thus no more animals will be slaughtered, all environmental issues- including climate change and water scarcity- will be resolved, world hunger will no longer exist, and deforestation will no longer be necessary. Plus best of all there will be meat a plenty that even die-hard vegans can consume with a clear conscience.
Okay, maybe this representation is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. A lot of hyped up marketing spin is involved and has been expended to “position” lab meat, including re-branding it as “clean meat” (in vitro meat, cell meat, and cultured meat all didn’t do as well in marketing surveys). That hype involves creating a market for a product line that might otherwise only have a very limited audience and appeal. To build a market, consumers have to be dissuaded from consuming real meat. So to build an audience a whole litany of out of context statistics are repeated about water footprints, land use, feed efficiency, deforestation, greenhouse gases, health concerns, and animal welfare.
