sprawn

I heard an interview in which a developer of cultured meat discussed how cultured meat has the added benefit of being a far less likely source of harmful viruses as the meat is grown in controlled conditions with much greater opportunities for testing at all stages. I am aware of cultured meats positive aspects like freeing up land that would be wasted on grazing for other use (or return to "wild" status), and the great benefits of reduced water and calorie input per gram of meat produced. What are some other rarely mentioned benefits (unforeseen positive consequences) of cultured meat?

There is a sort of "black box" aspect to the production. Energy, raw materials go in, cultured meat comes out. I heard that even at this early stage it takes 3 calories of nutrition to produce 1 calorie of cultured meat, as opposed to 23:1 with conventional techniques. Amazing potential at such an early stage in the industry.

I often point out to my friends who decry "factory" farming that farms were factories before factories were factories. Farmers have always adopted factory like techniques to concentrate, isolate, improve, protect, and increase yield. That's all a factory is, is taking a production process, centralizing it, and creating efficiency in the process. That's exactly what farms are now and have always been. The idyllic "farm" of the eighteenth century they are imagining was the factory farm of the 18th century.

It's a painful aspect of fledgling industries that some avenues of exploration are costly, but not fruitful. Huge investments must be made in areas with no fast benefit (thought later that research ends up being valuable). What steps are being taken to insure that the industry as a whole does not get bogged down in intellectual property battles, while at the same time protecting the huge and risky investments that someone is going to have to make to advance the state of the art?

Agreed. But people often assume that the suffering is a necessary and unavoidable aspect of modern techniques. And that a return to traditional techniques is good and desirable. I don't think it is, unless their objections can be backed up with a way to reduce the human population from 7 billion to 1 billion (humanely?) at the same time.