What If You Could Eat Chicken Without Killing a Chicken? (theoutline.com) 331
From a report on The Outline: San Francisco-based startup Memphis Meats announced this week that it had grown chicken in a lab -- chicken strips, to be precise. The strips, which were grown using self-reproducing cells, are technically "meat," but because the cells were not from an animal, the process by which this "meat" was "raised" is much cleaner, resulting in animal food that has the potential to sate both environmental groups as well as animal rights activists and vegetarians. Memphis Meats says it's hoping the product is ready for commercial sale by 2021. The company is part of an ever-increasing horde of Silicon Valley startups trying to solve the complicated problems of the meat industry, which range from cultural ideas about food to industrial and environmental issues to, increasingly, discussions about animal cruelty. [...] About 99 percent of animals raised for slaughter in the U.S. come from factory farms, and about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock. More so than chicken, livestock is incredibly inefficient to raise: It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
Tell me if you heard this before... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well damn, too bad there's no way to stop companies from filing people full of pesticides, hormones, and lab chemicals. I guess you'll just have to live with everyone getting uglier, stupider, and more libtarded.
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Well damn, too bad there's no way to stop companies from filing people full of pesticides, hormones, and lab chemicals.
I don't think Trump has the FDA slated for elimination in the 2018 FY budget. Maybe next year.
I guess you'll just have to live with everyone getting uglier, stupider, and more conservative.
FTFY
The real test is (Score:2)
...can they cross the road?
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Sure, after they finish seminary and are ordained.
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...can they cross the road?
In theory but nobody knows how to motivate them to do so.
Though the question of how to motivate is indeed unsolved; Two to three meters of aproach and a kick should deliver acceptable results.
In both cases of live and artificial chicken, I might add.
Who needs motivation when you can have momentum.
if it were cheaper, yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:if it were cheaper, yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
Climate change is an issue, the fix does not involve making things cost more especially food and energy those pretty much not optional spending. Much like fixing spam if the solution costs more it's not a solution. If this stuff is so much less taxing on the environment it should be much cheaper to produce.
Re:if it were cheaper, yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Polluters do not pay the cost to clean up their mess. That's why some things are cheaper than they should be.
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Tell that to the paper industry. And step back.
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And it does not matter we're talking about food not the latest iphone garbage. It's not an optional purchase. Raise the real prices and people starve. Any solution has to be at the grocery store cheaper than the real thing otherwise it's like a hybrid car just something to be smug about while paying far to much and/or having the government pick up the bill.
Re:if it were cheaper, yes. (Score:5, Informative)
Econ 101. Look up the word "externalities".
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Lookup starving, 45m Americans (2015 number) at or below the poverty line, they would like to eat.
You guys are all about externalities until it's something you want like solar because the mess is in china. Water and CO2 are not some magic thing, water recycles and the same for co2. The issue is pumping out co2 from sequestered sources. The issue is global population something you refuse to control.
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Stop giving the wealthy so many tax breaks and you would be able toafford welfare systems that address the 45m Americansbelow the poverty line.
The bottom 50% paid 2.8% of all US Income tax paid in 2015; the top 50% paid 97.2%. While it's commonplace to see stories of very rich individuals paying absurdly low marginal tax rates, those are by and large members of the fabled 0.01%, whose numbers are so few (138,000 tax returns in 2013) that raising their taxes wouldn't have much effect on the bottom line. The fact is that the average tax rate paid by the top 1% is over 27%. That's average, not marginal. Raising it back up to the 34% it was at in 1980
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Exactly, there are plenty more sources of unnecessary pollution and gross inefficiency that could be reduced or eliminated without harming people's quality of life...
Think of the amount of paper in the form of junkmail thats produced, delivered and subsequently discarded every year... I throw out several pieces a day, it serves no useful function.
Think of all the wasted fuel because so many people travel long distances to work, at the same time into congested business districts with no affordable residentia
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Don't necessarily disagree, but the problem is that often externalities (like pollution, cost of healthcare, etc.) are not paid for by incumbent technology/solution. Due to historical reasons, grandfathering, lax regulations and whatnot, the cost of the incumbent solution is artificially low which means any possible solution *looks* more expensive in comparison, even if it's cheaper overall.
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Climate change is an issue, the fix does not involve making things cost more especially food and energy those pretty much not optional spending. Much like fixing spam if the solution costs more it's not a solution. If this stuff is so much less taxing on the environment it should be much cheaper to produce.
I've no idea where you get that connection between environmentalism and cost from. Take something like a refrigerator, we want to keep something much cooler than environment. That's an uphill battle with thermodynamics, the less power we we want to use the more complex and exotic does the cooling solution have to be. Same with nearly everything else, cavemen with fire could make light, that is easy. Making LED lights where almost all the energy is converted to light, that is hard. A high efficiency engine i
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one of the greatest contributors to Climate Change
According to this pie chart, agriculture (which includes meat, but also rice production) is only responsible for 9% of the greenhouse gases.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]
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When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-indu [fao.org]
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The EPA graph also includes the other greenhouse gases, so there's not more to that story. Total methane only accounts for 4-9% of the total greenhouse effect, and according to your quote, livestock only produces 37% of that.
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We need a Godwin's law for climate change.
God Wins Law (Score:2)
Okay... let me think...
Humanity recklessly mucks up God's creation, despite being clearly told that we were to be its caretakers, and the increasingly fervent warnings about the consequences of our actions from basically all of our greatest thinkers that have seriously considered the issue.
The planet, as we were warned, transitions to something Humanity has never seen before, killing most or all of our species in the process.
God Wins. Maybe the next caretakers He creates will do a better job...
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Most people would agree Climate Change is real. The biggest question is what percent is due to humans and what percent is due to natural cycles. The other big question is how much of the human contribution is from CO2 and how much is from other human causes like deforestation. Current science doesn't have a good answer for these questions.
Bullshit. Here's a good answer for these questions from current science. It's not 100% human caused, but certainly over 90%:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w... [ucsusa.org]
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The biggest question is what percent is due to humans and what percent is due to natural cycles
It. Doesn't. Matter. We should be striving for zero impact regardless of anything else. We can't just keep fucking up the planet forever like a bunch of spoiled babies. We've killed 50% of the ocean life since the 1970s. We've broken the ozone layer. We've decimated the rainforests. We've polluted every single body of water in the world. We've fucked up the climate and the atmosphere. We've irradiated huge areas of land. Did you know Chernobyl won't be clean for literally millions of years? We've even pollu
Re:if it were cheaper, yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you know Chernobyl won't be clean for literally millions of years?
Apparently, w/o human intrusion for 30 years, the land around Chernobyl is thriving with life.
http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
An interesting quotable from this article...
Essentially, this means that human populations have a bigger negative impact than radiation.
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Are you sure about that? I've not heard a single remotely credible defender of anthropogenic climate change saying 100% anything. Obviously there's the groupies that don't really understand what they're talking about and just mangle the talking points they think they remember hearing, but *every* side has those, you can't use their mangled nonsense to judge anything but the general incompetence of humans outside their area of expertise.
About the only thing I can even think of having an even remotely credi
News for Nerds who eat pizza (programmers) (Score:4, Funny)
Less environmental damage done by your pizza toppings. Safer pizza toppings for you. Cheaper pizza toppings for you. More variety of pizza toppings for you. Less killing for your your pizza toppings. More land available to grow pizza toppings.
Eventually.
Right now, IVM is about at the stage the integrated circuit was in circa 1958. So nothing to worry about; but still, interesting.
Texture of the meat (Score:2)
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Of course, then you have to worry about it escaping the factory. [youtube.com]. ewwww, Bill Cosby.
Solved: Chicken Nuggets (Score:2)
I suspect by the time mechanically recovered meat has been processed, decontaminated, reconstituted, shaped, and cooked, there may be little difference. But by then even chicken doesn't quite taste like chicken anymore.
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Exactly... I don't think this counts as 'meat', it is more of a collection of certain cells at this point, and I think it's over-hyped and we're still quite a ways from having a lab-grown 'meat'. Sort of like giving someone a pile of lentils and saying 'here's your veggie burger'. Sure, lentils can be part of a veggie burger, but it's just one part of the whole..
Problem solved (Score:5, Funny)
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Yea, but if that "Subway Diet" is the least bit true... think of the yoga pants!
Then chickens would die out (Score:2)
Chicken isn't the most perfect example for this because we also eat eggs. Apply that logic to pigs though - yep, much more of a problem.
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Wild, or feral? There's a rather dramatic difference.
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Pigs are extremely intelligent and make excellent pets, and when they die, you don't have to bury them and waste space like with a dog, you can have a BBQ.
Yuck. Have you ever tasted what old boar tastes like? You have to over power it with BBQ sauce or I simply cannot get it down myself.
I'd eat a fake chicken sandwich (Score:2)
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Re:I'd eat a fake chicken sandwich (Score:4, Informative)
There is a device called a fence. You may have heard of it.
There is this thing called a bird. It flies. Wild chickens fly quite well. Even a stray domestic chicken would be able to get over any fence you're allowed to build on your property if it cared to.
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Would take a big PR strategy to take off (Score:3)
Not a large number of people (Score:3)
A large portion of people are against GMO food
A tiny handful of people are against GMO food, they are just exceedingly loud and annoying.
Do you think anyone eating at McDonalds or Burger King gives a rats ass (ironically one of the many ingredients they are probably consuming) about GMO? Those are some of the largest food joints on earth...
Most people do not care that much about GMO, nor conditions in which animals are treated. Most people want food and don't really care who or what had to die or suffer
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You must be talking about the USA.
Against popular believe most people don't live in the USA.
Typical regionalist Slashdot reader (Score:2)
What in my post makes you think I'm talking about the U.S. only? In fact you find McDonalds all over the world. In fact the most vociferous anti-GMO people hail mostly from America, and the rest of the world cares FAR less about how food is obtained (Hello, Foie Gras).
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Well, then you are obviously not aware that most people are against GMO. At least in Europe. Or what do you think why GMOs are banned in Europe, and the few exceptions need to be clearly labeled?
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There is a huge difference between what people will say in polls and what they will actually eat. Soda and Candy are also "unsafe".
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In India people will riot over rumors that meat is involved in some common product.
of course it's fine (Score:2)
meat is really just a collection cells, nutrients and water. Whether they are assembled in a womb or in a machine, if it tastes the same, has the same texture, and can be cooked the same way, then so what?
I feel this question is asked by someone whose parents never tricked their kids into eating something by saying it was something else or didn't contain an ingredient that the child irrationally doesn't like.
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if it tastes the same, has the same texture, and can be cooked the same way, then so what?
As long as it also has the same nutrients.
KFC to swtich to this! (Score:2)
KFC to switch to this!
and no the saveings will not be passed to you.
The yum! Brands ceo needs a new boat!
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Yet people still order their Pizza Hut and eat their Taco Bell..
Hope he likes that boat..
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Actually, that's likely going to be true. Processed chicken be grown in vats, and real chicken will get more expensive and hard to find.
The food of the Gods (Score:2)
Looks like Clarke is predicting the future again.
Water is renewable (Score:2, Insightful)
It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
Water that is released by the animal into the environment, and flows back into the ocean. Where sunlight evaporates the water, they form into clouds and it rains down again.
Main concerns are if you try to raise beef in the desert and have to divert rivers in order to support your operation. Or if you are emptying natural aquifers faster than they are replenished. But in many areas of the midwest and south there is sufficient surface water to operate a farm, and coming up with the 36 - 40 gallons of water pe
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Those figures aren't talking about drinking water for cows. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the water required to grow the corn that the animals eat.
And yes, a good fraction of the water used to grow corn is unsustainably mined from ancient aquifers.
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Please tell me what the figures are talking about, and then tell me how much water is permanently removed from the water cycle as a result.
Please include numbers.
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No, some of it is released into the local stream where it flows into a river where some city's water intake is located. It is treated and pumped into a potable water system.
Not all that returns is potable... It NEVER was potable, even before we started raising cattle.. Besides, the biggest polluter is located in those cities and towns most of you live in...
Bring it on! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think artificial meat inevitable but I doubt it would be healthful.
Why wouldn't it be? By the time your gastric juices are done with the food you eat, it's been reduced to a slurry that is absorbed at the molecular level. If artificial meat contains the same molecules as animal meat, i.e. vitamins, fats, and amino acids, your intestines won't notice the difference. I suspect the results of these experiments are already fairly healthful. Perfecting the cosmetic attributes such as taste and texture will be the hard part.
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If artificial meat contains the same molecules as animal meat, i.e. vitamins, fats, and amino acids,
That's a big if, because a lot of those things aren't made in the actual cells that we eat. They could be made by other organs in the animal's body, the animal's gut bacteria, or the animal's food sources.
Kosher? (Score:2)
What if you could eat pork without involving a pig? Would it be kosher? If so, that sounds like a market right there.
Counting water (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I the only reminded of Azimov's The Martian Way [wikipedia.org]? I mean the part, where an Earth's politician is explaining to electorate, how much water (used as reaction mass) it takes for a spaceship to get into space. The book's main characters observe, that most of the water so used falls right back onto the planet. But at least, in that novel some amount of water, however minuscule compared to Earth's vast oceans, does leave...
Well, in case of meat production — or indeed any other Earth-bound activity — no water is lost. Zero. Nada. So, what is the quoted statement supposed to mean?
Re:Counting water (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in case of meat production — or indeed any other Earth-bound activity — no water is lost. Zero. Nada. So, what is the quoted statement supposed to mean?
Yes, the net amount of water stays the same on Earth, but some water is more useful than others. E.g. fresh is more useful than salty, treated is more useful than not, a unit of water in the Sahara is more useful than a unit of water in Canada. When we "use" water, we often turn useful water into not useful water, or move it from a place where it's useful to a place where it's less useful.
Plus there's the issue where much of the water we "use" comes from groundwater sources, which can be completely non-renewable on any sort of human timescale.
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fresh is more useful than salty
Not to the creatures in the ocean it isn't...
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a unit of water in the Sahara is more useful than a unit of water in Canada.
And how many gallons of water does it take to grow one pound of human flesh? Maybe people in the Sahara should consider that.
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Sam? [youtube.com] is that you?
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Yeah, and beef is more useful than wood chips. Ultimately, the cost is energy — and our star is still shining very bright and hot. We are still using a tiny fraction of what Sol outputs...
Why would one seek to "renew" it at all? Water under ground is just not useful...
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Water under ground is just not useful..
It's very useful to keep water underground, and pump up a little bit every day to use. It wouldn't be very convenient to dump the entire aquifer on your crops at once, and let it run off to the ocean, and/or evaporate.
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Maybe you should go sit in a dinghy without any supplies in the middle of the Pacific ocean for a few days so you can find out just how useful all that "unlost" water really is.
Seen it (Score:2)
This was an episode of the show "Better Off Ted"
Hormones? (Score:2)
With regular meat, the animal's growth is controlled by hormones, so I'm wondering if the lab meat is grown using various added hormones to force the growth. I know one of the reasons some people prefer organic meat is because they know it doesn't have added hormones. What are the health impacts of eating whatever added stuff they have to use to make the lab meat grow?
With all the shortcuts the food industry has taken, if they get this lab meat to be cheaper than real meat, it will be a long time before p
Would I Eat It? (Score:2)
Absolutely, assuming it's roughly on par with real meat in terms of cost and quality.
It's really kind of crazy that we grow all this food to feed a whole animal, when we only want part of the animal. Plus there's the whole ethical question; I tend to not get too hung up about it, but given the choice between meat where an animal was raised in a feedlot and killed vs meat that was grown, I'll choose the latter.
Realistically, I imagine it will be a little while before they can adequately replace a t-bone stea
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assuming it's roughly on par with real meat in terms of cost and quality.
That's a big assumption, given that most stuff from the food industry isn't very high in quality.
Inaccurate /. summaries persist (Score:2)
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haha.. "Only." Much less worrisome given the 100 million or so cattle in the US. Luckily there's no areas of the US filled with cattle that's drought-prone.
It depends on where you raise the cattle. 2,500 gallons is a pretty common number, I believe it comes from averaging out a bunch of areas in the US.
Chicken are deeply stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Their purpose in life is to reproduce and get eaten. In nature, that is exactly what happens to them. I really see no problem with doing it to them in industrial production. Of course, I do hope not to get reincarnated as a chicken next time, but we will see.
Zero appeal (Score:2)
If I want to eat meat, something has to die for me to do so. I accept that. If I want to not kill an animal I can opt for meat-free options, something I do from time to time. Growing some kind of replacement in a lab strikes me as disgusting.
Work on real problems (Score:2)
How much land is used? (Score:2)
"About 99 percent of animals raised for slaughter in the U.S. come from factory farms, and about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock."
Surprised this isn't being discussed more.
Also surprised I'm not seeing a prevalence of 'well, I eat free-range/organic' remarks. Considering that free-range/organic requires MUCH MORE space, where are we going to keep these animals? Let's assume the space for free-range/organic is just a factor of 10 more...we're already using 1/3rd of the land
Fiction becoming fact? (Score:2)
Chicken Little by Frederick Pohl.
nothing more needs to be said.
No! (Score:2)
We get "factory-chemical process created" chicken and then I would worry about the chemicals and the quality.
And it takes 4-9 gallons (Score:3)
to raise one walnut and about a gallon to make a almond. Should we stop growing nut trees?
Even worse (Score:3)
So what? (Score:3)
>> It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
So what? Water is an effectively infinite global resource and it isn't ever actually consumed (i.e. lost). It all ultimately passes through the cow/human back into the environment where it evaporates then falls as rain.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
So what? Water is an effectively infinite global resource and it isn't ever actually consumed (i.e. lost).
Non-contaminated fresh water is not an infinite resource in any sense of the term. Water is only an infinite resource if you also assume energy (to decontaminate and desalinate) is also an infinite resource (it isn't).
What's wrong? (Score:3)
Wait? Is there someone wrong with killing a chicken? They are bred and exist to be eaten. It's equivalent to pulling a turnip out of the ground. Things die, we live.
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The difference between a chicken and a turnip is one is a vertebrate animal that is capable of learned behavior, while the other is a vegetable. You can't raise and dispatch a turnip inhumanely, because it is incapable of consciousness and feeling, a quality that is shared between humans and prey animals. Of course, for the approximately %1 of the human population who are psychopathic and incapable of experiencing empathy, this is not likely a concern. However some people choose to source meat where the an
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Once economies of scale kick in, I doubt that farming chickens will be cheaper than manufacturing chicken meat.
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Farming chickens also uses economies of scale, you know.
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The whole water thing is a dumb argument environmentalists dreamed up to make us feel bad about being alive. It's not like water from a stream in Minnesota is being diverted to livestock instead of irrigating poor farmers in the Sahara.
For the most part the water isn't coming out of a stream in Minnesota either. It's being pumped out of an aquifer in Kansas to irrigate the alfalfa and corn that we are feeding to the livestock. Those aquifers were built up over millions of years and are being drained over the course of decades. Just like we need to get off of fossilized fuels for our energy supply, we need to stop or reduce our reliance on fossil water for our agriculture. We can do this either by eating lower on the food chain, or find
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Actually, it's more like a quarter of the landmass...
https://www.learner.org/course... [learner.org]
So What? (Score:3)
Not really sure how this matters. How much is taken up growing crops? How much is taken up by roads, buildings, etc?
That's like saying my garage takes up X% of my slab. Ya? And?
The idea that humans need to be this fly on the wall, not interacting with the environment to "save" it is ridiculous.
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And watch it scream as you tear it off and cook it? Yeah, I'm down for that!!!
That's still not as cruel as the lives of all those boneless chickens they've been raising lately.
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Yeah, but raising the chickens in the first place is considerably less so.