On Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:20:14 GMT, and/or www.mantra.com/jai
(Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:

>3D printed meat could soon be cheap and tasty enough to win you over
>
>By Ryan Whitwam
>geek.com
>February 12, 2013
>
>The next time you’re about to bite into a hamburger, take
>a moment to consider the resources that went into making
>it. In a recent Solve for X talk, Andras Forgacs laid out
>all the statistics, and explained how tantalizingly close
>we are to a more sustainable method of meat production.
>Basically, humanity may soon be 3D printing meat instead
>of growing it in an animal.

Something like that will be the eventual end of livestock raising, like
machinery was the end of the need for work horses. There will still be a few
around in zoos and odd farms, but there won't be billions of them experiencing
life because they're raised for food. The same will be true for chickens etc. In
some cases I believe that overall will be a "good" thing like the case of cage
raised laying hens, and the brothers of most laying hens including cage free. In
others I don't believe it would necessarily be good or better from an overall
pov since I believe lives of positive value for livestock is a positive thing in
the overall. That doesn't mean anything will suffer a loss when livestock are no
longer raised for food, but it does mean it can be appreciated by those people
who are able when they are, have been in the past, and will be in the future.
ONLY eliminationists have reason to be unable to appreciate that.

>Forgacs starts by explaining just how costly a single
>quarter-pound beef patty is to produce. For that one
>serving, 6.7lbs of grains, 600 gallons of water, and 75
>square feet of grazing land were used. Now multiply that
>by 1000 to find your (approximate) impact

Six hundred thousand gallons of water to raise a steer for how long?

>— the average
>American eats over 220lbs of meat each year.
>Additionally, at least 18% of greenhouse gas emissions
>are due to meat production. All this for one burger?

That seems like an eliminationist type of estimate from my pov.