I appreciate your long and thorough reply, though I think you got off the rails in a few parts.

I wasn't looking to get into a debate regarding the ethics of eating animals vs not eating them. I'm very clear in my ethics regarding that. I, personally, find myself much more concerned with the living system as a whole, rather than individuals.

> About half of US soy is produced for animal feed[1]. I think worldwide this number is much higher (US imports feed). Also land use for animal farming (including what they need for growing feed) is HUMONGOUS compared to the land needed to feed a human on a plant-based diet.

This is a really good point, though I really wished I used a different example because my main point was that many veggies and vegans don't really care about the big picture so long as they can convince themselves their conscious is clean. They're the people in the Trolley Car Problem who would never push a large person onto the tracks to save five other people, but if you gave them a button that served the same function then they would go ahead and push that.

It is, of course, the same cognitive dissonance that allows factory farming to continue since plenty of people admit they could never kill a cow while munching on a burger. Just a few layers of abstraction give people peace of mind and technology enables people to hide behind more layers every day.

> Lab grown meat is going to make the discussion very pure.

I seriously doubt that. What technology can you think of that has made any discussion more "pure"?

> If we can provide the same experience/conveinience without the animals suffering, then what sick fuck would still pay for animal-based product?

Probably any "sick fuck" who doesn't have the means to spend half their paycheck on lab-grown protein sources, though I suppose they'd be more of a "poor fuck". Many people don't bother making a distinction between the two.

> Going non-factory-farmed hugely increases the resource consumption for a pieces of meat. I thought you were concerned with resource consumption?

One assumption that's constantly made regarding meat consumption, both as it relates to ecology and nutrition, is that we're either talking about 0 meat consumption or the typical average American diet of meat consumption, totally excluding the middle. I do not think that the average American diet of animal meat is sustainable or healthy and this is why I advocate for substitutes that don't cost billions in R&D and have a better chance of reaching the price point for an average American. Lets not forget that wages for average Americans are stagnant, so given inflation and other increasing costs the goal posts for what would be a reasonable protein price point is moving. So even if it gets cheaper over time, it's a race.

My main point in all this was to try to get people to think twice about just lauding lab meat without considering the potential issues. I'm not going to continue here because I try to maintain a policy of not having emotional conversations with people I can't look in the eye and you are obviously quite passionate about this.

Again, I appreciate the thoughtful and well-researched response, though I find it noteworthy that neither you, nor anyone else that responded, seemed to address the actual comparison of resources for lab grown meat vs nature grown meat.

Here is something published 7 years ago which I had to find on my own (found in search of response to your comment, thanks for that) which did a pretty good job of answering my core question and softening me to the lab meat:

https://phys.org/news/2011-06-lab-grown-meat-emissions-energ...

However, I also found a more recent article on lab meat which I found aligned with the core point I've been trying to make on many other issues as well:

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-lab-grown-meat-humanity-moral....

We're not using technology to become more moral or ethical, we're using it to become lazier and more complacent. The same attitude that allows people to eat meat without caring about the conditions under which it was made isn't going to change when lab meat becomes available... which means that if companies that make lab meat DO end up having to cut costs by killing some other ecosystem, they probably won't care about that either.

For me, whether you eat meat or veggies doesn't determine how ethical you are as a person, it's how much energy you're actually willing to spend on giving a shit about how your actions affect others.