Farmers have become like religious figures in the developed world. Nobody dares to criticize them, out of some kind of misplaced guilt for living in cities and shopping in supermarkets. Well, we need to get over this cultural cringe towards farmers because it’s killing us. The subsidies they receive should be going to their poor compatriots. The tariffs that protect them should be abolished so that their competitors from Africa and elsewhere can get a leg up at last. And their disastrous industrial techniques need to be regulated to oblivion: pesticides, nitrate pollution, over-irrigation, and obviously the moral catastrophe that is factory farming. Farmers have too much power just about everywhere, partly because they’re over-represented in politics yes, but we only tolerate that because so many people still think that agriculture is special in some mythological way. Well it’s not. It’s a sector like any other and farmers are just ordinary citizens with too much power. They need to be brought down to size.
what if the farmers are on their last stand, because society has already lost its path to protect people of so many other walks of life? if i was them, I might also be stressed about monsanto-bayer lab meat. our society really loves to make sure only the super rich can be relaxed while everyone else is sweating towards the next bill… that said I’ll try to switch to lab meat asap, for the environment. I’m just trying to highlight that I’d wish myself some care and respect by the government
I agree with a lot of your points but first world countries rightly protect local farmers because relying exclusively on foreign food is not a smart idea.
There’s much more to food than just the farmer. There’s a whole supply chain, and every link in that chain has as much power over the foodsupply as the farmer. Farmers are not special!
In the Netherlands the farmers recently blocked highways because politicians dared to put the meat-industry under stricter environmental regulations. The farmers argued that it would risk the foodsupply in the Netherlands… Guess what? 80% of their meat-produce is being shipped to china.
it just means that Italy will be woefully behind and will have to import quite a bit in a few decades when someone cracks the vat grown meat problem & its crazy cheap everywhere else.
The possibility of lab grown meat in the future is such a nice excuse to keep exploiting animals and destroying the climate, keep it up for next 20 years!
This isn’t exactly a head-of-lettuce issue here, but how long is this ban realistically going to be tolerated? 5 years? 10 years? The quality and availability of meta-meat are only going to go up, and the price is only going to go down relative to traditional meat. I can’t imagine that in 20 years, one generation, that people would tolerate a ban such as this.
Til the next government, then it will be reversed.
Friendly reminder that the meat will still be sold, cause due to EU they can’t stop that, so the only thing this law does is to stop italian companies to enter the market. smort
Lab-grown meat won’t available to the general retail market anytime soon, 15-20 years can pass before anything of what we’re discussing about happens. I don’t even expect society to exist in 20 years, let alone the EU… But let’s wait and see. In any case the current government has plenty of time to destroy the country 😅
Inb4 crazy vegan but id like to remind you all that the Animal Agriculture industry is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on the planet (cattle farming is the number one cause of deforestation)
The animal ag industry spends billions and billions lobbying for shit like this. Theyre just as evil as the oil companies. But they get a free pass because people like the product they make.
We need any help we can get to net zero carbon emissions, and lab-grown meat is one of the many things that moves the needle in the right direction. Not everybody is going to ride a bicycle and switch to a vegan diet, so the more low-carbon alternatives we make available, the better.
Glad to see that right-wing idiots have found yet another topic to be outraged by. I am not saying that lab meat is the best of solutions but it seems incrementally better than what we have today.
Eating plants directly is always going to be more efficient than eating lab grown meat which was fed on plants (because there are going to be waste products).
Eating plants directly is also healthier. Cancers, heart attacks, blood pressure issues… some very common health issues partly stem from humans in industrialized nations eating way too many animal products. Lab grown meat won’t magically be healthier.
There’s still a chance that lab-grown meat doesn’t pan out because it’s hard to scale up.
Lab grown meat is going to be high-tech for a while. This gives a lot of power to a few select companies. Lab-meat shoppers are going to be dependent on a few startups and eventually a few multinationals which have bought up the startups.
This also means prices are going to be dictated by this oligopoly of companies, most of which need to serve investors. Often that’s going to be tech investors who expect a lot of growth leading to a lot of profit.
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