> Without eating animal products society would collapse.
I'm not a vegetarian (I eat an egg every day!), but wow, what a confident assertion. I'm open to your evidence behind this, but it seems absolutely preposterous to me.
Imagine going to a part of the world ravaged by starvation and explaining to them that we're throwing millions at growing egg whites in a lab because the chickens are sad. The amount of privilege needed for this is incomprehensible.
I mean, you realise that one of the major long-term goals of this sort of thing is a _cheaper product_? Theoretical efficiency for something like this is far higher than for a chicken, because, well, you don't need to sustain an actual _chicken_. The egg-laying chicken itself is largely a rather expensive byproduct in the egg production process.
Further, "long-term" is a weasel word that is meaningless to people starving right now. The hungry want to hear food is coming, not some hifalutin agriculturally illiterate fantasy thought up by hung over trust fund kids.
Short if giving a specific date and objective success criteria, long-term means never.
What this company is doing is not zero-sum with providing food aid, and it's certainly not taking any food sources out of circulation for the hypothetical country being posited. Why is it one or the other? The money put into this research is not coming from the budgets for food banks. Is all R&D in this space, even from private investors, a waste in your eye?
I mean, long-term would want to be soon, or the company will go out of business. From the article, and I do realise that it is considered most improper to actually read them on this website:
> Onego Bio plans to sell Bioalbumen to companies that would then create the food products.
The processed food industry is very cost-sensitive and both industrial egg albumen and various substitutes are already available; if they're not price competitive they'll die quickly.
It doesn't seem at all unlikely that they'lll get to being price competitive quickly. They're producing a single protein with a fungus. There's another well-known example of this; quorn. Quorn's actually a bit more complex in that, once they've produced their protein they need to add stuff to make it palatable, and their processed output still comes in at about the same cost as processed chicken, and generally a bit cheaper than other processed meat. These people seem to be literally just producing albumen, so it's close to an ideal case.
I think the idea that there’s still so much about nutrition we don’t know is a very reasonable take and a good argument against removing animal products from our diet
Of course there is a conversation to be had, though I think there's pretty clear evidence individuals can function just fine without animal consumption. But the idea that "society would collapse"? That seems to be going just a tad bit beyond what I would consider a "very reasonable take".
I think it would be easier to argue that our addiction to meat consumption is one culprit fueling society's collapse already given the environmental and ecological impact that meat production creates.
If everyone stopped drinking alcohol, society would also collapse.
By monetary valuation, the global alcohol market is over 30x the size of the global meat market. Does this mean we should discourage people from replacing getting drunk with healthier alternatives?
Well, I had sources yesterday but I didn't save them. Today all I can find is that the alcohol industry is a little bigger, but not 30x (maybe closer to 20%). I'm not sure why there is so much disparity in these kinds of figures. Every source I can find today still seems to indicate the meat industry is at least somewhat smaller, though.
> Without eating animal products society would collapse.
... Wait, how does that follow? Like, if everyone stopped tomorrow, sure, maybe; it would at the very least be a massive economic shock, and would likely lead to critical shortages as well. But phased out over time, it's not clear why this would be the case.
Humans are omnivores. Without eating animal products society would collapse.