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Lab-Grown Salmon Hits the Menu at an Oregon Restaurant as the FDA Greenlights the Cell-Cultured Product
(www.smithsonianmag.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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i hope the tech will one day make slaughtering animals for meat a social taboo
like remembering the times before we had toilet paper...
However, the tech alone isn't even close to what's needed, remove mead subsidies. make it so it's a one every few days meal (like it used to be), not the core part of every meal.
also increase animal welfare regulation, so animals suffer less.
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
I'm on board with this, but, and I'm totally willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, abandoning our farm animals en mass seems like a bad idea. Especially pigs. Cows might fill the niche left by bison or aurochs, chickens are fucking suicidal and find unique ways to die whenever possible, but farm pigs turn into giant ass boar that aren't native and can genuinely harm people, property, pets and just generally wreak havoc. I'm not sure what a good alternative is, to be honest, since their current conditions are utterly cruel, but just turning them loose by the millions seems like something we'll regret a lot a decade later
A quick and dirty internet search says that a typical farm pig lives around 7 months. So you could ban every meat pig product in a year, stop breeding new pigs and just murder the old ones for meat and you would have no problem at all. So a grace period of less than a year is needed and you wouldn't have this problem. (I also seriously doubt that most farm pigs would be able to survive in the wild, but for that i am not knowledgeable enough. But e.g. modern chickens have a huge calcium deficiency which makes them not very suited for wildlife, there was an study that the average chicken at any given time has three broken bones.)
Or to put it in another way, we have to replace all farm pigs almost twice yearly anyway, so let's just stop replacing them.
That makes a lot of sense. My knowledge on feral farm pigs is anecdotal at best, but from what I've been told and understand (at work now, so not enough time to research it properly) hogs that get released or escape breed with wild pigs and create dangerous pigstrosities, but that may well be farmer lore/old wives tales for all I know