First of all, let me disclose that I am something of a tree-hugger. That said, I'm also a hunter and fisherman with a fierce respect for the natural system of which we are a small part. A few problems present themselves with our current reasoning.

First, about cloned meat. How can cloning an animal be more cost-effective than breeding one? Are we having trouble convincing animals (other than pandas) to have sex? I don't have the usual fear response to cloning that some people have, I just don't see the point.

Now, about lab meat. The constitution of a muscle depends almost entirely on what the host animal has eaten and how active its life has been. That's why free range meat is preferable to caged meat and why wild game is superior to both. There is no way that muscle tissue grown in a lab will be anything like what we're used to. And like our Wiccan friend mentioned, finding a cost-effective alternative to keeping cows will essentially mean the death of those animals. We have domesticated these animals to the point where they cannot go back to the wild, certainly not in the numbers we're talking about.

Now here's the crazy idea. We already have some excellent alternatives to meat! Legumes, quinoa, seitan, tofu... The list goes on and on. And seitan has a very pleasant meatlike texture. Not that I'm saying we need to use them exclusively. I'm not a vegetarian and not likely to ever become one. There are many health and environmental arguments in favor of eating lower on the food chain, treating animals humanely (grass-fed, free-range meat is just healthier) and cutting back on the amount of meat consumed (let's be honest, we eat too much). Likewise there are many perfectly reasonable justifications for vegetarianism, for those who want to go that way. But PETA's argument is just fluffy. These are people who simply do not live in the real world.

Well said.

I don’t think anyone has proposed cloning meat animals primarily for production and processing. Not at the moment anyway… As you say, the cost would certainly be prohibitive now and into the foreseeable future. Rather, I think the idea is to clone especially desirable animals as breeding stock. So for the most part we’d be eating the offspring of clones, not the clones themselves. I suppose the FDA had to rule on it regardless.

I’ve already shared my thoughts on most of the rest of the issues you raised in your in your top post in my reply to you in the “Chows as chow” thread. So I won’t repeat all that here.

Congrats on the (well-deserved) check mark by the way. Unless perhaps you take a contrarian view toward such trifles, in which case I support you in scorning such a bourgeois distinction.

Cheers.

Re: Cloning, my understanding is that it would allow farmers to mass-produce the ideal cow or chicken or pig. Of course, a big problem with cloning is that, by reducing genetic variation within a population to effectively zero (some mutation would likely still occur), it would dramatically increase that population's susceptibility to disease. That is, if a field of cows are all genetically equivalent, and if one cow catches a virus (say from one of the thousands of birds that plague commercial cow farms), then that virus could spread very quickly to every cow, given that each shares the exact same genetically-ingrained weaknesses in their immune systems. This would require increasing the already vast amounts of antibiotics & antivirals pumped into these cows, thus indirectly strengthening the diseases they are meant to fight, as well as doing all kinds of nasty things to the already-miserable cows (not to mention the meat that ends up on your plate).

Bottom line, I think, is that cloning may be economically good for meat farming in the short term and damaging in the long term. But, of course, one could make the argument that meat farming is so costly (both in terms of actual dollars and in terms of harm to the environment, and thus to local ecosystems and economies) that it is an increasingly untenable means of food production.

PETA, it seems, has implicitly acknowledged that the moral argument will only take them so far and that it is economic arguments that must be made to effect real long-term change. Economic arguments, after all, have become central to the environmental movement in the US. But sometimes the die-hards would prefer to maintain what this article astutely refers to as "message purity" rather than making the economic argument. Look what happened to Thomas Friedman, whose economic arguments for environmentalism earned him a pie in the face (literally--he got pied at a Brown speaking engagement, check Gawker.com for the video) from environmentalists who thought he had sold out the true concerns of the movement.

The question for PETA, environmentalists, and any other group struggling to effect progressive change in the face of an often indifferent world, is how to balance "message purity" with the compromises necessary to bring about widespread change. More and more groups seem to be making those compromises. Only time will tell if it works.