Engineered meat won’t end 98% of animal abuse because meat is not responsible for 98% of animal abuse.
First of all and as always, this anthropocentric calculation totally disregard all the abuse animals inflict on each other as if it is not animal suffering. But this historical omission is so inherent among so many activists that I prefer to focus here on the other reasons and just ask you to watch and read
this.
Second, the author omitted dairy cows and laying hens in this statement, inconceivable enormous suffering which engineered meat will not and is not trying to end.
The 2% that the engineered meat will not end, represent the fur industry, animal experimentation, race dogs and etc. the dairy and egg industries are totally disregarded even though they have such a huge part in the world suffering.
At first I thought that since these industries are about 2% of the intensive animal exploitation in a quantitative manner, they are the ones the author meant and I wanted to explain that even without entering to suffering quantifying of who suffers more than who, when considering that each chicken hen lives about 2 years in the battery cage compared to 40 days of each chick in the meat industry and that each cow in the milk industry lives about 6-7 years compared to fish which 70% of their consumption is not from intensive fish farms but from the ocean, these industries’ representation in animal abuse is much higher than 2%. And again the intension was to other industries anyway but I thought it is a relevant opportunity to clarify this point following of the author’s omission of these two horrible industries in the calculation.
Third, why wait 25 years? Of course the OOS project will take long time as well maybe much longer but it is not a social process that needs to ripen, it isn’t depended on marketing or on the willing of the public to accept the idea but on our capability to operate it.
And finally, it won’t work for all the reasons mentioned in this discussion regarding meat’s real place in people’s lives.
Earth to Venus phrased perfectly "People eat symbols not food"
Food in general is far more than an energy source for survival and those that eat meat pick it for reasons that have nothing to do with nutrition. It’s a domination symbol. No veggie burger can fill this violent urge, and synthetic flash has worse marketing potential then soy products.
Engineered meat will give more options to light meat eaters but I don’t see the meaningfulness in this claim because there are already so many products with a variety of vegetable compound basis that try to imitate the flavour of meat. If you think the reason why all these products didn’t managed to end 98% of animal abuse is because they don’t taste good or don’t taste the same as meat then read the study "The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation" which proves that most people can’t tell the difference from corps sausages to soy ones. How they ranked a certain sausage had to do with their character prepositions more than with the hotdogs they were given, as they were deliberately mistakenly labeled.
It proves that humans’ perceptions and expectations shape their experience more than the actual taste and nutritional value of the food they eat. How people feel about fake meat says more about their personal values than about what it actually tastes like.
This experiment is a major only one solution advocacy piece. If people’s yearning for meat is so strong they can’t control it, then we certainly can’t.