As a thinking experiment, let us consider that on the 1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions as been achieved and that it is possible to scale it in order to achieve industrial grade production level.
There is no limit on which animal tissues can be grown, so, any species is achieveable, only being needed a small cell sample from an animal to start productio, and the cultivated tissues are safe for consumption.
There won’t be any perceiveable price change to the end consummer, as the growing is a complex and labour intensive process, requiring specialized equipments and personnel.
Would you change to this new diet option?
At least in the U.S., meat production/pricing is heavily subsidized.
That article is highly suspect. The prices of beef cows sans tax credits is readily available, as is the average meat yield. A Big Mac uses 1/5 of a pound of lean cooked meat (2x 1.6 oz patties). So let’s be generous assume that it’s one quarter pound uncooked. $30 per quarter pound would put your average beef cow up around $54,000. At that price, The farmers would be getting 1 million a year per 19 head of cattle.
And all that’s assuming that we’re just grounding up all the random beef into ground beef. Ground beef is generally taken from the trimmings of the steaks and roasts or we’re volume is required at least the cheapest of the roasts.
Certainly the subsidy is there, But it’s more like pennies on the dollar rather than dollars on the penny.
The second sentence of the article gives $30 as the unsubsidized price of one pound of hamburger meat, not 1/5 pound. You have to read it more carefully if you want to get into the details.
Setting aside the details for a minute, how would a subsidy of only pennies on the dollar even be plausible? One purpose of agricultural subsidies is to stabilize prices; pennies on the dollar can’t do that.