NO LONGER PRODUCING A SQUEAL THAT DOESN'T GET USED?

National Review's Matthew Scully envisions "Goodbye to the Cruelty of Industrial Animal Farming."  It's now possible to culture meat without breeding and raising animals for slaughter.

Here’s a technology designed to rehumanize us, putting mankind’s brilliance and ingenuity all in service to our gentler side.

Gone, as this innovation reshapes the market, is any further claim of necessity for industrial animal farming, an enterprise that long ago slipped the boundaries of reasonable and conscientious practice — to say nothing of an environmental and public-health influence equally reckless. For meat companies — already challenged by popular, plant-based alternatives — culturing technology will mark a radical redirection, and there is no industry more in need of one.

That story is about commercial scale sale of chicken sandwiches in Singapore. Commercial scale sale of steak might also be possible, according to Reason's Ron Bailey.

The Israeli company Aleph Farms has just unveiled its lab-grown bio-printed slaughter-free fat-marbled ribeye steak. The steak is grown from living cow cells and then incubated to grow, differentiate, and interact in order to acquire the texture and qualities of a real steak. The company claims that it has "the ability to produce any type of steak and plans to expand its portfolio of quality meat products."

Bet on emergence: is there any reason for a vegetarian or vegan to be squeamish about eating a protein that wasn't bred for slaughter, or for a conservationist to be squeamish about land left fallow?

A switch to cultured meats and milk could have big benefits for the natural world. Currently, about half of the world's habitable land is devoted to agriculture and 77 percent of that is used to raise livestock and produce milk. Although controversial, one preliminary estimate suggests that producing cultured meats cuts energy use by 7–45 percent, greenhouse gas emissions by 78–96 percent, land use by 99 percent, and water use by 82–96 percent. The end of farming could be in sight as real factories replace factory farming.

Perhaps not so much the end of farming, as a change in its form. What happens, though ... you always have to think beyond the immediate consequences ... if a lot of land currently devoted to field corn for animal feed becomes available for sweet corn for human consumption?

If a chicken sandwich or a boneless T-bone (or does that become a filet or a tenderloin?) don't intrigue enough, might I interest you in Wiener schnitzel?  "A Finnish tech startup hopes to produce protein out of thin air and not much more, creating a plant-based product they can put into healthy drinks and yoghurts or even turn into a meatless schnitzel, the company said."  This project isn't quite ready for the plate, and there are a few teething troubles, although capturing carbon dioxide to make the protein tackles yet another challenge.

Maybe some of the land currently devoted to soybeans for chicken feed will become available to make tofu fish fillets (the ultimate in poor man's lobster) instead.  "Tofu pieces cut thin and covered in batter stand in for the fish, while sides include home fries, home made tarter sauce, coleslaw, and a lemon wedge."

Inefficiencies (in these anecdotes, negative nonpecuniary externalities) are incentives for self-interested agents to harvest (no pun intended) gains from trade.  I might not have been clever enough to see any of these opportunities.  Fortunately, others did.