TechTakes

Something this does lead me to wonder: the primary draw I usually have seen for lab grown meat is obtaining actual meat without animal suffering. (The article mentions theoretical environmental benefits if somehow perfected given the lack of need to produce unwanted parts of an animal, but given that any kind of processing of plant matter is going to be less efficient than eating the plants themselves, that seems like it can't really be the primary motivation). Do we actually need to culture cells to do that? Suppose we went the other way, instead of trying to, say, create chicken meat without the rest of the chicken, we were to take a chicken and try to redesign it so as to be unable to suffer, while keeping other useful properties (like an immune system, as the article brings up). Suffering requires a certain level of cognitive function, which requires a certain level of brain complexity and size. Chickens in industrial scale farms don't exactly utilize their cognitive abilities to the full, we barely even let them space to move to my understanding. So, what if we were to try to genetically engineer a chicken, or other livestock animal, with as little brains as possible while still being able to keep the thing alive, until the ethical issues of killing it were equivalent to those of something like a plant?