vegan

It’s Wired: of course it’s going to be riddled with blind support for capitalism.

Finally, where are they getting the DNA subsequences?

From the industrial scale pig torture infrastructure that was already here.

Soybeans are good, and they don't need to taste or feel like pigs for people to enjoy them.

Scolding people into eating their beans has been going great so far.

and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein

I can absolutely see this happening. I can also see them slowly replacing the actual meat with more and more nonmeat fillers over time, as fewer and fewer people can even afford meat.

I also expect there’s much more profit to be made in continued testing, more animal-based R&D in the form of trying to translate desirable phenotypes in animal meat to the plant-produced analog, and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein and sell it to omnivores as a greenwashed meat product.

Reflecting on what we know about the world I'm sure you are correct when it comes to that.

I was just coming at from the point of view that we probably all know some people in our lives that are never going to go Vegan because it's the morally correct thing to do. They just don't care. So, while I wouldn't support a scenario you described it would still be better for those people to at least transition to something like that.

I realize it's far from ideal, and I'm not promoting it, but it would objectively be better than those same people eating tortured baby animals the way humanity does it currently.

All I’m trying to say is that I think they should do the R&D without exploiting more animals.

I agree with that.

I'm hoping that people turn to alternatives as the costs keep rising. I was taking a look at the effects of inflation on groceries and it seems that animal products were the hardest hit. I know so many people that will complain yet still buy at these high prices because of a combination of not caring and being addicted to these foods. If they had an alternative maybe they would opt for it.

Any drop in demand is a compounding effect. It'll just accelerate the price increases as volume drops and hopefully one day we get to a point where we can extinguish these industries.

Obviously I realize that's an optimistic point of view.

It certainly might have been. Is that the company that tested on animals? I remember reading that about either Impossible or Beyond, I forget which one. That while the "meat" they produce is entirely vegan from the point of view of the ingredients they did do animal testing during the initial stages of developing some of those ingredients.

I'm not really sure what you mean by spreading it, like some bad actors are going to porkify the soy industry through guerilla farming? The challenge of gathering and preserving that much seed aside, for commercial farmers who grow GM crops it's very finicky to get those beneficial traits to be expressed through each subsequent generation through traditional breeding.

Would be better to introduce genetic incompatibilities so that GMOs were infertile with non-GMOs.

I guess if that was your goal they would probably have to insert a novel gene that wouldn't be present in say, the over 10,000 different varieties of conventionally bred tomatoes and then engineer the plant to produce sterile seeds, but that seems like a much more concerning trait to let out into the wild than beans expressing umami flavor. Terminator seed technology has been around for a while but as far as I know there have been no commercial applications because it worries a lot of different groups.