DumbSwede's Journal: Ultra Veal

I am a meat eater. It doesn't cause me a great deal of moral angst worrying about the suffering of animals, but I have to wonder if there are better alternatives to providing meat.

What I'm going to propose has a bit of an ick factor, but I'm curious what the roadblocks are to its implementation - that be of raising brain-dead animals for food.

I'm not talking about taking live animals and making them brain-dead, but genetically creating embryos that only have basic brain stem function. This sometimes occurs in nature and even human births and is known as being anencephalic (no Bush jokes please). A colloquial term being "frog baby" the head having a squashed frog like appearance with bulging eyes (no forebrain). Such babies die shortly after birth. It can be caused by pathogens in the womb or genetic birth defects.

My point is, animals so born could probably be raised with intravenous feeding. They could be stacked like cordwood and would experience no pain or suffering. The only waste to get rid of would be urine, no solid waste.

Pros:

1. Very little area needed to raise stock.
2. Stock can be raised in or near major cities, so lower transportation costs.
3. Controlled environment can be kept nearly pathogen free.
4. Less environmental impact from solid waste.
5. Animals can be engineered to maximize meat production. Other organs can be engineered to atrophy if not needed, especially the digestive track and some portions of the skeleton.
6. Less smell and fewer pests in farming areas.
7. No pain or suffering on the animal's part.
8. Possibility to create nutrients chemically, such that more land available for growing crops for direct human consumption. Note: this is not a given initially. Creating nutrient mix might require processing plant sources and could use more or less feed than conventional feeding. These is really the deal breaker, if efficiency of farmland used is not improved there is no real benefit.

Cons:

1. Public not accepting of such food stocks (even if indistinguishable in taste).
2. Nutrient costs. It the feeding fluids cannot be made at a cost not much more than equivalent food costs, then will not be adopted (despite savings elsewhere).
3. Cost of implanting engineered embryos into conventional stock to carry to term too expensive compared to just letting animals breed (which, all jokes aside, still requires a brain).
4. Energy cost might be greater per pound of meat created, depends on efficiency of creating nutrient solutions. Note: a breakthrough in energy production could be what puts this method over the top, based on Pros listed above.

Who's up for a brain-dead burger?

IV Feeding

[seafortn]

One note - IV feeding is very expensive - you can probably look up the costs on Google, but basically you have to provide everything in basic building blocks, and a pound of the amino acids, carbohydrates, and lipids found in (for example) a pound of soybeans would cost substantially more. Using a feeding tube into the stomach would probably be more efficient - perhaps a device could be attached to the colon to remove the waste...

Eeew.

[peacefinder]

Yep, that's revolting, all right. But taking the idea seriously for a second, I see a real feeding problem.

Young mammals need milk. The most ideal milk for the purpose comes from their own mothers, but over time humans have occasionally found this to be too burdensome to manage. (Sometimes for very good reasons, other times not... but let's not go there.) So we developed "formulas" to replace the unavailable breast milk. It turns out that making a formula on which young'ns can thrive is a pretty difficult