But this isn’t the only consideration for someone seeking spiritual progress. Meat, we’re told, is part of the class of foods that stimulates the passions, thus unsettling rather than calming the mind. Given the need to still the mind in pursuing spiritual goals, even IVM would be counterproductive. This the reason why some traditions forego garlic and onion – not for any ethical reason, but for spiritual reasons.

When it comes to eating conventional meat, I’d say there’s a strong moral imperative involved because of the direct nature of the harm caused (the meat is the dead body of an animal). On the other hand, arguments based on whether food is highly processed or is made by large corporations involve weaker moral imperatives because the issues are more diffuse and the harm more indirect. I don’t think that means that those secondary moral considerations aren’t important, just that I think that in general they shouldn’t trump the first ones. I think it would be better, for example, for people who insist on eating meat, if they were to eat factory made in-vitro meat produced by a large corporation rather than the body of a slaughtered animal, whatever the status of the company that grew, slaughtered, and marketed the flesh (and of course in many cases that would be another large corporation).

The main problem with vitro meat is “who owns it?” The answer is probably that some company has created a patented manufacturing process. So by replacing the farmer with the corporation, we lose more control over our food to a profit-generating machine. This will, by the nature of the profit-generating machine, lead to large-scale suffering. Is it a good idea to replace the suffering of an animal worth the suffering caused by a corporation (think pollution, plastics, outsourcing, genetic tampering, lobbying, etc)?

You make a rather peculiar argument. When we create a demand for meat, animals are bred to fill that demand. They’re raised on farms, transported, slaughtered, butchered, and sold as meat. When we don’t eat meat, fewer animals are bred, raised, etc. So the alternatives for the animals are not “be slaughtered or be ripped apart by wild animals” but “be slaughtered or don’t come into existence.” A non-existent animal won’t suffer. There’s therefore less suffering caused by our actions when we don’t eat meat.

Do we really increase suffering simply by eating meat? I would suggest that an animal may be given a less painful death in a slaughter house (one that took measures to make it as quick and painless as possible) then it would if it were just to die of disease in nature or be ripped apart by predators. I would think that from the Buddhist perspective, by not eating meat (if ignoring factors mentioned mentioned above), you aren’t really reducing the suffering and death in the world, you just aren’t involved in it.

I don’t actually have any figures to hand regarding how much energy it would take to grow in vitro meat, so I’m not in a position to make a comparison. The comparison would have to take into account all inputs involved in producing both types of food. But the true comparison would not be between in vitro meat and “growing a vegetable”, but between various kinds of high-protein vegetarian food, such as Quorn, tofu, and textured vegetable protein.

Personally, I find the entire idea of eating in-vitro meat totally repulsive. Even if it had the same texture and flavor, knowing that it was “grown” in a tube would ruin the whole experience.