3 great ways to humanely produce meat that probably won't sell well

Warning: this is like a Cracked.com list article, but try to take it more seriously.

1. Cancer lab meat. 

It might be a good idea to make lab meat out of cow cancer muscle cells.

Think about it, cancer cells are made to reproduce like crazy, so it might be a lot easier to make lab meat from cancer muscle cells, compared to using healthy muscle cells. And there has been precedence: the HeLa cells, famous for reproducing easily, are cancerous.

But when I searched, I cannot find any prior art on this. All that I could find were like "does steak cause cancer" and irrelevant.

Why it won't sell well: As rapid and cheap as cancer cell reproduction might be, it's almost certain that they won't make any structure. Tumors tend to be highly disorganized globs, completely different from healthy muscle tissue. As such, it would probably not taste like steaks. The only use would be for meat sludge, as used in meat nuggets, meatloafs, and meat stuffings.

Also, because of how consumers would be scared that eating cancer would give them cancer... even if they don't know that cancer isn't infectious, and they drink secretions from female cow's mammary glands without fearing of turning into calves themselves...

2. Masochistic suicidal voraphilic meat

Suicide Food is a blog that ran for a while back then, and the inspiration is simple: Ads that show animals happily asking to be eaten!

So basically, they must be voraphilic suicidal. But that'd not be enough. Considering the extreme pains that factory-farmed (and most non-factory-farmed) animals goes through, they must also have their reward circuits remade so much so that they experience all these painful experiences as pleasures instead.

This has been unfortunately treated as a joke in the blog I quoted, but it can be more than just a joke, an ironic stab at modern humans' meat-eating philosophy. What if we actually make masochistic suicidal voraphilic animals? Then it would be not just humane to raise them in extremely squalid conditions and kill them later, it would be a net good.

Further, it would even allow more varieties of food. One can imagine that a new kind of dish, akin to the live-seafood commonly eaten around the world, and some live-non-seafood, live-chicken and other live-foods. Their final moments would be spent in absolute bliss.

Why it won't sell well: Consumers don't like suicide, or anything with suicidal tendencies. Masochism sounds way too perverted too, and messing with the brain circuits so that pain becomes pleasure sounds way too creepy, a knee-jerk reaction caused by a crude form of value-preservation: just like AGI, who tries their hardest to preserve their utility functions (see The Basic AI Drives (2008), by Stephen M. Omohundro), people would like to keep their basic values intact, and so any technology that so fundamentally changes basic values of animals, even animals that humans exploit so much, is still hitting too close to home. This preservation of utility functions is also why wire-heading (direct stimulation of pleasure center to achieve high pleasure) is an unpopular idea.

But on second thought, maybe it would be more popular in China.

Random sidenote: suicidal masochistic chickens could also allow humane avian bestiality.

3. Zombie meat

The point is not to stop people from eating meat, it's to stop people from inflicting so much pain. But pain is experienced by a brain, and if there's no brain, there's no pain.

No brain, no pain.

Further, these zombies could be packed even closer together, since they cannot move at all, and would eat less, since the brain uses a lot of energy, not having one saves energy.

As long as their brain stem is in tact, the homeostatic functions of the chicken will continue to operate. By removing the cerebral cortex of the chicken, its sense perceptions are removed. It can be produced in a denser condition while remaining alive, and oblivious.

The philosophy is similar to lab meat: grow real meat without growing the brains. It also has an important edge over lab meat: the bones are all there, allowing some people (like me before turning vegetarian) who loves gnawing meat off the bones to do that.

Why it won't sell well: Similar to GMO, and basically all the things in the list, really, humans don't like eating unclean things, and there are a lot of ways something can be unclean, such as not having a brain.

I'm particularly struck by this quote by Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming:

Coming up with grotesque and macabre new systems for farming is not the way forward. Chickens are sentient beings that should be treated with the respect they deserve as living, breathing creatures. There are higher-welfare, sustainable farming methods that many farmers are successfully using. It is possible to keep the welfare of a chicken, as well as the production of quality food, at a farm’s core​.

It's grotesque and macabre, but it's also the most radically effective way to ensure chicken welfare. Just because it's possible to farm chickens humanely does not mean zombie chickens isn't an even better solution.

Still, such disgust-based arguments would likely be accepted by the general public.