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Originally Posted by tore
I know very well that our ancestors ate meat for a long time without cooking it and I'm of course not saying that was a huge problem. Just pointing out that parasites can be a huge problem and a strategy which reduces the parasitic load should be adaptive. Even regular pork tapeworms can kill people! I'm not saying it's the primary factor which makes cooking adaptive, just an interesting piece of curiosa.
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Oh yeah...parasites are nasty. My grandpa had a tapeworm. Eecch. I should think cooking the meat would be adaptive. Our teeth aren't so good at ripping through hair and hide, sinew, and muscle raw; cutting up and cooking meat and then drying/cooking it was probably an integral part of early humans' consumption of meat (around the time our smaller teeth were forming due to natural selection favoring those who were adept at using fire and cooking tubers (?) and flesh).
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As for the viability of factory-grown food, why do you think it would be so expensive? We are imagining the use of a technology not yet invented after all  I'd imagine if you had a hunk, or maybe a flat sheet of meat to increase surface to volume ratio, growing in or on a medium almost like a lump of cancer, you would not as much have to worry about things like space, sex, health, transportation of animals and you could likely grow it more effectively using less energy per pound meat than what is produced by real cows and pigs!
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I have a sneaky feeling we may have gone through this before in this thread.
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According to Wikipedia,
In vitro meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "Cultured meat is currently prohibitively expensive,[1] but
it is anticipated that the cost could be reduced to only being twice as expensive as conventionally produced meat.[3][4] Unfortunately if it is more affordable to eat the cow than the meat we creates human nature says this may be a long nasty ride.[5]"
And I remember reading about some some petri meat that took a long time to grow. Our mammalian cells usually divide pretty slowly, don't they? It isn't like bacteria or yeast. I can grow a mess of bacteria or yeast...billions of them...in the lab over just two days! Of course, if we are using hypothetical technology, then anything is possible!
Say, Tore...here's a question...and I don't think *this* has been in the thread yet
...since we're talking petri plate meat, would you eat petri plate
human meat? Yes, no, why, why not? I'd actually be more likely to eat petri plate human meat than non-human animal meat, assuming the original donor gave her/his permission for the tissue sample.