TBF, "space elves are awsome!"is exactly when my mine went when they explained it too.
@mommunism
It's really not. Like a lot of other issues relating to population and social development, this is a misunderstood topic. We dont need to switch to vatmeat to feed the poor regions of the world, we need to tailor the raching and farming to the environments that need food the most. Lab-grown meat is even more expensive than free-range beef and will consume more resources to create than factory farming. It may be ethical, but its highly impractical for anyone not in the upper .25% of the wealth.
A lot of West and central African cuisine is based on rice. Rice doesn't grow there well. What needs to happen is to convince them to eat grains and vegetables that grow well in those climates and soils and to make goats the #1 meat beast in the world. Goats already are more efficient than cattle, produce a more easily digested milk, can eat almost anything, tolerate heat and cold better than cattle and you can make clothing out of them without having to kill them, the way you do cattle or pigs.
Switching to tailored goats, environment-specialized crops, and micro-power generation, it's possible to create local micro-economies that allow communities to grow themselves without huge bailouts from wealthier nations. Which is, in the end, the only way they will ever be anything other than puppet-states and battlegrounds for proxy wars. These steps also let domestic populations in wealth states to free themselves from the shackles of macro-energy corporations and end factory farming. Beef has its place, but we have too many issues for super-expensive versions of beef to be useful.