+1, but I do want to note one important caveat. People who avoid meat (especially red meat) because of allergies to proteins in the meat may not be able to eat replicated meat either if it duplicates the same proteins.

Alpha-gal syndrome is an allergy to carbohydrates in most mammal meat. Human flesh doesn't have it, though...

As a vegetarian, personally, I would be happy to eat lab-grown meat. But I certainly know vegetarians who have said they will not do so, because animals must have been harmed early on in the research required to grow the meat. So the idea that it's fine for vegetarians because any particular given piece of lab-grown meat hasn't directly come from an animal is false.

@BobTway Your vegetarian friends have never seen the swath of dead animals from harvesters/farming then. (Source? grandson of a farmer)... If they are unwilling to eat something that is produced by harming animals. Because I am guessing that they still eat food that is made by farmers.

@BobTway While I can appreciate their idea, I suspect that the scientists would probably acquire meat that was already produced for human consumption, not slaughter animals themselves.

@BobTway So...what about fertilizer from abused animals? Or if the lab grown tech was perfected 300 years before they were born?

There are even more kinds of vegetarian. E.g. I'm a vegetarian because I find meat gross. I'd still find it gross if it popped out of machine and never had been part of an animal.

@Questor in general people see a big difference between deliberate harm and (even uncaring) accidents. The same can be seen in the framing of harm to civilians and their infrastructure as "collateral damage", even when it's pretty obvious that they were targetted (throughout the "war on terrorism* but probably for longer). There's a term for that way of thinking, but I've forgotten it.

@BobTway some of the early efforts used animal-derived products in cell growth media, which did the industry a lot of reputational damage in some circles

@BobTway so there can’t be anything real vegetarian to them, because everything has been made by people who wouldn’t exist if our ancestors didn’t harm animals. But well, regardless of how illogical that reasoning is, we have to take the point that people using that reasoning do exist…

Do we know if the eggs they eat are from a replicator or from a live animal?

I always imagined that they had used the transporter to beam, say, a cooked turkey into the pattern buffer, and then just kept "beaming out" copies of it. But I suppose if that was ethically troubling, they could instead beam in a live turkey, beam it back out again while retaining the pattern, then beam out another copy with everything but the head, cook that, and beam that into the pattern buffer. Is... is that better?

An additional caveat here is "not enslaving animals" doesn't, exactly, exclude hunting, though they would seem to go hand in hand.

@Holger: That's really just a special case of no ethical consumption under capitalism, which a lot of people find overly reductionist.

@JoeW They were indeed from a live animal, an 'Owon as explained here: “En route to the Endicor system, Commander Riker is in his quarters busily preparing an omelet made from 'Owon eggs he picked up at Starbase 73.”

Doesn't Ben Sikso's dad run a replicator-free restaurant that serves shrimp creole?

@Kevin I've mostly seen that as a rebuttal to this guy (but it is sometimes picked up by overly-reductionist anti-morality nihilists).

I have a problem with this answer. The original "in-universe" purpose of a transporter was to deliver people from one point to another: they remained alive, therefore by definition they remained meat. Therefore food generated from "patterns used by our transporters" should retain its designation (i.e. meat etc.).

@JoelCoehoorn hunting (the actual killing bit) is usually regarded as also inflicting suffering deliberately, so that's not a common view. But vegan except roadkill is a concept some people adhere to. And some would hunt introduced invasive species for food, but no other meat. That's really rare.

@MarkMorganLloyd True, but in-universe, there's a distinction between the transporters and the replicators. They're clearly related technology, but replicators are unable to produce copies of the same quality as the transporters, and in particular with food, it's often said that many people prefer non-replicated food (or food cooked from replicated raw materials). That said, it's hard to see how you would have ethical problems with using replicated meat and at the same time have no ethical problems with using transporters to move people/animals (of course, in-universe, some do ).

@MattThrower TIL that you're a vegetarian - me too :-)

@Randal'Thor it's funny what you can learn about each other through SE :)

@MattThrower I was going to let you know about the Veganism & Vegetarianism SE site, but now I see you've already posted there.