I'm all for bodily autonomy. If you don't want to eat cultivated meat, I'm not going to say you should. But that doesn't change the fact that other meat products might be morally suspect, of course.

Again, I'm far from convinced that a steak from White Oak Pastures IS going to be more animal friendly than the 'average' vegan meal. If you're defining animal-friendly-ness in terms of animal deaths (too-simple, in my view, for a variety of reasons), we're going to have to crunch the numbers. But, as indicated in my last post, I sincerely doubt the steak is going to come out on top. Yes, vegans can fixate on whether there are animal products present, but this is often going to be a good heuristic for the number of animal deaths, at the very least! (Of course, the whole point of my article above is that I /don't/ think that veganism is the be-all and end-all.)

Sorry about the open source issue. I linked Matheny just because he did a bit of early number-crunching. Land use is certainly a factor; off the top of my head, one of Davis's mistakes that Matheny points out is that he assumes that the same amount of land is needed to produce grass-fed beef as is needed to produce protein-rich plant products -- but that's not true. Beef takes more land. (Like I say, this is from memory of Matheny's arguments.) But part of the trouble here is that it just isn't clear how many animals are killed to produce plant-based foods. (Here's an open-source version of the paper that convinced me of that latter point: https://philarchive.org/archive/FISFDI.)

It's absolutely right that the amount of meat historically eaten varies depending on location, time period, culture, class, etc. My only point is that it's very easy to imagine that how we do it now is how it has always been done, and thus that changing how we produce meat (e.g., switching to plant-based or cultivated meat) is to end tens of thousands of years of continuous practice. I don't think it's that simple.

And even if it was, so what? While we shouldn't be blind to history in our ethical reasoning, neither should we use history as a textbook. We collectively have gotten a lot of things wrong in the past. This includes some things that are now considered obviously wrong, but were mainstays incredibly recently. (I'll not give examples. I'm sure you can think of some.)

I don't really have a view on the 'meat made our brains big' argument, as I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But I suppose I must ask, with my ethicist hat on, 'so what?' Even if we did evolve in such-and-such a way because we were engaging in such-and-such a practice, that doesn't prove that the practice is something we should continue with today!