The End of Farming and Trawling?

George Monbiot has written an interesting article (and has a due TV programme) extolling a the virtues of a company, Solar Foods, in Helsinki who are in the later stages of developing a process powering microbes in tanks with hydrogen (obtained from water) to rapidly produce a whole range of viable nutrition agents (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet). He suggests that, with safe-guards (such as making the technology freely available), this might well result in a total replacement of agriculture and 'farming of the sea' seen as major contributors to climate change, habitat loss and species extinction. The point is made that the best sites for these food-generating tanks might well be deserts and this would facilitate a re-wilding of the very substantial (and water-hungry) areas currently occupied by farming (as well as removing incentives to destroy forests). I am not so sure. In the case of the hydrocarbon industries, money and political pressure have been successfully used to largely prevent any reductions in their usage. Powerful farming and fisheries companies, as well as agrichemical industries, might well do the same for their products (often using employment as an argument?). It is also the case that getting the right nutrition is a very minor consideration in the eating habitats of most humans. The effects of status are evident in the demands of newly enriched folk for more animal protein. People still have 'magic' beliefs in the powers of rhinoceros horn and tiger bone that are unlikely to be replicated in a bacteria-generated facsimile even if it was chemically identical. Farming and fishing are also romanticised as 'traditional' (and with numerous votes) and should, in many people's eyes, be protected. There is also clearly an element of theatre in cooking, as is seen in a plethora of popular cookery programmes. Bacteria-derived foods may well prove helpful in feeding the planet but I am not sure it will "save our bacon".