The Coming Obsolescence of Animal Meat
The idea that human gustatory pleasure necessarily involves the inhumane farming of other creatures might come to be seen as outdated and gauche. A 'real' chicken sandwich might be viewed, in some quarters, as barbarous as poaching.
OLGA KHAZAN: ‘Animal meat is a habit that many young Americans are ready to abandon. A quarter of 25-to-34-year-old Americans now say they are vegans or vegetarians, prompting The Economist to proclaim 2019 “the year of the vegan.” Burger King this month introduced a Whopper made with a plant-based Impossible patty. True, chicken grown in a bioreactor like Just’s is still animal, not vegetable; but without the factory-farming component, some vegetarians and vegans might be inclined to love their chickens and eat them too… Because frankly, life for many mass-bred animals is no life at all. In her book Big Chicken, Maryn McKenna describes seeing 30,000 birds crammed into a hot shed, some with bellies rubbed raw and legs twisted underneath them…
Finless Foods’ Michael Selden rattled off an assortment of environmental and social injustices that motivate the need for cultured meat, from microplastics in our oceans, to greenhouse gases from shipping, to what he calls “environmental imperialism”: “The way that we get our food is very much just sort of like, we take what we want,” he told me. “If you live in San Francisco and you eat bluefin tuna, that bluefin tuna almost definitely comes from the Philippines. And we basically have fishing fleets in the Philippines that are, like, destroying local ecosystems to feed us”… Whether Americans are sufficiently distraught over the state of Filipino ecosystems to replace a dinnertime staple remains to be seen. But for now, these companies have bigger challenges to getting to market…
Some people relish traditions such as hunting and fishing and the more visceral experiences with meat they provide. But if Just and similar companies are successful, future generations might only know chicken to be a pleasant, meat-esque paste, with no bones and skins to speak of. In fact, our entire notion of animal products might become unhinged from animals. The idea that human gustatory pleasure necessarily involves the inhumane farming of other creatures might come to be seen as outdated and gauche. A “real” chicken sandwich might be viewed, in some quarters, as barbarous as poaching. That is, if the bioreactor thing gets worked out’. SOURCE…
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