THE CULTURED MEAT CULTURE: Is lab-grown meat good news for animals?
If meat is tied-up in beliefs about human superiority, it need not be in the future. Perhaps, among our grandchildren, very different ideas about what meat means will predominate.
JOSH MILBURN: The Singapore Food Agency has approved “chicken bites” containing meat made from real chicken cells that were grown outside of a chicken’s body. Alongside similar news from Israel, the Singapore ruling is being hailed as a watershed moment for cultured meat and the broader field of cellular agriculture.
Admittedly, these bites aren’t quite what cellular agriculture’s biggest advocates might hope they would be. Some problems are decidedly practical. For example, the bites remain pricier than meat produced by farming and killing chickens. This will be a major obstacle for consumer acceptance. But the bites’ producer – Eat Just – is planning to increase production, bringing down the costs.
Some problems, however, are ethical. The bites are made using foetal bovine serum – a particularly gruesome slaughter byproduct widely used in biomedical research. This, too, is a problem that can be overcome. The next production line, Eat Just claims, will replace foetal bovine serum with a plant-based alternative…
The prospect of cultured meat taking a share of the global meat industry sounds, on the face of it, like good news. Today’s meat industry is hellish for the tens of billions of animals (trillions, including fish) it kills annually and is an environmental disaster. Cultured meat offers the opportunity for a different meat industry: one that does not rest on the suffering and death of animals…
One common argument against cultured meat goes something like this. Meat affirms a moral hierarchy with humans above and animals below. To give animals their due, therefore, we should challenge the place meat has in diets, cultures and economies… Even if meat is tied up in beliefs (latent or otherwise) about human superiority, it need not be in the future. Perhaps, among our grandchildren, very different ideas about what meat is and what it means will predominate…
Let me not be misunderstood. I do not think that the value many people place in meat justifies the awful things that animal agriculture does to animals, to our planet and to our public health Not at all. I am a vegan, and I think you should be too. But the importance that people place in meat matters enough for me to raise a loud cheer for the news from Singapore. SOURCE…
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