IN THE GARDEN OF GREED AND GLUTTONY: Is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty animal agriculture problem?
People love eating meat, with global production and consumption growing steadily, and little sign of a collective vegan epiphany on the horizon. This makes intensive animal agriculture a wicked problem.
JAN DUTKIEWICZ: Intensive animal agriculture, which produces… most of the meat that Americans consume, keeps the price of meat artificially low by operating at huge economies of scale, and shifting the costs of this production on to people, animals and the planet. The industry deforests the land, releases hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, creates terrible working conditions at abattoirs, and necessitates abhorrent animal treatment on farms, all while engaging in price fixing, lobbying for environmental and labour deregulation, and pushing for unconstitutional anti-whistleblower laws.
The problem is that people love eating meat, with global production and consumption growing steadily, and little sign of a collective vegan epiphany on the horizon. This makes intensive animal agriculture a wicked problem: something so obviously detrimental, and yet so politically and socially entrenched, that it is unclear where reformers should even start…
Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology – in this case, animals – and do well by doing good… Cellular agriculture seems to offer a potential socio-technological hack: it could eliminate much of the damage that system causes, without requiring consumers to give up meat…
Long the stuff of science fiction and philosophical musing, cellular agriculture is fast becoming a reality. In December 2020, the San Francisco-based food company Eat Just launched the world’s first commercially available cell-based meat at the private 1880 club in Singapore. Its form – a chicken nugget – was partly symbolic, partly necessary: the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to replicate a chicken’s breast, wings or legs… Aleph Farms, an Israeli startup, has 3D printed a cellular ribeye steak. Shiok Meats of Singapore is cultivating shrimp without the shrimp. Berkeley’s Finless Foods is tackling the endangered bluefin tuna…
That private capital is working overtime to disrupt farming with synthetic biology is likely all that boosters and critics alike need to know about the technology. Techno-optimists see a future of widely available “clean meat”, as ecologically and ethically superior to the original as solar power is to coal. Opponents see corporate-controlled lab meat that slots all too comfortably into a broken capitalist food system.
Both sides have some truth to them, but they wrongly assume that the outcomes have been determined in advance. There was nothing predestined about the forces that drove the food system to ever-intensifying mechanisation, labour exploitation and environmental ruin in the past century; it happened because of political choices, collective and individual. Similarly, we need not be prisoners of tech monopolists slapping grey “vat meat” on our plates. What we need is an analysis of the possibilities of cellular agriculture – what this novel food technology, with the right policies and investments, could make possible for consumers, workers, animals and the environment…
To grasp the promise and perils of cellular agriculture, we need to understand the system it might change. Our current animal agriculture policies and practices do immense damage, and uprooting them will require enormous collective effort, but history shows that the system can change radically, even in the course of a generation.
For consumers, the current food system is defined by abundance and low prices. Americans spend just under 10% of their disposable income on food, among the lowest rates in the world, and eat a whopping 122kg of meat each a year, including 55kg of chicken… But there’s a high price to pay for low costs. Today, billions of genetically indistinguishable chickens live and die in squalid misery in supersized facilities designed around high efficiency and low margins. Three major processing companies – Tyson, Perdue and Koch – control the majority of the US market for chicken meat. The industry either functions as a quasi-monopsony, with a small number of buyers imposing prices and conditions on producers, or in some cases is vertically integrated so that Big Chicken directly controls most of the value chain…
Meanwhile, cramming animals into factory farms and clearing land for more feed crops has increased the likelihood of outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as swine flu, avian influenza or Covid-19. The system disables and kills even more people through non-infectious diseases: in the past 60 years, changes in diet have contributed to extraordinary increases in the number of Americans with obesity, diabetes and heart conditions…
The whole system has been engineered primarily for the benefit of the owners of farmland and huge agribusiness firms, and at the expense of the public… This was supported by the US government, which early in the 20th century launched research programmes, tax breaks and technology drives designed to facilitate intensive agriculture – to turn every farm into a factory, as the historian Deborah Fitzgerald puts it. All this led to the advent of factory farms after the second world war…
There are plenty of smart, progressive critiques of this system, but most of the suggested alternatives involve breaking up the food giants and downsizing or diversifying US farms. But antitrust policy alone won’t address the harms done to animals, labour or the environment by modern animal agriculture… Meanwhile, experts on the environmental impacts of the food system mostly concur that we need to eat much less meat. Some propose vegetarian and vegan diets as solutions…
However, there are no signs that anything except outright bans on factory-farmed meat can achieve the required cuts – and that, for now, is a political non-starter. This is where cellular agriculture comes in. The thing that could help solve the chickenisation of our food system is not pasture-raised hens, but mass-produced chickenless nuggets… For a cutting-edge biotechnology, cellular agriculture is actually a fairly straightforward process. It begins with stem cells, usually harvested from live animals via biopsy…
The potential benefits of this technology are manifold. Most analyses of these processes suggest they would use far less land and water, and have a smaller carbon footprint, than beef and dairy. If powered with clean energy – a big but not implausible if – they could have less environmental impact than chicken and pork. It would prevent the torture and killing of billions of creatures every year, and also greatly reduce the risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans. Cellular fish could have even greater ecological benefits, through relieving pressure on endangered ecosystems and reducing the extensive pollution caused by the fishing industry…
There is a parallel push to develop plant-based animal product alternatives. Given that these kind of foods can be made with existing technology and widely grown plants, and can scale up and reduce costs quickly, they are probably a better bet than cellular agriculture to challenge the conventional animal agriculture industry in the short term…
Cellular agriculture produces real meat, allowing it to take the $1tn global meat industry head-on. It does all this by “taking ethics off the table” – in the words of the Good Food Institute, an NGO that promotes alternative protein – relying on market mechanisms and appealing to consumer choice, and that could improve its chances of disrupting factory farming. It’s a moonshot that just might land. SOURCE…
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