Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab‐Grown Meat
In this article, the authors make a concise case for clean meat by highlighting the immense animal suffering that occurs on factory farms, and the public health consequences of intensive animal farming. They believe it is imperative for animal advocacy organizations and public health advocates to support research into making clean meat significantly cheaper and more widely available.
JONNY ANOMALY, ET AL: Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is that some people find it “disgusting” or “unnatural,” we explore the psychology of disgust to find possible counter-measures.
The authors argue that the public health benefits of clean meat give us strong moral reasons to promote its development and consumption in a way that the public is likely to support. They end by depicting the change from farmed animals to clean meat as a collective action problem and suggest that social norms rather than coercive laws should be employed to solve the problem…
In the article, the authors have tried to make a concise case for clean meat by highlighting the immense animal suffering that occurs on factory farms, and the public health consequences of intensive animal farming. Recent pandemics have made us painfully aware of the potential dangers of diseases “jumping hosts” between animals and humans. They believe it is imperative for animal advocacy organizations and public health advocates to support research into making clean meat significantly cheaper and more widely available. The authors also acknowledge that resistance to radically new kinds of food poses a psychological barrier that will need to be overcome for clean meat to fulfill its potential as one of the single greatest triumphs of the human species in reducing the suffering of animals, and people. SOURCE…
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