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Bruce Friedrich is excited—actually he’s “ecstatic!”— about “test tube meat.” Yesterday in USA Today, he wrote a spirited and, given the short space allotted, especially informative piece on the prospects of lab-grown burgers and nuggets. There’s certainly cause for cautious optimism on this front (in so far as one can be optimistic about junk food). To quote the most compelling segments of Bruce’s article:


“According to research from Oxford University, lab-grown meat will require up to 45% less energy, 99% less land, and 96% less water than conventional meat. Second, most of the processes involved in meat production today emit significant quantities of greenhouse gases. Oxford scientists say that lab meat would produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat.”
And,


“[L]ab-grown meat would be cleaner. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 48 million cases of food-borne illness annually, with hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. Many of those come from bacteria on meat, which can be traced to manure, blood, and other forms of contamination. Meat in a lab will eliminate the blood and the manure.”
And,



“Finally, raising animals for food necessarily involves animal suffering, and for more than 99% of farm animals, it involves abuses that would warrant cruelty charges if the animals involved were protected by the same laws that protect dogs and cats. Lab-grown meat will eventually eliminate live animals from the equation entirely.”




All good points that add up to a great article. Where matters get thornier, though, is in the claim that test tube meat is “an animal product that is not the product of an animal.” This is a really important hair to split. What Bruce is saying is that a burger grown from cultured cells will come from cultured cells in a petri dish, not a sentient animal. In this lab-to-table framing of the issue, the meat is not an animal product. But, of course, in a larger framing, a historical framing, all cultured meat will ultimately trace its roots to a sentient animal and, no matter how distant the lineage, will always be an animal product. May as well be perfectly clear about that connection.  If and when we eat lab meat, we’ll still be eating animals.

There will, in other words, always be some level of animal exploitation involved in the procreation of cultured meat. The big point, one that Bruce acknowledges, is that there is simply no comparison between the suffering required for test tube burgers and beef burgers as we now know them. The reduction in suffering would be immense beyond measure. It is for that reason that we should actively support the technology—not because it will end our reliance on animal exploitation. Which it won’t. But because it’s better. And perfect—like the fast ball— is boring.


Plus—and this is going to be dark—but the fact that there is residual exploitation involved in the production of lab meat might be, pragmatically speaking, a good thing in terms of getting people on board. As much as I despair in identifying this pervasive psychological tendency, my sense is that many meat eaters recoil at witnessing the brutality involved in getting a burger to the plate but, at the same time, harbor something inside of themselves that quietly gets off on the power differential that made that burger possible. What I’m saying is this: people like the fact that we can kill and animal, grill the result, derive pleasure from it, and do it all with impunity. Don’t ask me to explain why. It’s just what is.
Another quibble I have with Bruce’s take on lab meat is the idea that lab meat, as a technology, is somehow less bizarre than other food technologies that creep people out as being unnatural. Bruce sites GMOs as a counterexample, arguing that lab meat “is not splicing a salmon gene into a tomato or a pesticide into a potato.” First, no tomato has ever been marketed with a fish gene in it and, second, no pesticide has ever been placed in a potato (that’s technically impossible and, more to the point, there are no commercial GMO potatoes in North America—because one retailer, McDonalds, would not risk it). Anyway, lab meat is—as Bruce notes— not like transgenic technology. It is much weirder and, given the nature of genetic mutations, more likely to engender unexpected mutations and cause allergic reactions, etc.
But don’t despair: the fact that we’re talking about a truly bizarre creation—cultured meat—is hardly a deal breaker. True, enthusiasm for “all natural” is on the rise, but by the time somebody figures out how to make lab meat cost effective (and really this is the elephant in the room), we’ll likely be over our back-to-nature fetish, or at least more primed to accept another industrially fabricated product into our bloated bodies. We did it with the Twinkie. Spam. Funjuns. More to the point, we are a species of eaters that, about 7000 years ago, deemed it normal to drink the mother’s milk of a bovine. If we can accept that, I suppose we can accept anything.