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Cultured meat
Cultured meat is meat grown artificially from muscle cells in a lab or factory, instead of being taken from slaughtered animals. It is occasionally discussed in the popular and animal rights press. Despite raising some ethical problems for activists, it deserves support for many reasons, some of which are described here. The arguments for cultured meat are given briefly. The scientific technicalities could be more thoroughly discussed by scientific experts – links are in the menu items. Hopefully, sympathetic scientists as well as other AR activists will involve themselves in the discussion and advancement of cultured meat, given its potential importance. You can find out more about how to support the development of cultured meat at the Future Food website (http://www.futurefood.org/). Click to go back to the menu. Price Cultured meat could wreck the reared meat industry by undercutting it on price. Rearing animals is a highly inefficient way of producing meat because much of their bodies and waste has low market value. Cultured meat is presently expensive, but there are good reasons to think it could be cheaper than reared meat in the medium term. The tendency in chicken meat production – chickens accounting for the large majority of animals killed each year – has been to produce animals with higher meat content, by using selective breeding to increase muscle mass and reduce the relative size of other tissues. Cultured meat may be viewed as the ultimate goal of producers, since it removes all tissues apart from those comprising meat. However, it is one which is unobtainable through conventional breeding methods. On theoretical grounds, cultured meat should have a long run price advantage over reared meat. The current far higher price of cultured meat, even on a per item basis so that research costs are not included, has been explained by the price of the fluid needed to soak the muscle tissue in order to promote growth. Bovine fetal serum can be used but, as well as being of animal origin, is prohibitively expensive with half a litre costing over US$200 at the time of writing. A leading trial has found a growth medium made from maitake mushrooms is of comparable effectiveness. It is also cheaper; a 25 kilogram drum of powdered extract costs under US$1,000. I am not sure of the quantities required for production. Click to go back to the menu. Urgency A serious challenge to the existence of the international meat industry is overdue and urgent. Already the main source by far of animal abuse, the global rate of slaughter is likely to double to well over 100 billion animals per year in the next few decades as developing countries become richer and eat more meat. You can see the trends in consumption at http://faostat.fao.org/. The projection of future slaughter rates can be made by looking at the speed at which people in poor countries are becoming richer, and how much meat people eat on average when they have a particular income. There are other determinants of how much meat is consumed, of course, but broadly speaking income is a good measure. You can have a look at the link in the Food and Agricultural Organization publication “Livestock’s long shadow”, on page 9. The publication is available from http://www.fao.org/. Click to go back to the menu. Switching If cultured meat is cheaper than reared meat, major meat suppliers would be likely to switch to production of cultured meat. Their financial and industrial power, at present fighting against animal welfare, could be in competition against remaining reared meat producers. It is usual for profit-maximising businesses to use the cheapest production method whenever possible. However, some businesses may not be strict profit maximisers, such as collectives of farmers who are heavily invested financially and socially in reared meat production. The spread of cultured meat technology will encounter resistance in some sections of the meat industry, but the industry seems sufficiently competitive and organisationally diverse for cultured meat to enter despite it. Click to go back to the menu. Targeting Cultured meat targets animal abuse very precisely. Everywhere an animal is slaughtered for sale as food, cultured meat could replace reared meat and reduce the profit incentive for companies to kill animals. The benefits of focussed and comprehensive campaigns are well known within animal rights work, but typically they act on a small scale. Larger programs may lose focus under conventional campaigning techniques, for example when meat producers relocate to a different country, or they find loopholes in animal welfare laws. Cultured meat provides both focus and large-scale impact. Click to go back to the menu. Borders Knowledge of cultured meat production travels easily across national borders. The most rapid growth in animal slaughter is in developing countries like Brazil, China, and India. Usual campaign methods may fail if social conditions are not suitable, but if cultured meat is cheaper than reared meat then its production should expand in any country where minimising the cost of food production is the paramount agricultural concern. Most countries experience these cost pressures, as people move out of the countryside and there is increased demand for retailed food. Click to go back to the menu. Politics Cultured meat production presents no challenge to political regimes. A regime may stamp on welfare campaigns from independent civil society, whereas cultured meat replaces reared meat through a production technology which is broadly neutral to political viewpoints. The point will be particularly important for entry into China, a world leader in consumption and production. Click to go back to the menu. Morality The main requirement for a public shift from reared to cultured meat is that people want to pay less for their food. They do not have to change their moral position on animal slaughter, which is difficult to alter. People would have to shift their views to accept a form of meat which could be considered less natural than reared meat. However, the dominant form of production, factory farming, is associated with such extreme behavioural and genetic modifications that it would be easy to claim that cultured meat represents only a little more tinkering in natural processes. Moreover, for processed meat such as burgers, the primary marketing will be to companies, who may give less weight than the general public to the form of production compared with price. Click to go back to the menu. Permanence Once cultured meat is cheaper and healthier than reared meat, rearing of animals is irrevocably damaged as a large-scale production method in industrial societies – it will be an obsolete technology. It is much harder to reverse cultured meat’s effect than to reverse the outcomes of lobbying and persuasion. A prominent example of how certain animal welfare victories can be transitory is the British ban on fox hunting, which was passed with the support of the largest political party at the time. The main opposition party overwhelmingly voted against the ban, and look likely to overturn it when they regain power. A more personal, but not uncommon, example of reversal of animal welfare gains is the decision of vegetarians and even activists to start eating meat again. Click to go back to the menu. Speed Technological knowledge moves rapidly around the world, and the spread of cultured meat technology can at least match the likely growth of animal slaughter. Once it is developed, the technology’s spread can be self-sustaining in and across companies. The speed of technology’s spread through businesses has not been precisely estimated in economic analysis, but some indications are that it may account for much of total international economic growth, which is highly likely to indicate the rapid displacement of existing technologies by new ones. Click to go back to the menu. Consistency Support for cultured meat does not halt a wider campaign for veganism and animal rights. It is a contentious point whether welfare campaigning damages campaigns for animal rights. The question of whether to support cultured meat may be viewed as part of a similar debate, since support for any form of meat may be viewed as contaminating the core animal rights message. But the impact of cultured meat is potentially so much larger than most welfare policies that it is a clearly distinct case and should be treated as such, without establishing a general precedent for other positions on rights and welfare policies. Click to go back to the menu. Complementary Development of cultured meat complements other campaigning techniques. Increasing pressure on meat producers and users makes it more likely that they will abandon reared meat in favour of cultured meat, and the existence of cultured meat production will probably reduce the resistance they put up to campaigns against reared meat. The resistance will depend on how tied companies are to reared meat production. Click to go back to the menu. Options Familiar campaigning techniques are unlikely to be successful on their own in controlling the explosive growth of meat consumption worldwide. The trend in meat consumption over the last twenty years has been for large increases around the world, with growth or standstill in developed countries and rapid growth in many developing countries. The efforts of an active animal rights community have prevented the situation being far worse than it is, but they have not controlled the expansion even in developed countries. Click to go back to the menu. Efficiency Animal rights activists are small in number, but highly motivated and skilled. Where possible, coordinating action to support the emergence of cultured meat is an efficient use of resources. In the United Kingdom, there are some readily available figures on the number of vegetarians and vegans (for example at http://www.vegsoc.org/). Around five percent of people are vegetarians and perhaps one percent of people are vegans. The number of activists is likely to be far smaller than the vegan population, which seems to be the case from attendances at campaign meetings. Cultured meat could have a very large impact with the support of few workers because once it is shown to be better value than reared meat, it gains its own momentum when companies adopt it. Click to go back to the menu. Support Activist support can accelerate the development of cultured meat so that it has a quick emergence, adoption, and global spread. Cultured meat obviously requires biologists to develop the product, and businesspeople to sell it. There are other demands if cultured meat is to be widely accepted. For example, if meat producers and users are put under increased pressure for their treatment of reared animals, they are more likely to finance the development of cultured meat, and then use it when it is ready. There are also outstanding questions about the most effective organisational arrangements to ensure that cultured meat technology spreads quickly around the world. Click to go back to the menu. Biology If an activist has biological expertise, they may be able to ensure that the technology evolves in a way which promotes animal welfare to the highest degree. Although the general adoption of any form of cultured meat will reduce the misery of animals on an enormous scale, some feasible forms of production require no or almost no animal use on an ongoing basis. Expert activists could engage to ensure that one of these forms is developed quickly and so spreads most widely. Some of the current science behind cultured meat is explained on the New Harvest website (http://www.new-harvest.org/). The In Vitro Meat Consortium (http://invitromeat.org/) seeks academic contributions to its study – in vitro meat is a more clinical-sounding alternative name for cultured meat. Click to go back to the menu. Business If an activist has marketing or business expertise, they may be able to help with the commercialisation and global spread of a successful product, once scientists have produced a good basic product. Clearly, cultured meat will only widely replace reared meat if it is cheaper, but other important considerations relate to consumer acceptance, licensing and franchising, and customer support. The In Vitro Meat Consortium (http://invitromeat.org/) is seeking academic contributions on the economics of cultured meat. Click to go back to the menu. Slaughter Although muscle cells are used in cultured meat production, extraction does not require the death of animals. Biopsy extraction has been used in leading research. Animals could be killed to get the cells, but large-scale slaughter would defeat the financial rationale for companies shifting out of reared meat in the first place. Activists can give conditional support to particular forms of cultured meat production but not others. If you would like to know more about the techniques used in production, some are described in papers for both academic and general readerships at the New Harvest website (http://www.new-harvest.org). Click to go back to the menu. Reproduction A very large number of cells can be produced from a single cell, so it is possible that almost no biopsies would be required to produce cultured meat on an ongoing basis. In this case, very few animals would come into contact with the cultured meat industry. This may be the best outcome from cultured meat manufacture, if biologists are able to deliver it. As the technology is new, there is scope for major contributions from experts in cell replication – the In Vitro Meat Consortium (http://invitromeat.org/) is actively seeking them. Click to go back to the menu. Approval Activists do not have to eat or even like cultured meat, just support it because of its potential to ruin the reared meat industry. Cultured meat can appear ghoulish to vegans, and ethically motivated people may not wish to eat it even if it did not use animal products at all. From an animal rights viewpoint, the major purpose of cultured meat is not to cater for vegans but for meat eaters, and in doing so to stop the cruelty associated with reared meat. Click to go back to the menu. Companies Activists do not have to like the companies involved in cultured meat production or their motivations, just use them as a means to reduce reared meat consumption. If cultured meat is successful, then the major companies using it will probably only be interested in it as the best way to increase their profits. Animals will be protected principally by people’s wish to make money. It is not a pure solution for people concerned about people’s ethical position towards animals, and apparently it could be precarious if reared meat again proves to be cheaper than cultured meat in future. But for the reasons outlined in this site, it is likely that a successful commercialisation of cheap cultured meat would offer substantial ongoing protection for animals. Moreover, it seems to be among the few chances of obtaining it. Click to go back to the menu. Rejection Rejecting cultured meat in all circumstances is qualitatively and quantitatively far graver in its implications for animals than perhaps any other rights position. The benefits of cultured meat accrue principally to the species whose meat is created, and it offers a real and rare chance to stop the suffering of billions of factory farmed animals. An abolitionist may reject the infliction of pain and slaughter on animals in any circumstance. In a world where animal abuse is common and where future consequences for continued animal suffering are uncertain, this stance can be viewed as protecting animals from the possibility of a bad long run outcome more than offsetting any benefit which could accrue from the original pain or slaughter. A rejectionist stance towards cultured meat goes far beyond the normal abolitionist position, because the likely consequences of rejecting cultured meat and indirectly helping to maintain reared meat consumption are as bad as it can foreseeably be for animals. In other words, the expected benefits for animals of successful cultured meat are very likely to outweigh the expected costs by an astronomic degree. Click to go back to the menu. About Cultured meat could ruin the reared meat industry and spare the suffering of hundreds of billions of animals. This page presents reasons for animal rights activists to support it. The header photo is kindly supplied courtesy of http://www.all-creatures.org/. Click to go back to the menu. |