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When Meat Culture Meets Cultured-Meat
An article that appeared last week in AlterNet, written by Traci Hukill, sounded a strong warning about the prospect of laboratory-produced “cultured meat” substitutes to animal corpses as food, and the piece has attracted widespread attention. As a longtime ethical vegetarian who has written on this topic before, Hukill’s piece certainly attracted my own attention.
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COMMENTS
Posted by h.p.man on 01/08 at 07:55 AM
A refreshing article.
In general I applaud vegetarians ( I try to be
one myself, and have for many years ) ... but
almost everybody has witnessed a common
(human) tendency arise in some vegetarians, to assume a position of self righteousness .
It is comfortable to construct some moral
high ground and clamber on top of it... but
in reality is most likely an artificial construct of the mind. One has merely got stuck in a
fruitless backwater , which one
must leave behind to progress in any
significant way.
I personally would hope that I never feel the need to eat grown meat, or any other meat, but I know that in suitable circumstances of deprivation I probably would put my principles to one side. At present I am one of the fortunate, with access to all kinds of food products, and consequently am far from needing to fight for the bodies of other conscious things to sustain my own. I only hope my good fortune continues.
I assume, no doubt like Hukill, that my ethical/lifestyle choice to be vegetarian results in a reduction of the suffering of living beings in the world in at least some small way. However, I realise that other lifestyle choices I make will be increasing he net suffering of beings ( e.g. driving my car, wanting cheap consumer goods , going on holidays ) ... and
that just because I am vegetarian does not necessarily mean my net debt of suffering is less than a particular meat eater that I may happen upon.
So long as people want to eat meat, then this grown meat seems to hold the possibility of reducing the direct suffering of the multitudes that are born into, live and die in the hell worlds of the factory farms.
I do not think that a layer of grown muscle
cells is likely to experience life in the same
way as living cow. To grow a complete cow, capable of learning to walk, play, build relationship and rear it's young, just to take some cuts of meat and dispose of the rest, seems clearly to be a more serious ethical issue than directly growing the muscle fibers in a 'lab'. So I would not see it as something to campaign strongly against, while the world is covered with factory farms, and our soil and water is contaminated with the by products of these farms.
Posted by Todd Knows on 10/02 at 05:13 PM
It doesn't surprise me that people would be OK with something like this, they've been OK with the FDA permitting industry to perfuse our "food" with all sorts of additives that aren't even permitted in foodstuffs in other countries.
The US has THE most adulterated food in the world. So greedy and so corrupt is the system of safeguards that the end consumer has no way, or right, to know what is IN the food they buy. What's on the label is NOT what's IN the food. The FDA permits literally hundreds of adulterants added by industry to go in our food, without requiring products be labeled properly.
And you trust these people and organizations to keep us safe and to do the most ethical thing ? Please.
Posted by Dave Feuerman on 11/10 at 08:59 PM
There is certainly a cultured meat market out there. One day it will be found in a refrigerated section of Whole Foods, in between the slaughtered and the soy-based. The first consumers (early adopters) might be composed of vegetarians who yearn for the flavor of flesh, and want to brag to their friends that they eat meat grown in petri dishes. They'll call themselves "vegetarians, except for petri-meat." Unfortunately, for the aspiring meat culturers, veggie hot dogs and veggie burgers are being formulated to taste better every day. So to truly compete with the more mature and seemingly innocuous veggie meat market, cultured meat will need to be Kobe quality or at least indistinguishable to its factory farmed counterpart. Not an easy starting point for this new food.
However, as long as there is a meat market, there is an opportunity for cultured meat. It is a tremendous opportunity that we all recognize, but the path to growth of cultured meat in sales will likely be through niches and sales channels that none of us can exactly predict.
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