August 2013: The future of meat appears in London. At least, that’s how the media event I’m watching online has been billed. A hamburger made of bovine muscle cells grown in vitro is unveiled, then served to a panel of tasters while a studio audience of journalists watches. A promotional film describes the various ills that “cultured meat” promises to solve, ills caused by eating animals at industrial scale. Industrial animal agriculture possibly produces 14 to 18 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases. The byproducts of animal agriculture can pollute waterways and soil. Livestock, especially bovine livestock, is inefficient at turning plant foods into protein. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are a potential source of zoonotic diseases; furthermore, subtherapeutic dosing with antibiotics to speed animals’ growth builds antibiotic resistance in pathogens that can grow in feedlots.1 Billions of animals suffer in our meat production infrastructure, and the moral weight of that suffering depends on whom you ask, and on his or her philosophical views about animals. Today’s event conveys the implicit promise that “cultured meat” may solve all these problems. The short promotional film concludes with the words “be part of the solution.”
A second promotional film describes how the burger was made: The process started with a biopsy of cow muscle cells, followed by careful stimulation of a stem cell–driven, natural process of muscle repair, as cells were fed with growth media under carefully calibrated laboratory conditions. Gradually, what functions as a healing process in vivo (i.e., in living animals) becomes a meat production process, in vitro. Thus, the potential of stem cells to create new tissue becomes the biological grounds for a promise about the future of protein.
But this is only a test—or, only a taste. In vitro techniques cannot yet perfectly reproduce in vivo animal muscle and fat, and thus cannot perfectly reproduce what consumers recognize as meat. Cultured meat has yet to become delicious. Nor is the technology scalable. The techniques and materials are still too expensive. The burger taste-tested in London took months of lab time to make, and the entire project (materials, technician salaries, etc.) cost more than $300,000 US. If the holy grail of cultured meat research is to develop a product that can replace “cheap meat,” that is, the kind of meat that is produced at industrial scale and sold at fast-food restaurants, then the goal seems years or decades away.
If we succeed in growing meat—meat that never had parents, meat that was never part of a complete animal body—we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever. We will also transform our relationship with animal bodies, beginning at the level of the cell. Mark Post, the Dutch medical researcher who created the burger with the help of a team of scientists and technicians, seems hopeful and confident. He laughs good-naturedly with the journalists when they articulate their doubts. Of course, he acknowledges, it would be easier if everyone just became a vegetarian, but such a mass shift in human behavior doesn’t seem likely.
A Tale of Hope—or Hype?
October 2018: Scientists, entrepreneurs, and promoters are working to make cultured meat a reality. There is still no cultured meat on the market, but a handful of startup companies, many of them based in the San Francisco Bay area, promise that they will have a product to sell—presumably still not at the same price point as a fast-food hamburger or chicken nugget—in a matter of months or a handful of years.
I spent the years between the first in vitro hamburger unveiling and late 2018 conducting ethnographic research on the cultured meat movement, and I still cannot tell you if cultured meat will grace our tables soon. To the best of my knowledge, the two main technical challenges in cultured meat research have not yet been surmounted. One challenge is the creation of an affordably scalable growth medium not derived from animal sources (the current mix contains fetal bovine serum) and the other is the ability to create “thick” and texturally sophisticated tissue, such as that found in steak or pork chops, as opposed to growing two-dimensional sheets of cells and assembling them into meat. And beyond these technical challenges, cultured meat’s pioneers will need to find a way to make production “scale up” to the point where the cost of an individual serving of meat drops close to, or even equals, the cost of the conventional equivalent. In short, we don’t yet know what kind of technology story this is. Are we en route to success, or are we watching a cautionary tale in progress, one about hope and hype?
Much like self-driving cars, the advocates of which hope their use will reduce car crashes, cultured meat is promoted by those who believe in its practical and ethical benefits. But cultured meat is also like the self-driving car insofar as opinions vary as to whether a single technology can resolve a complex and, in some senses, social problem that involves not only engineering challenges but also the vagaries of human behavior. Like medical therapies based on stem cells, cultured meat excites the imagination and creates hope, but the hype seems to be running years or decades ahead of the reality. (Cultured meat itself is an offshoot of the effort to create tissues for transplant to human patients, an effort that goes by the name “regenerative medicine.”)
Cultured meat may one day come ashore on the high-tech equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys, where flying cars rust next to moldering piles of food pills, but it hasn’t yet. One of the forces keeping it afloat, both financially and in the popular imagination, is many people’s deep investment in the defense of animals. The cultured meat startups are linked by a loose social network of educated professionals, often vegans or vegetarians, who believe that cultured meat may accomplish what decades of animal protection activism has not, alleviating the suffering of animals in our food system. Not all venture capital investment in cultured meat research is inspired by a desire to protect animals, of course; there are investors interested in the potential environmental “cleanliness” of cultured meat, and those angling for a profit, just as profit orientation is part of the package for any investor. But the most vocal proponents of cultured meat speak more eagerly about the defense of animals than they do about the defense of the natural environment or human health, although they readily acknowledge that cultured meat (many of them call it “clean meat,” or use other terms) happily addresses all three needs at once.
Meet the Utilitarians
In addition to resources, the advocates of cultured meat have a philosophy ready to hand. Many of them are self-described utilitarians, readers of the works of philosopher Peter Singer, in particular his 1975 book Animal Liberation. In that book, Singer followed classical utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham by arguing that the way to determine the moral standing of animals is not by assessing their intellectual capacities relative to those of most humans but by asking if animals can suffer as humans do. Answering that question in the affirmative, Singer suggested that it was “speciesist” to deny moral standing to the suffering of animals. Many regard Animal Liberation as the bible of the contemporary animal rights movement, despite the fact that the book does not defend the rights of animals per se. Contrary to the thinking of some other philosophers concerned with animals, such as Tom Regan, Singer does not assert the inherent rights of animals, or (in what philosophers term a “deontological” fashion) define the maltreatment or even the use of animals as morally wrong. “I am a vegetarian,” Singer has written, “because I am a utilitarian.” Rather than focus on the inherent worth of a human or animal life, a utilitarian will ask how that life is contoured by experiences of suffering or happiness. These notions, unlike those such as inherent worth, are the conditions a utilitarian can measure with some hope of improving the world. Whether they share Singer’s ordering of concerns (first utilitarianism, then animal protection), many of cultured meat’s promoters have taken up Singer’s approach as a philosophical support for their work.
Utilitarianism combines the following features: It is consequentialist insofar as it judges right and wrong by considering the outcome of our actions, not preoccupying itself with the nature of those actions themselves. It is a doctrine of ends, not means. It is universalist insofar as it claims to take into account every being’s interests equally. It is welfarist in that it understands and measures people’s well-being in terms of the satisfaction of their needs. And it is aggregative in that it considers everyone’s interests added together with the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering for the greatest number. Individuals count only as part of the whole. Each one counts for one, never for more than one.
If this account of utilitarianism’s parts seems schematic, it is worth saying that many utilitarian accounts of the world can seem like line drawings or blueprints. As the philosopher Bernard Williams noted, this philosophy “appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty…is preferable to moral unclarity, no doubt because it is less alarming.”That is to say, for a utilitarian it is better to have a complicated job of balancing multiple interests than to be unsure what would count as a desirable outcome. Utilitarianism appeals to those who dislike moral ambiguity and to those who focus on outcomes; this characterization also applies to many actors in the world of cultured meat who eagerly anticipate an end to animal agriculture.
by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
A second promotional film describes how the burger was made: The process started with a biopsy of cow muscle cells, followed by careful stimulation of a stem cell–driven, natural process of muscle repair, as cells were fed with growth media under carefully calibrated laboratory conditions. Gradually, what functions as a healing process in vivo (i.e., in living animals) becomes a meat production process, in vitro. Thus, the potential of stem cells to create new tissue becomes the biological grounds for a promise about the future of protein.But this is only a test—or, only a taste. In vitro techniques cannot yet perfectly reproduce in vivo animal muscle and fat, and thus cannot perfectly reproduce what consumers recognize as meat. Cultured meat has yet to become delicious. Nor is the technology scalable. The techniques and materials are still too expensive. The burger taste-tested in London took months of lab time to make, and the entire project (materials, technician salaries, etc.) cost more than $300,000 US. If the holy grail of cultured meat research is to develop a product that can replace “cheap meat,” that is, the kind of meat that is produced at industrial scale and sold at fast-food restaurants, then the goal seems years or decades away.
If we succeed in growing meat—meat that never had parents, meat that was never part of a complete animal body—we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever. We will also transform our relationship with animal bodies, beginning at the level of the cell. Mark Post, the Dutch medical researcher who created the burger with the help of a team of scientists and technicians, seems hopeful and confident. He laughs good-naturedly with the journalists when they articulate their doubts. Of course, he acknowledges, it would be easier if everyone just became a vegetarian, but such a mass shift in human behavior doesn’t seem likely.
A Tale of Hope—or Hype?
October 2018: Scientists, entrepreneurs, and promoters are working to make cultured meat a reality. There is still no cultured meat on the market, but a handful of startup companies, many of them based in the San Francisco Bay area, promise that they will have a product to sell—presumably still not at the same price point as a fast-food hamburger or chicken nugget—in a matter of months or a handful of years.
I spent the years between the first in vitro hamburger unveiling and late 2018 conducting ethnographic research on the cultured meat movement, and I still cannot tell you if cultured meat will grace our tables soon. To the best of my knowledge, the two main technical challenges in cultured meat research have not yet been surmounted. One challenge is the creation of an affordably scalable growth medium not derived from animal sources (the current mix contains fetal bovine serum) and the other is the ability to create “thick” and texturally sophisticated tissue, such as that found in steak or pork chops, as opposed to growing two-dimensional sheets of cells and assembling them into meat. And beyond these technical challenges, cultured meat’s pioneers will need to find a way to make production “scale up” to the point where the cost of an individual serving of meat drops close to, or even equals, the cost of the conventional equivalent. In short, we don’t yet know what kind of technology story this is. Are we en route to success, or are we watching a cautionary tale in progress, one about hope and hype?
Much like self-driving cars, the advocates of which hope their use will reduce car crashes, cultured meat is promoted by those who believe in its practical and ethical benefits. But cultured meat is also like the self-driving car insofar as opinions vary as to whether a single technology can resolve a complex and, in some senses, social problem that involves not only engineering challenges but also the vagaries of human behavior. Like medical therapies based on stem cells, cultured meat excites the imagination and creates hope, but the hype seems to be running years or decades ahead of the reality. (Cultured meat itself is an offshoot of the effort to create tissues for transplant to human patients, an effort that goes by the name “regenerative medicine.”)
Cultured meat may one day come ashore on the high-tech equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys, where flying cars rust next to moldering piles of food pills, but it hasn’t yet. One of the forces keeping it afloat, both financially and in the popular imagination, is many people’s deep investment in the defense of animals. The cultured meat startups are linked by a loose social network of educated professionals, often vegans or vegetarians, who believe that cultured meat may accomplish what decades of animal protection activism has not, alleviating the suffering of animals in our food system. Not all venture capital investment in cultured meat research is inspired by a desire to protect animals, of course; there are investors interested in the potential environmental “cleanliness” of cultured meat, and those angling for a profit, just as profit orientation is part of the package for any investor. But the most vocal proponents of cultured meat speak more eagerly about the defense of animals than they do about the defense of the natural environment or human health, although they readily acknowledge that cultured meat (many of them call it “clean meat,” or use other terms) happily addresses all three needs at once.
Meet the Utilitarians
In addition to resources, the advocates of cultured meat have a philosophy ready to hand. Many of them are self-described utilitarians, readers of the works of philosopher Peter Singer, in particular his 1975 book Animal Liberation. In that book, Singer followed classical utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham by arguing that the way to determine the moral standing of animals is not by assessing their intellectual capacities relative to those of most humans but by asking if animals can suffer as humans do. Answering that question in the affirmative, Singer suggested that it was “speciesist” to deny moral standing to the suffering of animals. Many regard Animal Liberation as the bible of the contemporary animal rights movement, despite the fact that the book does not defend the rights of animals per se. Contrary to the thinking of some other philosophers concerned with animals, such as Tom Regan, Singer does not assert the inherent rights of animals, or (in what philosophers term a “deontological” fashion) define the maltreatment or even the use of animals as morally wrong. “I am a vegetarian,” Singer has written, “because I am a utilitarian.” Rather than focus on the inherent worth of a human or animal life, a utilitarian will ask how that life is contoured by experiences of suffering or happiness. These notions, unlike those such as inherent worth, are the conditions a utilitarian can measure with some hope of improving the world. Whether they share Singer’s ordering of concerns (first utilitarianism, then animal protection), many of cultured meat’s promoters have taken up Singer’s approach as a philosophical support for their work.
Utilitarianism combines the following features: It is consequentialist insofar as it judges right and wrong by considering the outcome of our actions, not preoccupying itself with the nature of those actions themselves. It is a doctrine of ends, not means. It is universalist insofar as it claims to take into account every being’s interests equally. It is welfarist in that it understands and measures people’s well-being in terms of the satisfaction of their needs. And it is aggregative in that it considers everyone’s interests added together with the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering for the greatest number. Individuals count only as part of the whole. Each one counts for one, never for more than one.
If this account of utilitarianism’s parts seems schematic, it is worth saying that many utilitarian accounts of the world can seem like line drawings or blueprints. As the philosopher Bernard Williams noted, this philosophy “appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty…is preferable to moral unclarity, no doubt because it is less alarming.”That is to say, for a utilitarian it is better to have a complicated job of balancing multiple interests than to be unsure what would count as a desirable outcome. Utilitarianism appeals to those who dislike moral ambiguity and to those who focus on outcomes; this characterization also applies to many actors in the world of cultured meat who eagerly anticipate an end to animal agriculture.
by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Alarmy
