here.
So, it's come to this. PETA has just announced a $1 million reward for the first group to make in vitro meat edible and tasty. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have decided that, in lieu of turning the whole world veg, they will promote research into suffering and death-free means of satisfying people's "meat addictions." (Talk of the Nation: Science Friday weighed in on this too.)
I mentioned in vitro meat in a guest blog post [on The World's Fair blog site] way back when. As a brief primer, this kind of meat cultivation bypasses such inefficiencies as bone and nerves, and goes straight for those cells - myoblasts, in my understanding - that would form muscle and seeks to grow only that (in a suitable medium, and likely scaffolded to more credibly emulate the thickness and texture of meat grown, well, in vivo). One of the foremost proponents stateside of this technology is a venture called New Harvest, but there is also plenty of interest across the pond (see, for example, the In Vitro Meat Symposium held earlier this month in Norway, a function sponsored by the In Vitro Meat Consortium).
According to William Saletan, the science reporter over at slate.com, PETA has taken some flack for this from those otherwise sympathetic to PETA's cause. Saletan, a self-avowed "big fan of lab meat," commends the group for taking this plunge, eschewing the purity of the position of eat no animal for the compromise of animal-less meat. Pragmatic, and still ethically palatable. Pardon the pun.
The arguments surrounding in vitro meat have also extended beyond the technical, and into the pragmatic and ecologically, socially, and ethically desirable. Basically, the idea is to identify the problems associated with current industrialized animal production processes - inefficiencies of production (feed-to-finished weight ratio), ecological harm from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in terms of waste and antibiotics, pain to sentient animals, etc. - and catalogue the ways that this technology circumvents them. Plus the added bonus of greater control of protein/fat content and environment. Beyond the strong pro-arguments, people tend to argue that animals will still have to die for this technology to work, or it never will work in the sense of really replacing the mouth feel and culinary pleasure of "real" steak, or who cares anyway? Animals are yummy. Period. (Lots of redundancy there, but how can I be sure you read "period" rather than just see . and stop?)
I'm not a big fan of lab meat, but am willing to engage in meaningful discussion here with people who might be invested. I gave part of my reasoning in the previous blog reference above. But I've been trying to work out more precisely what elements of the issue need to be given some thought, at least. We discussed this technology in a class I teach. In the discussion I tried to identify what I called "Infrastructural Constants" - things that in some way frame the industrialized food animal debate that we could have in this country. I came up with 6:
1. Industrial Processes (including centralized production and distribution networks)
2. Economic Constraints (i.e. the profit motive and economic networks of interaction)
3. Human Culinary Preferences (the yummy factor, but also cultural food practices)
4. Human Health (e.g. the Atkins diet)
5. Ethical Considerations (e.g. animal sentience)
6. The Animal Body and Behavior
I don't want to be too didactic here, so I'll leave the first five as they are there (even as they are overly simplified in that list). The sixth one, though, is worth a bit more explication. In Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, he quotes someone (I forget who) as referring to the industrial food animal as a "'protein machine with flaws.'" Those flaws, of course, emerge only in the context of the other five infrastructural givens. And to eliminate the flaws of the animal, we could seek to alter those other qualities, but it does seem easier (in a strange sense of easy) to engineer our way out of those flaws through modifications of the animal body. A protein machine still. Sans flaws.
From a WWII Filmstrip, "More Milk for Victory," 1942 (source)
That's why in vitro meat appears so seductive, to Saletan and even to PETA. But let me briefly enumerate three of my reservations - relationships, knowledge, and energy (and those last two are intricately related). I enumerate these three in the hopes of prompting discussion.
I worry about how alienated our relationships to the beings we consume as food become when what we eat is so precisely engineered for some ideal "us." No more pleasure from "living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend," as Wendell Berry puts it.
I worry about knowledge and energy, as well - the more control we take over the processes of protein production in this context, the more we have to know and the more energy we have to supply in order to make it happen. If we identify a continuum of wild creatures who feed themselves and somehow grow to lab-grown meat where most everything has to be under the purview of humans, well, I'm not so sanguine about the prospect of knowing enough and supplying enough to not create new flaws in our protein machines. The history of science and technology seems to be with me on that score. Of course domesticated animals exist somewhere on that continuum, and I'm not suggesting a return to pure hunting and gathering. But each extreme of the continuum has it's pressures.
Thoughts?
* For WG's bio, see this commentary on Wal-Mart and environmentalism. And then go here for his last post in a mini-series on mystery and knowledge.
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