The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food

Product Information

The way we talk about what we eat is changing, and calling for the end of animal farming is part of that change. Some animal advocates like Reese are moving away from individual advocacy. Most of the time, that sounds like “Go vegan.” It’s the slogan of the farm animal movement thus far. It’s also now part of the latent status quo. The new direction, Reese says, is towards institutional change. It’s safe to say that cultured meat is more controllable. Technology can help us create the ideal nutritional profile for clean meat, which can make it healthier for our bodies. Is Clean Meat Safe? Vegans take this practice a step further by avoiding all animal products, whether for ingestion or another use. They don’t eat eggs or dairy products, for instance, and they don’t use leather or fur products.

JBLCA (2018) Diet reform and vegetarianism. Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. https://www.lib.umich.edu/janice-bluestein-longone-culinary-archive/diet-reform-and-vegetarianism. Accessed 22 Feb 2019 Clean meat promises to bridge the gap between meat eaters and vegans and vegetarians, perhaps raising awareness about how animals suffer for our evening steak, but it may still be slightly controversial for some vegans. As I’ll explain below, clean meat contains actual meat – but only one single cell from an actual living animal is needed. MFA (2017) Four out of five Americans want restaurants and grocers to end cruel factory farming practices. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/four-out-of-five-americans-want-restaurants-and-grocers-to-end-cruel-factory-farming-practices-300487484.html. Accessed 22 Feb 2019 The relationship between humans and other animals has been one of juxtaposition for thousands of years. Human desire for meat – whether for reasons of culture, society, or survival long ago – has resulted in predation, domestication, and the wide-spread industrial animal agriculture that is today harming the planet, the people, and of course the animals. But could clean meat help alter that relationship so we stop viewing other animals as edible products versus sentient beings? Clean meat is much safer than “real” meat when you look at the big picture of the health impact of the animal agriculture industry.A bioreactor is used to cultivate stem cells into muscle cells. These cells multiply, creating the basis for lab-grown meat. While a “bioreactor” may sound scary, it is much like fermenting beer, and some companies are even using fermentation-like processes to make clean meat. So don’t be put off by the clinical terms at this early point in the industry. A Scaffold Is Used to Mimic Animal Movement and Develop the Muscle Here is a bit of bad news: Humanity is committing an ongoing moral atrocity at an almost unthinkable scale. There is, however, also some good news: We might be able to end it more easily than people assume. There are two more interesting cases of social movements focusing on individual change. First, much environmental discussion focuses on personal consumption changes, including recycling, purchasing eco-friendly appliances, abstinence from high-emission activities such as flying and eating red meat, and abstinence from everyday uses of plastic, such as plastic cutlery and straws at restaurants. However, environmentalists have recently railed against this approach, condemning it as ‘green consumerism’ and calling for what they have seen to be a more effective tactic: institutional change, particularly government regulation and taxation of private industry (Monbiot, 2009).

We have to feed and water all those animals, and to what end? They don’t live out their natural lives but instead find themselves suffering before dying in slaughterhouses. That’s not a sustainable way to feed humanity. Factory farming of pigs in the Netherlands is a dead end,” he says. “We now know that a pig is not a thing: it is a sentient being with a high level of intelligence, comparable with the intelligence of a child. What I see worldwide is that many pig farmers don’t know any more what pigs are about. They just don’t have the skills to know what’s right and what’s wrong.” The final piece of evidence we must consider to evaluate the institutional approach is the influence of technology on the potential for social change. If humans were entirely driven by morality, animal activists would need only to expose the facts of animal sentience and animal suffering to have consumers swap out their cheeseburger for beans and rice. In this scenario, the individual approach—particularly one-by-one education—would hold much more promise. But in the real world, people also need assistance in overcoming weakness of will. The moral step of veganism or vegetarianism becomes far easier if one can swap out an animal-based beef burger for an Impossible Burger, a new food product made from wheat, potato, and other plant ingredients to mimic the culinary experience of the All-American beef burger (IF, 2018). And with the prospect of cost-competitive cell-cultured meat, real meat made with animal cells instead of a whole animal, swapping out conventional animal products may become far easier. In this way, the topic of conversation when using the individual approach tends to drift towards the individual, becoming a matter of personal preferences, beliefs, needs, wants, values, or other attributes. This obfuscates the moral imperative against animal suffering and exploitation. It also risks an unrealistic expectation of dietary purity, given that even the strictest vegans struggle to eliminate 100% of their contribution to animal exploitation due to issues such as animals killed in plant agriculture, tiny amounts of contamination from animal products, or consuming goods from retailers or food companies that serve animal products. Salganik MJ, Dodds PS, Watts DJ (2006) Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science 311:854–856. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066

End the Cage Age

Factory farming has produced swine and avian flu (named because they most likely started from hog farms and poultry farms). These diseases along have killed thousands around the world. When Will I Be Able to Buy Clean Meat? Piper, Kelsey (15 November 2018). "We could end factory farming this century". Vox . Retrieved 5 August 2019. Asch SE (1956) Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychol Monogr: Gen Appl 70:1–70. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718 Institutional change can be undertaken from a variety of ideological perspectives. For example, if one is an anti-capitalist, then one may seek to not just end industrial animal agriculture, but to ensure it is not replaced with a comparable market system. This may even require metaformative steps prior to work on any specific manifestation of capitalism, whether the food system, transportation, energy, or other morally pertinent sectors. On the other hand, from a pro-capitalist perspective, one may be particularly eager to displace industrial animal agriculture via market forces, such as encouraging large food companies to embrace and develop high-quality, affordable animal-free food technology.

The U.S. can only do so much alone. For one thing, most of the problem occurs elsewhere. 49 percent of farmed animals live in China, which has 60 billion of them and no real animal protection laws. India is the next-highest country with 8 billion, while the U.S. itself only has 1 billion. A billion sentient creatures is still a lot of lives, though, and Reese says work in the U.S. has great value because of this country’s role in setting global trends. Practices implemented here will likely spread elsewhere. Ultimately, though, China needs its own domestic movement for animal welfare, and some have proposed an international treaty on animal rights . In fact, it’s remarkable to me that there isn’t such a treaty. International agreement on the basic standards of care necessary for animals seems an important corollary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ferrara EL, Chong A, Duryea S (2012) Soap operas and fertility: evidence from Brazil. Am Econ J 4:1–31. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.4.4.1 Similar technologies will produce alternatives to dairy, eggs, honey, and other consumable products that depend on taking away from animals.

Alliance to Save our Antibiotics

Reese, Jacy (16 November 2018). "There's no such thing as humane meat or eggs. Stop kidding yourself". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 August 2019. Here there’s very good news indeed: Meat alternatives are improving all the time. Plant-based burgers no longer taste like plants. The Impossible Burger , for instance, has come extremely close to replicating the experience of eating hamburger meat, and is about to be made available in stores. I’ve had one (if you’re in New Orleans, they’re here ), and thought it was phenomenal. It’s been a decade since I had a “real” one, of course, so I’m not a reliable judge. But I have noticed that veggie burgers are getting better. I never used to like eating them, and I mostly live on pasta and rice dishes, but the new ones like Beyond Meat are in a whole different class. Vuolo M, Staff J (2013) Parent and child cigarette use: a longitudinal, multigenerational study. Pediatrics 132:e568–e577. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-0067

Although data is limited, there is also surprisingly large support even for radical policy change to animal agriculture. For example, 47% of U.S. adults supporting a ban on slaughterhouses and 32% believing ‘animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation’ (Riffkin, 2015; Reese, 2017). Effecting real-world institutional change is much more difficult than achieving poll results, but this still constitutes evidence for the relative tractability of institutional change, given fewer than 1% of U.S. adults follow a vegan diet (Faunalytics, 2014). I suspect I will get letters from effective altruists about this part. Do not bother sending them, I know all of your arguments. )Greenhouse gases, including carbon and methane emissions, are among the strongest arguments for cultured meat. Factory farms produce tremendous pollution. It consumes enormous amounts of land, water, energy, and crops, and contaminates soil, air, and groundwater. Sustainability Singer P (2009) Speciesism and moral status. Metaphilosophy 40:567–581. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2009.01608.x If we take all this survey data into account, institutional change might be able to garner much wider support and participation than individual change. This individual–institutional gap seems to be an underexplored research topic in the context of what makes social movements succeed. This gap may result from a rational consideration of how behaviour change is easier to adopt en masse with institutional support (e.g., if everyone in a city is vegetarian, then consumers will not have to search for vegetarian food options), or it may result from a difference in gut reaction to proposals of individual change versus institutional change (e.g., people might think of their own diet changing when a vegetarian diet is proposed, but think of other people’s diets changing when a ban on slaughterhouses is proposed). Introducing clean meat can help reduce the consumption of slaughtered animals and convince factory farmers to change their ways. If even a small percentage of the population decides to go with clean meat (when it becomes available, that is), we’ll have grown one step closer to creating a fair world for animals of all types. Promote Animal Welfare There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all the materials for building[the windmill]were at hand. But the problem the animals could notat firstsolve was how to break up the stone into pieces of suitable size.. . .Only after weeks of vain effort did the right idea occur to somebody. . . .The animals lashedropes around these[boulders], andthen all together. . .dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. . . . Frequently it took a whole day of exhausting effort to drag a single boulder to the top of the quarry, and sometimes when it was pushed over the edge it failed to break.