Tastes like chicken
Dr. Krauthammer saw it coming
Agood writer will stick with you. For years. Things that Paul Greenberg wrote three decades ago still come up when we read the news. And not just conservative writers crowd the mind. Deborah Mathis once wrote a column about teaching her son how to wear his jacket in a store, so as to not call attention to himself—and we cut it out and taped it to the wall. We wish we had it still.
Charles Krauthammer was such a writer. He’s missed. Hugely. We often wonder what he’d have to say about politics circa 2023.
We do know what he thought about laboratory-based food. Because he wrote about it. And—archives to the rescue!—we found that column from 2015 after we read about another step in the lab-based meat business this week.
What, Dr. Krauthammer mused, will future generations say about our contemporary practices, and how awful we are today?
“I’ve long thought it will be our treatment of animals. I’m convinced that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded and slaughtered them on an industrial scale—for the eating.”
He was no vegan. He was just smart. And knew that things change. Big things.
Enter lab-grown chicken meat. This could get thorny, with so many chicken farmers and chicken houses in Arkansas. Not to mention a certain big ol’ business based in northwest Arkansas that runs the show. But we suspicion that a full switch from chicken sandwiches to lab-grown chicken sandwiches will take a generation or two.
This week, for the first time, regulators approved the sale of chicken meat made from animal cells—that is, labgrown meat. It’s soon for the restaurant table. And in the coming years, the grocer. The Agriculture Department gave two California companies the approval to sell meat that’s officially named “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat. This isn’t the vegetable/soy bean/impossible burger stuff you see in the freezer section today. This is real meat, not a substitute.
For the record, the Food and Drug Administration has already said labgrown meat is safe to eat. That might not be enough of a green light for it to catch on. But at least we’re told it’s not dangerous.
Get this: The cultivated meat is grown in tanks, according to the Associated Press. It comes from cells that are taken from a living animal, an egg or a bank of cells somewhere. The meat comes out in large sheets and is shaped to resemble something that we’re used to. Ummm-good!
But don’t expect to see it in Kroger anytime soon. The lab stuff is expensive, time-consuming, and isn’t close to producing the amount of meat that Americans need every day. Then, there’s the ick factor. The AP reports that half of U.S. adults say they aren’t going to touch the stuff. So real farms are going to need to produce real animals for years still.
Back to the Krauthammer piece, because he always said things better than we ever could:
The eating of real meat, and its “extinction will, I believe, ultimately come. And be largely market-driven, as well. Science will find dietary substitutes that can be produced at infinitely less cost and effort. At which point, meat will become a kind of exotic indulgence, what the cigar is to the dying tobacco culture of today.
“As a moderate carnivore myself, I confess to living in Jeffersonian hypocrisy. It’s a bit late for me to live on berries and veggies. My concession to my qualms is a few idiosyncratic distinctions (of no particular import). And while I don’t demand that every chicken I consume be certified to have enjoyed an open meadow and a vibrant social life, if I can eat free range, I will.
“No, I’m not joining PETA. Indeed, I firmly believe that man is the measure of all things. Sometimes you have to choose. I cringe at medical experimentation, but if you need to study cats’ eyes in order to spare some humans from blindness, do it. (Though not to test cosmetics.) If the Delta smelt has to die to conserve 1.4 trillion gallons of water for the parched humans of California, so be it. If the mating habits of the Arctic caribou have to be disturbed so we can produce 1 million barrels of oil a day—on a drilling footprint the size of Dulles Airport in a refuge the size of Ireland—I say: Apologize to the amorous herd, then drill.
“The cheeseburger question we leave to our progeny. Though, when their time comes, they should refrain from moral preening. They will, by then, have invented abominations of their very own. Humans always do.”