Cultured meat deserves support from Congress
Congress should make a massive investment of federal funds into open-access cultured-meat research for the sake of the environment, animal welfare, and public health. For readers who aren’t familiar with the term, cultured meat is grown from cells, without slaughter.
While this might sound like science fiction, the revolutionary protein has already been granted regularity approval in Singapore. An Israeli company, Future Meat Technologies, has reduced its production cost to $7.50 for a quarter pound of cultured chicken. Further development is necessary to make the price competitive with slaughtered meat.
The environmental benefits of cultured meat are manifold. The land, fresh water, and greenhouse gas emissions required to produce it are a tiny fraction of those necessary to raise animals. Meanwhile, there is no runoff of agricultural waste into rivers and oceans, since cultured meat is produced in a closed system.
“Industrial livestock agriculture — raising cows, pigs and chickens — generates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all cars, trucks and automobiles combined,” Greenpeace states. “Cattle ranchers have clear cut millions of acres of forests for grazing pastures, inhibiting the landscape’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.”
Furthermore, as the environmental group notes, factory farms create huge cesspools of manure that emit methane and nitrous oxide, in addition to carbon dioxide. Over the course of a century, a pound of methane actually has 25 times as much of a negative impact on the climate than a pound of carbon dioxide.
The animal-welfare benefits offered by cultured meat should be apparent. We kill over a trillion aquatic and land animals every year for food. The amount of suffering this represents is impossible to comprehend. To put it in perspective, only about 107 billion humans have ever lived, according to the Population
Reference Bureau.
Widespread adoption of this new protein will help make the cruelty of battery cages, gestation crates, and livestock trucks a thing of the past. That’s where they belong. In our heart of hearts, we all know this to be true. We can take the necessary steps as a society to align our food system with our compassionate values.
“Those alive today are the generations that came to know better,” Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals. “We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, ‘What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?’”
The public-health benefits of cultured meat are very important. In contrast to its slaughtered counterpart, which is processed in filthy abattoirs, this no-kill protein is produced in sterile facilities. It doesn’t require artificial growth hormones and unnecessary antibiotics. The latter helps create antibiotic resistance in bacterial disease.
We’re currently experiencing a worldwide crisis caused by a zoonotic virus known as COVID-19. In recent years, we’ve seen a number of diseases make the leap from animals to humans. You might know some of them as swine flu or bird flu. Cultured meat eliminates such danger from food production.
“Giant industrial farms remain, even though it is blindingly, terrifyingly obvious that packing huge numbers of animals together in confined quarters breeds lethal disease,” anthropologist Wendy Orent writes in The Chicago Tribune. “It has happened over and over, and it will go on happening, so long as industrial farms continue to exist.”
Congress should reallocate the billions of dollars a year in subsidies the federal government gives to animal-exploitation industries to culturedmeat research. This groundbreaking protein will benefit the environment, animal welfare, and public health. We must transform our food system.
The animalwelfare benefits offered by cultured meat should be apparent.