Institute For The Future

Engineering Meat

I'm sure I'm not the first researcher to spend a day reading about the high costs--in terms of land, fuel, and water--involved with producing meat only to wander into a restaurant for dinner and wind up ordering a bacon cheeseburger. The problem is that, well, meat tastes good. And so a lot of the time--particularly when a suggestion from Washington University Professor Adam Shriver that scientists work to genetically engineer farm animals so they cannot feel pain. Noting a dislike for factory farming of animals in general, Shriver argues that if people want to continue eating cheap meat, "we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused." The idea is not to change the farm but the animals; block pain receptors in livestock so that while they would still require tons of environmental resources to produce, at least they would "avoid... suffering." Recognizing that factory farming doesn't just cause animals to suffer but has huge environmental costs, the nonprofit approach: Skip the animals altogether and just grow meat in a lab. Like genetically engineering animals, this sort of technology isn't commercially viable yet, but could be feasible in five to 10 years. Jason Matheny, the organization's executive director, argues that:

I’m personally optimistic that consumers would actually savor a product that tasted the same as the meat that they already know, but is guilt-free. For instance, we can control precisely the fatty acids, the fat content of the meat. So, in principle, cultured meat could give you hamburgers that prevented heart attacks rather than causing them. That’s something consumers would like. They’d also like to have meats where they have to worry less about food-borne illnesses. Huge numbers of chicken carcasses are tainted with Salmonella or Campylobacter, and often those strains are resistant to antibiotics. There are real public health problems in how we currently produce meat.

As this post at Policy Innovations notes, Matheny is in good conceptual company--with Winston Churchill, actually--who once said, "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." In other words, it all makes sense, intellectually. But I wonder whether that's sufficient. In aargues that while lab grown meat could alleviate some of the environmental problems involved in factory farming, it "does nothing to address the deeper, systemic issues of food production—we should be getting more intimate with our food by growing gardens, eating locally, and getting healthy." What both critiques highlight are the many conflicting values that will play out in food production over the next decade. We want sustainably grown, pain free, food that also fits our conceptions of being in sync with nature. We may have spent centuries raising livestock to the point that most of us can conceive of a burger without considering the cow, but taking the next step of removing the cow from the process just sort of feels wrong. It's the yuck factor, in other words. And while a number of pressures will alter how we produce food over the next decade, I think the biggest factor might remain what are stomachs will, and won't, tolerate.