Progress is evil -- because it undermines morality!
Via Pajamas Media, I'm glad to see something that I've wished for for years is likely to become a reality.
James Hudnall links this Wired piece about factory-grown meat, which wouldn't come from animals, but from live cell cultures:
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.
Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.
“All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro,” says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. “We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively.”
That will be great for humanity, as well as for animals. No more slaughtering, no more suffering. But will it please the vegetarians? James Hudnall thinks not:
Of course, vegetarians are going to read this story and say how horrible. Probably some meat eaters, too. But think about it. This is a way to provide meat without all the pollution from animal waste, all the grain that needs to be grown with pesticides and so on. The water consumption will probably be a lot less. There is also the good chance a high quality of meat can be produced, hygienically and safely. And no animals are caged or killed. None will suffer. It’s just mindless meat being grown. Pure protein.
No one will make vegetarians eat it, and of course one of the common objections -- the moral one -- will disappear. I do see a problem, however, with out-of-work animal rights activists.
A possibility I speculated about not long ago in my discussion of a leading animal rights activist who opposes animal cloning for purposes of meat production:
Imagine!
No slaughtering, no suffering, no breeding!
After all, Pacelle is on record as being against killing chickens for food. Why, if we consider the future of the technological developments he opposes, there'd be no need for humane policing of slaughterhouses -- because there wouldn't be any slaughterhouses! Mr. Pacelle could retire.
(Might that be what he's against?)
Let's face it, no well-funded activist wants to have his work disappear -- even if he cannot say so. Money aside, these folks are also morality police, who make their money by appealing to emotion.
Even if genetic engineering could eventually bring back extinct species like the Dodo bird or the passenger pigeon, moralistic environmentalist scolds could be counted on to oppose that, as it would deflate the primary moral thrust of their argument: that man does irrreversible damage. Allowing the reversal of damage is therefore a dire threat to the these champions of fake morality.
Large organizations thrive on the problems they're dedicated to fight. It is therefore not in their interest to eliminate the problems which are their lifeblood. So, if an organization is unfortunate enough to actually solve a problem it is dedicated to solving, it must find a new one or cease to exist. If some clever scientist came up with an inexpensive, readily available device that instantly sobered up drunks by neutralizing all alcohol in their systems, MADD could be counted on to oppose it. And so on.
Thus, I don't expect the organized animal rights activists to smile upon factory grown meat. More likely, they'd join forces with the Rifkinist Luddites and pronounce it a "dehumanizing" threat to all humans -- and (somehow) to all animals.
(Where's the beef? Oh the humanity!)
posted by Eric on 06.22.06 at 01:03 PM
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Comments
This has me conflicted. On the one hand, meat is good, and making environmentalists/hippies shut up is always cool. But, no animal has to die to make this meat, so it can't possibly taste as good.
Jon Thompson · June 22, 2006 03:35 PM
One thing that PETA types forget is that there are many more of animals that we eat than if we did NOT eat them.
In other words, there will be less killing of meat animals but there will be less birthing of them too. If we close beef packing plants, how many wild cattle do you expect there to be? Won't other carnivores eat them instead?
In further words, the pig and cattle biomass will decrease if we stop eating them.
Oh well, pass the synthetic steak sauce.
Whitehall · June 22, 2006 06:56 PM
Im with Jon. Not just for flavor reasons though. Meat is a thing to be gotten by killing. Might as well eat tofu otherwise, and what self respecting person wants to eat that?
Mick · June 23, 2006 12:16 AM
What is killing? Don't we kill plants in order to eat them? If live meat-cell cultures are grown in laboratories, once we cook and eat them isn't that killing? I don't see any reason why meat (or any other form of edible protein) has to come from a sentient being.
If we bred brainless cows and slaughtered them, would that be wrong too? I can't see why.
I'm not saying the animal rights people don't want to stop animal abuse or that the AIDS activists don't want to stop AIDS; I said "no well-funded activist wants to have his work disappear" -- by way of pointing out that it isn't in their interest to be left with nothing to do. If they succeed, they'll find new targets for their energies.
Prohibitionism was not limited to alcohol, and the anti-drug hysteria (especially the anti-marijuana movement) directly followed the repeal of prohibition. Not only that, legal regulation of liquor provided jobs for those previously engaged in prohibition law enforcement. (The Prohibitionist Party lost much momentum, of course, but continued to exist for many years.)
Nor did the civil rights movement end with successful desegregation or the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It quickly morphed into the affirmative action movement.
As to the anti-abortion lobby, I don't think they'd go home if Roe v. Wade was overturned. They'd keep on fighting in the individual states, one at a time. And even if they succeeded there, I think they't turn their focus to RU-487 and even contraceptives.
TJ, I don't see how anyone could object, except the people who have money or organizational commitments.
I hate changing the subject like this, but WTH -- this post is receding.... Anyway, whenever I see the word "bison" I think of W.C. Fields and the "Bisonette" family ("It's a Gift," 1934.)
They don't make Americans like Fields anymore. If they did he'd be locked up.
William Claude Dukenfield was the eldest of five children born to Cockney immigrant James Dukenfield and Philadelphia native Kate Felton. He went to school for four years, then quit to work with his father selling vegetables from a horse cart. At eleven, after many fights with his alcoholic father (who hit him on the head with a shovel), he ran away from home. For a while he lived in a hole in the ground, depending on stolen food and clothing. He was often beaten and spent nights in jail. His first regular job was delivering ice. By age thirteen he was a skilled pool player and juggler. It was then, at an amusement park in Norristown PA, that he was first hired as an entertainer. There he developed the technique of pretending to lose the things he was juggling. In 1893 he was employed as a juggler at Fortescue's Pier, Atlantic City. When business was slow he pretended to drown in the ocean (management thought his fake rescue would draw customers). By nineteen he was billed as "The Distinguished Comedian" and began opening bank accounts in every city he played. At age twenty-three he opened at the Palace in London and played with Sarah Bernhardt at Buckingham Palace.
To answer that we need to answer "What is life?", as killing is ostensibly the ending of it.
Since Im not feeling particularly philosophical, or even thoughtful for that matter, Ill just say that killing should involve lots of blood and leave it at that.
Mick · June 24, 2006 02:31 AM
Actually, they should get the global warming crowd on board.
One of the biggest sources of methane today is cattle ranches.
Seriously, though, from what I heard the biggest problem with lab-grown muscle was to get it... well... exercised properly. a randomly stimulate mass of tissue does not have the same texture as a specifically, directionally stimulated mass of tissue. This is probably why they're only promising ground meat at this point. Once it's ground, the texture difference is unnoticeable.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
This has me conflicted. On the one hand, meat is good, and making environmentalists/hippies shut up is always cool. But, no animal has to die to make this meat, so it can't possibly taste as good.