This will surely get me into trouble, but like Cokie’s Law, it’s out there.
Red meat is nonexistent at my house, although not fowl and fish. The ecological and ethical debate about meat consumption rages, elevated by the advent of “cellular agriculture.” Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg atThe New Republic take it head on.
The usual environmental arguments apply. And the ethical ones. The pair also focuses on the fact that meat tastes good and gives pleasure. Overcoming that has always been a hangup. Except now there are nearly indistinguishable, lab-grown alternatives to the slaughterhouse:
As Joel Stein observed in last Sunday’s New York Times, “I spend nearly as much time talking about how I want to stop eating meat as I do eating it. I care about animals and the environment and, even more, virtue signaling about how much I care about animals and the environment. I just don’t want to make any effort or sacrifice any pleasure.”
Back in 2008, when cellular agriculture seemed like futurist fantasy, ethicists Patrick Hopkins and Austin Dacey recognized this exact dilemma and wrote that what they dubbed “vegetarian meat” is “something that we may be morally required to support” because (in theory) it works with the pleasures of meat-eaters like Stein rather than against them: It doesn’t ask them to sacrifice their pleasure in the name of normative ethics. This is also what makes cellular agriculture a sadism test. If cell-based meat can reach price, taste, and nutritional parity with slaughter-based meat, and tick the other social and cultural boxes that send consumers to the butcher, the only pleasure specific to conventional meat that remains is the pleasure that comes from knowing an animal died for your dinner.
While acknowledging people’s aversion to “Frankenfoods,” the pair grant ethical exemption to subsistence cultures like the Inuit, though it’s not clear why. Simply that in remote areas lab-grown meat will remain unavailable and unaffordable? And some religious practices might further complcate the ethical calculation, they admit. Which of these new foods might be considered considered kosher or halal?
As (techno-) optimists, we think most people will decline the sadist’s meal: When given the opportunity to indulge the pleasures of meat at a similar price point without the need for animal suffering and death, many humans will take it. But we are prepared to be wrong.
Or at least not to be right anytime soon.
This is not a snide observation and not an apologia for factory farming, but something I’ve wondered about for years, another complicating ethical factor, and one I have not seen addressed in this debate (unless I just missed it). If not for animal husbandry, how many domesticated species would be extinct, endangered, or ecological pestilences like feral pigs?