5 Reasons to Support Cultivated Meat – GWC Mag

When I stopped eating animals in 1993, I recall reading animal advocacy literature decrying that six billion land animals were slaughtered for food annually in the US. Today, 30 years later, the number is closer to 10 billion. The situation has also gotten worse around the globe as meat consumption keeps rising. 

What Motivates Food Choices?

What we in the plant-based movement have been doing hasn’t been working. Typically, we make three arguments for why people should eat fewer (or no) animals: it’s better for animal welfare, it’s better for the planet, and it’s better for our health. 

These three arguments certainly have merit, but sadly, animals, planet, and health are far from the top motivators of food purchases. Rather, most people decide what to eat based on taste, price, and convenience. In other words, if the taste isn’t great, if the price is too high, and if the food is hard to get, the chance of most people choosing their food based on animals or the planet (or even their health) is remote.

Most People Want Cars, and Most People Want Meat

It’d be great if people wanted to walk and bike more, but most people want to drive. That’s why making cars that don’t run on fossil fuels is so important. Similarly, most people want meat. It’d be great if people were happy to switch from meat to hummus wraps and lentil soup—I love those foods—but sadly, most people want meat. So we must give them a chance to “satiate their meat-tooth” without animals. 

Plant-based meats are doing a better and better job of this each year, but they still represent a tiny fraction of the meat industry and are almost always sold at prices far above animal-based meat. Just like we need lots of different clean energy solutions—wind, solar, geothermal, etc.—we need lots of clean protein solutions. 

That’s where cultivated meat comes in. Yes, we’re talking here about real, actual animal meat, simply grown without animals. I wrote a book on the topic, Clean Meat, that chronicles the journey of the entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors all racing to commercialize the world’s first slaughter-free animal meat. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it’s now science fact.

And with the US government’s historic approval of such meat recently, now is a good time to go over why this nascent industry is worth supporting.

Cultivated Meat Helps Prevent Animal Cruelty

Think about chickens. Nearly all of them in America languish inside overcrowded factory farms, living in their feces, never feeling the sun on their back or stepping foot on a blade of grass. They’re often pumped full of drugs like antibiotics and have been genetically selected to grow so big, so fast, that many have difficulty walking more than a few steps. And when they’re taken to slaughter, well, let’s just say you’d rather not know. 

Cultivated meat can avoid all of this. Not only is meat grown without animals free from the factory farm, but it also does not require any animal inputs at all. This stands in stark contrast to many organic fruit and vegetable farms, which typically use all manner of animal inputs, from blood meal to feces to bone meal. 

Cultivated Meat Helps Improve Food Safety

The term “clean meat” was popularized by the nonprofit Good Food Institute, and with good reason. Like clean energy, clean meat is cleaner for the planet, but also, the meat itself is just cleaner. Think about it: We’re warned to treat raw meat in our kitchens almost like toxic waste—why? Because there’s fecal contamination on it. E Coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter—these are all intestinal pathogens that can sicken us if we don’t cook the crap out of our meat–literally. 

But when growing clean meat, you’re just growing muscle and don’t need intestines at all. This absence of pathogenic bacteria means that clean meat doesn’t spoil nearly as fast as conventional meat, which is one reason why many food safety experts are so enthusiastic about it.

Cultivated Meat Helps Free Up Agricultural Land

Raising animals for food is a leading cause of rainforest destruction. Vox writes about the causes of deforestation: “It’s not toilet paper or hardwood floors or even palm oil. It’s beef. Clearing trees for cattle is the leading driver of deforestation, by a long shot. It causes more than double the deforestation that’s linked to soy, oil palm, and wood products combined, according to the World Wildlife Fund.”

The Washington Post ran a similar story called “Devouring the Rainforest” entirely about how American appetite for meat is putting the Amazonian rainforest animals on the path to extinction. 

The deforestation caused by animal agriculture is such a driver of species decline that the Center for Biological Diversity’s number one recommendation to help give wildlife a fighting chance is a simple, three-word slogan: Eat Less Meat. If we took their advice, we could convert a lot of agricultural land back into the forestland it once was.

Cultivated Meat Helps Feed a Growing Population.

Imagine a man at a gas station standing three feet from his car, squinting as he aims the pump toward his gas tank with both hands. As he squeezes the nozzle, gas sprays all over the car. A small portion makes it into the tank, but most of it splashes down the back door and trunk, running all over the ground. 

You’d probably think this man was deranged, and you’d be right.

Yet this is pretty much what we do when we funnel crops through animals to eat those animals. We simply waste a huge amount of food.

According to the World Resources Institute, a chicken needs about nine calories of feed for one calorie of edible meat in return. This is one reason many call farm animals “protein factories in reverse.” Huge amounts of feed grain are required to produce meat, which is grown on land that could otherwise be dedicated to growing crops for human consumption.

Experts agree that factory farming animals garner a bad return on investment. As Oxfam notes, “It takes massive amounts of land, water, fertilizer, oil, and other resources to produce meat, significantly more than it requires to grow other nutritious and delicious kinds of food.”

Cultivated Meat Helps Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The animal agriculture industry creates more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector combined. Let that sink in: Raising animals for food contributes more to Climate change than all cars, all boats, all planes, all trains, and all trucks—all combined.

Cultivated meat, on the other hand, uses a small fraction of the resources of slaughter-based meat. A recent peer-reviewed, published lifecycle analysis, for example, found that “commercial scale cultivated meat is almost three times more efficient in turning crops into meat than chicken, the most efficient animal.” Other analyses find lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with cultivated meat. (More here.)

Taking Action: A Future in Which Meat is Divorced from Animal Slaughter

Cultivated meat is now being sold in two American restaurants—in San Francisco and Washington, DC—and hopefully will become more available in the years to come. No one cares whether vegetarians and vegans eat this—it’s not intended for us. Rather, it’s intended for people who’d otherwise eat slaughter-based meat. 

Since the number of animals used for food has only skyrocketed since I became vegan in 1993, it’s clear we need a new option. Cultivated meat isn’t the only way to make a dent in these numbers, but it’s a promising solution to the vexing problem of how humanity can wean ourselves off a diet reliant on animal slaughter.

Yes, we can and should switch toward a more plant-based diet—eating less meat is a wonderful way to protect the planet and our health, and there are fantastic plant-based meat alternatives that make such a shift easier than ever. 

Yet just as we need many different types of clean energy, cultivated meat is another promising alternative to factory farming that deserves our Support. 

Is it possible that in that future, a factory farm will one day seem as archaic to us as a whaling ship? Might a slaughterhouse knife be viewed as much of a relic of a technologically primitive past as a whaling harpoon seems to us today? 

I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine. And I, for one, am looking forward to tasting that cleaner, greener, more sustainable, and more humane world.

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