Science carries on delivering its wonders to a suspicious and ungrateful world. Even the development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine in record time has not quelled our complaints about “Big Pharma” and its “excessive profits.”
But a yet greater revolution, vaster and more transformative, is on its way. Last week, Singapore became the first country to allow the commercial sale of manufactured meat. Chicken meat cultivated by the California-based company Eat Just will be soon available in restaurants in the world’s most forward-looking city-state.
Cultivated meat will change our planet benignly, utterly, and irreversibly: freeing up land, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and making obsolete much of the nastiness we currently inflict on other mammals.
We are not talking about a meat substitute. This is actual meat, grown in a nutrient rich-medium without the parts which, from a human point of view, are surplus. It is as if we could rear chicken breasts without feathers, skin, bones, feet, or brains that are capable of experiencing pain. Newspapers like to call it “lab-grown meat,” but it won’t be grown in labs for much longer. As commercial use becomes widespread, production will shift to factories in towns, allowing farmland to be rewilded.
We could be looking at the greatest change since our ancestors began to keep livestock over 10,000 years ago. At present, most of the world’s surface area is used to sustain the animals we devour, either through the production of feed grain or directly as pastureland. An alien visitor might assume that our planet existed to sustain domesticated animals and that we humans were there to service them. There are more chickens in Europe than all the wild birds put together. When we measure biomass, the combined weight of a species, the contrast is even starker. All the human beings on the planet put together weigh around 300 million tons, the large wild animals weigh around 100 million tons, and the farmed animals weigh 700 million tons.
The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has fleshed out the numbers. There are 200,000 wolves in the world but 400 million dogs, 40,000 lions but 400 million domestic cats, 50 million penguins but 20 billion chickens.
Most of us don’t like to think about the lives of those creatures — orphaned, imprisoned, mutilated, slaughtered. We like animals, but we also like eating animals, so we square the circle by vaguely telling ourselves that farming is doubtless more humane these days. But what if we could enjoy the meat without the farming? Wouldn’t we rush to make the switch?
You might be thinking, “I’d never put synthetic meat inside my mouth.” But let me suggest that the “yuck factor” involved in eating dead animals is, objectively, far greater. It’s just that familiarity has dulled our sensitivity.
I challenge you, the next time you are about to bite into some fried chicken, to think for a moment about where that bird came from. I’m not asking you actually to visit a chicken farm — trust me, having grown up on one, most people are well past the point where they could do that immediately before a meal. No, I’m just asking you to contemplate the life of that wretched bird: separated from its mother before birth, crammed into a box, raised without sunlight or fresh air, and fattened so that it can be prematurely killed by being lowered headfirst into an electrified vat. Is that really more palatable than cultivated chicken meat?
Livestock farmers the world over will lobby to put regulatory obstacles in the way of the new technology. I don’t blame them: It’s what every industry does when faced with an existential menace. But the change is coming. A shift to cultivated meat would reduce the land needed to produce food by around 99%, allowing nature to pour back into huge tracts of land — though some existing farmed landscapes would not doubt be retained for aesthetic reasons. Currently, livestock accounts for around 15% of greenhouse gas emissions — a proportion that is rising as meat becomes a staple in poorer countries. That figure would fall to close to zero.
Producers like to call it “clean meat,” and you can see their point. Quite apart from being removed from the pain and fear of the slaughterhouse, it is made without antibiotics and in a sterile environment, reducing the risk of E. coli and other infections.
Just as telephones replaced telegraphs and cars replaced horses, so this new technology will make much of farming obsolete. Of course, we feel a pang of regret, even of unease. But the potential gains are vast — as are the rewards for those countries that are quickest to follow Singapore.
