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"Hamburger Helper"

by Gregg Easterbrook www.belief.net

 

For those who don’t eat meat because of the violent way animals are slaughtered, science may soon provide an alternative.

Vegetarianism springs from the belief that it is barbaric to kill animals for food, at least when other options are available.  Most people don't become vegetarians because they dislike what’s in beef, poultry, or fish per se; the  dislike turns on how the meat is obtained.  Hypothetically, if it were possible to have meat without harming animals, ethical arguments for vegetarianism would decline.  Of course, it's not possible to have meat without harming animals.  Not today.  But all that may change.

Quietly, researchers are working on what may be the greatest alteration in the food chain since the first time a big fish swallowed a little fish -- a system in which steaks, chops, and poultry are obtained without raising or killing animals.  This is not starry-eyed futurism.  Based on the current pace of research; it is entirely possible that within decades or less, the raising, grazing, and slaughtering of animals for meat and other products will have been eliminated in the Western world -- if not the entire world.  And yet people will happily chomp on burgers and chicken salad made of genuine meat, while wearing shoes of leather.

What is being researched is a so-far-unnamed technology that may inevitably end up being called "synthetic meat," though it will be genuine, not artificial.  Steaks, chops, fish fillets, and the rest are, in the end, clusters of cells.  Today, cattle's bodies culture the desired cells; then we slaughter and slice.  But there's no inherent reason why meat cells must have animals attached to them in order to grow.  Meat is obtained in this way simply because, since prehistory, it's been the only method available.  Suppose that instead, meat cells were directly cultured -- that is, induced to grow under controlled conditions in a production facility -- the way many pharmaceuticals are now made.  Such direct culturing of meat has already worked in laboratory experiments, though not on anything like a commercial scale.

How would a synthetic-meat food chain work?

Farmers would grow feedstock plants, probably cereals and corn, that would supply the basic carbohydrates on which all food is based.  The plants would also be genetically engineered to contain the protein and micronutrients, such as minerals, found in meats.  (Altering crop plants by adding protein and minerals is being worked on in laboratory tests, too, but is not yet practical.)  The plants would be harvested and taken to production facilities -- essentially, meat factories -- where their feedstock compounds would be broken down into a nutrient stew.  Cell cultures for the desired types of meat would then be introduced into the stews and induced to grow.  The end result would be beef or poultry that is real and biological, impossible to distinguish from the genuine article.  And since the cell cultures would be based on samples extracted in a process little different from a biopsy, no animals would be involved in the production process except perhaps the farmers' watchdogs and pets.

Today, a number of academic researchers and agribusiness firms are working on this idea, among them the Mexican food-research company Empresas La Moderna, which invented the baby carrot.  (Many of the world's high-yield wheat strains were developed in Mexico, as were the plants on which The Pill is based; but that's another story.)  Costs for synthetic meat now appear prohibitive, but many analysts assume that improving technology will eventually push the cost below that of conventional meat and then the idea should take off.  Lower-cost beef and poultry through synthetic culturing would also offer a boon to the developing world, where millions have protein-deficient diets because they cannot afford meat.

If synthetic meat were in stores today, many consumers would shun it as "not real."  And there would be questions, of course, about its safety -- questions made all the more pointed by the confused nature of current safety regulations for genetically engineered crop plants.  But in principle, there's no reason why the regulation of genetically engineered food products cannot be improved to the point at which synthetic meat would be reliably safe -- after all, from a cellular standpoint it would simply be a copy of the stuff people eat now.

And while meat from a cellular culture might seem "not real" to today's consumer, a century ago steaks and chicken breasts trimmed and shrink-wrapped with sell dates and bar codes would have seemed "not real" to consumers accustomed to purchasing whole beef cuts or birds directly from butchers.

Beyond the ethical advantage of eliminating animal mistreatment and slaughter from meat production, a synthetic food chain offers many other possible advantages.  Meat could be genetically enhanced to reduce fat, add micronutrients, and perhaps even add health-improvement compounds.  (Already, researchers are working on putting hepatitis B vaccine into bananas in the hopes of eventually inoculating the world against the hepatitis disease group.)

The land area required for grazing animals would be drastically reduced, allowing many millions of acres of the American West and other areas to be returned to nature -- calculations suggest that the plant feedstock for synthetic meat could be grown in less than a quarter of the acreage necessary to graze equivalent amounts of cattle.  Pollution from chicken and hogs wastes, a rising problem for the Chesapeake peninsula, the Carolinas, and many areas of the developing world, would be reduced or eliminated if chickens and hogs were no longer intensively raised. Today antibiotic-resistant bacteria are being detected in some commercial meats, because cattle and chickens are given high doses of antibiotics, which triggers resistance mutations; if beef and poultry were cultured rather than raised, this problem might be solved.  Farm-raised fish would no longer threaten wild fish if there were no longer any reason to raise fish on farms. Bovine methane, a source of bad jokes but also a significant greenhouse gas, would decline as cattle herds thinned.  The future countryside of the United States and many other nations might be quieter, cleaner, and much more similar to its pre-technological condition.

Of course, there would be economic upheaval, as grazing and herding ranches went out of business; but it's safe to project that there will be economic upheaval no matter what the future holds.  And as the world's numbers of cattle, poultry, and hogs dramatically declined, far fewer animals would suffer confinement and slaughter -- for that matter, far fewer animals would live, period.  Supposing we assume that it is in an animal’s interest to be alive, an overlooked aspect of the meat economy is that it brings life to many millions of animals.  If vegetarianism -- whether philosophical or technological -- becomes the standard human diet, total lives experienced by domesticated animals will dramatically decline.  (Wild-animal lives might increase on the space freed up to return to nature, but bear in mind, the natural condition for most animal lives is suffering and early death.)  A vision of a future in which human beings eat all the meat they desire, without ever harming an animal, may become surprisingly practical.  Today, we think of the way great-grandmother obtained her meat -- walking out to the farm chicken coop, grabbing a bird, and wringing its neck -- as backward and primitive.  Our descendants may consider any killing of animals for food to be primitive -- and yet still dine on steak.


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