There are a host of unanswered questions about cultivated meat, produced in factories without having to kill an animal. Is it commercially viable? Does it further break our relationship to the natural world? Is it necessary? How will it affect farming and farmers? This post isn’t about those questions. Drawing on figures from the book I reviewed last week, Cultivated Meat to Secure our Future, this post is specifically about why the idea can’t be dismissed. It’s no silver bullet and there’s a lot of hype about it, but here are ten reasons to take cultivated meat seriously:
1 – Meat without violence. First of all, the obvious one: the widespread adoption of cultivated meat would save billions of animal lives. It prevents slaughter, and it also prevents the misery along the way. The vast majority of chickens, pigs and cattle are all raised in horrendous conditions. Cultivated meat would be produced without this abuse, and the fact that it exists would force livestock farmers to respond and improve conditions.
2 – Free up land. Cultivated meat can be produced in a fraction of the land taken up by existing meat production. It still requires a feedstock and so it still has a footprint, but it may be as much as 99% lower than current ranching and the vast fields of soy grown to support feedlot cattle. This freed up land could be used to grow crops directly for people, to grow energy crops, or it could be restored and rewilded.
3 – Increase biodiversity – Following directly on from the above, freed up land creates more space for wildlife. Ranching is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon, and cultivated meat would depress demand for more ranching land. Shrinking the ranching footprint would also reduce the number of times that domestic and wild animals interact, which is a driver of disease. Wild animals make up just 4% of life on earth. 35% of it is cows. Perhaps we could begin to redress the balance.
4 – Lower emissions – Beef is the most carbon intensive food on the planet, and when 35% of animal life is cattle, you have an emissions problem. Livestock farming has a similar carbon footprint to all the world’s cars, and while the number of vegans and vegetarians has increased, most people still want to eat meat. Cultivated meat could reduce the climate impact of meat production without banning something that people like – a vital approach if you want to keep them onside.
5 – Less energy – Meat without animals uses a fraction of the land and the water – over a 95% saving. The savings are lower on energy, but still significant when you consider the energy needs of raising the food that is fed to animals, and the global logistics of the meat industry. Cultured meat would need about a third of the energy.
6 – Less pollution – In the last couple of years England has woken up to the damage that has been done to our rivers, and that’s a story repeated anywhere that industrial farming has taken hold. Excess nutrients have choked the life out of rivers, but there would be no animal waste from a meat industry that doesn’t rear animals. There would still be waste, but its by-products are non-toxic and would cause an estimated 97% less eutrophication.
7 – Healthier – Some early proponents of cultivated meat argued that it would be healthier because it can be produced with less far. Then the industry realised that fat is one of things that makes meat satisfying to eat, and cultured meat will need fat if it is to taste right. The bigger win for health is that slaughtering and butchering an animal is a messy business. It’s very easy for meat to get contaminated with fecal bacteria, the leading cause of food poisoning. This would be impossible with cultured meat.
8 – Reduced risk of pandemics – an even bigger win for human health is the reduced risk of pandemics. As John Vidal warns in his book Fevered Planet, we’ve had a spate of pandemics and more are on their way. Most of them are zoonotic, orginating on factory farms where new viruses can easily emerge and proliferate and then leap between species. This too is impossible in an industry with no living animals.
9 – Reduced antibiotic resistance – A third major health benefit is the potential to steward antibiotics better. Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics over time, and the more they are used, the quicker that resistance develops. Vast quantities of antibiotics are fed to animals as a preventative measure, a spectacularly short-sighted practice that risks inflicting future generations with untreatable infections. Feeding unnecessary antibiotics to animals should be banned of course, but the problem wouldn’t even arise in an industry with no intensive farms.
10 – Disrupting big meat – this might sound like a long shot, but it is entirely possible that cultured meat could eventually undercut industrial farming on price. The cost has fallen dramatically already. A single burger that cost $325,000 in 2013 was down to $11 just two years later, and it can go much lower than that. And it’s worth remembering who risks losing their business to cultured meat. It won’t be family farms producing grass-fed and high welfare organic steak. There will still be demand for the ‘real thing’ and it probably can’t be replicated anyway. But if cultured meat can carve out a market share for sandwich tuna, chicken nuggets or pork sausages, it could be bad news for unsustainable and exploitative industries in urgent need of disruption.
None of this is a prediction. There are too many open questions to make a call on it at the moment. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. The reason to set out the potential of cultured meat here is that I’d say it would deserve our serious consideration for any one of those ten benefits. It would be worth the billions in research for two or three of them. All ten would be transformative, and it would be wise to watch this space.
The Earthbound Report 
Thank you!
Thank you for these interesting thoughts. I wonder about some of these arguments, however. Do you have more details to share?
Without violence: I seem to remember that actual animal cells are needed as feedstock – am I wrong on that? If not, how often does this feedstock need to be renewed? Wouldn’t that make it meat with less violence rather than no violence at all? (Still a good argument I guess, just a different one).
Healthier: contamination would definitely not come from the same source, but growing meat in a factory is probably quite difficult as well, just like making vaccines or insulin. Of course, we can trust that the industrial process is under control and that tainted products are very rare. This is what we do when we take medicine. But it is also what we do now when eating industrial-scale animal meat. Would the situation really be radically better?
Not arguing against anything, genuinely wondering about the strength of some of these arguments. It would not be the first time advantages of so-called “solutions” turn out to have been overstated, but it would not be the first time if some concerns prove unfounded.