Veganism is all about reducing the harm we cause to sentient beings to the best of our ability.
This is why we don’t eat animal products. It’s impossible to take the body
part or secretion of a living being without exploitation and pain. Or is it?
If meat and other animal products could be made without harming animals,
would there finally be such a thing as vegan meat?
Hi it's Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget.
When it comes to lab grown meat, there are vegans on both sides of the debate.
With the potential for massive reductions in the environmental impact of animal agriculture
and an end to the suffering and death of trillions of animals every year,
why wouldn’t every vegan be championing the cause for test tube meat?
Well like most topics I set out to cover, cultured meat production is far more complicated
than it may first appear. We’re going to cover some of the pros and cons of cellular
agriculture and why it's a hot button within the vegan community.
As always, I’ll be barely scratching the surface and will provide links to citations,
further resources, and a full bibliography on the blog post for this video
linked in the description.
The concept of growing and maintaining muscle outside of the body is not new.
Starting in 1912, biologist Alexis Carrel kept cells from an embryonic chicken heart beating in a nutrient
bath in his laboratory for more than 20 years. In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote in a predictive
essay optimistically entitled Fifty Years Hence that, “We shall escape the absurdity
of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts
separately under a suitable medium.”
Over the decades from NASA-backed fish fillets made of goldfish cells to the 2013 taste test
of the first ever lab-grown burger, the cultured meat, well, culture, continues to grow.
[See a brief but thorough timeline in the ‘In-Vitro Meat” section of this essay]
The advantages of this method of meat creation are obvious. Despite the efforts, hopes and
dreams of vegans and activists alike, the global demand for meat is on the rise
with India and China leading the charge.
With animal agriculture contributing as much as 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions,
using a third of the earth’s fresh water, up to 45 percent of the Earth’s land, causing
91 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction and serving as a leading cause of species
extinction, ocean dead zones, and habitat destruction, the environmental implications
alone could be staggering.
A 2011 study concluded that, “cultured meat involves approximately 7–45% lower energy use...
78–96% lower GHG emissions, 99% lower land use, and 82–96% lower water use
depending on the product compared.” While these numbers sound promising, the study was
largely criticized for basing its numbers on a not-yet-proven method of cultured meat growth.
While still theoretical, a 2014 study accounting for
other potential production methods found that energy use for cultured meat actually
exceeded current levels for beef production, but had significantly lower greenhouse gas
emissions and land usage and was only higher than poultry in water usage.
The reality is that the actual environmental impact of cultured meat remains unknown because
it’s still in such an experimental phase. The ground meat grown for 2013’s seminal
burger was a relatively simple creation of pure protein. It lacked any of the fat and
blood that give meat its flavor or the firmness of once-active muscle tissue. In order to
create meat products of more substance, the muscle, which is what meat is after all, has
to be exercised and provided with artificial blood flow, oxygen, digestion and nutrition.
Some scientists speculate that this increased energy demand may negate any reduction in
land usage and agricultural input.
Basically, when it comes to the environmental benefits, it’s still too early to know.
So what about the other main benefit: an end to the suffering and death
of trillions of beings every year?
Here is where cultured meat has the potential to shine. Maybe. Eventually. There are several
significant hurdles to overcome before lab-grown meat can be called anything near
"cruelty and animal-free.” The major issues on the ethics end are establishing self-renewing
stem cells and finding plant-based materials for the growth medium and scaffolding.
To understand what that means, I’ll give a very simplified version of in-vitro meat
production. Initially, cells are taken via biopsy from a living animal and deposited
into a growth medium where they proliferate and grow. Eventually, in order to produce
meat products with more structure than the ground patty,
they will need a form of scaffolding to hold their shape.
The first ethical issues arise when considering the long-term viability of the initial harvested
cells. Professor Mark Post, the man behind the famous taste-tested burger, has said that,
“the most efficient way of taking the process forward would still involve slaughter,”
with a “limited herd of donor animals” kept for stock. Others in the movement envision
the establishment of a self-renewing stem cell line, meaning only an initial biopsy
would be required at which point the cell line would replicate indefinitely.
Yet another concern is that, given humanity’s love of the new, different and exotic, we
may start breeding specialty animals for cell harvesting, which would still require the
confinement and reproductive control of sentient beings.
As a side-note, Post’s famous burger was made with egg powder to enhance the taste,
introducing another level of animal suffering. This is by no means, however, a necessary practice.
The second major ethical issue and one that isn’t widely addressed in most of the news
reports on cultured meat, is the growth medium into which the cells are deposited.
At the moment, the most widely used medium is bovine fetal serum. Fetal serum from an array of
animals is commonly employed in a wide range of experiments, including those for tampons,
which I covered in my “Are Tampons Vegan?” video.
The harvesting of bovine fetal serum is far from transparent. One study reached out to
388 harvesting entities with only 4% responding with any kind of methodology data.
Five sources explicitly declared their harvesting methods to be confidential.
Of those that did respond, the typical procedure for fetal serum harvesting was “by cardiac puncture"
meaning a needle directly into the beating heart of the fetal cow. They specify
that, “Fetuses should be at least 3 months old; otherwise the heart is too small for
puncture.” The general process is as follows:
“At the time of slaughter, the cow is found to be pregnant during evisceration (removal
of the internal organs in the thorax and abdomen during processing of the slaughtered cow)
… The calf is removed quickly from the uterus [and] a cardiac puncture is performed by inserting
a needle between the ribs directly into the heart of the unanaesthesised fetus and blood
is extracted.” This bleeding process can take up to 35 minutes to complete while the
calf remains alive. Afterwards, “the fetus is processed for animal feed and extraction
of specific substances like fats and proteins, among other things.”
The study continued with a detailed debate as to whether the fetal cows can feel this
procedure and their possible slow death from anoxia, meaning lack of oxygen, from placental
separation, and estimated that between 1 and 2 million fetuses are harvested annually for serum.
All in all, fetal serum from any animal is not, by any stretch of the imagination, cruelty-free.
The good news is that the champions of the cultured meat movement seem to be invested
in finding plant-based medium alternatives with both algae and mushrooms providing promising options.
Fetal serum’s drawbacks don’t stop at the ethical line. There are scientific
concerns as batches vary considerably in their composition. It also poses the threat of pathogen
introduction, is not environmentally friendly and is cost-prohibitive. Dr. Neil Stephens
of Cardiff University states that: “Everyone in the field acknowledges this as a problem
… It currently undermines a lot of the arguments that people put forward in support of in vitro meat."
This leads into two of the additional pros of cultured meat, both revolving around human
health. Though I personally believe that health is the last worry when it comes to producing
a possible alternative to mass animal slaughter, it’s worth noting that the composition of
cultured meat can be altered to provide superior nutritional benefits. The level of fat and
type of fat can be selectively controlled. The threat of food contamination and spread
of pathogens would also be greatly reduced, as cultured meat would not involve all the
biohazards of traditional slaughter. So if scientists are able to create a self-replicating
cell line, thus eliminating the enslavement and potential slaughter of animals, and find
a suitable plant-based growth-medium and scaffolding, thus eliminating the cruelty of fetal serum
and other animal byproducts, what objections remain against going after this concept in full force?
Two of the largest are cost and what’s best described as “the ick factor.” Surveys
involving every range of dietary practice seem to indicate that the majority of people
are put off by the concept of lab-grown meat. Interestingly enough, those people with the
highest rates of meat consumption appear to be the most sensitive to disgust.
Of course cultured meat proponents emphasize that “lab-grown” is a bit of a misnomer.
While in the testing stages, the meat is grown in laboratories. However, were it to go to
commercial production, it would be made in factories just like all of our packaged food
items, and some could argue, would be more natural than other chemical concoctions the
public readily consumes. [see blog for an illustration of potential production methods].
Also, given what all we inject into our food animals from hormones to antibiotics, to our
outright manipulation of their genes, one could ask just how natural “standard”
animal products really are.
While cultured meat doesn’t require the use of GMO’s, it’s possible that genetically
modifying cells may allow them to reproduce faster and thus prove more economical.
Speaking of cost, Mark Post’s initial burger in 2013 cost approximately ￡250,000
(over $350,000) to produce. However, by 2015, Post stated that the cost is now down to ￡8.00.
As with any new technology, the initial cost investments will be steep, but Post and others
in the movement see cultured meat eventually attaining a competitive price to traditional
products, though most likely not for at least another decade.
The vegan community is most dramatically torn on either side of this issue. Some feel that
any product derived from an animal remains a form of exploitation. Others believe that
with the insurmountable fight against the ongoing animal holocaust and more non-vegans
being born every day, we need to search for practical and viable solutions to replace
humanity’s rising demand for meat.
The vegans on the pro-cultured meat side I’ve come across through my research say their
motivation is putting the animals’ interests above all else. They believe it’s unrealistic
to expect humanity on a global scale to cease or even reduce their consumption of animals.
Thus, providing an alternative that not only looks and tastes like but actually is meat
could be, with the proper harvesting method and growth medium, the most immediate path
to animal liberation currently available. With the concurrent rise of research into
milk and egg-producing yeast and cell-culture-grown leather and other animal byproducts, could
it be that the laboratory and not the picket line will be the ultimate genesis of a vegan world?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this hot debate in the comments below. If you’d like
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I know I didn't have much time, I like tacked it on at the end there, but there are people
who have made yeast that produces the milk of a cow.
And yeast that produces egg whites without a chicken.
That's molecularly identical.
From yeast.
You've got the milk yeast...and the egg yeast.
Maybe we can make a meat yeast?
Probably not.