Some people want lab grown meat for the sake of the animals. People like Matthew Adelstein, Amos Wollen, and me, like to go on and on about how ending factory farming would be an enormous moral gain for us all. These people are soft cuckholds who I bet don’t even bench that much. They probably go “honk shoo” when they sleep, and sit down to pee. Babies.
The real benefits of lab grown meat are for humans. After all, we are the main characters of Earth. This planet is like Planet of the Apes except on this planet, humans are the apes, and apes are the humans - which makes us the top dogs. As kings and queens of the blue marble, we stand to benefit a lot from lab grown meat, and should be opposed to Ron DeSantis style bans even if we don’t care about the cruelty of animal farming.
Delicacies on tap
Not an often spoken about benefit, but lab grown meat will probably be better tasting than animals. People sometimes like to gush about high quality meat (especially when they’re trying to convince me to eat it). “This is a filet of beef that’s been aged for 40 years in the womb of Hedone, the goddess of pleasure herself” - that sort of thing. However, we mostly don’t eat these delicacies. Most of the meat we eat is low quality and comes from animals that lived in squalor. Not an exaggeration, sometimes it needs to have pus squeezed out of it.
However, once we can print this stuff, there’s no reason why it can’t all be top quality. We’ll be able to decide exactly how much marbling we want on our steak. We can print delicacies without the high cost. Hell, I bet we can even make it without pus squirting out. It’s the height of gastronomy!
No more lockdowns
In 2015, Famous rich guy and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (look it up) Bill Gates once said “If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic”. We then got to work, and no disease has ever gotten out of control since.
Okay, okay, there was a minor blip where I was trapped indoors, ate noodles, and watched the entirety of Dragonball Z in my pants. There are a lot of theories on how Covid began, and I’m not going to act like I know loads about it - but the prevailing one is that it started at Wuhan Fish Market. Basically, hygiene in the market was bad, and it was a breeding ground for a disease that would go on to kill millions, infect more, and worst of all - force us to have work socials over Zoom.
Whether or not you think Covid actually came from the fish market doesn’t matter much. The fact is, most new zoonotic diseases come from animal agriculture.
Since 1940, an estimated 50% of zoonotic disease emergence has been associated with agriculture (1–3). This estimate, however, is necessarily conservative because only direct agricultural drivers are considered in the epidemiological literature, i.e., within the farm gate. Food systems have environmental impacts before and after the farm gate (4), such as land clearing, food processing, and waste disposal. Food systems therefore affect zoonotic disease emergence indirectly. The true contributions of food systems to recently emerged zoonotic diseases remain poorly characterized.
This is unsurprising. The animals are all kept in very confined spaces where they cough, spit, and shit and all over each other. These diseases then spread among them, multiply, and evolve, before latching themselves onto some poor farmer who will probably be accused of beastiality for the rest of his life.
It’s not just new diseases we have to worry about. An estimated 73% of world microbials are used on farm animals. Antibiotics are amazing, but this widespread use is making them less amazing. The UN estimates that by 2050, up to 10 Million people a year will die from drug resistant deaths. That’s about as much as Cancer currently kills. So, basically, speeding up drug resistance by keeping animal farms is at least a little bit like inventing Cancer. That’s pretty bad!
Environmental Gains
Lab Grown meat is often touted as a solution for the environmental harms that animal agriculture causes. Some estimates put it as causing 92% lower emissions than current farming methods. There’s been some cold water thrown on this recently, because one pre-print study claimed that current methods used to grow lab grown meat would cause more emissions not less if scaled up. Emphasis on the word “current” there. It seems a bit silly to judge the emissions of a global lab grown meat industry by the environmental impact of the small R&D labs today. In the future, lab grown meat won’t be made by a few people in lab coats, dripping pipettes onto a petri dish. It’ll presumably be made in giant efficient meat factories, which only sound a bit less scary than what we currently have. I think Liz Specht from The Good Food Institute puts it well.
“Just as we wouldn’t assess the environmental impact of solar panels based on 1980s prototype production methods, we shouldn’t assess cultivated meat’s potential impact using R&D-scale processes. To deliver on cultivated meat’s potential to help satisfy growing demand for meat, reduce climate impacts and create space for more sustainable farming, governments must develop sustainable, large-scale production.”
It makes sense that lab grown meat has more potential for environmentally friendly meat production than animal farming. Raising animals for food is insanely inefficient, because most of the energy animals consume goes to body heat. They also grow things we don’t use, like bones, eyes, and teeth. A well streamlined lab grown meat supply chain could cut out these inefficiencies, and produce way less methane and sewage run off to do it.
Apart from Sam Altman giving birth to a Digital God and killing us all, I think reigning in a hothouse Earth should probably be at the top of our list of concerns. It affects everything else. Mass Immigration. War. Famine. Biodiversity. Most things will get worse (or improve slower) if we can’t keep the planet from heating up, and that’s bad because I live here.
No More Slaughterhouses
Slaughterhouses are terrible places. There’s a reason we don’t go to them on school trips. Obviously, they’re not so great for animals, but funnily enough, they’re not great for us either. Strangely, if you spend all day cutting the heads off sentient beings screaming for their lives, it can have an impact on your mental health!
Slaughterhouse workers are more likely to be depressed, anxious, violent, criminals, and sex offenders. There are also reports of workers turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with the job. I doubt that we’ll see the same impact on the people that create lab grown meat. At worst, you might be cornered by a nerd at a dinner party telling you how they make synthetic foie gras. Something we must all be willing to endure.
Most importantly
The best result we’d get from lab grown meat would be vegans finally shutting up and leaving us alone. You can even have a Thanksgiving dinner without being forced to make them a cauliflower turkey or whatever the fuck they’re insisting on this year. Just imagine. A Christmas without anyone mentioning torture. Sounds serene.
The most important effect: presumably, it will be much, much cheaper. Having a low price is the only way it will take over the market
A great read as always. Its a shame that the end of animal ag will be through economic rather than moral considerations, but whatever gets the animals out of the system is a good thing.