The ethics of lab-grown meat

A version of this article was printed in The Irish Vegetarian, Issue 137, Winter 2013

Perhaps it’s fair to say that the concept of lab-grown meat was originally conceptualised by Winston Churchill, when he declared in a 1932 essay "Fifty Years Hence" that by 1982 “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.”

Eighty years on and the idea hasn’t gone away. About five years ago the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) gave scientists until 30th June 2012 to confirm they could create "cultured" meat -- also known as in vitro or lab-grown meat -- in commercial quantities.  They launched a prize winning competition, awarding $1 million to the first scientific team that could prove that artificial chicken can be grown in large quantity, which would be impossible to differentiate from actual chicken flesh.

This, you might suppose, sounds like the premise of a futuristic sci-fi novel. Fascinatingly, though, scientists have actually been working on the advance of technologies for producing lab-grown meat for consumption since the early 1950s. In spite of this, the belief of somebody coming close PETA’s challenge seemed unlikely.

That was until Professor Mark Post, of Maastricht University, Netherlands, announced to the world that he expects the world's first test tube beef hamburger -- produced at a cost of about €250,000 -- would be revealed in October this year. The Observer (21st January 2012) reported that Postand and his team of researchers have been given $300,000 by the Dutch government, as well as receiving additional funds from an anonymous donor.

Speaking at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Vancouver in February, he said: “we are going to provide a proof of conceptshowing out of stem cells we can make a product that looks, feels and hopefully tastes like meat.”

Post said his team, who have been working on the project for the past six years, have already successfully replicated the procedure with cow cells and calf serum.  “My vision,” Post claims, “is that you have a limited herd of donor animals in the world that you keep in stock and that you get your cells from there.” 

He confesses that some non-human animals will still have to be slaughtered to provide the bovine stem cells, but an individual animal would be able to produce about a million times more meat through the lab-based practice than through the conventional method of meat production. 

To produce a complete hamburger, Post estimates, his team will need to grow 3,000 strips of muscle tissue and a couple of hundred pieces of fat tissue. With the right funding and regulatory approval, he believes his method could be scaled up to commercial proportions within less than a decade.  

In light of this revelation, one may then ask: why bother going to such lengths to develop cultured meat technology?  We could avoid the killing and cruelty of billions of animals that is currently practiced in slaughterhouses and factory farms. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that the global consumption of meat is to double between 2000 and 2050, and the bulk of this increase is predicted to come from countries with developing economies, such as India and China. If this figure is accurate, the production of lab-grown meat would be a viable way to prevent an astronomical amount of animal cruelty in the future.

In addition, meat production is one of the main contributors to global environmental degradation -- global warming, loss of biodiversity, and fresh water scarcity. In a study published last year in Environmental Science & Technology, Hanna L. Tuomisto, and M. Joost Teixeira de Mattos argue that increased global demand “will also double meat’s impacts on the environment unless more efficient meat production methods are adopted.”

Their solution to the negative environmental impact is: “to grow only animal muscle tissue in vitro, instead of growing whole animals.” Interestingly, their results showed that cultured meat has 99% lower land use, 80-95% lower greenhouse gas emissions, and 80-90% lower water use compared to conventionally produced meat.

The study also suggests that lab-grown meat could have other possible benefits: “the quantity and quality of fat can be controlled, and, therefore, the nutrition-related diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, can be reduced.” It may also prevent the reach of animal-borne diseases.

So, would these proposed advantages convince vegetarians and vegans that lab-grown meat was ethically justifiable? Certainly it would seem difficult for vegetarians and vegans -- those concerned with the interest of non-human animals -- to say it is no more justifiable than conventional methods. Despite much improvement, some may find the production of lab-grown meat problematic since it won’t be entirely cruelty-free -- non-human animals, even then, would still have to be slaughtered to provide the bovine stem cells, although this norm would be remarkably reduced.

However, suppose -- in the future -- the production of lab-grown meat was free of all animal participation, no evident of health risks and it dramatically reduced the impact of polluting the environment, would vegetarians and vegans, then, have a moral objection to its consumption? Or, more specifically, would they have a moral objection to eating it themselves?

You might say that the idea of lab-grown meat is repulsive -- since it would still be actual meat flesh we are eating; the consumption of lab-grown meat, in other words, would be terrible because it’s revolting. Surely, though, this is not a convincing argument, but merely a “yuck” response. There are many types of food we find unpleasant -- the way, for example, some people find Brussels sprouts or mushroom unpleasant -- but we don’t say we have a moral objection against eating them.

Some might find the notion of cultured meat unnatural or disturbing -- the engineering of Frankenstein food, so to speak. Again this type of argument would appear quite emotive rather that one based on reason. In the early part of the twentieth-century, the philosopher G.E. Moore claimed, in Principia Ethica, that appeals to nature solely to make moral claims is to commit the “naturalistic fallacy”: “To argue that a thing is good because it is ‘natural,’ or bad because it is ‘unnatural,’ in these common senses of the term, is therefore certainly fallacious.”  Accordingly, it seems we have no basis to say that, since producing lab-grown meat is unnatural, it is therefore morally bad to produce and consume.

You might then appeal by saying: “I know lab-grown meat production is wrong, but I just can’t come up with a reason why.” The psychologist Jonathan Haidt names this fixed and confused preservation of a judgment, without supporting reasons, “moral dumbfounding”.  The clearest evidence of moral dumbfounding, Haidt argues, is when one will openly state that they know something, but cannot find a reason to support their conviction.

There may well be reasons why lab-grown meat would be morally objectionable -- unintended consequences are always a possibility, especially when the boundaries of science and technology are advancing. In spite of this, much of the evidence, at the moment anyway, as we have seen, seems to point to the opposite direction. The production of lab-grown meat is not intrinsically bad and we must look beyond out intuitions when we make moral evaluations of its operation. Vegetarians and vegans concerned with our current treatment of animals in society, I believe, should acknowledge the news that certain types of lab-grown meat could be commercially available over the next couple of decades, which could drastically reduce the amount of suffering currently assign in meat production.