Consumers need only opt for cellular meat over conventional meat: a choice between a moral right and a moral wrong. It is also an answer to the intransigence and passive cruelty of the everyday meat consumer.
JAN DUTKIEWICZ: You may soon be confronted at your local restaurant and grocery store with a dilemma that until now was the stuff of science fiction stories and philosophical thought experiments: If you have the choice of two steaks, one cultured in a lab and the other carved from a cow corpse, which are otherwise indistinguishable and similarly priced, which would you choose? As biotechnology scrambles centuries of human assumptions and debate about the relationship between eating, pleasure, and ethics, it also raises the possibility that eating animals may soon boil down to sadism, in its classical definition: deriving pleasure from inflicting suffering when other options exist.
Aleph Farms isn’t alone. Cellular agriculture, or the process of growing animal tissue from stem cells, is fast speeding toward mass-market release. In December, Singapore gave regulatory approval for the sale of cell-based meat to California-based food company Eat Just… There are many good reasons, aside from the fundamental question of whether it’s ethical to kill animals just because they taste nice, to reduce your meat consumption. Industrial meat agriculture releases huge quantities of methane into the air and is a driver of global climate change. Animal waste turns into runoff, polluting nearby watersheds or causing E. coli outbreaks by contaminating greens such as lettuce and spinach. Even pasture-raised meat, produced at scale, can drive deforestation in vulnerable ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon. The meat industry also abuses animals long before it actually kills them…
Many people reading these words will already know all this: The catastrophe of industrial meat is a poorly concealed secret. Still, those dimly aware of the realities continue to eat meat in staggering quantities—about 220 pounds of flesh each and every year for the average American, to be precise. Objections to meat-eating slam into the stubborn fact that many people enjoy eating it. A lot. Those pleasures span the gustatory and sensorial through to the complex emotional satisfactions tied to the commensality of meals with friends and loved ones, as well as to attachments to cultural, religious, and family traditions…
In 1789, Jeremy Bentham wrote that when it comes to moral consideration for animals, the key question is simply, “Can they suffer?” The goal of preventing this suffering and recognizing that animals’ interests—specifically to be free from confinement, pain, and slaughter—have moral value has undergirded the politics of animal protection throughout its history. From lefty Tom Regan through utilitarian Peter Singer and on to libertarian Robert Nozick, many philosophical treatments of the animal question simply conclude that ethics should trump enjoyment: Animals’ interests, rights, and welfare outweigh how they taste to humans…
To the extent that animal rights activists and theorists address the pleasures of meat-eating at all, they tend to present it as mere carnivorous false consciousness: People have merely been socialized to believe they enjoy eating animal flesh; if they just ate the right turnip or tempeh it would shatter this belief and unlock the authentic pleasures of plant-based food. Alternatively, they dismiss it as ethically trivial, hand-waving away the real sacrifices they demand of consumers. Consumers have mostly returned the favor by dismissing vegetarianism and veganism…
For some, being told they shouldn’t desire the pleasure of meat only makes eating it—and rubbing it in vegans’ faces—even more pleasurable. Denigrating other people’s pleasures as superficial, tawdry, and disposable may not change what those people desire, but it can alienate them. But we can learn important things from querying which pleasures people simply cannot do without, as these pleasures are a window into what they truly value and what sort of society produced them… For most of human history, the gustatory and social pleasures of meat have been inextricably linked to the suffering and deaths of sentient creatures. That made it difficult to distinguish sadists from people who just craved the flavor of bacon…
Even compassionate and empathetic people may prefer traditional meat, thinking it’s for reasons other than sadism — a gut reaction that tells them that lab meat won’t satisfy the dictates of tradition, custom, or scripture in the same way as an Easter ham, a summer barbecue, or zeroa on the seder plate. The challenge in those cases is to ask: “but why?” Why exactly does tradition demand that the food on the table be acquired from an animal that was previously living and conscious—and therefore definitionally suffered? Why exactly is someone more squeamish about eating something that spent time in a petri dish than about eating something that struggled as it died? What sorts of passive sadism have been passed along in assumptions we’ve never thought to question? And why? Are we content to live in a society governed by such assumptions? And how could we change this if we so desired?…
By uncoupling the pleasure of meat from suffering and death, cellular agriculture will force us to be more precise about the nature of the pleasures we crave. Its great promise is that, in changing everything about meat production, it changes nothing about meat consumption. Consumers need only opt for cellular meat over conventional meat: a choice between a moral right and a moral wrong that are otherwise indistinguishable. It is also an answer to the intransigence and passive cruelty of the everyday meat consumer. SOURCE…
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