Revision as of 16:57, 30 January 2018

Work in Progress

Clean Meat, otherwise known as in-vitro meat

In Paul Shapiro's book "Clean Meat", he makes the case for how cellular agriculture can transform the food production process and totally remove animals themselves from the equation. It is claimed that cultured meat, if made commercially viable, would be far more resource efficient, requiring up to 45% less energy, 96% less water, and 99% less land than conventional beef (Tuomisto & Mattos, 2011). Clean meat has the potential to put far less strain on the environment, and could require no animal suffering whatsoever.

Many vegans, however, do not seem to support this technology.

Opposition is rooted primarily in two camps, the health-based vegans, and the deontological, but there are also practical concerns to be raised about the process and concerns over whether the benefits might be exaggerated. While consequentialist ethical vegans broadly agree that if in-vitro grown meat can compete with meat of slaughtered animals then developing it is the moral thing to do, there are still a lot of unknowns. This article will attempt to address them, and highlight areas that are less clear.

Health based opposition

Some vegans, including vegans for ethical reasons, place human and societal health in high regard. Beyond animal ethics, it CAN be an ethical reason to be vegan to oppose the animal agriculture industry based on the harms to human beings (much like as one might oppose the soft drink industry, the smoking industry, etc.).

Clean meat, despite being much cleaner (minus most pathogens) than dirty animal suffering inducing meat, could still have numerous health disadvantages which exist in current meat, and clean red meat may still be carcinogenic.

Not all vegans are willing to take a quicker win for veganism at the cost of a less complete transition for human beings to healthier plant based diets.

It might be possible the tweak the fatty acid profiles of clean meat (more lauric and oleic acids, for example), and even the amino acid profiles (more lysine, less methionine), and remove the heme iron, but that may involve genetic engineering -- a technology which much of the public is afraid of and may use as a reason to oppose clean meat-- and would very likely also change the taste (the impossible burger achieves a meaty taste using heme iron from legume roots). For these reasons, it may be more effective from some perspectives to continue development of mock meats based on plant proteins and plant fats, promote a social change in taste, and utilize moral disgust of animal based meat to end reliance on what is viewed to be an inherently unhealthy food product.

Deontological opposition

Deontological vegans frequently oppose clean meats because they do not fall neatly under the definition of vegan, and because in some broad sense humans are "exploiting" the animals' biology or DNA, or because the original sample was taken without permission.

Definition of Vegan

The Definition of Vegan is subject to some debate, but the consequential ethical aspects are pretty strong in it. Still, many people take a hard-line position of saying clean meat isn't vegan, and point to the dietary terms in the second half of the vegan society definition, disregarding the spirit of the law in favor of the letter:

"In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

Because the cells are technically animal cells, clean meat would be animal derived (much in the way oysters are, by this strict definition, technically not vegan -- see weaknesses in the Definition of Vegan.

However, just because something isn't vegan, that doesn't mean it's wrong. It also doesn't mean vegans need to eat it in order to be generally supportive of the technology's development by encouraging others and contributing donations to the research.

Exploitation

The definition of exploitation itself is vague, ranging from the narrow-- harmful use -- to the broad: use in any sense.

From a consequentialist ethical perspective, it is clear that not all use is harmful, but harmful consequences are not a concern for deontologists: they are concerned with means that violate certain rules, and exploitation is a common one.
"that we never treat others as a means to an end, but rather as ends"

Development

Some concerns about it from vegans I think can come from the original use of animals to make its development possible in the first place, whether the cells and meat used to sample or the bovine serum (see growth medium below), and while consequentialists broadly realize that these smaller harms could be justified by the long term end of animal agriculture (given agreement that this is the consequence) deontologists don't think that way, and ANY harm, no matter how small, can never be justified by its ends no matter how enormously good.

Practical Skepticism

Growth Medium

A common criticism of in-vitro meat is that to develop it scientists use fetal bovine serum which is definitely not vegan since it comes from slaughtered pregnant cows. It's only taken for the sake of research and development, to analyse it and identify which kind of molecules are necessary for meat to grow, and all in-vitro meat companies seek to completely eliminate the need for it. In-vitro meat made from FBS wouldn't be any more ethical than meat from slaughtered animals, and relying on it economically makes no sense because it's an expensive product with unreliable supply.

Numerous start-ups are attempting to find more ethical alternatives for fetal bovine serum. This study investigated the feasibility of using platelet lysates (PL) as a substitute for FBS. Sourced from outdated human platelet donations. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22130485

There are serious pathogenic concerns over introducing human products into the food system, though.

There are also other synthetic alternatives. The drawback is that the non FBS alternative would take multiple sera to create the product. If you plan to grow muscle tissue, you'd need muscle tissue sera. For brain tissue, brain tissue sera, and so-on. But the sera do exist.

The technology is still new, so it's up to us to invest in research that could produce an efficient, ethical alternative to FBS that would render cultured meat commercially viable.

researchers have been able to effectively culture animals cells with a serum-free medium from maitake mushrooms. Some cells even show a higher rate of growth with maitake mushroom extract than with with FBS (Bhat & Fayaz, 2011). This could be a far more ethical alternative to fetal bovine serum for culturing animal cells. Without these alternatives, you can pretty much throw any ethical argument for clean meat out the window, which is why so many cellular ag companies are doing away with FBS.

References: Bhat, Z. F., & Fayaz, H. (2011). Prospectus of cultured meat—advancing meat alternatives. Journal of Food Science and Technology, 125-140. doi: 10.1007/s13197-010-0198-7

Cell Lines

There's also the concern of animal cell lines. Alongside a vegan growth medium, immortal cell lines is something in-vitro meat companies are aiming for, so they don't have to continuously do biopsies from live animals. But in fact not all in-vitro meat companies are actually aiming for immortal cell lines: Mosa Meats says they still need donor animals, with one sample of a cow being able to make 20,000 tons of beef (http://mosameat.eu/faq.html). It's much less harm with only a fraction of the number of animals used, so it's a huge improvement over current meat production, but it's still continuous use of animals and not quite the standards vegans may hope for. Now let's do some math. Netherland's population in about 17,200,000 people (https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/visualisaties/population-counter), and beef consumption per capita in Netherland in the last few years has been around 15.5 kilos (https://www.statista.com/statistics/618821/per-capita-consumption-of-beef-in-the-netherlands/). That means annual beef consumption for the entire population of Netherland (I take this country because it's where Mosa Meats is) is about 266,000,000 kilos. I suppose by "ton" Mosa Meats means non-metric ton, which converted to metric would mean 18,143,695 kilos. Let's divide: 266,000,000 / 18,143,695 ≈ 14.65 which would mean taking cells from 15 live cows per year could be able to supply the demand of beef in Netherland. Assuming the biopsy is harmless and not too invasive, this perpetual need of using cows might be a nitpick for a consequentialist vegan rather than a big deal.

However, most in-vitro meat companies (Modern Meadows immediately comes to mind) are looking for ways to remove animals entirely from the process.

99% less land claim

This claim is likely looking only at animal grazing footprint, and ignoring the land it takes to produce the growth medium.

Plant Based Meat

The response I've seen from some vegans is that it's unnecessary and useless, because we might as well eat vegetables instead. I think those are overestimating how much willpower people have, and are simply dismissing other people's taste for animal products because of how much more important they think their animalist cause is. I agree that the taste pleasure people are taking from animal products doesn't make up for all the ethical problems caused by animal farming, but that doesn't mean completely dismissing the taste of animal products shared by more than 90% of people is okay.

Some vegans might instead want to put focus on plant-derived alternatives to meat, but I'm not sure plant-based alternatives will convince billions of meat eaters around the globe to give up meat. The Beyond Burger was EXCELLENT. But I was already a vegan after trying it. I'm not sure it would've convinced me to drop the real thing and become vegetarian. And that's exactly what most consumers want. The real thing. And if enough people invest in this technology we can provide them the real thing (minus the animal suffering).

Yet many vegans/animal rights activists refuse to support clean meat. They prefer to set-up in public spaces, showing ridiculous videos of animals being tortured in factory farms, thinking that this would move people to make the rational decision. Or they urge meat eaters to try plant-based "alternatives" to meat products, assuring them that they taste JUST LIKE meat.

I'm afraid most of these tactics are futile, going from personal experience and also from history. As Shapiro points out in his book, it wasn't people's concern of horses that ended their use for transportation, it was the invention of the car. The discovery of kerosene saved the whales, not animal welfarist sentiment. Lab-grown meat can do the same for the chickens, pigs, and cows of today. It can literally save lives.

Agreed. I also think those vegans are misunderstanding the target audience of clean meat, which isn't vegetarians. As I stated in my original post, I think plant-based proteins taste great, but they're not going to convince billions of die heard meat-lovers to forfeit meat. However, with clean meat, they don't have to. They would have the exact same product sans wasted resources and animal suffering. I'm not asking vegetarians to try clean meat, I'm asking them to support this technology which could literally saves millions of lives.

Risk of non-viability

There also may be concerns about the technology's maturity and the feasability of the concept. I guess some people may think that putting faith in in-vitro meat is merely blind faith in technology, and might be as unrealistic as replacing all fossil fuels with solar panels. I'm not one of those people, the technology sounds more feasible and scalable to me than something like nuclear fusion, but I would like to know more about the technology's maturity. Does Shapiro talk about it in the book? There are reasons to be optimistic, after all the sequencing of the human genome originally took several years and billions of dollars of investment, now the sequencing of an individual's genome can be done for less than 1,000 dollars and only a few days. But I'd like to know more about the challenges biologists are facing and how realistic overcoming them might be.

Another concern I have seen being expressed is related to bacterial contamination. Because in-vitro grown meat would lack an immune system, it could easily be attacked by pathogens, making antibiotics necessary. But on the other hand proponents often say that not using antibiotics is one of the many advantages of in-vitro meat, my guess is that it's grown in an ultra sterile environment, similar to where "bubble babies" are forced to live because of their extremely impaired immune system.

Unfortunately, there are still quite a few challenges in making clean meat commercially viable, it's still quite a new technology after all. The biggest obstacle is the cost. The very first cultured hamburger costed over $300,000. Far more research is needed to develop the technology to make this accessible to large populations. In order to foster cell growth in a petri dish, you've got to have the right growth factors, which we just don't have to produce on a mass scale. Scientists are working hard to make this technology more affordable.

It seems as though the biggest obstacles are producing in-vitro meat on a mass-scale, all the while making it cheaper than the meat we already have.

Other in-vitro animal products

If, or rather hopefully when, in-vitro meat becomes a commercial reality I don't know for sure how I'll approach it. Maybe I'll still be competely disgusted at the idea of eating animal flesh even without the ethical concerns of animal slaughter, maybe I could try it occasionally to inspire meat eaters to eat it rather than meat of slaughtered animals, but either way I find unlikely that I'll eat it regularly again. On the other hand other animal products like dairy, leather and gelatin don't disgust me at the same fundamental level as meat for some reason, and I would have no rational or irrational objection to any of these if they become available animal-free like how some companies are working on them — and I'm not gonna lie, even as a vegan I can't deny how delicious dairy products can be and since they still don't make me irrationally disgusted like meat does I'd gladly introduce Perfect Day's yeast milk products in my diet once they become available.