(As a contrast to my post on regenerative farming and eating meat. It
does accept meat-eating but on the basis of producing it from live
animal-cell cultures, which still doesn't address the metabolic rift
question.)
New Republic
Jan Dutkiewicz, Gabriel N. Rosenberg/February 23, 2021
The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat
The rise of cellular agriculture will force consumers to consider the
moral consequences of torturing and killing animals for food.
Consider a steak. When it hits the hot oil in the pan, your mouth can’t
help but water at the aroma. That familiar crackle of fat beginning to
fry and render is the sound of the maillard reaction: that wondrous
molecular dance of the steak’s amino acids and sugars as they caramelize
during the searing process. When you pull it from the pan—it’s only a
few moments away now—and your teeth sink into the medium-rare flesh, you
will experience the textural contrast of the unctuous interior and the
crispy crust. But you won’t be thinking about chemistry. With the aroma,
the texture, and the savory juices coating your tongue, you will be
absorbed. This is what it feels like to eat a perfect steak, and it
feels good.
Now imagine that no animal suffered and died to provide you with this
pleasure. In early February, the Israeli company Aleph Farms announced
that it had 3-D printed a steak from live animal-cell cultures. The
approach simulates the vascular system of living animal tissue. This
means that as the steak grows, it develops as a dense web of sinew,
muscle, and fat that are practically indistinguishable from meat
harvested from the body of a dead cow. Its steak is a well-marbled rib eye.
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 JUST foods. Earlier that month, a
tasting restaurant for cell-based chicken opened in Israel,
reportedly serving a sandwich that tastes just “like a chicken burger.”
Prefer surf to turf? San Diego company Blue Nalu plans to launch
cultured seafood products in the near future.
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, and depends on the exploitation of vulnerable human workers at the
best of times. During Covid-19, slaughterhouses have become hubs of
infection. Animal agriculture also helps develop and spread other
zoonotic illnesses, such as H1N1 swine flu and H5N1—and more recently
H5N8—avian influenza, in addition to playing a role in the development
of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Objections to meat-eating slam into the stubborn fact that many people
enjoy eating it. A lot.
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.
Vegan and vegetarian critiques of meat have struggled to deal
productively with these pleasures. 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.
Admitting that many people might enjoy eating meat means reckoning with
the experiential costs of reducing meat consumption. Pleasures are tough
to shake. When faced with ethical abstractions like claims about animal
rights, many consumers will soberly nod along, even as they prepare to
take another bite. 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. The French
philosopher Georges Bataille encouraged people to look without flinching
at the carnage of the abattoir. He didn’t believe that seeing animal
slaughter should make people feel shame and renounce meat (he did
neither); rather, Bataille believed that disavowing the savagery of the
slaughterhouse evinced a cowardly “unseemliness” and that a society that
eats animals should unflinchingly face the violence of its pleasures. We
don’t need to agree with Bataille’s conclusions to agree that pleasure
must be examined head-on, and not ignored.
In the case of meat, we will need to understand the nature of the
pleasure in question: Do we take pleasure from the steak’s sizzle and/or
from the comforting childhood sense-memory of Dad slapping it on the
grill? Is it the turkey itself or the Thanksgiving dinner where it is
served? Or are we only satisfied when we know that this product came
from an animal? Is the fact that what we are eating once lived,
suffered, and died a crucial part of the way we think about tradition?
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.
Cellular agriculture will force us to be more precise about the nature
of the pleasures we crave.
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.
As Joel Stein observed in last Sunday’s New York Times, “I spend nearly
as much time talking about how I want to stop eating meat as I do eating
it. I care about animals and the environment and, even more, virtue
signaling about how much I care about animals and the environment. I
just don’t want to make any effort or sacrifice any pleasure.”
Back in 2008, when cellular agriculture seemed like futurist fantasy,
ethicists Patrick Hopkins and Austin Dacey recognized this exact dilemma
and wrote that what they dubbed “vegetarian meat” is “something that we
may be morally required to support” because (in theory) it works with
the pleasures of meat-eaters like Stein rather than against them: It
doesn’t ask them to sacrifice their pleasure in the name of normative
ethics. This is also what makes cellular agriculture a sadism test. If
cell-based meat can reach price, taste, and nutritional parity with
slaughter-based meat, and tick the other social and cultural boxes that
send consumers to the butcher, the only pleasure specific to
conventional meat that remains is the pleasure that comes from knowing
an animal died for your dinner.
Some meat-eaters will object, as the French minister of agriculture did
on Twitter in December, that “lab-grown” meats are unnatural
“Frankenfoods.” They will say that they desire the pleasure of “real”
meat. But after thousands of years of selective breeding and, more
recently, the widespread use of gene editing, artificial insemination,
growth hormones, and antibiotics, the vast majority of today’s livestock
is as distant from pristine nature as you, reading this on your computer
or phone, are from an ape. Nature doesn’t build abattoirs, force-feed
chickens to bursting, or pack swine into concentrated animal feeding
operations. Humans do.
Most meat, in other words, is not “natural” as consumers might
understand it, which should lead us to reflect on what we may desire
when we desire natural meat. As religious studies professor Alan
Levinovitz reminds us, treating the “natural” as intrinsically good or
moral can lead to practical and ethical errors. “Nature,” after all, can
be cruel; desiring the natural may mean desiring cruelty. Other
meat-eaters might resist this claim, touting meat produced using
holistic, ecologically friendly methods, such as regenerative cattle
grazing. But that would make meat far more scarce and expensive, and it
would still require slaughtering animals. It might just be a greener,
sadistic pleasure reserved for the wealthy.
Finally, meat-eaters may note that for some people and cultures, eating
meat is part of a more sustainable, symbiotic relationship with animals
and their ecosystems, rather than a consumer pleasure as we have
described it. True, our argument is not universal. But it does apply to
most American consumers. Just as our argument does not necessarily apply
to, for instance, Inuit communities, it does apply to non-Inuit critics
who would use Inuit hunting practices to justify their own eating
habits. Similarly, some consumers may have serious religious or
spiritual rationales that could complicate the consumption of cultured
meat. A debate in religious and scholarly circles is already in full
swing about what permutations of the cellular agriculture production
process would allow these novel food products to be considered kosher or
halal. We respect these important debates, but we do not think they
relate to the current majority of consumption of industrial meat
products. Gestures to the customs and beliefs of some cultures by people
from outside those cultures may be seized upon to justify but seldom to
honestly explain why consumers are eating either Big Macs in their cars
or $350 cuts of Wagyu at company dinners.
Surveys of consumer willingness to buy cellular agriculture products
vary wildly, ranging from outright refusal to eager anticipation. But
surveys about a theoretical product can only tell you so much. The proof
will be in the eating.
As (techno-) optimists, we think most people will decline the sadist’s
meal: When given the opportunity to indulge the pleasures of meat at a
similar price point without the need for animal suffering and death,
many humans will take it. But we are prepared to be wrong. It may be the
case that many people are attracted by the knowledge that a sentient
creature suffered and died for their dinner—that it helps those people
feel vigorous, predatory, dominant, and powerful, as the ecofeminist
scholar Carol Adams has argued. Depriving people of “real” steak may
soon be as central to right-wing grievances as guns: an item to be pried
from their cold dead hands. (Remember the uproar about the Green New
Deal allegedly taking away red-blooded Americans’ burgers.) But even
liberals and centrists should consider the lesson offered by thinkers
such as disability rights activist Sunaura Taylor, who links animal and
disability liberation; ethicist Lori Gruen, who argues that compassion
for animals helps develop “entangled empathy”; and legal scholar
Maneesha Deckha, who has written about the intersection of animal rights
with pluralism and postcolonialism: Actively choosing to reduce the
suffering of another can be a practical way to improve your general
capacity for empathy and compassion, both personally and politically.
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? In this sense, cellular agriculture, properly examined, should
force us to probe not just our dietary habits but also the larger
politics of pleasure and suffering as they are unequally distributed in
our society: What other forms of suffering make daily consumer pleasures
possible, and what would be required to make it otherwise? Cellular
agriculture offers the rare opportunity to recognize, respect, and even
fortify the cherished pleasures that many consumers take from meat even
as we work to address the very real interest animals have in avoiding
suffering and death. At the core of this approach is a commitment to a
more democratically hedonic society that offers robust and accessible
pleasures for all and where suffering and sacrifice are minimized or, if
they cannot be avoided, are borne not just by the poor, weak, and
vulnerable.
Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz
Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in
Montreal and a visiting fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at
Harvard University.
Gabriel N. Rosenberg @gnrosenberg
Gabriel N. Rosenberg teaches at Duke University and is the Duke
Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center.
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