Jesus, it's been two years since I've made an entry here. Thinking about it now it seems like such a short period of time, but when I really think about what's transpired since then it feels like an eternity. Anyways, I didn't want to reminisce, but since I couldn't help myself I'll just keep it to a minimum.
In my recent readings I've come across a series of three articles, one right after the other, that all have to do with the same subject, zombie meat. Actually, it's quite serendipitous that I came across them when I did, they come together in almost a perfect narrative. The first was an article in a scientific magazine that gave a brief overview of cultured meat, meat grown in a lab from animal stem cells. Then today I read an editorial by local writer John Kass (I knew I wasn't going to like it before I clicked on it). Almost immediately after I read a third article in a scientific magazine on the sustainability of beef production.
I'll give you the bullet points for these articles. Cultured meat: It is prohibitively expensive right now and there are questions as to its nutritional value, but it has the potential to drastically reduce the environmental impacts of meat production. From the article: "The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that demand for meat will swell by more than 70 percent by 2050. Already 30 percent of the world's ice-free land is devoted to feeding animals for meat thanks to the fact that cows and pigs convert only roughly 15 percent of the plants they eat into edible meat...The FAO estimates that livestock are responsible for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities."
Mr. Kass' article is, to put it simply, a tirade against cultured meat. It is a typical "change is bad"-type soliloquy positing cultured beef as some Frankenstein-esque example of science run amok while recalling the sights, sounds, and smells of cooking real meat. "This is the way the world ends," he says of cultured meat, and later "But before their sick dreams are realized, I hope I'm dead, because I refuse to live in a world without spits and coals and tasty real critters."
The last article I read talked about the sustainability of global meat production, or rather the lack of it. The takeaway-the less land we use for meat production the better. According to the article "Looking at alternate diet scenarios, if we shift all crops from current uses to direct human consumption, we could feed an additional 4 billion people," and "Animal products, which require more calories to produce than they end up creating, also need more land and represent one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions."
Now, a disclaimer to start, cultured meat is a very new technology and therefore is both prohibitively expensive and comes with many question marks. The first article states that "the lab meat would reduce methane pollution by 95 percent, as well as reduce the need for farmlands to feed livestock by 98 percent, according to a 2011 study by the University of Oxford published in Environmental Science and Technology," but only if certain technologies progress further in the coming years, by no means a guarantee. However, technology not only progresses and becomes more refined with time, the cost also comes down as improvements in the process are made and enough competitors join the mix. That there are technological or financial barriers is not a decent argument for abandoning a product altogether. The potential gains these articles put forward are massive. We could increase the efficiency of our farmland, divert more food resources to feeding people, perhaps even combat or wipe out malnutrition, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a sizable number, not to mention drastically reduce animal cruelty.
The response Mr. Kass gives is disappointing to say the least, if not unexpected. His entire article lacks substance, relying more on prose about his love affair with eating "real critters" and the horrors of modern science. The first part makes me wonder if there isn't a bit of spite in the anti-vegetarian mindset. Personally, I must admit this news of cultured meat is a bit exciting to me. I happily accept the challenge of abstaining from meat, but I can't say I wouldn't welcome being able to taste it again guilt-free, or that something like this might make managing my intake of vitamins that are normally attained through meat easier. If we could get all the nutritional benefits from meat and its taste from synthetic meat, then what would be the argument against abstaining from killing animals for consumption? I just like killing them? I have some nostalgic attachment to killing and eating them? I think it goes beyond even that, I think there's some sick pleasure that Mr. Kass gains from cooking something that was living and breathing, possibly some biological holdover from our hunter-gatherer days.
Anyways, beyond the reservations I have about killing animals for consumption, there are other consequences to eating "tasty real critters." Let's say everything falls into place tomorrow, the technology to make cultured meat viable is instantly available, it can reduce methane pollution by 95% and farmlands used to feed livestock by 98%, are Mr. Kass' romantic notions about consuming living animals really worth giving that up? He refers to a world where people eat synthetic meat as apocalyptic, but that is exactly the sort of world we are looking at if we don't cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Species are already dying, global temperatures are already shifting, and we are on the precipice of hitting some of the road markers in global temperature shifts that scientists have been warning us about. Even if our emissions are cut to zero tomorrow, the gasses already in thee atmosphere will continue to trap heat and drive global change. To reduce methane emissions by 95% would not only not be apocalyptic, it would help us to avert disastrous scenarios down the line.
We are sitting at a crossroads right now where we have the potential to do a lot of good. We have the ability to invest in new sources of energy that don't pollute our atmosphere, in new and old modes of transportation that reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses, in alternative ways of living that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make us healthier individuals for it. The world is changing, and many of us are trying to find constructive ways to change with it.
Mr. Kass is not one of those people. His article speaks of apocalyptic consequences, but provides no substantive arguments to support such hyperbole. He is rallying against the future and he doesn't know why. I think this is a fairly common theme among conservatives in this country, the world is changing and they don't know how to change with it. While it is true that tradition is important, it is also important to be able to change at the same time, to know what to let go of and what to hold on to. Lao-Tzu writes "Should you want to contain something, you must deliberately let it expand...Flexibility and yielding overcome adamant coerciveness." Change cannot be stopped, that is the way of things. People like Mr. Kass cannot understand that, they need to hold on to the world they remember, even in a coercive manner. Worse yet, they feel the need to pull as many people into their way of thinking, even if it's destructive. Is it worth giving up a 95% reduction in greenhouse gasses to preserve Mr. Kass' nostalgia, his view of how the world is, to keep the world as he sees and remembers it? Absolutely not. Mr. Kass' argument is an appeal to sentimentality, an appeal to tradition, and when that runs straight up against practical benefits to all of humanity then sentimentality and tradition must lose out.
