What if meat were no longer murder?

Will cows soon be safe from the meat industry?

I’ve not eaten meat for 26 years, so it was with some interest that a few weeks ago I read an article in the Guardian Weekend magazine about ‘fake’ meat and how scientists are looking into ways to make it more ‘meaty’. The feature is now on the Guardian’s website.

Two means of making fake meat were discussed. The first was pretty uncontroversial: using plant material to synthesise meat, much the same as Quorn today but actually tasting and - crucially - feeling like meat. I can’t actually remember the taste and texture of meat, but I understand that any replacement meat products currently on the market don’t come close.

Well, I say uncontroversial, but that’s not so to the many companies making millions from producing and selling the real thing. To them this research is highly problematic. But not from a moral standpoint. The second method, however, is more complicated.

In the future we could all be eating meat grown in test tubes.

This involves in-vitro meat - flesh grown in test tubes. Take a pig, or a cow, or any animal for that matter, kill it and, using stem cells, grow some meat. It’s obviously a lot more complex than that, involving all sorts of science magic. It also requires killing an animal. But, the article says, one animal “could provide the seed material for hundreds of tonnes of meat”. This is obviously much better than is currently the case - about 1,600 mammals and birds are slaughtered PER SECOND for human consumption, according the Guardian.

According to this Time article, the average person in the industrialised world eats around 176lbs of meat a year. There are 2,204 pounds in a tonne. So just one tonne of in-vitro meat would feed 12 people for a year. Hundreds of tonnes would feed thousands. One animal for thousands of people doesn’t sound like too bad odds (unless you happen to be that animal).

The in-vitro process seems to somehow remove the act of killing from the production of the meat - that cow can’t possibly have anything to do with those lab-grown steaks can it? And it certainly answers the environmental questions. But is it enough? For me, no. I want to see a process in which no animal is harmed.

What if that were possible? What if, instead of killing the cow, scientists could just administer a local anaesthetic and chop out the bit they need? Patch the cow up and send it on its merry way. They could ‘borrow’ animals used for other industries - dairy cattle, sheep or goats raised for their wool and so on. The environmental arguments against the meat industry are again safely rebutted, so what about the moral issues? The animals are no longer harmed and there’s no need for factory or intensive farming; in fact the few animals that were bred for meat production could live in the lap of luxury.

Guilt-free steak?

It seems I would no longer have a reason to be vegetarian. I’m still not sure I’d want to eat the meat though. Why? I’m not entirely sure. Its provenance doesn’t bother me, although I’m sure it would worry many people. I think that, after 26 years of not eating the stuff, the idea of ingesting flesh just doesn’t appeal. That said, I’d happily eat the plant-derived stuff, even if the taste and texture were exactly the same as the in-vitro version.