Ideas
Feb 19, 2023 7:00 AM
Winters advocates for lab-grown meat as the quickest route to ending animal suffering, and thinks other vegans should get on board to speed things up. Indeed, designating lab-grown meat vegan seems a vegan decision, one that prioritizes the wider implications of lab-grown meat on the natural world above how comfortable it makes you personally feel.
Vegans also need to take control of the discussion surrounding lab-grown meat production if we are to ensure the technology progresses in a manner that is environmentally friendly. It is tempting to believe that lab-grown meat is pioneered by vegans, but the opposite is true. Cargill, one of America’s most powerful animal agricultural firms, is at the forefront of lab-grown meat investment. This is not done due to a desire to transition away from factory farming, but in recognition of an increasing population and an inflating market for protein. This is a problem for everybody who cares about animal suffering and climate change.
Still, lab-grown meat does not necessarily have a lower carbon footprint than animal agriculture, due to the large amount of energy involved in its production. To lower global agriculture’s overall carbon output, we need to ensure that the land freed in the emancipation of farm animals is used for renewable energy. Vegans need to help ensure lab-grown meat products are sold as purely lab-grown, not used to pad out existing meat products to reduce manufacturing costs. And if vegans apply pressure to manufacturers of lab-grown meat, we can encourage an end even to the harvesting of cells from live cattle through the creation of cell lines from which future meat cells can be sourced.
An ethical revolution in global agriculture is possible. But its full potential can only be realized with the use of “unnatural” technologies controlled by moral people, not businessmen. For vegans to turn their backs on lab-grown meat over the technicality of its being derived from an animal’s cells is silly. To argue that people simply go vegan to fight climate change and end animal exploitation is to deal with those issues in a parallel universe where the obstacles of context, economic viability, and personal preference vanish. We need to deal with the world as it is now: in peril. Permitting vegans and meat-eaters a get-out through contributing—however slightly—to the argument against lab-grown meat is to permit the continuation of animal exploitation and environmental destruction. And that isn’t very vegan, is it?
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Tags
#Lab-Grown Meat