Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

by Paul Shapiro

If you want a steak, you could just grow a steak, instead of raising and slaughtering an entire cow.

Once the price of clean meat is low enough, it will make not only ethical sense but also economic and ecological sense to replace slaughterhouse meat with clean meat.

We could use the wonders of bioengineering to construct either paradise or hell. It is up to all of us to choose wisely.

Humanity’s population has doubled since 1960, but our consumption of animal products has risen fivefold, and it’s projected by the United Nations to keep rising.

For each chicken you see, envision more than one thousand single-gallon jugs of water sitting next to it. Then imagine systematically, one by one, twisting the cap off each jug and pouring them all down the drain. That’s about how much water it takes to bring a single chicken from shell to shelf. In other words, you’d save more water skipping one family chicken dinner than by skipping six months of showers.

“I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, taste the same, and also be much healthier for everyone. One day we will look back and think how archaic our grandparents were in killing animals for food.”

we’re now facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance in human medicine, a problem that many medical and public health professionals say is due to animal agriculture.

About 80 percent of all antibiotics in America are fed to farm animals, not to treat illness but subtherapeutically as a means of promoting growth and preventing sickness

Concerned about the ability to continue using literally life-saving antibiotics in human medicine, the American Medical Association now calls for a federal ban on using antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals, but due to the ag and pharma lobby i...

animal feed is the leading cause of rainforest deforestation, essentially killing the lungs of our planet.

slogans like “Save the Rainforest” might be more instructive if they concluded with “Eat Less Meat.”

It was an inventor’s imagination, not a social movement’s moral argument, which rescued horses.

The poultry producers told him that, while many people think of their companies as being in the animal production business, they really see themselves as being in the protein production business. To them, it didn’t matter so much where that protein came from so long as it was healthy, safe, and nutritious.

“There are basically three things that can happen going forward,” Brin predicts. “One is that we all become vegetarian. I don’t think that’s really likely. The second is we ignore the issues and that leads to continued environmental harm, and the third option is we do something new.”

Ironically, the last thing soy producers want is for Americans to shift from meat to soy products like tofu and edamame, since the latter require so much less soy. As the Soybean Board report notes, “actions to maintain and expand animal agriculture in the United States—by supporting its long-term competitiveness—are of critical importance to the soybean sector.”

About half of American leather use goes to shoes, a third to furniture and car seats, and the rest to accessories.

“Traditional leather production leaves behind a vast carbon footprint, a destructive trail of environmental pollution, brutal animal suffering, and, often, disturbing human-rights violations.”

Today, huge amounts of leather get wasted because cows stubbornly don’t come in shapes resembling wallets, shoes, and wristwatches, but in the lab, you can grow leather into any shape you want.

To me, the leather was indistinguishable from an actual cow’s leather. Moreover, it only took mere weeks to grow, as opposed to leather from a cow, which takes years.

“I’m convinced that when we look back in thirty years on today, how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and handbags, we’ll see this as being wasteful, inhumane, and indeed crazy,” Forgacs presses. “We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. Perhaps we’re ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured.”

We may be taught to fear violent crime and terrorism, but the most serious threat we face is really from our own forks and knives. The number one killer of Americans is heart disease, which overwhelming evidence ties to a meat-heavy diet. Overconsumption of meat certainly isn’t the only cause of heart attacks, but it’s a major culprit.

Another major killer of Americans, cancer, is also connected to our desire to gorge ourselves on meat. The World Health Organization in 2016 classified processed meats as Group 1 carcinogens, meaning we’re as certain they cause cancer as we are about cigarettes.

My goodness

The fact that such rigorous thinkers as Harris and Dawkins believe that our present-day meat-eating will one day be viewed similarly to the slave system of our ancestors and yet still struggle to become vegetarians themselves—while conceding it’s the right thing to do—affirms the argument of many in the clean meat space. When even those who are persuaded that they shouldn’t eat animal-produced meat for some reason feel compelled to continue eating it, foods like Uma Valeti’s may help many bridge the gap between their values and their actions.

Great point

Factory farming is a major risk for investors. There are four inconvenient truths about factory farming—what I call the four horsemen of the apocalypse: human health, climate change, food security, and planetary resources. Factory-farmed meat is the number one user of freshwater, antibiotics, deforestation, and it just isn’t an efficient way to feed people. Farm animals are outpacing humans in demand for cereals now—we need to stop this madness.

“Recall that plant-based meat is just one-quarter of one percent of the meat sector now. Twenty percent is forty billion dollars per year.”

we don’t even yet know if clean meat will be regulated by the USDA or FDA; the former regulates meat, but its regulatory framework assumes that there are live animals involved and slaughter processes to inspect. The latter regulates all other food, including fish.

Farm subsidies cost the American taxpayer about $20 billion every year, more than double the EPA’s budget, mostly to support wealthy corporate farms.”

Brown’s goal is to convert meat-eaters to his plant-based meats, thereby converting pastures and cropland back into forest. In his words, he literally wants to “change the way the Earth looks from space.”

Even if clean beef replaced all conventional beef in America, the change would affect less than 1 percent of all farm animals in the country. Simply put, nearly all terrestrial farm animals in America are birds.

There are thirty-five million cattle slaughtered for food annually in the United States, compared to nearly nine billion chickens.

Put another way, when you include turkeys, that’s nearly three hundred birds killed every second of every day inside slaughter plants around the clock—just in America alone.

In 2014, Consumer Reports announced its survey of three hundred chicken breast samples purchased from American grocery stores. The result: virtually all of it—97 percent—harbored dangerous bacteria like Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli.

“Antibiotic-resistant infections are linked to at least two million illnesses and twenty-three thousand deaths in the United States each year,” Consumer Reports noted. This is one reason the Consumers Union—which publishes Consumer Reports—lobbies so strongly, yet so far unsuccessfully, to ban nontherapeutic antibiotic use in animal agriculture.

Sadly, forty-eight million Americans are sickened annually from food contaminated with Salmonella and other pathogens. And the biggest source of the problem is chicken and turkey meat. “More [food-borne illness] deaths were attributed to poultry than to any other commodity,” reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Of course we won’t have any Salmonella, since that’s an intestinal bug. Well, guess what? We won’t need intestines to produce our meat. People one day will marvel at how we thought it was normal to essentially play Russian roulette every time we ate some meat.”

In the field of cellular agriculture, these entrepreneurs are focused on the subfield of what’s typically called acellular agriculture. Cellular ag is best known for generating living cells (like muscle or skin cells) that can proliferate and become food or clothing. Acelluar ag entails coaxing living, microscopic organisms, like yeast, bacteria, algae, or fungi, to produce specific organic molecules such as fats and proteins that aren’t actually alive themselves.

“Cows are sacred in India, which means Hindus don’t kill them, but they still suffer enormously and are slaughtered for food anyway, just not by the Hindus.” In fact, India is tied with Brazil as the largest exporter of beef in the world.

“It takes us seventy-two hours to go from yeast to milk.” Gandhi beams. “For a cow, it’s two to three years before she can produce any milk at all. And you need all the resources to produce the hooves, intestines, horns, eyes, and all the other parts we don’t care about. At Perfect Day, we just need an udder and a brain.”

After all, nearly no one is making their food purchasing decisions based on what will maximize the sum total of happiness in the world, or even what will reduce the most amount of suffering. For better or worse, ethics are low on the list of criteria that shape most of our consumer behavior, especially when it comes to food. Instead, survey after survey shows that what matters most when it comes to our food purchasing are three factors: price, taste, and convenience. Food sustainability advocates may wish ethics, environment, or health were competing with those stark realities, but sadly they’re nowhere near the holy trinity of price, taste, and convenience.