I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Simpsons did it
But for real, I am super interested in the concept of cultivated meat. I’m no vegan, but if less animals need to be mistreated and murdered for my steak, I’m not going to complain.
I mean I think in this case Norse mythology beat the Simpsons to this at least a few centuries before with Heidrun
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous. These synthetic meats are all fed fetal bovine serum. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is made by drawing blood from bovine fetuses via cardiac puncture at government-approved slaughterhouses. The collected blood is allowed to clot, then centrifuged to separate the serum from the red blood cells. The raw serum is then frozen and undergoes further processing, including sterile filtration, to become suitable for use in cell culture.
Any steak made this way would have to cost thousands of dollars.
Right now it is. The attention these projects are getting is intended to pique the interest of people who can help fund research into making the process more efficient and affordable.
If the animal has been given the best possible life it could have right to the moment of death would you still have misgivings about meat?
Unfortunately - and this is the problem - it is incredibly inefficient to raise animals properly. Almost any ‘humane’ animal products that you can think of have very harmful practices embedded in them.
Firstly - the animals having the best possible life right to the moment of death would still allow things like lamb. Surely giving a baby the best possible life before killing it young is still barbaric?
Secondly - secondary animal products would still require harmful practices. For a dairy cow to produce milk she has to be pregnant / have a baby. Some farms produce ‘humane’ dairy which involves allowing the mother and calf to live together, but then it also requires them to sell the male calves to be killed for veal because… what else would a male calf be for?
And finally, onto the point of inefficiency. Do you have any idea how many chickens are killed every single day to supply our food system? You probably do, but you may be unaware of what that means - the Earth does not have enough land possible to raise these chickens, it is physically impossible and that is just one farm animal.
So the future of a humane world for animals either involves quality synthetic meat, or everybody is suddenly happy to go vegan, or more likely; everybody remains carnivorous and we continue to torture animals.
the vast majority of male dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter. practically none of them end up as veal.
I barely have misgivings about meat as it is. But yes, an animal that is raised on quality feed, and given space to grow before being harvested is always going to be preferable to the industrial levels of farming that capitalism requires to meet demands.
Makes sense I enjoy meat as well but I try to stay away from factory farmed meats and mostly get meat from family farms or hunting but that’s not a luxury that everyone’s able to do.
It blows me away that some towns or cities only have a walmart for their grocery store.
Most animals behave pretty clearly as if they don’t want to die, and humans have been really bad, historically, at deciding correctly who is person enough to mind being enslaved/genocided/colonialized.
Warfare would look quite different if the winner had to eat the loser.
Bosmer lore in a nutshell.
Yes, it is still murder and their life was not full. I don’t care how pampered the animal was its life was still cut short and its purpose was solely as a commodity for human consumption.
Sure it’s murder but meat is delicious and I care for my animals before I slaughter them and use everything I can.