Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

When most people think of lab grown meat, they immediately think “eww.” After all, our meat is supposed to come from healthy, fat, happy, grass fed cows, not some industrial chemical laboratory in New Jersey. The disgust with the prospect of lab grown meat makes sense, until you consider the alternative.

I hardly want to regale everyone with the horror of industrial farming from an ethical perspective so I’ll just leave you be with the fact that animals, especially complex mammals like cows and pigs, can feel pain. I’m not saying that they should have “rights” the same way humans do, but I am saying that there should be some moral consideration for their protection against excessive harm. There are also other significant negative effects of industrial meat production. The animal waste from industrial pig farms poisons water supplies and the air, for just one example of the negative environmental effects of meat. And most importantly, meat production is a meaningful contributor to climate change due to the methane emitted by the livestock themselves, as well as the changes in land-use due to expanding pastures for more animals.

In an ideal world, a carbon tax would make meat more expensive so as to reflect its environmental cost, but that wouldn’t deal with the ethical issue. For that, we would need to see some sort of sea change in either our attitudes towards the morality of industrial farming or some sort of alternative. And hopefully, some day, lab grown meat can be that alternative.