Lab Grown Meat - the good, the bad and the ugly.
I started out this morning planning to write an essay, based around my reading over the last few months, on lab grown meat and it's pros and cons.
I was going to go into detail of the production and the arguments for and against.... but even just making notes I have got to 3 A4 pages ... and I think that if I continued with my plan most people would not get to the end of the article. .... So instead I am going to point you to the people who have already written / produced articles and videos on the subject.
I have to be honest that I started out fairly anti lab grown meat - even before looking into it. I then however found some really excellent articles and videos on favour and began to change my opinion. I have however swung back and finished firmly against for reasons I think will be clear from my writing below.
It is obvious that this is a highly charged and hugely political issue - and that every article and video comes from a very specific standpoint with something to gain. They all make good points - whether in favour or against. ... but without really tackling much of the other side's viewpoint. I have not included everything I read by a long way, but here are a selection.
In favour:
This video above is made by the Good Food Institute (GFI) - an American based, but worldwide non-profit NGO (although large with a huge financial turnover and stakes in many political pies). It states it's aim is to "improve food sustainability and ethics" - noble aims I am fully in favour of.
There is however a big "but" in this .... The GFI, through many of the of the research companies it leans on and endorses, has close ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Davos Convention, the Gates Foundation, the Rockerfeller institute and several other names that crop up when we look at "those who run national governments from above". The GFI partners with the WEF in the creation of international food policy. Personally these points raise some fairly enormous red flags for me. .. mainly to do with putting our food into the hands of multinational corporations and biotech companies who can own patents, license who gets it, modify it, control the supply of it, weaponise it, contaminate it and never be held responsible for any fallout. It also of course takes food production away from the individual and from farming.
This Australian Animal Welfare Charity produced an early article on lab grown meat stating 7 reasons they would support it. On face value these are obvious reasons we would probably all agree with, but many of the articles against (below) call out some of their suppositions and statements as materially false.
Debating the controversy:
This is a scientific paper from Malaysia. They have broadly come down in favour - for the future - but caution that at present we are not ready to license it for human consumption as there are many longer term questions that need to be answered. I think it also worth noting that they compare it to current intensive farming and not to the novel-yet-ancient regenerative and permaculture models that have significant bonus.
This article is the most comprehensive I have found and covers both sides of the argument very well. The authors are from 2 distinct French organisations - the first the Agroecology department in Lyon, and second the University of Clermont.
A school level educational article from the European Food Information Council on a few pros and cons, without really going into the depths of either. Funding sources are more varied than the GFI above, but do include "food production stakeholders" - for which the bigger purses of course belong to the biotechs not the farmers. .. although they do cap private corporate investment to a max of 45% of their income.
Arguing against:
These articles come from various perspectives
The ethical butcher, in my view could have come down on either side in terms of benefitting his business.... if lab grown meat is seen as the more ethical alternative (as it is often postured) he could have argued in favour, become an early adopter and won big money - yet his arguments against are, to me the most convincing and well reasoned I have seen. They played a big part in my swing back this way.
The carnivore movement advocate for people to eat more meat - however they always stipulate that for the health benefits a carnivore diet needs very high quality non intensively farmed meat. Unlike most of those in favour they are therefore comparing lab-grown to high welfare, organic and regenerative methods.
I thought this was an interesting article to include as I had presumed that lab grown meat would appeal to those who were vegan and vegetarian due to animal welfare concerns - it highlights issues around the current and expected production methods that I think are often overlooked.
Having read all of these and many more, and watched numerous videos - from the BBC world service, to various educational resources for schools, and then further videos by apparently well researched individuals - I do definitely fall into the camp of being very much not in favour of lab grown meat.
My main reasons for this centre around the issues of food provenance and the "Real Cost" calculations that need to take place. ... financial costs of the labs; environmental costs of the crops needed for sugar (monoculture) and its refining and transportation; environmental and economic costs of pharmaceutical processes needed to create the "growth medium"; costs of the sterilisation procedures. Then also the human costs in terms of mental health and wellbeing from a decrease in open land and not seeing / being involved with farm animals; the costs to the farmers with loss of livlihood; the cultural costs including loss of rural life and loss of know-how. The unknown and unquantifiable costs of loss of animals on our land - on our ecosystems, our biodiversity and our carbon sinks (grassland is the biggest in the UK)
Finally and most pragmatically we need to think about the likely loss of genetic lineage and diversity across any remaining small populations if lab grown meat where to take off. The what ifs that are often forgotten: What if we move to lab gown meat from a small selection of biopsies only and those fail - and what if we've lost 90 of our animals and no longer have the genetic diversity needed to repopulate??
Whilst I am firmly against lab grown meat at this point I do not believe that the systems we currently have - particularly those of intensive livestock farming and monocultured arable farming are right either.
Good, organic, pasture fed (on biodiverse pasture) beef, mutton, venison and other (country dependant) meat from happy animals gives us protein that also contains a wealth of micronutrients and other health benefits. Cattle reared in this way on true pasture are in fact net negative for carbon, and the methane they are renowned for producing is minimal when soya is removed from their diet. (Methane is also unstable and does not persist as a greenhouse gas). Organic and particularly true regenerative farming methods include crop / pasture rotation on a regular basis. These negate the need for nitrogen based petrochemical fertilisers as the animals fertilise as they eat .. and the pasture they are eating from is in itself nitrogen fixing. ... this gets it fully ready for an organic food crop the following year. ... FarmED have shown soil improvement from our often nearly dead soils (with current monoculture farms) to living loamy active soils can occur in only 7 years with a good animal to crop rotation schedule.
What we need is not a change from framing to biotech, but a change in farming practice ... to regenerative MIXED farming and permaculture farming - a change where farmers are not siloed into livestock or arable but do both as the one supports the other. Nature gave us everything we need to have good, sustainable, natural food. We just need to go back to to listening to it.
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