There's a lot of issues with this article, but most of them boil down to the fact that you're using figures about pasture-raised animals to launder a defense of factory farming (despite claiming to find it morally reprehensible!).
Many of the substantive critiques here fall apart because they're comparisons between LGM vs Pasture Ruminants on marginal land, not Industrial CAFO chicken or pig meat. The distinction between Pasture meat and Tyson is a big one! Routing crops through an animal (as in CAFO) multiplies field deaths because they scale with cultivation. A grain-fed CAFO animal therefore causes more field deaths per kg than a pastured animal grazing untilled forage. Field deaths themselves are a bizarre way to measure a welfare effect — I doubt anyone would consider the life of a vole killed via field cultivation to be anywhere near the same level of suffering as a cow captive in a factory farm.
A lot of the structural issues that you point out are contingent upon factors such as the not yet decarbonized feedstock supply chain or the currently fossil fuel reliant electrical grid. Also, relative to other stressors that drive increasing energy prices like Data Centers, EV Charging, etc. cultured meat is a small piece of the pie.
Regarding the agroecology bit, LGM meat cutting into Tyson's market share is hardly a stressor on some Iowa farmer converting corn acres to silvopasture, these economies are not as intertwined as this piece makes them out to be. To the extent that they are intertwined, the effect is reversed, LGM out-competing CAFO would lower feed-corn demand and make the transition easier.
If we assume that the shift towards lab-grown meat happens within a 5-year window some of the critiques in this article would hold true; but claiming that LGM research should therefore be de-prioritized (or done "a little bit") is nuts.
Some other brief notes:
- The FBS footnote belongs in the body of the text because its load-bearing piece in the rest of the section's argument, burying it is a bit more than dishonest
- The avian-flu example is weak, you concede that cultured meat is a resistance buffer against flock culling while still positioning it as the worse alternative
- If meat demand falls due to LGM, it doesn't mean no more animal co-products. it means that they come from animals who get longer lives, the demand for those co-products doesn't disappear. Either the price of such goods increase (which is a small price for animal welfare) or the supply of co-product oriented animals increases.
- I'd get rid of the pasture-appreciating in value bit, by that logic we shouldn't build any manufactured good
I'm not sure how you can possibly claim that I'm "laundering a defense of factory farming," when literally the first section after the preamble discusses how this is not a defense of factory farming and we should indeed move away from it.
Hence, the very first parenthetical of my reply. My point is that the consequence of this rhetoric necessarily leads to outcomes that further instantiate factory farming as the status quo, LGM as it exists now (and as it will likely remain for the next 20 years) is not in competition with Pasture-raised Ruminants.
See, I fundamentally disagree with that. There is only so much market for 'more expensive, environmentally-friendly, animal-welfare minded' meat. Agroecological and LGM **are** mostly in competition with each other, with both in competition against industrial meat.
Lab grown meat and vertical farming could scale to feed hundreds of billions without covering the planet in human agriculture. One could re-wild vast tracks of ranches and cash crops acreage. The majority of your article is motivated reasoning. Having lived in Amish country for a decade, I get the wistful thinking. Unfortunately, we live in a science fiction reality and if AI goes well humanity can expand massively. If AI goess poorly, then feeding humanity becomes a footnote.
This is an amazing article, thank you. I enjoyed the level of detail and the system thinking. I think it's hard to communicate on the level of systems, and it's easy to be misunderstood.
Some of the critical comments could have their truth, but a) modeling (imagining) the future is a freaking hard task, and allowing ourselves to imagine a sustainable and fair future will get the critiques to the keyboard more than anything else, and b) you wrote an essay, not a book or a policy paper, and fleshing out all the systems level thinking and underlying not-linear, not-trivial presuppositions would totally require a book - and that would also be too much of a mouthful for most people (and only good faith critics would pick it up). So cadeau for you effort and meticulousness 🙏
These are all useful and clear considerations, but I'm not convinced that developing lab-grown meat is a bad idea.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but it seems as though a lot of the products produced via animal parts could probably be replaced by alternatives. Who, for example, truly needs anti-aging cream made from cow brain?
You also talk about the potential benefit of livestock grazing around solar panels - but I'm sure that increasing the production of artificial meat wouldn't eliminate cows and goats entirely. A possible future involves less meat consumption (from real animals) overall, and no restricted force-feeding operations, but still some animals that graze on pastures.
The substrate that feeds the meat cells increasing the demand for monoculture crops is an interesting idea, but I don't see why it's necessary that the nutrients for the cells be sourced unethically. That's a contingency. Couldn't a nutritious substance be made from multiple plant species?
The same can be said of the energy complaint. The energy required to "incubate" the meat cells is problematic only if we don't have an overabundance of energy from renewable sources. We shouldn't assume that the technology and infrastructure to produce clean energy won't improve alongside the technology that enables lab-based meat production.
The maintenance of the facilities meat cells are grown in is a challenge, but why would it be an insurmountable one? Every industry involves tool and facility maintenance.
Of course, our overall resource distribution system is build in a manner symbiotic to factory farms, creating bottlenecks and challenges for alternative ways of doing things, but a lot of these challenges are contingent rather than necessary. Monoculture crops and poor farming practices, for example, are contingent.
You suggest moving back to smaller farms, but that comes with a lot of challenges, too. The entire economy would need to change to make it feasible for less efficient small farms to compete against more efficient factory farms. Food insecurity would need to drop for individuals to choose more expensive meat products for ethical reasons. I do like the idea of humane small farms, but they face systemic barriers, just like lab-grown meat.
Note that my stance is that lab-grown meat shouldn't be the **foundation** of our meat production system. I'm perfectly fine with it as a tangential product.
An analogy that I use IRL (and should've incorporated into the piece) is how for electricity production, nuclear power is considered "baseload" production, i.e. slow, steady, and consistent, while solar/wind are "variable" production as their production flexes up and down. Here, it is my belief that agroecological meat should be viewed as the "baseload" priority with lab-grown meat serving that "variable" production that can flex up/down to meet demand.
Damn. Although I am a carnivore, it isn't part of my religion and I had hoped for the advent of non-animal derived meat that was more nutritious, tasted better, did not abuse the rights of animals, and so on.
I enjoyed this article very much. But I chuckled at the idea that farm animals spread manure by themselves. Horses certainly don’t. They congregate. Even outdoor run ins and pastures must be picked by hand. Hours of hard work! because standing in wet manure will damage their feet. Perhaps it is different with cows, I don’t know.
This is true if animals are congregated for allowed to totally free-roam (they'll spend most of their time in their favorite spots). However, if adaptive rotational grazing practices are implemented (such as on my farm and many others), then the animals will naturally spread their manure across the land.
At the more industrial scale, there are farmers that are innovating on incorporating edible cover crops for grazing into their crop rotation, allowing for animals to naturally spread their manure. Think something like corn-soy-cover crop.
There's a lot of issues with this article, but most of them boil down to the fact that you're using figures about pasture-raised animals to launder a defense of factory farming (despite claiming to find it morally reprehensible!).
Many of the substantive critiques here fall apart because they're comparisons between LGM vs Pasture Ruminants on marginal land, not Industrial CAFO chicken or pig meat. The distinction between Pasture meat and Tyson is a big one! Routing crops through an animal (as in CAFO) multiplies field deaths because they scale with cultivation. A grain-fed CAFO animal therefore causes more field deaths per kg than a pastured animal grazing untilled forage. Field deaths themselves are a bizarre way to measure a welfare effect — I doubt anyone would consider the life of a vole killed via field cultivation to be anywhere near the same level of suffering as a cow captive in a factory farm.
A lot of the structural issues that you point out are contingent upon factors such as the not yet decarbonized feedstock supply chain or the currently fossil fuel reliant electrical grid. Also, relative to other stressors that drive increasing energy prices like Data Centers, EV Charging, etc. cultured meat is a small piece of the pie.
Regarding the agroecology bit, LGM meat cutting into Tyson's market share is hardly a stressor on some Iowa farmer converting corn acres to silvopasture, these economies are not as intertwined as this piece makes them out to be. To the extent that they are intertwined, the effect is reversed, LGM out-competing CAFO would lower feed-corn demand and make the transition easier.
If we assume that the shift towards lab-grown meat happens within a 5-year window some of the critiques in this article would hold true; but claiming that LGM research should therefore be de-prioritized (or done "a little bit") is nuts.
Some other brief notes:
- The FBS footnote belongs in the body of the text because its load-bearing piece in the rest of the section's argument, burying it is a bit more than dishonest
- The avian-flu example is weak, you concede that cultured meat is a resistance buffer against flock culling while still positioning it as the worse alternative
- If meat demand falls due to LGM, it doesn't mean no more animal co-products. it means that they come from animals who get longer lives, the demand for those co-products doesn't disappear. Either the price of such goods increase (which is a small price for animal welfare) or the supply of co-product oriented animals increases.
- I'd get rid of the pasture-appreciating in value bit, by that logic we shouldn't build any manufactured good
I'm not sure how you can possibly claim that I'm "laundering a defense of factory farming," when literally the first section after the preamble discusses how this is not a defense of factory farming and we should indeed move away from it.
Hence, the very first parenthetical of my reply. My point is that the consequence of this rhetoric necessarily leads to outcomes that further instantiate factory farming as the status quo, LGM as it exists now (and as it will likely remain for the next 20 years) is not in competition with Pasture-raised Ruminants.
See, I fundamentally disagree with that. There is only so much market for 'more expensive, environmentally-friendly, animal-welfare minded' meat. Agroecological and LGM **are** mostly in competition with each other, with both in competition against industrial meat.
This side-argument is not a hill worth dying on. The rest of your comment is very cogent.
Lab grown meat and vertical farming could scale to feed hundreds of billions without covering the planet in human agriculture. One could re-wild vast tracks of ranches and cash crops acreage. The majority of your article is motivated reasoning. Having lived in Amish country for a decade, I get the wistful thinking. Unfortunately, we live in a science fiction reality and if AI goes well humanity can expand massively. If AI goess poorly, then feeding humanity becomes a footnote.
This is an amazing article, thank you. I enjoyed the level of detail and the system thinking. I think it's hard to communicate on the level of systems, and it's easy to be misunderstood.
Some of the critical comments could have their truth, but a) modeling (imagining) the future is a freaking hard task, and allowing ourselves to imagine a sustainable and fair future will get the critiques to the keyboard more than anything else, and b) you wrote an essay, not a book or a policy paper, and fleshing out all the systems level thinking and underlying not-linear, not-trivial presuppositions would totally require a book - and that would also be too much of a mouthful for most people (and only good faith critics would pick it up). So cadeau for you effort and meticulousness 🙏
:D
These are all useful and clear considerations, but I'm not convinced that developing lab-grown meat is a bad idea.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but it seems as though a lot of the products produced via animal parts could probably be replaced by alternatives. Who, for example, truly needs anti-aging cream made from cow brain?
You also talk about the potential benefit of livestock grazing around solar panels - but I'm sure that increasing the production of artificial meat wouldn't eliminate cows and goats entirely. A possible future involves less meat consumption (from real animals) overall, and no restricted force-feeding operations, but still some animals that graze on pastures.
The substrate that feeds the meat cells increasing the demand for monoculture crops is an interesting idea, but I don't see why it's necessary that the nutrients for the cells be sourced unethically. That's a contingency. Couldn't a nutritious substance be made from multiple plant species?
The same can be said of the energy complaint. The energy required to "incubate" the meat cells is problematic only if we don't have an overabundance of energy from renewable sources. We shouldn't assume that the technology and infrastructure to produce clean energy won't improve alongside the technology that enables lab-based meat production.
The maintenance of the facilities meat cells are grown in is a challenge, but why would it be an insurmountable one? Every industry involves tool and facility maintenance.
Of course, our overall resource distribution system is build in a manner symbiotic to factory farms, creating bottlenecks and challenges for alternative ways of doing things, but a lot of these challenges are contingent rather than necessary. Monoculture crops and poor farming practices, for example, are contingent.
You suggest moving back to smaller farms, but that comes with a lot of challenges, too. The entire economy would need to change to make it feasible for less efficient small farms to compete against more efficient factory farms. Food insecurity would need to drop for individuals to choose more expensive meat products for ethical reasons. I do like the idea of humane small farms, but they face systemic barriers, just like lab-grown meat.
Note that my stance is that lab-grown meat shouldn't be the **foundation** of our meat production system. I'm perfectly fine with it as a tangential product.
An analogy that I use IRL (and should've incorporated into the piece) is how for electricity production, nuclear power is considered "baseload" production, i.e. slow, steady, and consistent, while solar/wind are "variable" production as their production flexes up and down. Here, it is my belief that agroecological meat should be viewed as the "baseload" priority with lab-grown meat serving that "variable" production that can flex up/down to meet demand.
Damn. Although I am a carnivore, it isn't part of my religion and I had hoped for the advent of non-animal derived meat that was more nutritious, tasted better, did not abuse the rights of animals, and so on.
Fascinating arguments! Thank you Patrick.
I enjoyed this article very much. But I chuckled at the idea that farm animals spread manure by themselves. Horses certainly don’t. They congregate. Even outdoor run ins and pastures must be picked by hand. Hours of hard work! because standing in wet manure will damage their feet. Perhaps it is different with cows, I don’t know.
This is true if animals are congregated for allowed to totally free-roam (they'll spend most of their time in their favorite spots). However, if adaptive rotational grazing practices are implemented (such as on my farm and many others), then the animals will naturally spread their manure across the land.
At the more industrial scale, there are farmers that are innovating on incorporating edible cover crops for grazing into their crop rotation, allowing for animals to naturally spread their manure. Think something like corn-soy-cover crop.