The Grumpy Vegan is cautiously optimistic about New Scientist‘s tortuous reasoning in support of eating less factory farmed meat and investing in more research for in vitro meat–it’s good to see the scientific mainstream press catch up at last with what the animal rights movement has been saying for decades.
Nevertheless, there’s much to quibble over in their editorial, “Growing meat in the lab.” For example, emphasizing the blame onto the developing countries need to consume meat and dairy products–an artificial desire inspired by the west’s obsession with meat and its promotion as a measure of affluence and success. Also, the editor’s can’t quite bring themselves to consider veganism as a viable option. Oh well.
Humans evolved to be omnivores. We’re poor converters of most vegetable matter, and gained much in the past from using herbivorous animals to convert grass and leaves into high-quality protein. But in a world where food and land are in short supply, livestock production is a hugely inefficient use of grain. To produce the steak we eat, a calf needs nutrients and energy to grow and sustain an entire body, only a part of which we consume.
Most analyses – including New Scientist’s – place blame with the changing dietary patterns in developing countries, which are resulting in a greater demand for meat. That’s certainly a problem, but so is the fact that the west is not reducing its own meat consumption. In the western world, we typically consume about three times as much animal protein as we need, along with far more animal fat than is good for us.
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However, in terms of people ultimately fed, using land to grow animal feed is still inefficient compared with growing food crops for humans. And efficiency gains with livestock have come at a cost to animal welfare and the environment – problems that current animal science will at best mitigate, not solve. Research will breed animals to be a bit more “efficient” and a bit less diseased, and housing systems may be adapted a little better to animal behaviour. But increasing efficiency still further, while also reducing animal-welfare problems to a negligible level, would require technology beyond anything we see today. It would mean developing animals that thrive in confinement systems and are stripped as far as possible of unnecessary tissues and motivations. And there is no turning back. Free-ranging animals on traditional farms will never produce enough meat to satisfy the increasing world population with its growing demand.
