Meat in a Box

On your mark. Get set. Let the ethical dilemma begin!

Last Monday, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a $1 million prize for the commercial development of in vitro meat—meat that is grown from stem cells in a laboratory. Of course, offering prize money to entice entrepreneurs is not a novel idea. The Ansari X prize, eventually awarded to Space Ship One, provided $10 million to develop private space flight. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded prizes to develop autonomous ground vehicles. Even Google has offered a $30 million Lunar X prize for the first privately funded group to send a robot to the moon. However, PETA’s prize is unconventional in that it is the first prize put forward in the area of ethics, not exploration.

For PETA, an organization devoted to stop the slaughter of animals, in vitro meat has obvious appeal. Despite efforts from activists, meat consumption continues to grow at home and abroad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reported that from 1970 to 2005 US meat consumption increased 12.3 percent to 200 lbs per person per year. The U.N. similarly predicts that global meat consumption will double by 2050. To any observer, the prospect of ridding the population of carnivores appears rather bleak. Therefore, PETA has decided to follow a time-honored path: if you can’t beat them, co-opt them. In vitro technology would perhaps make everyone winners: the masses could enjoy a nice steak and the animal activists wouldn’t have see any cattle butchered for that steak.

However, the legitimate question arises whether in vitro meat is a Pyrrhic victory for animal rights activists. The terms of the PETA prize state that competitors must create chicken meat that “has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.” However, recreating tissue as complex as muscle is no simple task. A piece of chicken that is indistinguishable from real chicken would have flesh, fats, connective tissue, and perhaps even blood vessels and neurons. Therein lies the problem. If it looks like chicken and tastes like chicken, then why isn’t it chicken?

The answer that PETA offers is that since no whole animals are killed, the eating of in vitro meat is not a problem. This technicality raises some serious ethical questions. Is a vegetarian who eats in vitro meat still a vegetarian? Similar problems can easily be imagined for any other individual with dietary restrictions. For example, Jewish kashrut and Islamic halal both restrict the consumption of pork. Would pork grown in vitro or tissues that taste like pork but are different from any living animal fall under the restrictions? The same scenario can be imagined for Hindus who don’t eat beef. An even more extreme version could be imagined if an individual wished to grow and eat human flesh in vitro. Although a societal rebuke against cannibalism is understandable, can it really be said that eating tissue from a test tube is the same as eating a person?

While the last example is rather whimsical, the criticism remains. Using technological developments to bypass ethical restrictions sets a poor precedent. At best it’s a blithe disregard for the spirit of the law, with an overemphasis on the letter of the law. At worst it smacks of hypocrisy. After all, practicing what you preach and genetically engineering a way to make your unfavorable practices kosher are not the same things.

Ultimately, in vitro meat is the future of agriculture because of economic reasons, not animal welfare. According to the UN, in 2002, one-third of the global cereal harvest was fed to livestock . Roughly 75 to 95 percent of that food is lost to animal metabolism or the growth of inedible cells (hair, bones, etc). This high energy-cost method of producing meat cannot continue to supply food—especially for a global population that the U.S. Census Bureau estimates to reach 9.3 billion persons by 2050. If the level of affluence and food security is to be maintained, then a new strategy to supply the world’s population with low-cost high-quality protein needs to be proposed.

While in vitro meat production may very well be the hope of this century’s Green Revolution, it should not be construed as a solution to the ethical question of whether or not people should raise and slaughter animals. Even though PETA’s prize is presented for the wrong reasons, it will still nonetheless be a boost to a field that could take decades to mature. And when it does, I call dibs on the first rack of polar bear ribs.



Steven T. Cupps ’09, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a biological anthropology and economics concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.