The national conversation that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have so long desired is coming, but not how most people expected.
Some call it clean meat. Others call it Frankenfood. Call it what you want, but it is meat--chemically and nutritionally--that's never been part of any animal.
A two-day conference recently hosted by the Good Food Institute in Berkeley, Calif., included 7,000 virtual and physical participants and a long list of speakers to discuss its advantages and challenges.
It's a relatively new technology that harmlessly takes cells from animals and places them in a culture, providing nutrients and other compounds that allow them to grow. Once grown, they are stimulated to form muscle protein fibers and formed into three-dimensional structures. Something similar happens in medicine with synthesized human tissue engineering.
Despite growing interest in the clean meat movement, we will not break from 2 million years of eating animals and 10,000 years of domesticating them for food without massive debates. The first is already raging: Should we call it "meat"? Future debates are likely to revolve around the ramifications for the planet.
As with any new food technology, there will need to be significant testing requirements to ensure safety, and there will need to be serious consequences for companies that create harmful products.
It's perfectly natural to be uncomfortable with such a seemingly unnatural idea. But even Winston Churchill predicted it in his time: "Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."
As clean meat becomes more commercially viable, we can expect to see a lot more of these arguments. In the end, the question we'll grapple with is whether "eating technology" is really any worse than eating animals.
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Richard Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Editorial on 10/09/2018