The “cultivation room” at Upside Foods in Emeryville, California. The company is one of two now approved to sell lab-grown meat to U.S. consumers. Upside Foods
We appreciate Garth Brown writing in New Atlantis for this rather disgusting explanation of one big part of our industrial meat system:
Queasy about lab-grown meat? Too bad — you’ve pretty much been eating it for decades.
In her community, it’s common knowledge that my mom is a soft touch when it comes to chickens. She maintains a motley flock of adoptees — backyard hens whose owners have moved, scrawny layers too old to be worth their feed, the pets of children who never much wanted them in the first place. She knows most of the people who donate the birds, or at least knows how they connect to her capacious social circle. But a few years ago, a complete stranger arrived at her door. He came bearing two bony, adolescent chicks, pink skin showing through their white feathers, their beaks and feet comically outsized. He’d bought them as an Easter present for his grandkids, and rather than petite, pretty hens, they had turned into gangly monstrosities.
Mom spotted them for the woefully underfed meat birds they were, but she nevertheless took them in. One died almost immediately, whether of natural causes or at the teeth of a fox no one remembers. The other survived. It grew and grew and ate and grew some more, inflating until it weighed some twenty pounds, more than three times as much as a standard laying hen. Released from the pen for their morning constitutional, the other members of the flock would dart about after bugs and shoots. They’d take dust baths and cluck and squabble. The lone broiler would do all this too, but at half speed. While the araucana and barred rock chickens swiftly tacked about the large patch of hosta that curled around the back deck, the broiler would plod through it like a miniature white tugboat. Perhaps because of her size, she moved with uncommon deliberateness, as if taking each step only after a great deal of thought. She walked, and the leaves parted before the prow of her serene, unflighty chest.
For the past century, agriculture in America has been getting more productive and more efficient. After stagnating for decades at twenty-something bushels per acre, average corn yields have risen to nearly two hundred. Horses have been replaced by horsepower. Chicken meat, once a relatively rare byproduct of the egg industry, has become the most consumed meat in the country, a shift made possible by advances in genetics and feed. Now over a billion dollars, from sources as varied as Bill Gates, venture capital funds, and agribusiness giants, have been invested in the idea that the next big thing in food is to leave farming behind, at least the livestock part of it. Instead of growing chicken meat in a chicken, why not grow it in a test tube?
In June, U.S. regulators for the first time gave two California companies, Upside Foods and GOOD Meat, a green light for offering lab-grown chicken to American consumers, with star chef José Andrés becoming the first to cook it for his guests in July. The menu of his restaurant China Chilcano in Washington, D.C. now boasts “a tour of Peruvian cuisine beginning with our cultivated chicken anticucho from GOOD Meat” for the price of $70.
The arrival of lab-grown chicken in America marks a radical change to the food system, but it is also a logical extension of the progression of agriculture. A chicken breast cultured in a vat and one taken from a factory farm broiler are both products of the same miraculous, troubled system. The single-minded pursuit of efficiency that is largely responsible for this system has caused immense damage to the social fabric of rural communities, to some — though certainly not all — parts of the environment, and to the fundamental connection between place, food, and human beings. But it has also allowed food production to more than keep pace with the demands of a growing population. The modern food system feeds the largest human population ever, at historically low rates of famine.
Continuing to avoid global famine is the most important goal of this system. That means any critique of the trajectory of agriculture, even when it involves a change as profound as moving meat production from the factory farm to literal meat factories, must be balanced against this goal. Is it possible to sustain the bounty yielded by our modernized food system but also temper its excesses, or even reform it into something better?…
Read the whole article here.
Organikos 