Moral suasion – seeking to convince people to switch to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons – is going nowhere: globally, meat-eating continues to rise while the percentage of vegans remains in low single figures in all but a few countries. I’ve long been convinced that the only effective strategy is to produce alternative products that are in effect indistinguishable from meat, dairy and eggs, but are cheaper and healthier. Around the world, scientists and startups are working on it.
Give it up, George! We aren't going to go vegan, not for our 'health', nor for 'the environment' either. It's a lost cause, stop flogging that dead horse and consider BBQing it instead.
There is a wide range of developing technologies, which are often misleadingly reduced to “lab-grown meat” or “cell-cultured meat”. What these terms originally meant was growing whole cuts in a bioreactor on a collagen scaffold.
Sounds delightful, does it not? I prefer mine grown on a bone scaffold - in other words, on an animal.
After initial enthusiasm, I came to see this as a dead end: it is simply too complicated and too expensive. Now the terms are often used to cover all new alternatives, including far simpler and cheaper technologies such as brewing microbes. Such new-protein technologies are the leading threat to the global livestock industry, because they could be used to replace animal sources for everything from cheese and ice-cream to sausages, burgers, eggs, fish and steak, as well as creating a vast new range of foods we cannot yet imagine.
And don't need to...
Last spring Solar Foods, the company in whose lab I first ate a pancake made from bacterial protein, opened its first factory, near Helsinki. The transition to such new-protein sources could be as profound in its impacts as the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture. If done right, it could massively reduce demand for land and farm chemicals.
If you doubt the potential of these technologies, you have only to look at the effort deployed by meat corporations and their tame politicians to shut them down. At the behest of livestock lobby groups, lab-grown meat has been banned in Florida, Alabama, Italy and Hungary. Politicians in France, Romania and other US states are seeking to follow suit.
Good for them! But of course, action that in any other arena would be taken as 'big government protecting our health' is here presented as 'government in thrall to Big Meat'. A conspiracy theory, in other words.
Now, according to Greenpeace’s investigative outlet, Unearthed, a new campaign funded by the livestock industry and fronted by a former meat executive is pressing for an EU-wide ban. As the far-right Hungarian government has the presidency of the European Council, the campaign could succeed. The UK government’s support for new proteins is a very rare benefit of Brexit.
Ah, another thing the mythical 'far Right' are being blamed for...
We should recognise self-serving corporate propaganda when we see it, confront protectionism and neophobia, and support the technologies that could be our last, best hope of averting environmental catastrophe.
We do recognise 'self-serving propaganda' when we see it George, it's why no-one ever takes your advice.
