Nicholas Yeo/Getty

How do you feel about lab meat? Personally, I hadn’t thought about it much prior to this corker of a piece from Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg on meat ethics. The idea behind lab meat is that you take some animal cells and culture them in the lab, with the potential to mass-produce meat that requires no animal suffering. Companies are getting better at it. Once upon a time, there were merely no-suffering chicken nuggets (they look pretty juicy, actually). Now the technology seems to be closing in on well-marbled steaks.

It’s not a done deal yet. But soon, Gabriel and Jan write, customers could face “a dilemma that until now was the stuff of science fiction stories and philosophical thought experiments: If you have the choice of two steaks, one cultured in a lab and the other carved from a cow corpse, which are otherwise indistinguishable and similarly priced, which would you choose?”

This piece doesn’t simply excoriate people for eating meat. That’s not really the point. Vegetarians and those urging a change in eating habits for climate or ethical reasons suffer from a problem that bedevils the entire left—namely, as YouTuber Natalie Wynn recently told Liza Featherstone for The Nation, a tendency to sound scoldy:

There’s this moralistic almost-puritanism. Sometimes there’s this suspicion of glamour—a suspicion of beauty, even—because that’s seen as decadent and bourgeois. And I hate that. I much prefer the Oscar Wilde division of leftism. Part of what makes human life worth living is not simply having enough food but … aesthetic excess.

And that’s the great promise of lab meat: the ability to eat ethically but not ascetically. Vegetarian theorists and activists, Jan and Gabriel write, too frequently have simply dismissed the question of pleasure from their examination of gastronomic ethics. Instead, we should treat pleasure as morally and politically relevant—not outweighing the suffering of animals, but something that has to be considered if consumers are to be persuaded to lessen that suffering. “By uncoupling the pleasure of meat from suffering and death,” they write, “cellular agriculture will force us to be more precise about the nature of the pleasures we crave.”

Jan and Gabriel ask pointed questions: If people have the option of lab meat, for instance, and still choose “real” meat, then how is that to be distinguished from simple sadism? People may think they prefer “real” meat for instincts relating to tradition, or a squeamishness about artificial life—but why does tradition or squeamishness demand that our meat come from something that “struggled as it died”?

These are uncomfortable things to contemplate. It’s also worth noting that one can have valid concerns about lab meat oversight and regulation, while religious scholars have much to sort out with regard to how lab meat fits into certain strictures. But the piece is also remarkably hopeful—even romantic—in its vision for the future: “At the core of this approach is a commitment to a more democratically hedonic society that offers robust and accessible pleasures for all and where suffering and sacrifice are minimized or, if they cannot be avoided, are borne not just by the poor, weak, and vulnerable.”

Anyway, food for thought. 

–Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Advertising

Animals are literally climbing mountains to escape warmer temperatures.

According to research published Monday, the National Flood Insurance Program would need to more than quadruple premiums to cover the “estimated risk” in 2021 for over four million residential homes at substantial risk of flooding. Most assessments currently underestimate flood risk, which will grow substantially in many areas as climate change accelerates.

Don’t miss this eye-opening piece on the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to keep Americans cooking on gas stoves. Read it for details about how marketing experts have helped shape your ideas of gas stoves as high-status, or culinary necessities, and for a reminder that cooking with gas comes with real health risks, separate from the greenhouse gas implications. But also, check out these two paragraphs in particular:

In the last few years, the industry has encountered increasing resistance to its claims that natural gas is perfectly safe. Last June, I published a piece that exposed how gas groups representing utilities hired social media influencers to convince millennials and Gen Xers that gas stoves are the superior way to cook. The two main campaigns are the work of the gas trade groups the American Public Gas Association, a collection of public and municipal utilities, and the American Gas Association, which is comprised of privately owned utilities. These groups have hired prominent public relations firms to seek out influencers who emphasize—and whose presence embodies—the cool factor of gas cooking while mentioning none of the risks. In fact, in the posts I reviewed, none of the influencers appeared to have a hood over their stoves, or even to mention ventilation. I knew I had caught the industry’s attention with the story when many of the Instagram posts embedded in the piece were soon deleted, and I started receiving long, mostly unsolicited emails from the industry’s various consultants. 

I didn’t know how they had reacted to the negative press until I read a trove of emails obtained through a public records request by the fossil fuel watchdog Climate Investigations Center. According to the emails, representatives from the public relations firm Porter Novelli reached out to their client, the American Public Gas Association, which then asked gas executives at several utilities if its campaign should be paused in light of the backlash. The answer was a definitive no. “They should not stop for even 1 hour,” one utility executive, industry veteran Sue Kristjansson, replied in an email. “And … if they are saying that we are paying influencers to gush over gas stoves so be it. Of course we are and maybe we should pay them to gush more?”

Rebecca Leber | Mother Jones 

Advertising

Copyright © 2021, The New Republic, All rights reserved.