I’m not looking at you, starving kids in Africa, the ones whose choiceless plight we lick off our plates to honour. It was never you I was chided for, anonymous hungry third-world children. No, it was the anonymous Chinese farmers who painstakingly endured sweltering heat to harvest each individual grain of rice that I so ignorantly neglected to finish.
Though this isn’t the case as much these days to feed our eight billion strong population, it’s still crucial to contemplate the source of our sustenance. We already know that the meals we consume and how they got to us are often not handled in the most conscience-settling way.
Conveniently packaged in slices, cubes, or minced; then breaded, fried, or grilled—looking far removed from the original creature that it was culled from. It’s probably what makes delicacies like balut a little less palatable to most modern folk.
So the woke among us began to steer away from meat. And when we just couldn’t do without it, sought alternatives. Hailed as an industry disruptor, cultivated meats undoubtedly enjoyed welcoming headwinds in Singapore; the first country in the world to sell it.
A couple years in and over a decade since the first lab-grown burger was unveiled in London (costing £263400 to create), the market has seemingly slowed. It could be a bevy of reasons.
Sure, these operations take up proportionally less space than the land required to house livestock and the crops farmed to feed them, but it doesn’t take a scientist to know the electrical output of running these labs alone wouldn’t be any less damaging than cow farts.
We also learned it wasn’t any healthier. Instead of sickly animals injected with biotics to keep infections at bay, a vat of cell tissue undergoing chemical and bioprocess engineering then 3D printed for texture.
Call me old fashioned but I’d hedge bets that our organic bodies would respond better digesting natural albeit boosted produce, as opposed to wholly artificially constructed compounds.
Plant-based diets aren’t that different. No hate on plant-based meats and how convincingly good technology makes them taste, but if health was the motivation, consider sticking to actual plants.
And just when we thought at the very least, nothing had to bleed for us to fill our bellies. We’ve afforded premiums for meat from animals that are less stressed before, so better yet if they don’t even have to die, right?
It’s a beautiful fairytale except that science meat isn’t totally slaughter-free. The extraction of cells and the magic cocktail of nutrients to breed them must derive from somewhere, and let’s just say obtaining fetal bovine serum isn’t pleasant to stomach.
If we had to acquire food via traditional backbreaking methods, it’s unlikely that yield would struggle to keep up the way it does today. Further opening means for developed nations to sate appetites only allows leeway for greater demand. So efforts to relieve strain on the supply chain while well-meaning, may unfortunately be more counterproductive than answering the root cause.
