I’m a meat eater, and I have no qualms about killing animals to eat them. But I also believe there are several things brewing that will end meat.
The first is cloning.
It won’t be long before someone can grow meat in a lab. I mean genuine meat, not some silly substitute made of quinoa and beets.
This lab-grown meat will be cheaper, and higher quality. It will have exactly the amount of fat you want. It will be tender and tasty, and it won’t be in weird shapes and sizes.
The people selling this meat will ask why in the world an animal should have to suffer to give you meat of lower quality at a higher cost? And, of course, there’s no answer to that.
But the important point is that this cloned meat will transform the veganism debate entirely. It won’t be a question of the morality of eating animals. The cloned stuff will just be better.
I’ll eat it, and I look forward to it.
The second is disease.
You probably know that many of the worst diseases affecting humans come from livestock. There’s talk that this new Chinese monstrosity is from some hideous bat stew, although I’ve also read that it’s from snakes.
However that turns out, the point is that animals raised (or used) for food are a potential source of trouble. Keeping animals at a safe distance will slow the spread of new diseases.
Taking it all together, I simply don’t see a path for modern meat production to continue. The ugly way we treat animals, the potential for disease, and the easy alternative of cloned meat will put an end to it.
Lab-raised meat might be less susceptible to disease due to the lack of animal behavior associated with it, but it won’t be immune. And an infected meat production facility is in some ways scarier than sick animals. For one thing, it will almost certainly be much larger in scale than any livestock facility we now have, and so if an infection spreads to humans who consume the meat before it’s detected, it would be much more devastating.
And what happens when that lab-raised meat starts getting a mind of its own? We must think about these things.
That’s a good point about infections. Lab-raised meat won’t be immune. But I still suspect it will be cheaper. I simply don’t know enough about such things to know if it would be safer.