It’s official – the coldest day in hell since Charlton Heston made good on his promise to deliver a firearm in his cold dead hands: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it supports “meat.”
Far from just supporting meat, PETA is promoting a $1 million prize for any organization that can produce and market volumes of in vitro meat by June 2012. In vitro meat is meat tissue grown in culture in a controlled environment rather than in an animal body in a pasture, lot, sty or cage.
The echoes of Heston and “soylent green” are creepily present in the challenge to produce the nondescript tissue mass, though we are told that the cultures will be bred from stem cells of animals that we already traditionally eat, like chickens, cattle and swine.
The New York Times reported that PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has been “hoping to get the organization involved in advancing in vitro meat technology for at least a decade.” However, the announcement has shocked PETA to its core as the “meat is murder” mantra will now be complicated by the idea that meat without skeletal, circulatory and nervous systems may not exactly be in a position to be murdered.
The Times further reported that Newkirk understands the move has initiated a “civil war” within PETA, with one PETA Vice President, Lisa Lange, maintaining the philosophy that “animals are not ours to eat,” while Newkirk defends the support of body-less meat tissue in terms of actions that will lead to conditions in which “fewer animals suffer.”
I am at once pleased, shocked and appalled by the announcement and the implications of separating our meat production from animals’ bodies. The decision of what to eat has social, economic and environmental repercussions that need to be addressed. We have to consider the question of whether or not we should support further industrialization of meat-type food products, because in the answer we will at once betray and realize a belief in either pastoral or industrial narratives of utopian ideals.
PETA’s problematic move only further complicates this discussion. In order to try to make itself relevant again, PETA has imposed its argumentative claim of animal ethics and rights directly into the midst of dialogue on livestock production’s role in global climate change. Earlier this month there was an inaugural in-vitro meat symposium in Norway. The press surrounding this event seems to have provided the right conditions for PETA to impose itself in such a fashion and, in effect, attempt to hijack collective concern about climate change.
This is moxie beyond what I’ve come to expect from PETA, as they seem to have realized there’s only so far that nearly naked models and undergrads – always women by the way, but that’s a question for another time – can move PETA’s social message of ethics. All such discussions always have to move into the marketplace and faux-meat has a relevance to the masses and the market that faux-fur can never garner.
The sheer brilliance of re-founding PETA upon such a paradox strikes fear deep into my heart.
My first fear is that environmental reactionaries could actually think that this is a good idea and that we should further isolate human existence and sustenance within an illusion that modern industrial utopia can be achieved. There is precedence for markets, activists and consumers to all jump on alternatives with a rapacity that outpaces logical thought – biofuels is the best current example, in the context of its unintended impacts on food supplies and prices.
My second fear is exactly the same market function that I often put forth in this column as an integral element in the success of an overall sustainable market, economy, society and environment. I fear that people will buy this stuff. No doubt they will.
There is already an appetite for mechanically separated, chopped and pressed meat tissue products, and this in vitro meat tissue could easily fill that processed food market. As far as bone-in products marbled with fat like my two favorite cuts of dead cow – the New York strip and rib-eye steaks – how to produce these without the mess, disease and emissions of the rest of the cow is a challenge that attendees to the Norway symposium have been discussing how to overcome.
At this point we’re back to the urban myth that there are vats of chicken breasts somewhere in the mid-west, growing without the rest of the chicken. Given that utopia, or dystopia given your ideals, it’s time to pick a side and, as always, vote with your dollar. On the one hand you can throw your faith in a pastoral ideal in which local and ethically slaughtered meats can serve as an answer to problems of unsustainable environmental, social and economic practices. On the other hand, you can decide that, given Earth’s human population, further industrialization of meat tissue is a logical, even desirable step.
The philosophy embodied in either position, unlike Newkirk’s meat tissue, cannot be separated from your personal behavior and choices and, subsequently, the future that we collectively realize. Like Newkirk says, in ethics and philosophy, this is war.