Princeton Prof Sees Lab Meat Beating Livestock Producers

Given that meat consumption continues to rise as countries become more affluent — with China the textbook example — a more efficient form of producing meat and other animal products is desperately needed, Princeton University bioethics Prof. Peter Singer wrote for Project Syndicate.

Photo Insert: It will be easier to persuade people to avoid meat from animals if they can still eat meat and other animal products that taste like the products they know, but do not require raising, feeding, and killing a live animal.

It means promoting cultured meat that would save 70 billion chickens from slaughter annually.

Vaclav Smil, a world authority on food, energy and the environment, has listed five categories of “undeniable burdens” implied by reliance on growing crops to feed animals.

They include monocultures for growing feed crops, with increased soil erosion, inefficient conversion of plants to animal products, especially among cattle, generation of huge volumes of concentrated animal waste that preclude adequate recycling to crops, greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions from feed crops and animal metabolism and animal-welfare concerns related to the treatment of a vast number of confined animals.

Of course, if everyone just switched to a plant-based diet, we could eliminate all these burdens and, as a recently released report shows, reduce the risk of new pandemics.

Despite the encouraging rise in plant-based eating, however, a complete switchover doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.

It will be easier to persuade people to avoid meat from animals if they can still eat meat and other animal products that taste like the products they know, but do not require raising, feeding, and killing a live animal.

And that nourishes the hope that we will soon see the end of a cruel, inefficient, destructive, and dangerous industry.

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