Iām in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with ācultivatedā pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitaminsāessentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animalās fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
Iāve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my braināmy mouth thinks Iām eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that itās fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didnāt have to die for it. This is the best Iāve come up with: Itās Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Unfortunately - and this is the problem - it is incredibly inefficient to raise animals properly. Almost any āhumaneā animal products that you can think of have very harmful practices embedded in them.
Firstly - the animals having the best possible life right to the moment of death would still allow things like lamb. Surely giving a baby the best possible life before killing it young is still barbaric?
Secondly - secondary animal products would still require harmful practices. For a dairy cow to produce milk she has to be pregnant / have a baby. Some farms produce āhumaneā dairy which involves allowing the mother and calf to live together, but then it also requires them to sell the male calves to be killed for veal becauseā¦ what else would a male calf be for?
And finally, onto the point of inefficiency. Do you have any idea how many chickens are killed every single day to supply our food system? You probably do, but you may be unaware of what that means - the Earth does not have enough land possible to raise these chickens, it is physically impossible and that is just one farm animal.
So the future of a humane world for animals either involves quality synthetic meat, or everybody is suddenly happy to go vegan, or more likely; everybody remains carnivorous and we continue to torture animals.
the vast majority of male dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter. practically none of them end up as veal.
I wasnāt familiar with that. When I wanted to see if I could buy ethical cheese I found one farm which reared calves with mothers, and read that although everything else they do seemed to be ethical, they did sell their male calves to be used for veal. That may have been incorrect and if it was, I was unaware.
The cheese was also extremely expensive too, like 10x the price of normal cheese.