Our taste for flesh has exhausted the earth

More than almost anything else we put into our mouths, meat matters. What flesh we eat — or forsake — tells the world who we are, what class and caste we belong to, what gods we believe in. Halal or kosher. Pure-veg or paleo. Hormel or farmers market.

Worldwide, 80 billion animals are slaughtered every year for meat. Raising all those animals has already claimed most of the world’s farmland. It has led to zoonotic diseases and vast deforestation. It has polluted air and water and spewed planet-heating gasses into the atmosphere.

It has also enabled many more people to eat meat more often than ever before, which has in turn put pressure on governments to both keep meat prices affordable and reduce its climate hoofprint.

What will all of this mean for the $1 trillion global meat industry?

A new kind of factory farming is on the horizon, one that grows meat in giant steel vats, either from live cells taken from live animals or from tiny micro-organisms.

This new industry has many names — lab meat, cellular meat, cultivated meat, precision fermentation. I think of it as chicken without wings.

Its fans praise its extreme efficiency: feet, tails, feathers, snouts are eliminated. Its detractors say it’s a threat to culture and livelihoods. To some people, it’s just uncanny, or maybe it’s just the natural next step in how uncannily the modern food system has denatured meat.

Countries most worried about the future of their food supply are racing to conquer the new meat market. The world’s billionaires are making a bet on it too, including global meat giants. The United States is among the first countries to permit its sale. And even though it’s only occasionally available at fancy restaurants in the United States and at one specialised deli in Singapore, it’s already so divisive that it’s pre-emptively banned in places as dissimilar as Florida and Italy.

The commercial future of cellular meats is still unclear. And even if it takes off, it’s unclear whether it’s any better for our health or the health of the planet than the industrially produced meat most of us eat today.

The one certainty is this: Our taste for flesh has already exhausted the Earth. Our relationship to meat is, once again, changing.

Meat, Revolutionised

The Industrial Revolution changed meat. In the 19th century, refrigeration enabled meat to be trucked in from far away, or shipped from even farther away, which eventually led to the razing of forests in places like Brazil.

Production became more efficient. By the late 1940s, antibiotics became routine in chicken feed. By the late 1990s, genetically modified corn and soy brought bumper crops of animal feed. Animals were bred to be bigger and faster-growing. In the US, government subsidies helped: free groundwater, federally backed loans, price guarantees for feed crops.

And meat went big. Today the $1 trillion global meat industry is dominated by a handful of corporations, including JBS, Cargill, and Tyson. Since 1961, meat production has quadrupled, dwarfing the growth in the human population, which merely doubled. Meat went from being special to being an everyday entitlement. The more we prospered, the more flesh we ate.

China’s meat consumption jumped sharply, from about 6.6 pounds per capita in 1961 to more than 140 pounds in 2021. But the United States became the lions of Planet Carnivore. On average, Americans went from eating around 207 pounds of meat in 1961 to 280 pounds, in 2021, and chicken came to dominate. In 2022, Americans ate 100 pounds of chicken per capita, double the amount 40 years ago.

It wasn’t just chicken consumption that changed. It was the bird itself.

Follow, as I have, a chicken truck to the slaughterhouse — birds crammed into cages, feathers flying across the road — and you realise how profoundly we have altered the nature of the animal. Thanks to feed and breeding, an 8-week-old chicken today is about four times heavier than an 8-week-old chicken was 60 years ago. Their breasts are so large that they can have a hard time standing.

The New Factory Farm

Future chicken may not have to stand at all. Why bother having feet? Or wings? Or beaks? All that animal eats up scarce resources: land, water, feed, time.

This is the theory of change for the cellular-meat industry. Take away the animal. Grow the animal tissue.

Cellular meat injects itself into many of the fraught ethical, environmental and financial dilemmas around meat consumption. Industrial farms, where animals live short, crowded lives, often produce fewer emissions per pound of meat. On small farms that eschew chemicals, animals live arguably better lives, but they produce more expensive meat and, usually, more greenhouse gas emissions.

With cultivated meats, there are no animals, and no concern over animal welfare. They may still rely on genetically modified corn and soy for feedstock, but if bioreactors run on renewable energy they will have a smaller climate footprint.

Meat production today accounts for somewhere between 10% and 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how you measure it. Reducing those emissions is vital if the world is to reduce the hazards of planetary heating.

The new factory farm grows chicken cells in giant steel vats called bioreactors, swilling with amino acids, vitamins and sugars, all the things cells need to grow. The time it takes for the cells to multiply enough to make solid pieces of chicken tissue: roughly two weeks.

Little wonder that the world’s food giants, including ADM, Cargill and Tyson Foods, have invested in the new meat upstarts, albeit nominally compared to what they pour into legacy meat operations. This new industry is still, well, embryonic. It’s tough to scale up production in bioreactors.

On a blazing Thursday evening, I got a taste of future chicken in the unlikeliest of places, a rooftop party in Miami. The whole thing was for show. Florida would ban the sale of cultivated meat in three days’ time. And anyway, cultivated meat wasn’t yet available in Florida or anywhere else in the country.

Upside Foods, the cellular-meat startup hosting the party, passed out stickers. “Chicken so delicious it’s illegal,” they read. (In August, the company sued Florida over the ban.) A crowd gathered around the chef, Mika Leon, as she laid chicken strips onto a pan, rubbed with Cuban spices. The oil sizzled as she flipped the strips over, showing how the tissue charred. She laid the strips on a crisp fried tortilla, with a dollop of mashed avocado and some lime.

When I took a bite, it was more or less standard supermarket chicken — chewy, fleshy, somewhat bland. It worked well with all the fixings, and it would be just fine in a nugget or a breakfast sausage, which I’m not a fan of. It tasted nothing like the gamy, rich country chicken I’ve eaten in home-cooked stew in the Himalayan foothills.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed into law the ban on cultivated meat, he said he was “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

In treating meat’s future as a culture war issue — feet-and-feathers traditionalists vs lab-grown disrupters — he was signalling just how deeply people feel about the
matter.