The Future of Meat Without Animals
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The Future of Meat Without Animals

Brianne Donaldson, Christopher Carter

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eBook - ePub

The Future of Meat Without Animals

Brianne Donaldson, Christopher Carter

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Plant-based and cell-cultured meat, milk, and egg producers aim to replace industrial food production with animal-free fare that tastes better, costs less, and requires a fraction of the energy inputs. These products are no longer relegated to niche markets for ethical vegetarians, but are heavily funded by private investors betting on meat without animals as mass-market, environmentally feasible alternatives that can be scaled for a growing global population. This volume examines conceptual and cultural opportunities, entanglements, and pitfalls in moving global meat, egg, and dairy consumption toward these animal-free options. Beyond surface tensions of “meatless meat” and “animal-free flesh,” deeper conflicts proliferate around naturalized accounts of human identity and meat consumption, as well as the linkage of protein with colonial power and gender oppression. What visions and technologies can disrupt modern agriculture? What economic and marketing channels are required to scale these products? What beings and ecosystems remain implicated in a livestock-free food system? A future of meat without animals invites adjustments on the plate, but it also inspires renewed habits of mind as well as life-affirming innovations capable of nourishing the contours of our future selves. This book illuminates material and philosophical complexities that will shape the character of our future/s of food.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781783489077
Part I
OUR PAST CANNOT MEAT THE FUTURE
Beyond Meat
Ethan Brown
I believe that it is necessary and possible to build meat directly from plants. My understanding of the scientific challenge is sufficiently advanced or naĂŻve, or most likely both, that I see the day when we will remove the animal from meat production and be none the worse.
Our relationship with meat is a fascinating one. We would not be the species we are without meat. Roughly two million years ago our ancestors stumbled upon a primitive version of a Clif Bar when they began to scavenge for meat off the bones of downed prey. This nutrient-dense source of food delivered protein, fat and nutrients more efficiently than voluminous plant matter. It fueled the growth of our brains (a more than doubling in size), propelling us to the top of the food chain. Further, meat allowed our ancestors to adapt to changing climates that doomed close relatives who were reliant only on vegetation. While they perished, we moved to new ecosystems and ate the animals therein.
Today, meat is deeply stitched into the fabric of many of our religions and traditions, courtship rituals (even the modern dinner date) and sense of economic well-being. What is more, it tastes really good. The problem is that meat consumption is also fueling major disease epidemics, climate instability, natural resource depletion and the orchestrated suffering of sentient beings at an unprecedented scale.
The good news is that we don’t have to give meat up. I always liked the young woman/old woman sketch used in management courses. You’ve probably seen it. Is it an old or a young woman? Yes, it’s both. I think the same way about meat. Is meat something that comes from a chicken, cow, pig and other animals? Is it amino acids, lipids, water and a trace amount of minerals and carbohydrates organized in a particular architecture? Yes.
The first definition, meat comes from animals, presents you with an ever-worsening set of problems (from human health to climate) that must be solved. The second definition frees you to focus on one problem – how do I source meat’s core parts from plants and organize them in the architecture of meat? The first definition puts you on a path where we must dramatically reduce meat consumption if we are going to have a sustainable economy. The second definition envisions a world where meat consumption – meat made directly from plants – increases and we are all the better for it.
The relationship between livestock and climate stability is a good example of the constraints of the first definition, in which meat is defined by its origin. Livestock’s influence on our climate is best captured by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang (formerly and currently at the World Bank Group, respectively). I first met Dr. Goodland when I was still a student. He came to our home to speak at one of my dad’s informal gathering of faculty and students (my dad was, and is, a professor). Dr. Goodland was then the highest-ranking environmental officer at the World Bank. Though I cannot remember much of what he said that evening, he impressed me greatly. Tall and broad and formal, it was clear that his position at the bank did not override his loyalty to the facts available to him through his discipline of ecology.
It was no surprise that when Goodland and Anhang’s work, ‘Livestock and Climate Change’, was published years later (2009), I read the findings with interest. In it, Goodland and Anhang make the case that at least 51 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the livestock industry. Since its publication, I have heard some people challenge – yet no one credibly deconstruct – the percentage. One of their key points relates to the fact that animals breathe, and in doing so, emit carbon that should be counted. Goodland and Anhang explain that the carbon cycle model we learn about in school presumes an equilibrium between carbon breathed out by animals and carbon absorbed by vegetation; but there are six times more animals raised for food today than in 1960, while forests worldwide have been reduced. We might try to attack this problem by making livestock more efficient, like we do power plants and automobiles. The problem is that you run into biological limits very quickly. Although we can engineer a lot of things, cows and pigs who don’t breathe are unlikely to be among them (though their tissue is another question).
When we shift our thinking towards defining meat (core parts, architecture, chemistry) by what it is versus where it has historically come from (animals), we are freed up to focus on one problem – how do I source meat’s constituent parts directly from plants and organize them against meat’s blueprint? Amino acids and lipids are abundant throughout the plant kingdom; minerals and carbs abound; and water (which comprises more than half of the weight of meat) flows freely in many parts of the world. Crucially, we can understand meat’s physical design and make-up. At a high level, this is spelled out in textbooks or you can discover it yourself by putting a chicken breast, for example, through an MRI.
At Beyond Meat, we have our sights set on sourcing meat’s constituent parts from plants and assembling them in the form of meat. Though the human relationship with meat is infinitely more complex, I think of this along the lines of mobile versus land-line phones. Our obligation is to provide the consumer with a better meat, one that is freed from the animal and capable of delivering more of what consumers want – taste, protein, nutrients, convenience – with less of the downside. Just as few people (perhaps none?) railed passionately for or against preserving the land-line and embraced mobile phones, if we are successful, we will see consumers – in a relatively short period of time and with less controversy than one might expect – welcome a better meat, one that is made from plants.
Ethan Brown
CEO, Beyond Meat
www.beyondmeat.com
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Goodland, R. and Jeff Anhang. 2009. “Livestock and Climate Change”. World Watch Magazine 22, no. 6 (November/December): 10–19. Accessed January 21, 2016, http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf.
Chapter 1
Towards 2050
The Projected Costs of and Possible Alternatives to Industrial Livestock Production
Brian G. Henning
In 2014, an estimated 311.8 million metric tons of animal meat1 were produced worldwide, enough for 93 pounds for each of the 7.325 billion people on Earth (‘Meat’). On one level, this more than fourfold increase in meat production since 1960 might be seen as a great success story about the spread of prosperity and wealth. President Herbert Hoover’s memorable 1928 campaign pledge to put ‘a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage’ has, at least for many in the so-called developed world, largely been realized. This juxtaposition of chickens and cars is appropriate in a way that Hoover did not intend: in an important sense, the same industrial processes that have put a ‘car in every garage’ now make it possible to ‘put a chicken in every pot’ or a burger on every plate. What has made it possible to realize the ‘prosperity’ in Hoover’s promise is the industrialization of food production, and livestock are no exception. By applying some of the same principles that organized Henry Ford’s assembly lines to agriculture (combined with the economically distorting effects of vast agricultural subsidies and other environmental and economic externalities), once-expensive food items – such as beef, pork and chicken – are now within the reach of billions of people; indeed, they are often cheaper than fresh fruits and vegetables.
On Hoover’s measure, then, the shift to intensive, industrial methods of livestock production has been wildly successful. Thanks in large part to the adoption of intensive methods worldwide, more than 68 billion animals are slaughtered each year; an average of 2,150 animals are killed every second of every day (FAOSTAT 2012). At more than nine times the size of the human population, livestock cast a very long shadow indeed. A primary contribution of this essay is to provide a survey of the human and environmental impacts of livestock production. We will find that, considering both the direct and indirect effects, the overconsumption of animal meat is now a (if not the) leading cause of or contributor to both malnourishment and obesity, chronic disease, antibiotic resistance and the spread of infectious disease; the livestock sector may now be the single greatest source of freshwater use and pollution, the leading cause of rainforest deforestation, and the driving force behind spiralling species extinction; finally, livestock production is among the largest sectoral sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contributing to global climate change.
Recognizing the inefficient and environmentally destructive nature of intensive livestock production, this essay will consider various solutions being proposed to ‘shrink’ livestock’s long shadow, including ‘technical’ or ‘market’ fixes, a transition to ‘new agrarian’ methods, and the movement to a vegetarian or vegan diet. Though important and morally relevant qualitative differences exist between industrial and non-industrial methods, this essay will conclude that, given the present and projected size of the human population, the morality and sustainability of one’s diet is inversely related to the proportion of animals and animal products one consumes.
MEAT, NUTRITION AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Humans now derive, on average, one-third of their daily protein and 17 percent of their energy (calories) from animal sources (Steinfeld et al. 2006, 269). Yet, as one would expect, these averages mask great differences in meat-eating patterns, from a low of 11 ounces of meat consumed per person annually in Bangladesh to a high of 259 pounds, 5 ounces per person annually in the United States (FAOSTAT 2011). The way that people interact with livestock also varies greatly. While many wealthy people only interact with animals when they are on their plate, raising livestock is the primary livelihood of one billion (36 percent) of the world’s poorest individuals (those who live on less than US$2 per day) (Steinfeld et al. 2006, xx and 268). Reflecting this complex reality, livestock production methods vary considerably, from small-scale operations using extensive, pasture methods, to large-scale operations using intensive, industrial methods. While several decades ago the geographical distribution of these methods, extensive and intensive, would largely have corresponded to developing and developed nations, respectively, this is no longer the case, with extensive methods increasingly being championed by environmentally conscious consumers in developed nations and developing nations seeking to meet rising demand and achieve economies of scale through the adoption of intensive methods.
Despite these seemingly divergent trends, 80 percent of the considerable growth in the livestock sector worldwide is from industrial livestock production (Steinfeld et al. 2006, 278). The vast majority of the billions of animals raised for food each ...

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