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The Conscience of a CarnivoreIt's time to stop killing meat and start growing it.

By William SaletanPosted Saturday, May 27, 2006, at 8:09 AM ET

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Where were you when Barbaro broke his leg? I was at a steakhouse, watching the race on a big screen. I saw a horse pulling up, a jockey clutching him, a woman weeping. Thus began a worldwide vigil over the fate of the great horse. Would he be euthanized? Could doctors save him? In the restaurant, people watched and wondered. Then we went back to eating our steaks.

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Shrinks call this "cognitive dissonance." You munch a strip of bacon then pet your dog. You wince at the sight of a crippled horse but continue chewing your burger. Three weeks ago, I took my kids to a sheep and wool festival. They petted lambs; I nibbled a lamb sausage. That's the thing about humans: We're half-evolved beasts. We love animals, but we love meat, too. We don't want to have to choose. And maybe we don't have to. Maybe, thanks to biotechnology, we can now grow meat instead of butchering it.

With all the problems facing humanity—war, terrorism, poverty, tyranny—you probably don't worry much about whether it's right or wrong to eat meat. That's understandable. Every society lives with two kinds of moral problems: the ones it's ready to face, and the ones that will become clear or compelling only in retrospect. Human sacrifice, slavery, the subjugation of women—every tradition seems normal and indispensable until we're ready, morally and economically, to move beyond it.

The case for eating meat is like the case for other traditions: It's natural, it's necessary, and there's nothing wrong with it. But sometimes, we're mistaken. We used to think we were the only creatures that could manipulate grammar, make sophisticated plans, or recognize names out of context. In the past month, we've discovered the same skills in birds and dolphins. In recent years, we've learned that crows fashion leaves and metal into tools. Pigeons deceive each other. Rats run mazes in their dreams. Dolphins teach their young to use sponges as protection. Chimps can pick locks. Parrots can work with numbers. Dogs can learn words from context. We thought animals weren't smart enough to deserve protection. It turns out we weren't smart enough to realize they do.

Is meat-eating necessary? It was, back when our ancestors had no idea where their next meal might come from. Meat kept us alive and made us stronger. Many scientists think it played a crucial role in the development of the human brain. Now it's time to return the favor. Thousands of years ago, the human brain invented agriculture, and hunting lost its urgency. In the past two centuries, we've identified the nutrients in various kinds of meat, and we've learned how to get them instead from soy, nuts, and other vegetable sources. Meat has made us smart enough to figure out how we can live without it.

So, why do we keep eating it? Because it's so darned tasty. Don't give me that hippie shtick about how McDonald's or Western society foisted beef on us. McDonald's didn't invent the appendix. McDonald's didn't invent all the genes we've acquired—at least eight, according to a 2004 article in the Quarterly Review of Biology—that help us, but not chimps, manage a meat diet. Look at the fossil evidence recently published in Nature. About 5,000 years ago, when people in Britain figured out how to domesticate cattle, sheep, and pigs, they promptly switched from fish-eating to meat-eating. A similar revolution swept North America about 700 years ago. My daughter has been demanding meat ever since she tasted it in baby food. I've seen vegetarian friends lust at the thought of a burger. We're carnivores. We evolved that way.

If we were just beasts, that would end the discussion. But we're not. Evolution didn't stop with our lusts; it started there. Food gave us brain power. Technology lifted us above survival and gave us time to think. We began to understand the operation of living things, even ourselves. We saw what we were, and we saw what we could be. That's the paradox of humanity: Our aspirations transcend our nature, but they have to respect it. To become what we must become, we have to work with what we are.

Anyone familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous understands this duality. It's the heart of the Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." Many alcoholics take this to mean that addiction can't be changed, but behavior can, with God's help. But prayers often mean more than we understand. In the case of meat, maybe we don't have to go cold no-turkey. Maybe what we're asking for, what God is giving us, is the wisdom to see that we can't change our craving for meat, but we can change the way we satisfy it.

How? By growing meat in labs, the way we grow tissue from stem cells. That's the great thing about cells: They're programmed to multiply. You just have to figure out what chemical and structural environment they need to do their thing. Researchers in Holland and the United States are working on the problem. They've grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn't allow them to taste it. Now they're working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult. Three Dutch universities and a nonprofit consortium called New Harvest are involved. They need money. A fraction of what we spend on cattle subsidies would help.

Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We'll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We'll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We'll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming. But 300 years from now, when our descendants look back at slaughterhouses the way we look back at slavery, they won't remember the benefits to us, any more than they'll remember our dried-up tears for a horse. They'll want to know whether we saw the moral calling of our age. If we do, it's time to pony up.

A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Growing mammalian cells requires a nutritious medium that includes, among other things, 10% FETAL BOVINE SERUM or FETAL CALF SERUM. Yes, that's serum taken from the fetuses of cows. No, it's not a non-invasive process. Often it is taken from fetuses discovered inside a cow after it's been butchered for meat at a slaughterhouse.

The reason fetal serum is used is that it contains a complex mixture of proteins, hormones, buffers, and other nutrients that have been shown to be necessary for cells to grow in culture. [...]

Now, I also work with mammalian cells myself, and I feel (on good days, when experiments are working) that my research justifies the animal contribution. I'm not saying that all research requiring FBS/FCS should be shut down because it's unethical. I'm just saying that if you think that growing meat somehow obviates the need to kill animals, think again. Meat doesn't come from nowhere--it comes from meat.

--obeyscient

(To reply, click here.)

Humans are related to all living things, so killing our relatives is a natural part of our existence, and there's not much we can realistically do about that. But we all draw the line somewhere, in terms of what beings are too closely related (both in terms of family tree and in terms of intellectual similarity). Some people draw that line very high (no eating other people). Others a bit deeper (no eating chimps and monkeys), and others far deeper (no eating any animals). I come out in the middle. No eating mammals.

--Arkady

(To reply, click here.)

There is no inconsistency between having some animals for pets, and yet eating others. In both cases, we are using animals to satisfy our wants. In the case of animals we eat, we're satisfying our desire for meat, and for food we enjoy. With pets, we're satisfying a desire for companionship and the desire to care for something. With race horses, we satisfy our interest in competition our wish to be entertained.

In all cases, we're just using animals for our benefit and enjoyment. There is no conflict. This is just how nature works: those species that are best evolved get to be on top. Right now, that's us, and there is no moral reason to stop. It is not self-evident that animals have rights like we do; other than the "gut feelings" of a few people, there is no basis for this position.

"Nature" (if such a thing actually existed) does not care what one species does to another. We can decide that it is "wrong" to use animals to our benefit, but such a decision would be essentially arbitrary. The concepts of right and wrong do not really apply here.

--cs30109

(To reply, click here.)

Lovely idea, but I see at least one problem with it besides the difficulty of mass producing such meat - what happens to all the livestock we have now? There are way too many cows, pigs, chickens, etc. to just release them into the wild, and even if we did, they've been domesticated for so long, they may not be able to survive in the wild. They no longer have an environmental niche.

--seastarpisaster

(To reply, click here.)

This "growing meat," idea seems to dovetail really nicely with Douglas Adams' clever solution to the problem -- in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," meat loving patrons were introduced to animals that were genetically engineered so that they wanted nothing more than to be eaten. They'd even point out their tastiest parts.

Saletan might be onto something here. Genetically engineer me a hangar steak with some great marbling and I'm all for chomping on it.

--destor23

(To reply, click here.)

If eating "grown" meat is fine, and really different from eating "natural" meat, then why stop at mere animals? Would it be unethical to eat, say, a human heart as long as the heart was grown in a lab and was never part of a human? Maybe human thigh will turn out to be tastier than top sirloin. And how nutritious might baby brains be? Will we at least be able to enjoy such common pleasures as dog and horse without the barking and whinnying of 'animal lovers'?

If we can create 'fine tuned' manufactured foods then we could mass produce celebrities for consumption in another way. "Give me a pound of Oprah and some Paris Hilton for desert..." If you were a particularly delicious person you could get rich on the property rights to your own flesh.

--fozzy

(To reply, click here.)

(5/27)

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