“Lab-grown meat”, which is cultured from muscle cells, and thus considered, by some, to be morally acceptable for consumption, has one under-considered problem:
Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production. …
[…] Derrick Risner at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues found that the global warming potential of cultivated meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced, is 4 to 25 times higher than for regular beef.
The researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of cultivated meat that estimated the energy used in each step in current production methods. They predict that this will be similar regardless of which animal’s cells are being cultivated.
They found that the nutrient broth used to culture the animal cells has a large carbon footprint because it contains components like sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each come with energy costs. [“Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (13 May 2023, paywall)]
Technology is often subject to initial condemnation because of a drawback later overcome by advances, so, if eating a steak from a petri dish is your dream, despair not yet. But, in today’s world, energy is the foundation of just about all that we do. Natural grown meat has some significant advantages, so far, over lab-grown, so if we want to continue to eat meat, like most omnivores, then we may have to discard what we could consider to be a proposed moral precept.
