Why Do Conservatives Fear ‘Frankenflesh’?

For some reason, a lot of conservatives have a knee-jerk negative reaction to lab-created meat. I checked the writings of the likes of Edmund Burke and John Locke and found nothing on this. Likewise with P.J. O’Rourke — though doubtless,...

The post Why Do Conservatives Fear ‘Frankenflesh’? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

For some reason, a lot of conservatives have a knee-jerk negative reaction to lab-created meat. I checked the writings of the likes of Edmund Burke and John Locke and found nothing on this. Likewise with P.J. O’Rourke — though doubtless, he would have said something quite funny. I admit, I just don’t get it.

Nevertheless, Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Facebook Live on Memorial Day to denounce either meat grown in a Petri dish, or a peach tree dish, depending on whom you ask. (READ MORE: Biden’s Approach to China Is Illogical)

“They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat, which grows in a peach tree [Petri?] dish,” Greene said. “So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body that’s saying, ‘No no don’t eat a real cheeseburger; you need to eat the fake burger.’ The fake meat from Bill Gates. They probably also want to know when you go to the bathroom and if your bowel movements are on time or consistent.”

Okay, that’s a bit strange. But she’s right about the Gates connection. He is an investor in a lab meat company, Upside Foods, that received FDA approval earlier this year and he has used his considerable bully pulpit to press (for) the flesh for years.

I use Almighty Facebook to keep my fingers on the pulse of conservative America, and it does seem a lot of right-wingers oppose the technology for some reason.

“Frankenflesh” Meat Like Beer

Lab-grown meat is sometimes called slaughter-free, in vitro, vat-grown, cell-based, and synthetic, among other names. I avoid “cultured meat,” because to me it invokes flesh inclined to watching Brideshead Revisited. (It appears I’m the first to use the term “Frankenflesh,” for which I expect I’ll probably go to Hell or at least serve a long time in Purgatory.)

Whatever the name, making it requires taking a few cells from high-quality livestock, and then figuring out which of them can grow and form meat products. Those cells are then fermented in a stainless steel vat and provided with essential nutrients to be fruitful and multiply. The technique isn’t too different from brewing beer, which certainly inclines me to it. Ultimately the meat is processed like conventional meat products and packaged and prepared just like the ma nature variety. (READ MORE: Rockefeller’s Dream: Global Governance Through ‘Climate Change’)

It must not be confused with “plant-based” or vegan meat, which has proved to be disappointing in the taste category, but perhaps confusion has made conservatives wary of lab-based flesh. Lab-based meat is meat. Perhaps a partial analogy is synthetic diamonds. Natural and lab-grown diamonds don’t differ in terms of composition, hardness, or other physical and optical properties. But synthetic diamonds are much cheaper than the natural variety — and they also don’t fund wars.

For now, lab-grown meat is simply too expensive except for people like, well, Gates and another well-known lab meat investor, Richard Branson. A few U.S. and Singaporean restaurants have served it, but don’t bother checking Walmart or ordering it up at Golden Arches.

That being said, prices have dropped dramatically. The first lab-produced beef burger cost an amazing $325,000 back in 2013. Producers have since chopped production costs by 99 percent to roughly $17 per pound, which is still too high. For most of us, the meat needs to reach approximate price parity or we won’t bite. I wouldn’t trust any predictions as to when that will happen; but since it should be as easy to produce a good cut as a bad cut, we will probably see lamb achieve parity before hot dogs. (Then no more nightmares for Clarice Starling.)

The Benefits of Lab-Grown Flesh

But let’s presume it does reach price parity or even becomes less expensive than the real stuff. (After all, the artificial intelligence that we’re currently seeing was sci-fi just a few years ago and according to Hollywood, we were supposed to have a moon colony by 1999). If that happens, it could have many advantages.

Switching to lab-grown meat could reduce animal suffering. While the actual slaughtering seems fairly humane in Western countries, more intelligent animals such as pigs and cows do know that something very bad awaits them even if they lack a comprehension of death. YouTube is filled with videos showing as much. Poultry are less aware; they’re pretty stupid. We killed chickens and bunnies in Army Special Forces training and they were oblivious to meeting oblivion.

Further, the process of raising the animals often remains cruel. In general, I’m no PETA fan but they make good points about both factory farming and so-called “humane farming.” Being a chicken isn’t fun no matter what. It’s no longer the nasty business documented in Upton Sinclair’s 1905 classic The Jungle, but life is still not great for them. (READ MORE: VIDEO: Kerry Promises to Get Rid of Coal Faster. That’s Not Good.)

That said, while individual animals like Babe can be cute, in vast numbers they can be a nightmare. The wholesomely named Smithfield Foods is owned by China (smart that they kept the name instead of going with People’s Pork) and raises and slaughters about 18 million swine a year. This year, China announced the completion of a single pig farm meant to kill 1.2 million animals annually. These facilities create massive amounts of manure, that can carry pathogens and heavy metals.

These mountains of manure can be difficult to keep out of the groundwater we drink and bathe in. It’s long been suspected that pigs, especially Chinese ones, are a sort of mixing bowl for viruses. The process combines human, swine, and avian DNA and then transfers that to waterfowl, who then transfer it to us. In that sense, both “swine flu” and “avian flu” may be redundancies.

Beyond health considerations, even a decade ago 26 percent of the planet’s ice-free land was used for livestock grazing and 33 percent of croplands are used for livestock feed production, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). That’s a huge contributor to deforestation. Cultivated meat could cut land use by 94 percent to 99 percent compared with traditional livestock production, and reduce water consumption by 82 percent to 96 percent, says Rosalyn Abbott, an assistant professor in biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering who is working on what he calls “3D printed meat” at Carnegie Mellon University.

Meanwhile, per capita meat consumption has doubled since 1960, and over the last half-century worldwide consumption has tripled. Both figures are steadily rising because people like protein and about a billion of them are lacking it worldwide according to FAO.

What about fish? One-third of fish stocks are over-exploited. That’s a threefold increase since 1974, according to the FAO. Fish farming has grown six-fold since 1990, but just can’t keep up.

It Could Be Safer

A huge advantage of lab-grown meat is that it’s produced in a highly controlled environment that protects the meat from microbial contamination such as the intestinal germs E. coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter. I’ve had at least two out of the three and they’re no fun. Unfortunately, meat is susceptible to contamination beyond the slaughterhouse or the lab so lab-created meat is not a panacea.

Lab meat would also prevent the spread of diseases between animals (zoonotic) such as the current African swine fever pandemic which has wreaked economic havoc. It has a mortality rate approaching 100%.

Antibiotic resistance is one of those rare “scares” that is very real. The evidence suggests that using drugs to fatten animals faster with less feed has contributed to the problem, and a few years ago many countries including the U.S. banned the practice. But other countries haven’t.

Meat can also be designed to contribute to healthier diets. The fat content can be controlled by adjusting the growth medium, as can the amount of saturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids. The problem is that people tend to prefer fattier cuts as reflected in the USDA grading system in which the top level, “prime,” means the most fat marbling. But you’ll still have a choice, as we do with dairy products. For drinking milk, I prefer higher fat; for cereal, skim.

There will be issues to iron out, including various religious beliefs. For example, would bio-meat be Kosher, or the Muslim equivalent, halal? Kosher rules? Oy vey! They vary and can be mind-boggling. Jewish holy scriptures only present a basic outline. But part of those rules concerns human health and humane slaughter, so lab meat has the advantage there. The same is true of halal, and indeed some Jewish and Muslim authorities have announced that lab meat per se can be acceptable. 

For conservatives who care about such things, it would appear lab meat production can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, depending on your source. Livestock, essentially cows, produce about 14 percent of what are called greenhouse gas emissions. (For shame, Bessie!) But a University of California-Davis pre-print (not yet accepted by a journal) indicates the number could be much worse, depending on how you do the calculations. 

That said, you never know when politics are involved, and some insist more advanced and richer countries need to reduce meat consumption by three-fourths to save world resources. In his book The Uninhabitable Earth, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote that “there is something of a moral crime in how much you and I and everyone we know consume, given how little is available to consume for so many other people on the planet.”

Lab-Grown Meat Isn’t a Life v. Right Debate

Doubtless, some feel that anything the left likes, we on the right should oppose. But there’s no solid liberal position on lab-based meat. PETA is ambivalent. In an official statement last June the group said: “Years ago, PETA funded the very first foray into cultured meat research at two U.S. universities, offered a $1 million prize for the first laboratory that could create commercially viable lab-grown chicken meat.” It says it further helped with the patent process to ensure it would be sold cheaply. But it then added that “everyone can and should go vegan now.” Geez, not even just vegetarian.

So you can oppose PETA on this — even as you agree with PETA on this.

Taylor Greene specifically cited the Gates connection. It would not logically follow that if Gates is a lefty, we should oppose anything he’s for. I presume he’s against the death penalty for shoplifters (By publication date, calls to his office on this vital issue were not returned.)

I find Gates somewhat enigmatic. Conservatives identify him with liberal causes, but among his major concerns is affordable power, which, to him means nuclear. Indeed, he’s funded next-generation nuclear projects.

He’s very concerned with sanitation, especially the disposal of human waste, which is hardly a political issue, any more than malaria. Yes, Gates buys the basic tenets of global warming, but he strongly opposes those who would use it to try to throttle industrialization and reverse population growth, such as Michael Moore. He favors technological solutions, including perhaps geo-engineering, as I have written. That comprises methods for combatting global warming without reducing gas emissions. Indeed, even as PETA demands we become vegans, Gates replies “We can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians.”

Bill and Melinda Gates did give half a billion to the Biden Inaugural Committee, but the nifty thing about donating to inaugural committees is you already know who’s going to be president. In other words, it’s a very efficient way of buying influence. Wink, wink.

I would figure Gates as left of center, but hardly a member of the commie pinko cabal.

I guess the best explanation is that we’re not supposed to buy into “If it’s new, it has to be good.” Tried and true has a value all its own. But so far, lab meat has been passing the test. 

I just can’t see any conservative argument against lab-grown meat. I do see a left-wing argument against it, the fairness aspect expressed above by David Wallace-Well, that technology is bad and it’s not enough to bring up the developing world we must bring down the developed world.

Conservatives don’t need to be strange bedfellows with the likes of those.

Michael Fumento (mfumento@outlook.com) is an attorney and author and has been a science journalist for over 35 years. His work has appeared in TNR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Atlantic, and many other fora. He currently lives in the Philippines, known for barely edible beef that comes from poor cows that look like they have TB.

The post Why Do Conservatives Fear ‘Frankenflesh’? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.