New Study Is Extremely Embarrassing for Lab-Grown Meat
Researchers at UC Davis have made a startling discovery that could change the way we view lab-grown meat.
As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they found that the meat alternative’s environmental impact appears to be “orders of magnitude” higher than retail beef you can buy at the grocery store — itself already a very environmentally damaging foodstuff — at least based on current production methods.
If confirmed, the research could be damning: lab-grown meat, long seen as a greener alternative to meat products that don’t involve the slaughter of animals, could be more harmful to the environment than the products it’s trying to replace.
“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef,” said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor at UC Davis, in a statement. “It’s not a panacea.”
Bugger and damnation. As a somewhat repentant carnivore who likes his meat but acknowledges that veganism has the ethical point, I’ve been hoping lab-grown meat would prove a viable alternative for me… I mean, that would further depend on me actually liking the stuff when I finally try it, but if it worked for me then perhaps I might feel a bit better about, you know, not having another living being die for my survival. If this report is accurate, though, that may not actually be the case. Though apparently it’s not all bad news:
Assessing the cycle of energy needed and the greenhouse gas emissions involved in all stages of producing lab-grown meat compared to conventional beef, they found that the global warming potential — an environmental metric measured in kilograms of CO2 emissions — of lab-grown meat is between four and 25 times greater than the average for beef products sold in stores. […]
Lab-grown meat companies have tried to end their reliance on pharmaceutical-grade ingredients and focus on food-grade ones instead, something that would make growing meat in a lab far more environmentally competitive.
“We believe commercial-scale cultivated meat production will be more sustainable, efficient and healthier for the planet than conventional animal agriculture because we will not be raising and slaughtering billions of animals or using one-third of the planet’s ice-free land to grow food for them,” Andrew Noyes, vice president and head of global communications at Good Meat, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
If the companies were to make that switch, cultured meat’s global warming potential could end up being anywhere between 80 percent lower to 26 percent higher than conventional beef production, according to the researchers.
So it might only be substantially more damaging than making real beef instead of hideously so. I feel so much better about that.
