The Prospect of a Meat-Free Future

A curious thing about movements is that, inevitably, some of their most vocal adherents are less interested in success than in being the downtrodden righteous. The romance of a doomed cause and the satisfaction of discerning what only the elect can see hold an appeal that the prospect of incremental persuasion and partial victories can never match. Whether a LaRouchian nutjob or a militant vegan, this sort of misanthropic apostle grows more self-assured with each day that the ignorant damned fail to see their sin.

Bruce Friedrich stands at the other extreme. With his book Meat, he implicates animal agriculture in ills from malnutrition to pandemics to the destruction of the last remaining wildernesses on earth, but even as he describes each new horror he hastens to assure the reader that a painless, universal solution is imminent. He argues that alternative meats will soon lose their qualifier; as both ever-improving plant-based mimics like the Impossible Burger and commercially viable lab-grown meat become cheaper, the word meat will come to mean a compound of expertly flavored soy protein or the output of a bioreactor, not the flesh of a once-living animal. Rather than try to persuade his readers to change their behaviors today, he seeks to convince us to get excited for the world in which we will find ourselves tomorrow.

One challenge with a survey of this sort, a brief book that touches on dozens of topics each of which would require several chapters for anything like a comprehensive discussion, is that its persuasiveness necessarily hinges on a deferral to expertise. In this case, that means the expertise of Friedrich himself as the director of an institute that advocates for meat alternatives, the many scientists he knows, and the papers larding the bibliography. Unlike outright propaganda, whether a film like Cowspiracy or a TikTok of a frugivorous expat mauling a durian on a picturesque beach somewhere in the South Pacific while expounding on carnism, Meat is generous, honest, and as enthusiastic as a labrador with the scent of bacon in its nostrils. Its copious footnotes are genuine, and while reading his book, I never caught Friedrich engaged in any misrepresentation. Yet time and again the imperatives of telling a story that is simple and optimistic lead to a lack of nuance, with the spiky corners of problems sanded away to slot tidily into a narrative from which any sliver of ambiguity has been excised.

Take feeding the hungry. Early in the book Friedrich blames hunger on the cost of food in the context of a larger discussion of just how many of the crops we raise go into the stomachs of livestock instead of humans. He does not point out that by any reasonable measure food is cheaper than it has ever been even as meat consumption is at an all-time high, or just how much rarer the current food system has made famine than it has been at any other point in the history of humanity. While food could always get cheaper, so efficient is industrial agriculture that the misallocation of the calories needed to feed the hungry has much more to do with geopolitics and immiserating poverty than the absolute cost of food.

Or look at health, where he takes at face value the claims of Dean Ornish’s best-selling but decrepit books, which argue that removing meat from the diet has been scientifically proven to reverse heart disease. In Friedrich’s telling, even the prospect of preventing the number-one killer of Americans is not enough to override the innate human love for artery-clogging meat. He does not entertain the possibility (obviously correct in my view) that Ornish’s research, like the vast bulk of dietary science, has been communicated to the public with far more certainty than it warrants.

Or, staying with diet, consider how he deals with Ultra-Processed Food. By any definition products like the Impossible Burger qualify as UPF. Their ingredients have been refined and reconstituted, and aside from salt most of these components would never appear in a normal kitchen. But because Friedrich wants plant-based meat alternatives to be better than real meat in every way and without any tradeoffs, he breezily explains that the sole problem with UPF is caloric density, and because plant-based meat alternatives are less calorically dense than the real thing, the way they are made does not matter. He may be right, and for my part I suspect caloric density is one of the biggest reasons it’s so easy to overconsume UPF. But it is also entirely possible that the actual processing, by which isolated components of whole foods are reconstituted into products that have been iteratively focus-grouped for palatability, will encourage overconsumption by other mechanisms.

I gesture at these particulars not because they discredit Friedrich or his project—after all, I’m not taking the time to explain why you should believe my assessment instead of his—but because they are at the very least areas of lively dispute. As such they call for an explanation of the contested terrain and some measure of humility, not overconfident certainty.

Yet confident certainty is what his argument hinges on; the heart of the book is the case that advances in Ultra-Processing will—not might, but will—soon make plant-based meat alternatives that consumers prefer to the real thing, and that advances in both chemistry and industrial production will make lab-grown meat possible at scale. Both, inevitably, will arrive at a lower price than real meat, at which point beef and chicken and pork will start losing market share.

Friedrich goes about convincing us of all this inevitability in a curious way. The problem, he argues, the reason so many people are feeling pessimistic about meat alternatives, is that we have an unrealistic idea about how scientific advances become consumer products: “There are endless examples of technological innovations that went from inconceivable to indispensable, (or at least ubiquitous) in a matter of a few decades.”

He begins with the car. At first cars were expensive, dangerous, and rare, the ultimate symbol of the alienating excesses of the wealthy. But in the blink of an eye they became reliable consumer goods and reshaped the built environment to suit them. He has other examples of this slow, then all at once dynamic: solar panels, genetic testing, man-made ice, heavier-than-air flight, computers, and ecommerce.

I very much take his point, and I agree that most humans are not good at sussing out which fringe technologies will reach critical mass, yet I repeat that it is a curious, even disingenuous, way for Friedrich to make his argument. I would submit that the public has grown suspicious of claims that lab-grown meat is the future not because of a collective naïveté about the realities of scaling a novel industry but because from the outset the loudest voices in that very industry have been predicting its imminence every chance they get, and their prediction have failed, and failed, and failed.

In the past couple decades there have been hundreds of news stories that breathlessly quote scientists and CEOs associated with dozens of lab-meat startups, all confidently stating that it will be hitting store shelves in just a year or two. Far easier than linking to each is to point to this 2021 Mother Jones article, which includes a chart of predictions from both universities and companies about when to expect commercially available lab-grown meat. (I’m especially tickled that Maastricht University alone has made a half dozen lapsed predictions.) All but a handful have been proven wrong, and those that have not are on borrowed time. This category could include a 2018 MSNBC article, which quotes Friedrich himself as saying that lab-grown meat would be available to consumers at a high price point in three years and cost-competitive in ten.

The reams of positive coverage that lab-grown meat has attracted portray it as a solved problem that only needs more scale to be cost-competitive, with perhaps one or two minor technical kinks in need of straightening, and in Meat Friedrich explicitly affirms this view. But the two-decade-and-counting very public history of claims that lab-grown meat is almost here and the lack of bioreactor nuggets in the Price Chopper freezer case create a dissonance which can’t be ignored, even if many scientists who have staked their livelihoods on everything working out remain optimistic.

For every technology that has gone from niche to universal in an eyeblink there are innumerable others that have failed. Take flying cars. There have been vehicles that could both drive like cars and fly like planes since the 1950s, but none have been commercially viable. Planes want to be light and require specialized training to operate. Cars want to be durable, operable by any human with a pulse, and able to keep that pulse ticking in the case of a crash. These competing goals can be partially, but not entirely, reconciled, and the result is always too compromised and too expensive; the demands of physical reality have so far stymied the endless efforts to build a flying car that is safe, cheap, and practical.

A more direct comparison would be vertical farming. Vertical farming has gone through many of the same hype cycles as lab-grown meat at roughly the same time, but unlike lab-grown meat, quite a lot of companies did bring vertically farmed produce to market, only to discover that costs stayed persistently high. There are some niches in which growing high-value berries or salad greens for an affluent local market can pencil out, but the infrastructure and energy costs limit such opportunities. That it might well be possible to grow more feed corn per acre in a converted ten-story building than in an identical footprint of the best farmland in the world is neither here nor there, because it would never make economic sense to do so.

Just because something is technically feasible, which lab-grown meat certainly is, does not mean it will ever pay. It could be that all the complex inputs and massive bioreactors and the difficulty of sterilizing a million square feet of stainless steel between batches and so on will simply always cost more than packing hundreds of thousands of broiler chickens into a warehouse, feeding them corn and soy, then running them through a disassembly line.

The other plank of Friedrich’s argument offers circumstantial evidence that he should not be sanguine about reducing costs. Remember, in addition to lab-grown meat, he believes that plant-based meats will also soon compete with the real thing. In both cases the efficiency of not feeding a dozen calories to an animal in order to get one calorie of food that will be eaten by a human should translate to savings. But plant-based meat alternatives remain significantly more expensive than regular meat, despite the fact that they are already realizing this efficiency.

Making a soy burger already uses far fewer beans than what would be fed to a steer to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of beef, if by ‘nutritionally equivalent’ we mean total protein. If, in 2026, an Impossible burger cannot be cost-competitive despite being so much more efficient than meat to produce from a caloric perspective, I have a very hard time believing lab-grown meat, with the cleanliness requirements of a medical facility and growth mediums the complexity of which mean they will inevitably be much more costly than soy, will be able to do so any time soon.

Time and again while reading Meat I asked myself who this book is for. Is it for the layperson wondering whatever happened to lab-grown meat? Is it for the policymakers, Wall Street, and food industry establishment, who between them have the money to find out how quickly meat alternatives might make economic sense? Is it for curious young people interested in whether lab-grown meat might provide a career? It’s explicitly for all of these, but, at the risk of engaging in the laziest sort of armchair psychologizing, I think it might also be for Friedrich himself.

Early on Friedrich points out that persuading people to become vegans or even reduce meat consumption has conclusively failed as an approach to fixing the food system. This means the moral abomination that is factory farming grinds on, remorselessly implementing any amount of suffering that increases efficiency, from farrowing crates for sows to debeaking layers to auctioning off three-day-old calves to prevent them from stealing a single unnecessary ounce of their mothers’ milk. It makes sense, then, that he might pin his hopes on beating these industries at their own game, a method of production so efficient that not just suffering but sentience becomes a waste of energy. Entertaining the possibility that the path to salvation might instead be a twenty-year-long dead-end would be hard indeed.

Meat is so unrelentingly upbeat and so steadfast in its insistence on the inevitability of technological revolution as solution that it never entertains the possibility of failure; it portrays the question entirely as when not if. Perhaps Friedrich, with his granular knowledge of every ongoing development in meat alternatives, simply sees things more clearly than those of us on the outside. Perhaps he is giving us a dispatch from the near future. Or, perhaps, he has grasped so tightly to a particular hope that he cannot bear the prospect of loosening his fingers.

Should time prove him wrong, all the energy, money, intelligence, and political capital poured into the pursuit of lab-grown meat will be a monumental waste, and the problems that rightly trouble him will remain. Technological solutions, especially when they are cheaper than what they replace, can enter the lives of more people far more rapidly than the changes that result from the slow work of political change and the even slower work of shifting social norms. But a promised technological fix that never quite materializes can cultivate nothing but complacency.

There are two problems in particular that, I think, we do not have the luxury of waiting for lab-grown burgers to solve. The first is animal welfare, which Friedrich mentions several times but does not dwell on, presumably to avoid alienating otherwise sympathetic readers who might feel judged by a litany of the systemic depravities factory farming generally entails. The second is land use. Agriculture in a variety of forms touches vast swaths of the earth’s surface, and demand for increased agricultural output is driving the destruction of the last great wildernesses. While the economic efficiency of meat alternatives remains unclear, their potential to release some of the pressure on land development are obvious, at least in theory; even the least generous estimates acknowledge that lab-grown meat and even more so plant-based meat substitutes would use far less acreage to produce protein than raising livestock.

The two issues are intertwined and will become more so as the global appetite for meat increases. It is a universal trend that as humans become more affluent they eat more meat, and increasing demand puts pressure on producers to maximize output and puts pressure on frontier farmers to convert virgin forest into pasture or crop land. The likely future, barring Friedrich’s technological solution, is one of more intensification in livestock farming and the steady conversion of every potentially arable acre to cropland to feed all those pigs and chickens.

Yet standard policy tools can address both welfare and land use, however imperfectly. As I write this the version of the farm bill making its way through Congress has a clause that aims to prevent states from limiting the use of farrowing crates in pork production. While it is depressing that the ag lobby has been so energetic in pursuing the elimination of any limits on the suffering to which hog farmers can subject pigs, they are responding to laws that have passed and that have been forcing change. Other partial but meaningful welfare requirements—like increasing the square footage per animal, requiring outdoor access, and so on—could blunt the worst excesses of the factory system.

The conservation of land is more clearly a political matter, and one that could less clearly be solved by the widespread adoption of lab-grown meat. Reducing meat consumption might reduce or reverse the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, just as shifting patterns of agriculture have seen much of the American Northeast reforest in the past hundred years. But it is also possible that some other industry would emerge to exploit the land. The virgin forest might be chipped for biomass, burned to make way for pulpwood plantations or ethanol corn, or turned into a colony of billionaire bunkers surrounded by a four-hundred-mile exclusion zone.

Rather than trying to change the ground reality by attempting to render the ground economically useless, conservation at least addresses the problem directly. I’m not naive enough to think such an approach is easy to pursue or likely to succeed, but with both land use and animal welfare I’d bet on direct action over hopes that an emergent technology can rapidly reshape the globe.

In Technology and Contemporary Life Albert Borgmann contrasts making music on a violin with listening to it on a stereo to illustrate the way technologies imply a particular relationship to the world and a particular way of living in it. The stereo is opaque, made from hundreds of parts whose provenance and workings cannot be easily discerned, capable of playing limitless, perfect music on command. The violin is intelligible, made of parts serving a comprehensible purpose, and it only generates sound when held by well-practiced hands.

This means the technology encourages a way of life and a manner of relating to other humans and to the products of human creativity. Recorded music allows the individual, discrete, passive consumption of music, a mode of consumption that the advent of streaming and Bluetooth headphones has amplified. A violin, in contrast, requires sustained engagement by communities of practice, and it creates music that only exists while it is being played. Hearing music directly from a violin requires a person to either be a musician themselves or have some sort of relationship with a human who is. It is not that passive consumption is in itself a problem, but that a whole life built on it lacks something fundamentally human. Too much passive consumption necessarily atomizes each of us and thins a society, and the technologies of ease are overwhelmingly the technologies of passivity.

Borgmann is our finest philosopher of technology, but his argument maps onto agriculture imperfectly. Whenever we think about food and farming, we should first affirm the wonder of a world in which famine has been so reduced, in which calories are so superfluous that we can feed them to animals, turn them to gas, and simply waste them in volumes our ancestors could not comprehend. The distance that lies between most of us and our food is a tragedy and a loss, but the miracle of feeding the world more than outweighs it. There are ways, I think, to begin reversing the loss and subverting the tragedy, but we must also attend to the miracle.

When it comes to farming, utilitarian concerns have a weight they do not when it comes to the sort of music we consume. Advocating for less and better music or fewer and better words is one thing, but with food, it is something else entirely. The absence of music or words is silence, which has both beauty and purpose; the absence of food is famine, which does not. Much to my regret, I have found nothing that convinces me that organic or regenerative or permaculture or any combination of alternative paradigms is ready to replace the sheer productivity of industrial agriculture. Instead, we should be looking to make reforms that are tempered with tremendous humility and prudence.

Yet food is, simultaneously, the quintessential example of Borgmann’s insight. Food we have prepared ourselves and shared with friends and family has a savor that a purchased meal always lacks, and food we’ve had a hand in growing is richer still. In its base necessity, food finds us at our most creaturely, and in its capacity to connect us to each other, to tradition, to the land, and to our creativity it finds us at our most human.

If Friedrich is right, if meat alternatives are destined to replace meat, if the skyscraper Chinese pig factories are razed to the ground to make room for gleaming stainless incubators capable of churning out ton after ton of pristine, nutritious, precancerous cells, if millions of acres of feed corn revert to prairie roamed by bison and antelope and wolves as the corrugated barns once packed with billions of chickens molder, if the hundred-thousand cow Texas feedlots empty and their clouds of miasmic dust blow out across the plains one final time to settle upon the roofs of warehouses packed with eternally fecund, eternally senseless bodyoids from which limitless butter-soft filet can be carved, I won’t have many tears for the fallen regime of depredation and unseen suffering.

But neither will I celebrate the technologies that have unmade it. Instead, I will commit myself to a doomed cause, and I expect I’ll find at least a measure of romance in remembering something most people have forgotten. Though I will no longer farm, I will still have a garden, and when I have friends over for grilled chicken, we’ll be eating a bird that spent a life pecking up clover and carpenter ants and whose throat I slit with my own hands.

Image Credit: George Inness, “The Lackawanna Valley” (1856)