From grass-fed beef to lab-grown meat, "ethical" meat is pitched as a solution to our food system's problems. Here's why it can't work.
I disagree with my friend and journalist Leighton Woodhouse on many
things: policing, homelessness, and appropriate responses to climate
change. But one of the most surprising disagreements that was
revealed, in a conversation we had this weekend, was on the question
of “ethical” meat.
Leighton is a dedicated animal rights supporter. He’s covered some
of the most important issues relating to the movement in the past
decade, from so-called ag-gag laws, which make it a crime to take
photographs in factory farms, to the rising use of civil
disobedience to bring attention to animal abuse. To this day, one of
my favorite all-time videos on animal rights is a profile Leighton
did of Priya Sawhney, a dear friend who has co-founded multiple
organizations with me, and who personifies the rising boldness of
the movement.
Lab-grown meat won’t solve the many other ways that animals are exploited: for their fur, as experiments, or as nuisances to be exterminated in the wild. I have said before that, while my current focus is factory farming, I have bigger fish to save. The suffering of a single species of deep sea animal, the bristlemouth fish, probably outweighs all the animals killed in factory farms in a single year.
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