A spectre is haunting veganism: the spectre of vegans.
In recent months, we’ve seen an alarming rise in caveman opposition to lab-grown meat. In Florida, Ron DeSantis has banned the sale and distribution of lab grown meat, declaring, after smashing his head several times with a wooden club and grunting “Belly Rumble! Og Hungry!”, that “Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs”.
In the view of Jeff Maurer, a political comedy writer on Substack, DeSantis’s ban was motivated, in part, by a desire to seem more manly. He laments that DeSantis didn’t do this by more conservative, less freedom-restricting means—for example:
Buy a motorcycle and also one of those leather vests that nominally says “Sons of Satan” or “Grim Reapers”, but which actually says “I’m middle-aged and not coping with it well”;
Wrestle and/or fuck a bear;
Be filmed walking away from an explosion with a look on your face that says: “What? I walk away from explosions all the time. Not even worth turning around.”
Seduce Jill Biden and then ghost her;
Run with the bulls, but upstream;
Buy truck nuts, lawnmower nuts, chair nuts, tea kettle nuts, and hand-painted miniature of the 250 year-old Wilhelmsbad Park carousel in Germany nuts;
Kill a deer, but not in the woods: Marry the deer, take out a life insurance policy, and then poison the deer so slowly that the police never suspect a thing. Because that’s cold.
John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has announced his own reluctant support for the bill on Twitter. As Matthew Adelstein has speculated, Fetterman may have done this intentionally, “to dispel myths that the republicans had a monopoly on stupidity”. Others have suggested, more plausibly, that Fetterman’s stance stems from an unusually low proficiency in verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, and processing speed, which results in him being so dumb that not even Willy Wonka could sugar-coat the matter.
It may also have something to do with protecting the interests of Big Agriculture, I’m not sure.
What’s most alarming, though, isn’t that certain US politicians—whose political careers often hinge on them glazing and robe-kissing the animal agriculture lobby—but that many vegans are staunchly opposed to lab-grown meat. Since a divided house cannot stand, it’s important to consider their arguments, and do so with as much fairness and charity as the diligent writing staff at Going Awol will abide, in light of their duty to keep you, dear reader, smiling and wanting more.
Before I consider their arguments, though, it helps to lay out the common-sense case for lab-grown meat. This sets the standard for what a vegan argument against lab-grown meat will have to overcome.
I.
Briefly, here’s the case in favour.
Factory farms are ridiculously horrible places. Their day-to-day practices—cramming multiple, genetically oversized hens into tiny, A4-sized wire cages, immobilizing mutilated and pregnant sows in tiny, unsanitary gestation crates, grinding up male chicks and undersized baby turkeys in electric macerators, etc.—are pretty obviously morally horrifying. I think most people who eat meat, even if they unwittingly buy it from factory farms (where, in the US, 99% of farmed animals live), would be appalled if they found out how they operate.
In general, if it’s seriously wrong to do something, it’s seriously wrong to pay others to do it for you. But buying meat from factory farms—where 99% of US meat comes from—does just this, since factory farming is seriously wrong. (I’m assuming here that taste pleasure doesn’t justify torturing sentient livestock, just as sexual pleasure doesn’t justify bestiality, rape, or this piece by Richard Hanania.)
Lab-grown meat lets people derive the same taste benefits from their food as processed, intensively farmed meat does, without the torture and killing. This makes it vastly morally preferable to meat from factory farms.
Pair that with the fact that the FDA considers it safe—and that there’s a good chance it’s healthier, since it contains fewer antibiotics and additives—and the case for it seems as kosher as a lamb on Passover.
II.
That in mind, here is one reason why some thoughtful vegans are wary of lab-grown meat.
Oftentimes, when a practice is seriously immoral, it seems wrong to imitate that practice. Consider: burning money in front of a homeless person is seriously immoral. As a result, it seems intuitively wrong to simulate burning money in front of a homeless person, using a VR headset to recreate—and relish in—the virtual beggar’s embarrassment. This seems true even though no real person is embarrassed.
Some vegans think the same is true of lab-grown meat. Eating factory farmed meat is wrong. But if that’s the case, then so is imitating—and relishing in—the experience of eating factory farmed meat (which, after all, is what lab-grown meat was made for).
As Fabio Bacchini and Elena Bossini put it in their peer-reviewed paper, “The Ethics of Imitation in Meat Alternatives”:
If we can produce meat alternatives that, for the sake of argument, are as nutritious as traditional meat, the only gain we can have by making them mimic traditional meat is having a more familiar and pleasing food experience. But this pleasing surplus is obtained at the cost of a tickling simulation of an intrinsically wrong action, i.e., the act of eating an innocent animal that must have been expressly killed for us to eat it.1
In response to this argument, there’s a crucial difference burning virtual money in front of a virtual homeless person and eating fake, lab-grown meat. In the VR case, you’re imitating an immoral action. When you eat lab-grown meat, in contrast, you’re not imitating an immoral action: rather, all you’re doing is imitating a food that, under normal circumstances, it’s immoral to pay for.
To make the point explicit: it’s not intrinsically wrong to eat meat. There’s no sensible vegan objection, for example, to eating roadkill. It might be yucky, but it doesn’t harm any animals—the pheasant was dead when you found it, and swiping off the road won’t incentivise drivers to run over more of its brothers. Hence, the practice you imitate when you eat lab-grown meat isn’t, strictly speaking, wrong. What’s wrong with meat consumption is the production and purchase of it. And eating lab-grown meat doesn’t imitate either of these in any meaningful sense.
You might retort that I’ve just canned the problem and kicked it down the road: doesn’t buying lab-grown meat imitate buying factory farmed meat? Maybe, but only in the sense that buying gluten-free cornflakes “imitates” buying normal-person rice crispies. Factory farmed meat and lab-grown meat are different and differently labelled products, often shelved in different parts of the supermarket. There’s no sense in which buying lab-grown meat “imitates” buying factory farmed meat in a morally troubling way.
III.
Here is another vegan objection.
Imagine we began lab-growing—and eating—human meat. Not only would that be gross, but it would seem to offend against human dignity somehow (perhaps because it would implicitly communicate the idea that humans are the kind of things that can be eaten, and so aren’t worthy of respect).
In the same way, some argue, lab-growing animal flesh and eating it is wrong for the same reason: it offends against the dignity of animals, by communicating that they’re the kinds of things that can be slaughtered, packaged up, and eaten with a side of fries.
In reply, what seems to matter in the case of human meat is that humans would see other humans eating human meat, and come to feel degraded by it. In contrast, animals are oblivious to whether we eat lab-grown meat. Not a single animal will ever feel disrespected by the practice.
To quote David Chauvet:
Just as animals will not suffer if we aim a gun at them if they do not know what a gun is, animals cannot suffer from viewing us eating cultured meat because they do not know that this is something that resembles them2.
To my mind, this more of less neuters the worry. If aliens in a faraway galaxy began lab-growing homo sapien meat for its taste and nutritional value—but remained steadfast in its ethical commitment against killing real live humans—I don’t think we’d have anything to complain about, since we’d never know they were growing our cells.
In the same way, the fact that cows will never clock that we’re eating lab grown beef burgers staves off the worry that they might be offended or insulted or whatever.
IV.
Here is one more for the road.
Some vegans are oppose factory farming because they’re fans of all things natural. Though they might not put things so explicitly, because they don’t have well-formed views, some vegans seem to think that whenever humans meddle in nature—be it by farming animals on an industrial scale, or by growing meat in labs—something’s gone morally awry.
I think this anti-interventionist impulse is basically meritless. As Jeff Sebo has written:
Why think that human intervention in the natural order is wrong in itself? After all, as Mill (1904) argues, human activity is either natural or not. If human activity is natural, then it is never an intervention in the natural order, and so is never wrong on this view. If human activity is not natural, then it is always an intervention in the natural order, and so is always wrong on this view. Either way, this is not an especially useful guide to action.
If the worry is just that human intervention in nature tends to go wrong a lot of the time, we should ask whether lab-grown meat is likely to be one of those instances. And given its potential to disrupt—and, potentially, displace—factory farming, one of the worst moral atrocities humans have ever committed by the numbers, it’s hard to see how, in this particular instance, the costs of artificially intervening could possibly outweigh the benefits.
Bacchini, F., & Bossini, E. (2023). The Ethics of Imitation in Meat Alternatives. Food Ethics, 8(2), p. 12. (Note: the authors don’t endorse this objection themselves.)
Chauvet, D. J. (2018). Should cultured meat be refused in the name of animal dignity?. Ethical theory and moral practice, 21, p. 398.
Lab-grown meat may be the best possible way to reduce real live animals from being mistreated and slaughtered, whatever its downsides. On that basis alone, even if the arguments that you make didn't work (I think they do) it would be a good idea. I don't know that anything preferable exists. Vegans that object to its use like this are shooting their cause in the foot I fear. As we see on many issues the "yuck factor" trumps reason or evidence however so often.
I suspect the vegans that object to lab-grown meat are not motivated by utilitarianism. Probably just folks that find consumption of flesh physically repulsive (maybe animal lovers, or those who physically witnessed animal suffering).
Consuming "fake" flesh may be symbolic of causing harm to an animal, and in an ideal world even this would *feel* too morally reprehensible for anyone to do. I don't think its about offending the animals (like your example about humans)—rather, that the act of eating flesh symbolizes the widespread willingness to kill a sentient creature for minor pleasure.
Unfortunately, though, much of the world consumes meat on a regular basis and it seems much easier to ethically produce meat than to make everyone a vegan. The symbolic interpretation of eating lab grown meat is trivial in comparison to its positive impact.