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Listening to the ‘Yuck Factor’: Why In-Vitro Meat May Be Too Much
to Digest
Paper prepared for the Panel: “Digesting Nature”American Political Science Association Annual Meeting,
September 2, 2010, Washington, DC
Revised September 6, 2010
Peter F. CannavòAssistant Professor of Government
198 College Hill RoadHamilton CollegeClinton, NY 13323(315) 859-4829
At the age of 6, my younger daughter, Peri, decided that she
could no longer abide the killing of animals for food. She
gave up meat, a pledge to which she has faithfully adhered
for almost two years. On a trip to the supermarket with my
two daughters, we decided to purchase some of what we call
‘fake chicken patties’ – soy patties made to resemble and
taste somewhat like fried chicken breast. While perusing
the refrigerated cases of meat substitutes we came across
what looked like a new brand of soy chicken patty, something
called Quorn. Out of curiosity, we bought it. The Quorn
patties didn’t taste much different from the familiar brands
like Boca, Morningstar, etc., though my older daughter,
Maja, thought they were better. They were also just as
highly processed, always a source of nagging misgivings on
my part. However, some research on the Internet revealed a
far more sinister truth. It turns out that Quorn is made
from mycoprotein produced in vats of Fusarium venenatum, a
mold. There have been concerns that Quorn may make some
people ill because of toxins produced by the mold. However,
2
the Quorn patties tasted good and none of us became ill.
Still, we never purchased them again. Why? The idea of
eating soil mold seemed disgusting to us (we don’t eat bleu
cheese either), particularly my wife, Helen, an infectious
disease specialist – some species of Fusarium has been known
to cause infections in human beings.
Quorn is probably harmless, but is, well, yucky.
Writing in Newsweek, Gersh Kuntzman underscored this
yuckiness. He noted how Quorn’s manufacturers got into
trouble for falsely claiming their product was derived from
mushrooms, a no less fungal but more familiar and palatable
origin: “to the food watchdogs, Fusarium venenatum is
something closer on the evolutionary scale to the mold in a
frathouse shower during a janitors’ strike. A long janitors’
strike.”1
We often show repugnance for more or less benign things
that conflict with our view of the world. It may be food
made from mold, or, in much more troubling instances of
1 Gersh Kuntzman, “There’s a Fungus Among Us,” Newsweek, May 20, 2002 (http://www.newsweek.com/2002/05/19/american-beat-there-s-a-fungus-among-us.html).
3
repugnance, it may be interracial marriage or homosexuality.
In such cases, repugnance is associated with bigotry and
hate. The so-called ‘yuck factor,’ a term coined by
bioethicist Arthur Caplan, has also motivated opposition to
genetically modified foods.2 Often disparaged as
‘Frankenfoods,’ GM foods seem unnatural and hence inedible,
and even harmful. In the broader field of biotechnology,
the yuck factor is also involved in opposition to cloning.
While the yuck factor might seem to be little more than
prejudice against what is different or unfamiliar,
bioethicist Leon Kass famously enlisted the yuck factor as
an indication that something is morally awry with cloning,
especially the cloning of human beings.3
Other deployments of biotechnology also elicit the yuck
factor. One interesting example is in-vitro meat, the direct
propagation of meat in tanks of nutrient liquid.4 Though as
2 See Charles W. Schmidt, “The Yuck Factor: When Disgust Meets Discovery,”Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol.116 (12), December 2008, pp. A524–A527.
3 Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning ofHumans,” New Republic, Vol. 216 (22), June 2, 1997, pp.17-26.
4 See Nancy Shute, “What Will We Eat?” U.S. News & World Report, August 4, 2008, Vol. 145 (3), pp.48-49; Leo Hickman, “Fake Meat: Burgers Grown in
4
yet only produced in extremely minute quantities, in-vitro
meat has been lauded as a way to raise meat without killing
animals and without the dirt and filth associated with
livestock, as a way to develop meats lower in fats and
stocked with additional nutrients and even pharmaceuticals,
as a less land and resource-intensive way to produce meat,
and as a possible solution to world food shortages. Many
vegetarians and animal-rights activists welcome the idea of
in-vitro meat. The organization People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, has in fact offered $1 million to
anyone who can by 2012 produce commercially viable in-vitro
‘chicken’ indistinguishable in taste from the real thing.5
My daughter Peri was revolted by the idea of in-vitro meat.
Though I have for ethical and aesthetic reasons abstained
Beakers,” Wired.Co.UK, July 31, 2009 (http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/08/features/fake-meat-burgers-grown-in-beakers?page=all); Jim Kling, “Future Feast,” Scientific American, Vol.16 (4), December 2006, pp.30-33; Gregory M. Lamb, “Where’s the Beef? Try the Lab,” Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 2008, p.25; Brendan I. Koerner, “WillLab-Grown Meat Save the Planet?” Slate, May 20, 2008 (http://www.slate.com/id/2191705); Matt Ford, “In-Vitro Meat: Would Lab-Burgers Be Better for Us and the Planet?,” CNN.com/Technology, August 8,2009 (http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/07/eco.invitro.meat/index.html).
5 See Shute, “What Will We Eat?,”and Hickman, “Fake Meat.”
5
from eating mammals for the past 20 years, I’m also fairly
revolted by in-vitro meat. In this essay, I would like to
examine the reasons for revulsion at what purports to be a
benign technology. My discussion also touches more
generally on the issue of cloning and genetically re-
engineering human beings, a topic that falls under the
heading of the ‘posthuman.’6
The deployment of the yuck factor in moral reasoning
has been highly controversial, as it seems to validate
prejudices. Nevertheless, I think that the repugnance or
squeamishness one might have for laboratory-grown meat does
point to something troubling about raising artificial meat
in a tank. Moreover, even though our current use of meat
necessarily involves killing animals and, increasingly,
brutalizing them in factory farms, growing meat outside the
body is itself threatening to human bodily integrity and to
prohibitions against practices such as cannibalism. The
culturing of meat in a vat raises issues of what Julia 6 See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999); Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2003); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
6
Kristeva identifies as the abject and problematically
crosses certain boundaries that protect the self. Moreover,
the in-vitro culturing of meat moves us further down a
troubling path toward an entirely denatured, machinic
existence. In the end, there is a scary irony to in-vitro
meat: as we attempt to pacify and sanitize the production of
meat, we may be creating much more insidious threats to both
human beings and, I would add, other animals as well.
The development of in-vitro meat is being pursued by
researchers in the Netherlands and at a Baltimore-based
nonprofit, New Harvest. However, any commercially viable
product is probably decades away. The most immediate
application would be substitutes for more traditional ground
beef and sausage rather than the production of whole steaks
or pork chops. Yet so far, only small samples of meat about
two centimeters long have been produced. The process is
still very expensive: ‘pork’ produced by the Dutch
researchers would cost about $45,000 per pound.7 The
production method involves taking stem cells or embryos and
7 Koerner, “Will Lab-Grown Meat Save the Planet?”
7
growing them on a scaffolding as skeletal muscle tissue
cells in ‘bioreactors’ containing a solution of glucose,
minerals, and hormones and other proteins. The muscle
tissue has to be ‘exercised’ so that it has a fibrous
texture like real meat. Otherwise, it will have the texture
of undercooked egg.8 To be ‘exercised,’ the meat is
stimulated with electric currents or mechanical devices.9
Antibiotics are required to keep in-vitro meat in the
bioreactor from becoming infected, and before the meat can
actually be palatable, artificial flavorings have to be
added.10 An article in U.S. News & World Report reports, “One of
the very few people to have eaten in vitro meat is Oron
Catts, a 40-year-old artist.” He tried the ‘unexercised
product. “Catts and collaborator Ionat Zurr grew frog
steaks in vitro for an installation and performance in
Nantes, France, in 2003 called ‘Disembodied Cuisine.’” The
“disembodied cuisine” was not a hit:
8 Hickman, “Fake Meat.”
9 Koerner, “Lab-Grown Meat.”
10 Hickman, “Fake Meat.”
8
The artists used tissue engineering to grow two quarter-size disks of muscle on a polymer scaffold, then sautéed the steaks in a honey-garlic sauce, quartered them, and served dinner for eight. It was nota gourmet experience. The scaffold didn't degrade enough, Catts says, and the unexercised muscle had a texture reminiscent of snot. “It was fabric with jelly,” he says. “Four people spit out the bits.” That was five years ago, and he hasn't eaten meat since.11
Yet some writers herald a revolution in human
existence. In the transhumanist online magazine, h+,
futurist and humorist Hank Hyena (aka Hank Pellissier)
trumpets “Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives.”12
He crows, “In-Vitro Meat will be socially transformative,
like automobiles, cinema, vaccines.” Its popularity boosted
“by continued outbreaks of filthy over-crowded farm animal
diseases like swine flu, Mad Cow, avian flu, tuberculosis,
brucellosis, and other animal-to-human plagues,” in-vitro
meat will render “its murdered rivals” obsolete. Ranches
will go under and unemployed ranch workers will move to
11 Shute, “What Will We Eat?,” p.49.
12 Hank Hyena, “Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives,” h+ Magazine, November 17, 2009 (http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/eight-ways-vitro-meat-will-change-our-lives).
9
cities, freeing up the arable land now devoted to raising
livestock. The meat will be healthier: “In-Vitro Meat will
be 100% muscle. It will eliminate the artery-clogging
saturated fat that kills us. Instead, heart-healthy Omega-3
(salmon oil) will be added. IVM will also contain no
hormones, salmonella, e. coli, campylobacter, mercury,
dioxin, or antibiotics that infect primitive meat.” In-
vitro meat will “conquer” starvation and protein deficiency.
The greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, air and water
pollution, and food and water consumption associated with
livestock production will be eliminated. In-vitro meat
will be less messy and a lot less brutal: “Once we get over
the fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we'll be thankful
that it doesn't shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink,
bleed, or scream in pain.” It will also help encourage
local, high-tech food production: “The convenience of buying
In-Vitro Meat fresh from the neighborhood factory will
inspire urbanites to demand local vegetables and fruits.
This will be accomplished with ‘vertical farming’ – building
gigantic urban multi-level greenhouses that utilize
10
hydroponics and interior grow-lights to create bug-free,
dirt-free, quick-growing super veggies and fruit (from dwarf
trees), delicious side dishes with IVM..” Most importantly,
in-vitro meat will mean the end of slaughtering animals for
food and is thus supported by animal rights activists.
In online commentary on various articles on in-vitro
meat, many readers welcome in-vitro meat for these same
reasons. They also point out that livestock are already
raised in highly industrialized settings and that growing
meat artificially is after all a lot less disgusting than
slaughtering an animal.
However, others express concern about ‘playing God,’ a
common fear that often attends developments in
biotechnology. Others worry about the nutritional content
and possible health risks of in-vitro meat, or they point
out that in-vitro meat still requires various products from
animals, such as cells and serums; that it would still draw
upon considerable inputs of materials and energy and also
generate waste; and that it would put farmers out of
business. Some commentators wonder why we don’t just switch
11
to a vegetarian diet or at least raise livestock in a more
humane and sustainable way. One reader of a CNN story on
in-vitro meat finds the whole concept more than a bit
creepy: “Very scary. Kind of reminds me of the Matrix.
Embryos grown for consumption as food. There is something
wrong when we can’t find a better balance to co-exist in
some sane way with nature and animals. I’ll pass.”13 A
commentator on Hyena’s article was more blunt: “This sounds
just gross. Guess I'll have to take up hunting and
fishing.”14 One blogger was even more direct: “Ahhhhh!
Throwupthrowupthrowup.”15
Mark Post, a Dutch researcher working on in-vitro meat,
is puzzled why anyone would find it repulsive or see its
development as playing God. He wonders why it meat should
be regarded as any different from, say, hydroponic tomatoes
or other agricultural innovations: “I don’t see why it is
any more problematic than, say, introducing a completely 13 See Ford, “In-Vitro Meat.”
14 Hyena, “Eight Ways.”
15 “Mmmm, Test Tube Meat,” Gawker.com, April 21, 2008 (http://gawker.com/382037/mmmm-test-tube-meat).
12
water-grown tomato. We have been domesticating grasses for
thousands of years. This is pretty much artificial
selection.”16
The yuck factor here and elsewhere is of course felt as
an emotional response. But such an emotional response may
indicate deeper, more profound moral qualms. As Mary
Midgley notes, advocates of biotechnology claim to have
reason on their side and dismiss emotional responses of
disgust as irrational.17 The attempt to dismiss enemies of
‘progress’ as ‘emotional’ is of course a familiar theme in
other debates, for example over road-building, clearing of
wilderness and farms for development, globalization, and the
loss of family farms and small businesses. Those who the
play ‘reason vs. emotion’ card rely on the assumption that
anthropogenic technological and environmental change are
objectively desirable and, absent meddling by misguided
16 Hickman, “Fake Meat.”
17 Mary Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity: Why We Should Pay Attention to the ‘Yuk Factor,’ Hastings Center Report, September-October 2000, pp.7-15. On invocation of the yuck factor or repugnance as irrational and reactionary, see for example, Ruth Macklin, “The New Conservatives in Bioethics: Who Are They and What Do They Seek?,” Hastings Center Report, Vol.36 (1), January/February 2006, pp.34-43.
13
opponents, inevitable, while the opposition is driven by
nostalgia, reactionary sentiments, and ‘mere’ feeling.
Midgley argues that in fact feeling is an important
concomitant of moral sensibility: “Whenever we seriously
judge something to be wrong, strong feeling necessarily
accompanies the judgment.” However, she adds, “Of course,
we know that these feelings are not an infallible guide. Of
course we need to supplement them by thought, analyzing them
in a way that gives us coherent and usable standards.”18
Similarly, Kass acknowledges, “Revulsion is not an argument;
and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly
accepted.”19 Unless one is expressing a purely aesthetic
preference, saying something is yucky, repulsive, or
disgusting is the beginning of moral deliberation and
debate, not the end of the conversation.20
Kass himself uses repugnance and his opposition to
cloning to help justify a conservative agenda that attacks
18 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p. 9.
19 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” p.20.
20 Carl Elliott, “Passion Slaves,” Society, Vol.44 (4), May/June 2007, pp.31-45.
14
the sexual revolution, questions the moral acceptability
even of in-vitro fertilization, and upholds the traditional
heterosexual family as the only really proper context for
having and raising children. “Cloning,” Kass says, “turns
out to be the perfect embodiment of the ruling opinions of
our new age,” wherein we deny “the inherent procreative
teleology of sexuality itself” and, seeing children as
purely a matter of choice, we come to regard “only those
children who fulfill our wants [as] fully acceptable.”
Children become a product of an urge to pure self-creation,
a perspective which leads to “self-cloning.”21 Thus, Kass
plays right into the hands of those who dismiss the yuck
factor as an expression or outgrowth of reactionary
prejudices. Kass lumps cloning in with the sexual
revolution, gay rights, feminism, single-parent families,
and other changes in sexuality, procreation, and family life
over the past half-century, which only serves to undermine
his own position that cloning would represent a significant
and dangerous qualitative change in human reproduction.
21 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” pp.18, 23.
15
Moroever, Kass gets bogged down in teleological arguments
about purpose of sexuality and its supposed relation to our
sense of mortality and incompleteness.22
Kass thus manages to obscure his more compelling and
straightforward argument, one that does validate the idea of
cloning as qualitatively distinct and also deeply troubling:
the generation of children with a pre-specified genetic
profile through the cloning, multiplication, and
manipulation of embryos – including to produce so-called
‘designer babies,’ a practice that cloning would help
realize – crosses the line from procreation of human beings,
a process that demands our openness to the vagaries of
genetic inheritance and the unconditional acceptance of
offspring, no matter their genetic constitution, to the
outright manufacture or even mass production of human
beings, with embryos reduced to raw material for direct
manipulation. Kass says:
Human cloning would also represent a giant step toward turning begetting into making, procreation into manufacture (literally, something ‘handmade’), a process already begun with in vitro fertilization and
22 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” p.22.
16
genetic testing of embryos. With cloning, not only is the process in hand, but the total genetic blueprint ofthe cloned individual is selected and determined by thehuman artisans. To be sure, subsequent development willtake place according to natural processes; and the resulting children will still be recognizably human. But we here would be taking a major step into making man himself simply another one of the man-made things. Human nature becomes merely the last part of nature to succumb to the technological project, which turns all of nature into raw material at human disposal, to be homogenized by our rationalized technique according to the subjective prejudices of the day.23
The argument that the instrumentalization of nature
culminates in the similar treatment of human beings is of
course not original with Kass, though he connects it to our
unease with cloning. Heidegger points out that in treating
nature as “standing reserve,” we ultimately do the same to
ourselves.24 Marx notes the generalized commodification of
both things and workers under capitalism. Kass, though a
conservative, also raises such concerns about
commodification: the manufacture of human beings will
“proceed under the banner of commerce.”25 From a left 23 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” p.23.
24 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953) in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1977), pp.311-341.
25 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” p.24.
17
perspective, one might argue that having commodified
virtually all other aspects of human life and nonhuman
nature, global capitalism will finally colonize reproduction
down the cellular level. Though Kass alleges that the
manufacturing and commodification process has already begun
with IVF and genetic testing, reproduction is still a long
way from making babies to order, even if we allow for pre-
screening of embryos to prevent birth defects or serious
inherited diseases. Cloning would be an enormous step in
the direction of manufacturing humans, and Kass persuasively
argues the degree to which cloning, despite its promise of
enhancing individual choice and autonomy in the reproductive
process, is “inherently despotic” and dehumanizing.26 I
will return to these concerns about human manufacture and
biotechnological despotism in my discussion of in-vitro
meat. It turns out that the reduction of living animal
tissue to mere raw material to be manipulated at will, a
process already begun with factory farming and its attendant
26 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” p.24. See also McKibben, Enough, and Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
18
brutalities,27 opens a similar, though perhaps more
roundabout, path to our own dehumanization. And this
perhaps is why growing meat in bioreactors or vats elicits
disgust, whereas hydroponic tomatoes do not.
As William Boyd documents,28 the familiar broiler
chicken is actually the result of almost a century of
advances in industrial organization and production
processes, genetics, the chemical and pharmaceutical
industries, nutritional and health sciences, breeding
technologies, rural electrification, and soybean and corn
production, a thorough mechanization of organic life. The
modern chicken, confined to brutally overcrowded conditions
in industrial production facilities, has been reduced to a
biological machine for producing meat and eggs. The next
step is the transformation of chickens into animal
microencephalic lumps (AMLs), which Sara Gavrell Ortiz
27 See William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,”Technology and Culture, Vol.42 (4), October 2001, pp. 631-664; Wyatt Galusky, “Playing Chicken: Technologies of Domestication, Food, and Self,” Science as Culture, Vol.19 (1), March 2010, pp.15-35.
28 See Boyd, “Making Meat.”
19
describes as “beings with such small brains that they would
lack the cognitive capacity to feel pain or have interests;
they are ‘senseless’ beings.”29 The AML is not much
different from in-vitro meat.
If chickens and other animals raised for food suffer
immensely, especially with factory farming, why not just
breed AMLs? Such senseless chickens could be sources of
meat and could also lay eggs. Yet, as Bernice Bovenkerk,
Frans W.A. Brom, and Babs J. van den Bergh note, such a
prospect still seems intuitively repugnant.30 Why?
Midgley says that at root the yuck factor is a response
to something being “unnatural.” Though the use of the
natural as a normative standard has been notoriously
employed to legitimate repressive, bigoted, or exclusionary
practices, there is also a sense that what is “natural”
involves our fundamental conception of how the world is
29 Sara Elizabeth Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare: Animal Integrity, Animal Dignity, and Genetic Engineering,” Ethics & the Environment, Vol.9 (1), Spring 2004, pp. 94-120 (95).
30 See Bernice Bovenkerk, Frans W.A. Brom, Babs J. van den Bergh,
“Brave New Birds: The Use of ‘Animal Integrity’ in Animal Ethics,” The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 32 (1), January/February 2002, pp.16-22.
20
organized. Certainly, mud huts, plastics, axes, airplanes,
Stargazer lilies, bassoons, antibiotics, default credit
swaps, smart phones, contraceptives, Congressional hearings,
home runs, and plump strawberries are all in some sense
unnatural. Yet, some departures from nature are so
challenging to one’s fundamental conception of physical
reality that they seem, and may in fact be, quite
threatening. We have traditionally regarded the living
world in terms of separate, coherent entities,
scientifically referred to as species. Breaking the
boundaries of species to create monstrosities and strange
hybrids is threatening to this order. Midgley notes,
“Traditional mixed monsters – minotaurs, chimeras, lamias,
gorgons – stand for a deep and threatening disorder,
something not just confusing but dreadful and invasive.”31
An AML, though genetically still a chicken seems
morphologically like a disturbing hybrid between a bird and
a strange, otherworldly organism. In contrast to
postmodernist views of cyborgs and transgenic organisms as
31 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p.10.
21
liberating hybrids subverting and overturning traditional
hierarchies and oppressive essentialisms,32 Midgley sees
biotechnology as creating a threatening and chaotic world in
which “organisms can always be shifted and transformed into
one another.”33 The entire world, including the human body
itself, becomes fluid raw material to be manipulated by the
disembodied designer. “Our culture has of course already
moved a long way in the direct of making that shift.”34
What is especially disturbing about such both
transgenic hybrids and monsters and also the monstrous AML
is how such creations threaten bodily invasion or the loss
of bodily integrity. Bovenkerk, Brom, and van den Bergh
suggest that creating AMLs would violate the physical
integrity of a chicken as a whole organism and raising such
“quasi-chickens” would interfere with a chicken’s
32 See Teresa Heffernan, “Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life,” Cultural Critique, 53, Winter 2003, pp. 116-133; Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
33 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p.11.
34 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p.12.
22
flourishing as a life form.35 They maintain that an
animal’s integrity involves, among other things, being whole
or intact in terms of physical and mental endowments and
capacities, and being able to sustain itself independently
in an environment suitable to its kind. They acknowledge
the difficulty of defining integrity and determining when it
has in fact been violated – an organism’s integrity is not a
clear-cut, objective standard. Does a medical procedure to
treat a human or nonhuman animal violate that creature’s
integrity? Would it make a difference if, say, a limb was
amputated for necessary medical reasons as opposed to being
amputated to satisfy someone’s sadism or perverse sense of
aesthetics? Are physical interventions like surgery, or
drawing blood, violations of integrity? Despite such
problems with defining integrity, the concept, they note,
has value. It enables us to understand what it means to
speak of the inviolability of the person or other organism
from intrusion or infringement that interferes with
flourishing or health or, in the case of human beings, is
35 Bovenkerk, Brom, and van den Bergh, “Brave New Birds.”
23
done without consent. Thus, they say, “When we envision a
future in which we buy eggs from a warehouse housing
hundreds of rows of flesh-colored humps created from what we
once knew as chickens, a feeling of discomfort comes over
us. We – or many of us, anyway – have a moral intuition
that changing chickens into living egg machines is wrong.
The moral notion that gives voice to this intuition is
‘integrity.’”36
Reducing a human or nonhuman animal’s capacities to
satisfy its own needs would violate its integrity.37 This
could involve confining a pig to a tiny pen or cutting off a
chicken’s beak so that it doesn’t peck at its neighbors in
overcrowded conditions, or breeding animals that are
fundamentally impaired, missing brain or appendages or
certain basic neurological functions. We might say that
such an animal is no longer whole or intact, and it cannot
sustain itself independently in an environment suitable to
its kind. A chicken bred to be an AML is only partially a
36 Bovenkerk, Brom, and van den Bergh, “Brave New Birds,” p.21.
37 Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare.”
24
chicken and, though domesticated chickens can be easy
targets for prey in the wild,38 an AML would quickly and
certainly die outside its artificial, mechanized
environment. Gavrell Ortiz relates the notion of animal
integrity to the concept of animal dignity: “what underlies
both the notion of animal integrity and animal dignity may
be an account of an animal’s own good based on the
uninhibited development ‘of those functions and operations
that a member of the species can normally perform.’”39 On
this view, “it is morally problematic to change those
capacities that would affect the development of the normal
functions of an animal as a member of its species, since
this change would make the animal worse-off.”40
However, it could be argued that AMLs are not chickens
at all. Therefore, the integrity of an AML is not violated
38 Galusky, “Playing Chicken.”
39 Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare,” p.111; quoted material is from Philipp Balzer, Klaus Peter Rippe, and Peter Schaber, “Two Concepts of Dignity for Humans and Non-Human Organisms in the Context of Genetic Engineering, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Volume 13, 2000, pp.7-27 (23).
40 Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare,” p.112.
25
when it is used to produce eggs. In fact, let’s say we
discovered that some chickens had somehow evolved into such a
life form. Would the very existence of that life form
violate the original chickens’ integrity or dignity? If an
organism lacks not only the capacity to pursue certain needs
or interests but is also devoid of those needs or interests
and does not even have the cognitive ability to know whether
those needs or interests have been eliminated through
bioengineering, then it becomes difficult to say that the
organism’s modified state violates the integrity or dignity
of its genetic forebear.
However, a thought experiment might help here: What if
a researcher created, from single cells, disembodied human
torsos with uteri to bring children to term? It is safe to
say that many people would find this grotesque. And this is
because the disembodied torso, while perhaps not strictly
speaking human per se, can also be seen as a partial human
made into a piece of biological plumbing.41 The very 41 This is similar to concerns about the instrumentalization and commodifcation of women serving as paid surrogate mothers. See Elizabeth Anderson, “Is Women's Labor a Commodity?” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol.19 (1), Winter 1990, pp.71-92.
26
existence of such an entity would likely be perceived as a
violation of human integrity, as disembodied human parts
would be harnesses for production or reproduction purposes.
This is not much different from Brave New World’s various
castes, many of whom were bred with limited intelligence in
order to be happy with lifetime menial positions.42 If such
an organism evolved on its own we might also be disgusted,
but the notion of a violation comes in when the impaired
form is created deliberately.
There are several objections to these arguments,
including as they relate to in-vitro meat. First of all,
the notion of whether an AML violates the integrity or
dignity of a chicken or other nonhuman animal is ultimately
a matter of human perception. One may speak of an AML as
having extremely limited capabilities and lacking the status
of an autonomous life form, but one cannot speak of an
objective property of integrity or dignity in nature that
adheres to a broiler chicken (at least when liberated from a
factory farm) but not to an AML. Thus Bovenkerk, Brom, and
42 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).
27
van den Bergh point out that “integrity is not a biological
aspect of the animal itself after all. The concept then
loses its objective, biological character and becomes a
moral rather than an empirical notion. It does not refer to
a notion of factual intactness or wholeness so much as to
perceived intactness. It refers to how we feel an animal
should be.”43 Moreover, it is highly unlikely that a
chicken, unlike a human being, would feel its integrity
threatened if it encountered an AML chicken, though perhaps
a more sentient animal like a pig might be alarmed by an AML
version of itself. Gavrell Ortiz also suggests that in-
vitro meat, which is really “not an organism but a bundle of
growing tissue,”44 may not raise the same issues of
integrity and dignity. A blob of meat or a “living edible
tumor”45 in a growth medium is not really a deliberately
impaired animal, even if the meat’s DNA is identical to a
chicken’s. However, from a human standpoint, the production
43 Bovenkerk, Brom, and van den Bergh, “Brave New Birds,” pp.17-18; emphasis in original.
44 Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare,” p.116.
45 Gavrell Ortiz, “Beyond Welfare,” p.116.
28
of in-vitro meat, even chicken meat, might constitute a
threat to human integrity and may even further threaten the
integrity of other animals. Moreover, even if integrity is
a matter of perception, its violation still affects our
relationship to ourselves and to other animals.
In developing this argument, I want to return to the
issue of unnaturalness. Significant transgressions of what
is considered natural tend to arouse repugnance, as noted
earlier. In some cases, such as repugnance against
interracial marriage or homosexuality or even oral sex or
exotic foods, the labeling of something as ‘unnatural’ is
ultimately revealed as a prejudice or, in the latter two
cases, a subjective aesthetic preference. However, this
does not mean that all supposedly ‘natural’ boundaries are
merely prejudice. One might think of widespread injunctions
or taboos against cannibalism, incest, pedophilia, or
mutilation of the dead. These injunctions have multiple
origins and justifications, but in part they involve created
boundaries to protect the self – and in the case of incest
and pedophilia, extremely vulnerable selves like children –
29
against violations of physical and mental integrity.
Injunctions against the mutilation of corpses would seem to
protect the self against future, posthumous violation. In a
similar vein, anthropologist Mary Douglas also speaks of
concepts of dirt and pollution as involving the breaching of
boundaries. Dirt is “matter out of place.” What counts as
dirt in one setting does not count as dirt in another. For
example, “food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to
leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered
on clothing.” She remarks, “Dirt then is never a unique,
isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt
is the by-product of a systematic ordering and
classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves
rejecting inappropriate elements.”46 Taboos involve
putatively unnatural practices that breach important
boundaries. Even environmental pollution can be seen in
this regard. While taboos, systems, and conceptions of what
is natural often serve to uphold power relations and
46 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.36-37.
30
hierarchies, they can also serve to protect the self against
invasion.
One area where taboos are especially pronounced is the
abject, a topic explored by Julia Kristeva.47 Drawing on
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Kristeva
focuses on the significance of a child’s development of
selfhood separate from the mother, a separation that
involves distinguishing between self and other, and subject
and object. The abject is what threatens this separation of
the self from the world, and in physical terms it often
manifests as the dissolution of corporeal form through open
woods, defecation, and decaying corpses, as well as bodily
fluids like shit, blood, pus, vomit, and sweat:
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck.48
These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself,
47 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
48 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.2.
31
as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live.49
Similar to Douglas, she says, “It is thus not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous,
the composite.”50 Thus, with its fluidity, the abject
exists in a kind of borderland between subject and object.
The corpse is perhaps most emblematic of abjection. It is
transitional between human and nature, subject and object,
living and nonliving, and the intact and decomposed.51
In many cases, the abject is matter not only out of
place, but without a proper place where it would be
accepted. Food spattered on clothes may be repulsive, but
food itself is not (though food has an interesting relation
to the abject, as I discuss below). However, shit or human
49 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.3.
50 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.4.
51 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.109..
32
corpses are almost always repulsive and threatening. They
are the stuff of taboos and prohibitions.52
Again, like repugnance in general, the concept of the
abject is frequently associated with bigotry. The abject is
frequently associated with difference, with those who in
some ways challenge one’s own conception of selfhood. Those
who are different have been labeled as dirty and
threatening. Consequently, they have been socially
marginalized and disempowered. The list of those relegated
by various cultures to the abject is quite expansive: women,
people of color, gays, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Jews,
Gypsies, immigrants, the poor, the mentally ill, homeless,
the disabled, and so on.
As these prejudices suggest, what is abject is not
invariant across cultures, as Gail Hawkins notes. Thus
certain taboos involving menstruating women may appear
foreign to us, while contemporary American society’s extreme
phobia about germs – as evidenced by the ubiquity of hand
sanitizer – may also seem bizarre to an outsider. A
52 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp.16-17.
33
European or Central Asian might not share Americans’
aversion to eating horsemeat, and an East Asian might not
share Americans’ or Mexicans’ aversion to dog meat. Hawkins
thus deems the psychoanalytic concept of abjection too
ahistorical.53
However, Hawkins does not entirely dispense with the
concept of abjection. As she points out, our relation with
what is viewed as abject waste is not only one of protecting
the self against threat, but also a matter of actually
constituting the self. “Waste,” she says, “constitutes the
self in the habits and embodied practices through which we
decide what is connected to us and what isn’t. Managing its
biological or material reality is part of the way in which
we organize our self and our environment, keep chaos at
bay.”54 Again, disgust in the face of bodily waste, decay,
corpses, gore, disease, and filth and in the face of
practices like cannibalism, incest, or pedophilia thus seems
53 Gail Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p.3.
54 Hawkins, Ethics of Waste, p.4.
34
to be a way of protecting the self against threats to health
and integrity.
Food has an interesting status here. It exists at the
nexus of life, nonlife, culture, nature, waste, and dirt; it
is both outside the self and a future part of the self.
Kristeva says, “When food appears as a polluting object, it
does so as oral object only to the extent that orality
signifies a boundary of the self’s clean and proper body.
Food becomes abject only if it is a border between two
distinct entities or territories.”55 Food comes from the
soil or from animals. It is in danger of becoming
putrescent and even harmful and deadly. What is healthful
to one person can be toxic to another. When eating, we open
our bodies up to the outside world, absorb foreign matter,
and both nourish ourselves and put ourselves at risk. Being
omnivorous human beings heightens the risk. As omnivores,
Michael Pollan remarks, we are not born with inherent
dietary boundaries and so must create elaborate rules to
55 Kristeva, Powers, of Horror, p.75.
35
distinguish edible from inedible.56 Many of these rules
involve taboos and regulations regarding the preparation and
eating of meat.
As Kristeva notes, meat in some measure inhabits the
realm of the abject in that it emerges from death and
gore.57 Meat goes from life to death and back to life
again. When we eat meat, we ingest the corpses of
previously living animals – animals killed by human beings –
and incorporate those corpses into our own living flesh.
The extreme horror many, if not most, societies experience
at the notion of cannibalism, a kind of horror that seems to
even overshadow horror of other forms of murder, perhaps
indicates an anxiety that we ourselves are also flesh and
that nature does not provide any comfortable distinctions
between human flesh and nonhuman flesh. Those distinctions
have to be created and enforced by human beings. As David
Schlosberg notes, in the natural world, “part of the
flourishing for animals is to be protein for other life
56 Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma:
57 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.96.
36
forms.”58 At a recent public lecture, Schlosberg mentioned
the experience of Australian green theorist Val Plumwood.
Being attacked and nearly devoured by a crocodile led
Plumwood to a very tangible realization of how human beings
are also meat and potential prey.59 Indeed, various
cultures, such as the Salish in the Pacific Northwest, have
even regarded prey animals, like salmon, as human beings in
another form. Humans are meat and their death and ingestion
can also nourish an animal, including perhaps a human
animal.
The advent of in-vitro meat is an attempt to remove
these ambiguities from food and create a sterile, guilt-free
product. Recall Hank Hyena’s comment: “Once we get over the
fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we'll be thankful that
it doesn't shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink, bleed,
or scream in pain.” Or, recall his desire for a “bug-free,
58 David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.151.
59 For an account of this experience, see Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” inJames O'Reilly, Sean O'Reilly, and Richard Sterling, eds., The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying (Palo Alto: Travelers’ Tales, 2000), pp.127-146.
37
dirt-free” agriculture. (Ironically, in-vitro meat is the
end product of a process that has thoroughly industrialized
food production, created intense animal suffering and new
sources of environmental pollution and food-borne illness,60
and by distancing us from everyday contact with food
animals, made us unaware of their suffering.61)
But meat grown in a vat is supposedly still meat, so it
is not free from the anxieties surrounding meat. It may be
cruelty-free, but causes anxiety in another way. In-vitro
meat is not like hydroponic tomatoes. Hydroponic tomatoes
are still grown as part of a plant; the growth medium is
different, but the plant is basically the same. Perhaps a
more apt comparison would be growing tomatoes, sans the
plant, in vats, a prospect hardly more appetizing than vats
of mold producing Quorn. However, the idea of growing meat
outside the body seems especially grotesque, because it is
like an open wound – living flesh is no longer contained
within an organism but floats in a chemical soup, merging
60 Boyd, “Making Meat”; Galusky, “Playing Chicken.”
61 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p.306.
38
with its artificial environment. This is akin to the
partial chicken, the AML more or less directly interfaced
with mechanized life support systems, as well as to the
biomechanoid images of artist H.R. Giger, or to depictions
of cyborgs, their flesh interpenetrated with tubes,
circuits, and prosthetics.62
Thus exposed and technologically interfaced, such flesh
is open to further direct manipulation. Julie Clarke
discusses Blender, an installation by artists Stelarc and
Nina Sellars.63 Samples of the artists’ fat, nerves,
connective tissue, and blood floats in a soup of anesthetic,
adrenaline, sodium bicarbonate, ethanol, and saline
solution, all encased in a Plexiglass vessel. The mixture
of tissues and chemicals is periodically blended into a
bubbling, frothy mass. Clarke notes, “Like the soupy mass
that remains when organic matter disintegrates, disrupting
62 The cybernetic, zombie-like Borg, villains in various Star Trek films and television series, provide one well-known example of this latter disturbing image. 63 Julie Joy Clarke, Corporeal Mélange: Aesthetics and Ethics of Biomaterials in Stelarc and Nina Sellars's Blender, Leonardo, Volume 39 (5), October 2006, pp. 410-416.
39
the border between the original body and the surrounding
area, which it invades, the biomaterials, although thoroughly
contained, disturbed the boundary between the bodies of the
artists and the machine in which their excess biomaterials
were housed. Equally disquieting was the animation of the
biomaterials by wholly technological means, suggesting the
complex interrelationship formed between the human body as
raw material and the ability of technology to reanimate and
reconfigure it into a new body.”64 The artists’ “bodies
[are] encapsulated in a vessel that in effect embodies them
as pure material that contains within it the potential for
human/nonhuman alliances.”65 The artists’ tissues and the
container had been sterilized, but for Clarke, the
installation still evokes the abject. The presence of fat
reminds her of the rendering of fat and making of soap from
the corpses of Jewish concentration camp victims, who were
themselves considered abject by their captors.66 The
64 Clarke, “Corporeal Mélange,” p.412.
65 Clarke, “Corporeal Mélange,” p.412.
66 Clarke, “Corporeal Mélange,” p.413.
40
installation also evokes concerns about biotechnology in our
own society:
Coagulated, blended and homogenized, the biomaterials subtracted from each artist’s body make problematic anynotion of an individual body unaffected or untainted bythe other, in a society in which the biomaterials of a human or nonhuman animal may be absorbed, transplanted into or grafted onto another. Indeed, the technical reanimation and blending of the biomaterials in Blender alert us to the potential of biological materials to bereconfigured, reused and revitalized by biomedicine. However, any idea of intimacy suggested by the intermingling of biomaterials in Blender was sanitized by the fact that the fluids were mixed outside the bodyin a disinfected chamber. This new body then containedwithin and protected by a technological exoskeleton, ishygienic, controlled and under surveillance.67
The sterilized environment housing human tissue evokes the
blending, manipulation, and reanimation of that tissue
through highly controlled mechanisms and processes. It is
the mirror image of chicken or other animal flesh grown as
an AML or as sheets or lumps of meat in a nutrient medium.
As Wyatt Galusky notes, what we turn animals into
through our industrialized food production processes,
“through our technological engagement with all facets of
their existence (what they eat, where they live, what they
67 Clarke, “Corporeal Mélange,” p.416.
41
do, what their bodies become) says a lot about what we as
humans think about ourselves and what we come to value in
(human) nature – uniformity and control.”68 Galusky sees
the industrial re-engineering of chickens, and their
possible ultimate transformation into in-vitro meat, as
reflecting an effort to simplify nature and engineer out its
surprises. Importantly, this effort to thoroughly
manipulate and control nonhuman nature leads to not only the
re-engineering of nonhuman animals, but to our own re-
engineering as well. He asks, “[W]hat kind of a human is
anticipated by this technology? Perhaps a human accustomed
to increasingly controlled environments, increasingly
engineered food, increasing intervention on ideal body types
via surgery and genetic alteration, increasing reliance on
chemical controls of disease and mood, which in turn create
a greater dependence on those systems that provide such
necessities. Perhaps the domesticated chicken suggests a
harbinger of things to come for humans who themselves seek
68 Galusky, “Playing Chicken,” p.17.
42
to fully control their diet, their environment, and their
stimulation.”69
Yet despite the aspiration for control, there is an
irony here. Biotechnology, as Teresa Heffernan points out,
seeks to exert complete human control over nature in the
laboratory and to enable us to transcend animality, death,
dirt, and disease, but it ends up implicating us further in
the material world through new, threatening forms of
hybridity.70 It is a fairly small step from growing
cruelty-free meat from nonhuman animals to growing human
meat for human consumption. In his posting on in-vitro
meat, Hank Hyena predicts, with a touch of satire, an easing
of the taboo on cannibalism:
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts -- obviously, “DinoBurgers” will be served at every six-year-old boy's birthday party.
69 Galusky, “Playing Chicken,” p.32.
70 Teresa Heffernan, “Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret ofLife,” Cultural Critique, 53, Winter 2003, pp. 116-133.
43
Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, “The State of the Art,” with diners feasting on “Stewed Idi Amin.” But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble theirown meat.
One reader thus commented on this scenario: “You sure know
how to work my gag reflex, baby.” The author replied, “Yes,
it seems sickening, way past nose-picking. But taboos
usually get experimented with, so I suspect we'll be eating
each other and ourselves.”71 Hyena thus shows his own
anxiety at the breaking of boundaries and categories that
are fundamental to most worldviews and thus regarded as
natural, but he also rightly suggests that once flesh is
directly manufactured, some people will get past their
repugnance they still have and try in-vitro human meat.
The creation of in-vitro meat is a radical act of
control over nature and over animal flesh itself. The
completely unrestrained technical manipulation and
71 Hyena, “Eight Ways.”
44
‘perfection’ – at least with regard to meat production – of
nonhuman animals raises the prospect of radical manipulation
of human beings.72 Interestingly, early twentieth century
attempts to breed the ideal chicken for human consumption
coincided with the ideology of eugenics and its dream of
perfecting the human organism. The American Breeders’
Association, formed in 1903, was interested in both
agricultural breeding and human eugenics.73 If we accept
the radical manipulation of nonhuman and even human tissue
suggested by in-vitro meat, then one would have to be a
radical Cartesian dualist to feel assured that a
thoroughgoing instrumentalization of the human being and
significant infringements on human rights would not follow.
Midgley sees such a radical Cartesianism implicit among
those who believe in continued human autonomy while
embracing the re-engineering of all nature, including the
human body:
72 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p.12
73 Boyd, “Making Meat,” pp.653-655.
45
The really strange and disturbing thing about all theseimages is the alienation of the human operator from thesystem he works on. He appears as an extraneous critic,a fastidious reader, free to reshape books to suit his own taste, a detached engineer redesigning a car to hisown satisfaction. Even when the book or car in question is a human body—perhaps his own—this designer stands outside it, a superior being who does not share its nature. Readers can always get another book if theydon't like the first one, and car-owners are not much surprised at having to get another car. What sort of being, then, is this operator supposed to be? He (it surely is a he) can only be a Cartesian disembodied soul, a ghost in the machine. He “lives in his body” only in the sense in which a yachtsman might live in his boat. Like so much of the science-fiction that has influenced them, these images are irremediably dualist,implying a quite unreal separation between ourselves and the physical world we live in.74
And who would this designer be? Just anybody?
Technology does not develop in a political vacuum, but in
the context of power structures, both political and
economic. Despite fantasies about local or even tabletop
meat-producing bioreactors, the production of meat through
an intensive fabrication process would likely further
enhance the industrialization and centralization of food
production and further reduce most of us to passive
74 Midgley, “Biotechnology and Monstrosity,” p.12
46
consumers of food we know little about. Already, as Pollan
notes, the intensive manufacturing of food today is
disempowering, as it puts the corporate world in charge of
deciding what counts as food and what doesn’t.75 We would
also be further enmeshed in an almost entirely artificial
world in which eating, perhaps our most intimate interaction
with nonhuman nature, is merely the final step in a
thoroughly mechanized process. Unsurprisingly, vat-grown
meat is a feature of the bleak, denatured futures where
technology and corporate control have run amok, as in
William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and
Crake.76
As noted earlier, the notion of animal – human or
nonhuman – bodily integrity is in some measure a matter of
human ideals and perception. Certainly, severing a healthy
chicken’s leg would violate its integrity, but severing a
chicken’s diseased leg may not. Also, it is difficult to
say that an AML or a lump of in-vitro meat is itself a
75 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, pp.301-303.
76 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984); Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Random House, 2003).
47
violation of the integrity of an existing, unimpaired
animal. However, the human perception that integrity has been
violated, and the breaking of ‘natural’ boundaries or taboos
of how flesh should be treated may itself be consequential.
Once the integrity of animals and their flesh has been
violated in this way, all flesh, nonhuman or human, may
become fair game, pun intended.
As authors like Pollan have noted, we are already quite
enmeshed in a highly industrialized, centralized food
production system that treats animals as little more than
blobs of flesh. Certainly, in-vitro meat would alleviate
all of the animal cruelty and some of the environmental
impact associated with meat production today. The world’s
growing appetite for meat could be satisfied in ostensibly
more benign ways. However, these arguments beg some
important questions: Why should we eat as much meat as we
want? Why not raise less meat on smaller farms where the
animals are treated more humanely and raised more
sustainably? Or, for that matter, why not give meat up
entirely and go vegetarian? A global vegetarian diet would
48
eliminate the abuse and slaughter of animals for food and
much of the waste and air pollution problems associated with
livestock. Moreover, a vegetarian diet would feed the
world’s population much more efficiently and arguably with
less environmental impact than reliance on either meat the
old-fashioned way or meat grown in vats. This time, we
would do well to take seriously the yuck factor.
49
