Clean Meat Won't Significantly Reduce the Number of Animals Now Being Killed
Proponents of cellular meat are telling the public, the press, and animal advocates that cultured of cellular meat will eliminate or at least radically reduce the killing of animals in agriculture, and that within decades, conventional animal agriculture will even have been rendered "obsolete." But the truth is more complicated. While industry experts now estimate that, twenty years from now, flesh from living animals may constitute as little as 40% of the total protein market, the overall number of animals slaughtered will be only slightly less than, or even about the same as, the number of animals being killed today. That is what the research shows. As Justin Kolbeck, a co-founder of Wildtype, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of cellular seafoods freely admits: "When we started Wildtype, we never thought—at least in the near- or medium-term—that the seafood products that we would produce would completely eliminate or even extraordinarily reduce the need for conventional seafood production” (emphasis added).
The reason so many vegans and animal advocates are being snookered into believing that synthesized flesh is the Holy Grail of animal justice is thanks to misleading headlines like the following one in the Guardian: "Most 'meat' in 2040 will not come from dead animals, says report: Consultants say 60% will be grown in vats or plant-based products that taste like meat." Technically, the Guardian's headline was correct: a consulting group named AT Kearney did recently release a report predicting that, in 20 years, most protein products will either be synthesized flesh or plant-based meat alternatives, rather than meat from animals raised and killed on farms. But what the article fails to mention is that the overall number of animals killed will be mostly unchanged.
How can that be?
It's simple: the global meat market is expected to double in the next 20 years. That means that even if half or more of all "conventional" meat products are replaced by vegan and cellular ones, the number of animals being slaughtered would remain close to what it now is (an unprecedented 50,000,000,000 land mammals and avians, and one to three trillion sea animals per year). At best, in other words, the combined cellular meat and vegan markets will hold the current horrible rate of violence steady, by curtailing further increases. But that is all.
After the AT Kearney report was released to the media in June 2019, we contacted Carsten Gerhardt, one of the authors of the report and a senior Kearney partner, and asked him whether our interpretation of the report's projection was correct--that the "disruption" of the meat market they predict will not substantially reduce the record number of animals now being killed. Gerhardt confirmed what we thought, saying in an email: "Yes, the number of animals killed will only decrease a little due to the overall increase [in the meat market] according to our research."
The findings by Kearney, like those of other industry groups investigating the future "protein" market, are furthermore based on market projections and informed guesswork. That means that we have no certain way of knowing whether the share of the market taken up by alternatives to conventional meat will in fact turn out to be 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, or even less. Which means that, absent a more robust strategy in animal advocacy, 20 years from now it is entirely possible that the overall number of animals slaughtered each year will be more than it is today. Even in the rosiest scenarios of the Clean Meat lobby, the mass killing of animals will go on for many years. According to a 2021 report by McKinsey and Co., the global management consulting firm, even if cellular meats live up to their hype, by 2030--nearly a decade for now--cultivated meats will constitute only one half of one percent of the global meat market.
For a more detailed discussion of the market forces driving this shell game, see other pages on the site, particularly our discussion of why clean mean isn't intended to replace meat from animals raised in "factory farms."
What about Fish?
Fish are highly complex beings with intelligence, memories, and emotions--as biologist Jonathan Balcombe showed in his book, What a Fish Knows, and as can be seen in this video on fish cognition. Estimates of the number of marine animals killed each year in the global fisheries industry run from one trillion to three trillion. Fishes are hauled up out of the depths in the countless billions, where they slowly suffocate on the decks of ships, or die in agony from decompression, or are stabbed or clubbed to death. Scientists estimate that humans are now killing up to 100,000,000 sharks each year alone. In many cases, sharks have their fins cut off and then are dumped back into the ocean, alive, to drown.
Surely, then, we should use the new cellular technology to eliminate this fathomless suffering and mass killing....The cultivated meat lobby tells us that indeed we can, and that we in fact are already moving toward an animal-free fish production. However, informed critics have raised troubling questions of these claims. “'I’m really skeptical of claims that cell-based seafood companies will make a difference for fisheries and ocean conservation,'” said Benjamin Halpern, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has researched cultivated seafood’s ability to reduce fishing pressure" (as reported by Victoria Namkung in the Guardian). Though fish-cellular companies like Wild Type and BlueNalu claim that synthetic fish products can be scaled up to meet global demand, the new cellular products seem aimed for a boutique market that will leave the main industrial practices of the fisheries untouched. As Halpern notes, "This is feeding the affluent another food product....Even at the cheapest level – and it will never be that cheap – it’s not going to be the food product most people eat around the world." Halpern's view is shared by marine conservation biologists. Rob Jones, head of aquaculture at the Nature Conservancy, acknowledges that both plant-based and cellular fish products may offset some of the production. But even the most optimistic scenarios show them playing only a small role in the global ocean fish market. “'Both cell-based and plant-based seafood can be a part of that future,'” Jones acknowledges, but he believes that "alternative seafood products could achieve [only a]...1% to 2% of the overall market, similar to plant-based meats."
Unless and until human beings begin to take the needs, interests, and experiences of their fellow creatures seriously, granting them a right to exist without human violence, it is certain that the "wars of extermination" in the earth's seas will go on as before.
The reason so many vegans and animal advocates are being snookered into believing that synthesized flesh is the Holy Grail of animal justice is thanks to misleading headlines like the following one in the Guardian: "Most 'meat' in 2040 will not come from dead animals, says report: Consultants say 60% will be grown in vats or plant-based products that taste like meat." Technically, the Guardian's headline was correct: a consulting group named AT Kearney did recently release a report predicting that, in 20 years, most protein products will either be synthesized flesh or plant-based meat alternatives, rather than meat from animals raised and killed on farms. But what the article fails to mention is that the overall number of animals killed will be mostly unchanged.
How can that be?
It's simple: the global meat market is expected to double in the next 20 years. That means that even if half or more of all "conventional" meat products are replaced by vegan and cellular ones, the number of animals being slaughtered would remain close to what it now is (an unprecedented 50,000,000,000 land mammals and avians, and one to three trillion sea animals per year). At best, in other words, the combined cellular meat and vegan markets will hold the current horrible rate of violence steady, by curtailing further increases. But that is all.
After the AT Kearney report was released to the media in June 2019, we contacted Carsten Gerhardt, one of the authors of the report and a senior Kearney partner, and asked him whether our interpretation of the report's projection was correct--that the "disruption" of the meat market they predict will not substantially reduce the record number of animals now being killed. Gerhardt confirmed what we thought, saying in an email: "Yes, the number of animals killed will only decrease a little due to the overall increase [in the meat market] according to our research."
The findings by Kearney, like those of other industry groups investigating the future "protein" market, are furthermore based on market projections and informed guesswork. That means that we have no certain way of knowing whether the share of the market taken up by alternatives to conventional meat will in fact turn out to be 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, or even less. Which means that, absent a more robust strategy in animal advocacy, 20 years from now it is entirely possible that the overall number of animals slaughtered each year will be more than it is today. Even in the rosiest scenarios of the Clean Meat lobby, the mass killing of animals will go on for many years. According to a 2021 report by McKinsey and Co., the global management consulting firm, even if cellular meats live up to their hype, by 2030--nearly a decade for now--cultivated meats will constitute only one half of one percent of the global meat market.
For a more detailed discussion of the market forces driving this shell game, see other pages on the site, particularly our discussion of why clean mean isn't intended to replace meat from animals raised in "factory farms."
What about Fish?
Fish are highly complex beings with intelligence, memories, and emotions--as biologist Jonathan Balcombe showed in his book, What a Fish Knows, and as can be seen in this video on fish cognition. Estimates of the number of marine animals killed each year in the global fisheries industry run from one trillion to three trillion. Fishes are hauled up out of the depths in the countless billions, where they slowly suffocate on the decks of ships, or die in agony from decompression, or are stabbed or clubbed to death. Scientists estimate that humans are now killing up to 100,000,000 sharks each year alone. In many cases, sharks have their fins cut off and then are dumped back into the ocean, alive, to drown.
Surely, then, we should use the new cellular technology to eliminate this fathomless suffering and mass killing....The cultivated meat lobby tells us that indeed we can, and that we in fact are already moving toward an animal-free fish production. However, informed critics have raised troubling questions of these claims. “'I’m really skeptical of claims that cell-based seafood companies will make a difference for fisheries and ocean conservation,'” said Benjamin Halpern, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has researched cultivated seafood’s ability to reduce fishing pressure" (as reported by Victoria Namkung in the Guardian). Though fish-cellular companies like Wild Type and BlueNalu claim that synthetic fish products can be scaled up to meet global demand, the new cellular products seem aimed for a boutique market that will leave the main industrial practices of the fisheries untouched. As Halpern notes, "This is feeding the affluent another food product....Even at the cheapest level – and it will never be that cheap – it’s not going to be the food product most people eat around the world." Halpern's view is shared by marine conservation biologists. Rob Jones, head of aquaculture at the Nature Conservancy, acknowledges that both plant-based and cellular fish products may offset some of the production. But even the most optimistic scenarios show them playing only a small role in the global ocean fish market. “'Both cell-based and plant-based seafood can be a part of that future,'” Jones acknowledges, but he believes that "alternative seafood products could achieve [only a]...1% to 2% of the overall market, similar to plant-based meats."
Unless and until human beings begin to take the needs, interests, and experiences of their fellow creatures seriously, granting them a right to exist without human violence, it is certain that the "wars of extermination" in the earth's seas will go on as before.