We Respond to Our Critics
Reply to Stijn Bruers' "Opposing Cell-Based Meat: A Serious Irrationality"
It is a welcome sign that this website has finally begun to attract the attention, as well as the ire, of some within the multi-million dollar corporate and philanthropic juggernaut known as the "Clean Meat" lobby. The lengthiest criticism we have received so far is a blog entry from Stijn Bruers, entitled, "Opposing Cell-based Meat: A Serious Irrationality in the Animal Rights Movement" (October 2020).
In his essay, Bruers cites the growth of "dangerous irrational beliefs" in society, and laments that such "irrationalities" are also to be observed among the anti-capitalist, feminist, and animal justice movements. As "Exhibit A" of irrationality in animal rights circles, Bruers cites this very website, saying that our arguments are riddled with logical fallacies, including inconsistencies, bad analogies, selection bias, and cognitive bias. Bruers then outlines our myriad errors (as he sees them), all the while affirming his own belief that cellular meat is the best, most "efficient," and most effective strategy for reducing the number of animals in animal agriculture. In our reply below, we show that it is in fact Bruers who commits a variety of fallacies, including straw argument, false dilemma, use of equivocal terms, bad analogy, and non sequitor, in his unconvincing defense of cellular meat.
"One-Sided Reasoning"
Bruers accuses us of "one-sided reasoning" for not considering all of the "positive" impacts that he presumes will accrue from sales of lab-grown meats. We find it odd that the authors of a website entitled "CleanMeat-Hoax.com" should be faulted for declining to present the pro-industry perspective on its subject. Be that as it may, if everyone who writes on this subject is required to give "both sides" of this story, then proponents for Clean Meat--who have tens of millions of dollars to spend to promote their project, while we, collectively, have spent only $70 on this website--are presumably doing even worse than we are, having chosen to ignore our criticisms of their project. Will Bruers now also ask the Good Food Institute to leave off its own "one-sided thinking," perhaps by posting some of our objections to Clean Meat on the GFI website? We hope so.
As further evidence of our "one-sided" thinking, Bruers wonders why we don't acknowledge that purchases of cellular meat products will help the animal cause by providing alternatives to meats from slaughtered animals. To this we have two responses. First, his argument assumes that investments in animal-free meat will cause a reduction of animal suffering and killing, and this assumption in turn relies on the as yet unanswered empirical question of whether investment in animal-free meat will actually cause a reduction in animal suffering. (And it's not at all clear that it will.) Second, Bruers misses our larger point, which concerns the structure of the capitalist market. Whatever "good" comes of buying cellular meat products from meat companies, an unintended consequence is to reinforce the meat system as a whole, by providing new opportunities for companies to expand their existing factory farming operations.
One example we give to bolster this point is that of Cargill, the largest and arguably most destructive agribusiness on the planet, which has invested in cellular meats (see "Clean" Meat Won't End Factory Farming). In a recent press release, we noted, Cargill declared that it remains "committed to growing our protein portfolio. This includes investing in, and growing, our traditional protein businesses"--i.e., meat from animals raised in intensive animal agriculture. In the same release, Cargill then went on to illustrate its "commitment" to factory farming by announcing that it had just invested more than half a billion dollars "in conventional protein in North America alone, including the acquisition of Five Star Custom Foods, modernization of our turkey hatchery in Virginia and the conversion of our Columbus, Neb., plant into a cooked meats facility." In addition, Cargill also stated that it had acquired "Southern States Cooperatives’ animal feed business" and invested in "the NouriTech FeedKind facility in Memphis." All of these investments were cited in the release as "further underscor[ing] Cargill’s overarching commitment to animal protein...."
As this example suggests, whether or not cellular meats will reduce the number of animals being killed in the long run, right now there is no intention on the part of industry to replace live animals. Whatever "benefits" accrue from having some consumers buy some cellular meats, then, those benefits are likely to be outweighed by the damage that will be done--is already being done--in helping the meat industry navigate an industry path which (at this writing) is explicitly intended to maintain global animal production at or near present levels for decades to come. Proponents of cellular meats have led many animal advocates to see it as the "solution" to the problem of human violence towards animals. (The Good Food Institute, for example, claims that "better alternatives will replace conventional animal agriculture.") However, this is not how the meat industry and its investors see the matter. As one industry analyst observed last year: "Alternative proteins — from insects to legumes to cell cultures -- are not something to view as a replacement for animal proteins, but just another competitor in a huge global protein market." ("How Alternative Proteins Can Support the Animal Agriculture Industry," Tri-State Livestock News, March 2019).
Reinforcing Meat Culture
Bruers disagrees with our view that the cellular meat lobby often reinforces norms and myths about meat (see "Clean Meat Discourse Reinforces All Meat Culture"),[1] writing that cellular meat companies do not "have to reinforce meat culture lies and myths." However, whether or not such companies "have to" do so, the fact is that they are doing so.[2] Aleph Farms, to take one of our examples, has promoted its products by stating, "we believe meat is one of life’s pleasures, to be celebrated and enjoyed." By claiming that meat "is one of life's pleasures," one that should be "celebrated," Aleph and other cellular meat companies are reinforcing the idea that not eating animal products is to deny oneself an essential good--a good without which life would be less enjoyable and perhaps even less meaningful. In short, they are strengthening the idea of meat qua meat.
Laboratory synthesized meat involves the literal reproduction of the cells of animals' bodies; the bioengineering of the flesh of chickens, pigs, cows, fish, and so on. It is therefore difficult to know what to make of Bruers's claim that "Cell-based meat does not conceptualize animals as meat [but only]... conceptualizes cell-based meat as meat." In any event, proponents of cellular meats cannot have it both ways: they cannot on the one hand claim that cellular meat products will be identical to the products derived from the bodies of slaughtered animals (under a microscope, they will be virtually indistinguishable), and, on the other, deny that those products have anything to do with animals at all.
Certainly, with the bioengineering of flesh in laboratories, we all find ourselves at the limits of ontology, struggling to find a language for new entities that do not correspond neatly to intelligible natural categories such as "plant" and "animal." Nonetheless, Bruers muddies rather than clarifies the issue with his equivocal use of the term "resembles." "Another worry [of Clean Meat critics]," he writes, "is that cell-based meat strongly resembles animal-based meat, such that consumers are likely to want the 'real thing.' But the same goes for plant-based meat that strongly resembles animal-based meat." He continues: "opponents of cell-based meat are worried that cell-based meat reinforces the myth that meat is essential. But if these arguments are correct, then vegan animal rights activists should also criticize" vegan products that also "strongly resemble animal products."
This is a false analogy. Unlike plant-based foods, cellular meat is animal-based meat. Look at it, touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it: the consumer can only conclude that what lies before them is animal flesh. Cellular meat is animal flesh--it does not merely "strongly resemble it." Bruers thus creates a false equivalency between vegan foods and cellular ones. If there were no difference between the two, then why are he and other proponents of so-called Clean Meat representing the technology as the "solution" to the problems of animal agriculture? Why not just promote plant-based foods, which are more ecologically sustainable, more ethical, and don't evoke ontological confusion?
One problem with Clean Meat discourse is that it positions cellular meats as somehow more "real" than plant-based foods--as "authentic" meat, because it's flesh.[3] Proponents thus play to the public's anti-vegan and anti-animal rights prejudices, by bashing plant-based foods as inferior to "the real thing"--i.e. meats synthesized from the cells of animals. The GFI's enthusiasm for cellular meats at times even undermines its own advocacy for plant-based foods. For example, GFI staff member Dara Homer, making the case for a high-tech foods revolution, writes: "This doesn’t mean grabbing the crispy bacon from your plate and replacing it with spongy blocks of tofu or taking jobs away from American farmers. This means producing the foods we know and love in modern, safe and sustainable ways."[4] Tofu has been a pejorative cultural metonym for vegetarianism for at least half a century--a trope used to ridicule animal advocates, vegetarians, and vegans. Why then are GFI staffers perpetuating the trope?
Bruers states that the goal of cellular meat proponents "is stopping people to eat animal-based meat, not keeping people [from eating] meat." But by "meat," let us be clear, he means animal flesh, not vegetable meat. So he is effectively saying, "the goal is to stop people from eating animal-based meat, not to keep people from eating meat made of animal flesh" that is more sustainable, etc. If that sounds contradictory or just plain confusing, imagine how confusing it will seem to consumers. The benefit of plant-based food alternatives to traditional flesh is that they there is no ambiguity about them: they symbolize a post-animal future in ways that cellular meats simply do not and cannot. There is a clear alternative to cellular meat, and it's called veganism. Only in shifting away from animal products altogether--that is, a shift to a plant-based diet--can we put an end to animal agriculture, animal suffering, and the speciesist economy.
This summer (2020), the Beyond Meat company put out a terrific TV ad that explicitly underscored the fact that we can all enjoy a hearty, ecologically healthy meal without consuming animal flesh. "What if we took this cow off the table," the ad copy reads, "and just make friends with her?...What if taking the animals out of the meat made us and our planet healthier?" Though Beyond Meat's marketing efforts are not themselves beyond reproach (the problem with all such advertising is that they elide the structural violence underpinning our economy), the ad was nevertheless praiseworthy for having created a critical-utopian image of a world without animal products and without the domination of animals. The unambiguous message of the advertisement is that we can and must stop thinking about animal products as something necessary, desirable, and inevitable.
Unfortunately, cellular meat companies cannot put out so straightforward a message, owing to the fact that they have not taken "the animals out of the meat" because the meat is literally made of animal flesh. Beyond Burger and other plant-based products challenge the hegemonic paradigm of animal production in ways that cellular meats do not and cannot.
Yes, the new vegan meats "strongly resemble" meat from animals. But the resemblance is ultimately superficial, "ontic" rather than ontological. Anyone who purchases a Beyond Burger comes to the product grasping the elemental distinction between plants and animals. They comprehend that Beyond Burgers have nothing animal in them. The problem with the cellular meat strategy is that it blurs these foundational natural categories. Contrary to Bruer's argument, then, one cannot "swap out" our cellular meat in our argument and replace the term with "vegan meat" (as Bruers suggests that one can), because they are different kinds of things.
Capitalism and Technology: Good for Animals?
One of the more fundamental points of disagreement between ourselves and Bruer is over the nature of capitalism and of the technologies it produces. Bruers argues that a "strategy that fights against animal exploitation is a priori less likely to succeed if that strategy requires extra things that are difficult to achieve, for example requiring the destruction of the capitalist system, or requiring that people start putting 'ethics on the table.'" But this begs the question. If capitalism, as a system, is indeed one of the fundamental bases of animal exploitation, not merely "accidentally" but constitutionally, then we cannot envision animal liberation within its framework. And that is a theoretical as well as empirical question, one that Bruers fails to address in a substantive or convincing way. Instead, Bruers repeatedly demonstrates his misplaced faith in the virtues of the "free market" and the technology that comes out of it:
"In the past, technologies realized strong reductions of basic rights violations of draft horses (replaced by cars for transport), oxen (replaced by tractors for plowing), hunted whales (whale oil replaced by kerosene for oil lamps), messenger pigeons (replaced by telephones for communication), laboratory rabbits (replaced by human skin tissues for cosmetic testing), pigs (replaced by recombinant DNA bacteria for insulin), bees (beeswax replaced by light bulbs for lighting), sheep (wool replaced by synthetic fibers) and movie animals (replaced by computer animated CGI-animals), without having to fight against capitalism, corporations, governments, ideologies, myths, beliefs or stubborn human attachments."
As this list suggests, in Bruers' eyes, capitalism and technology are to be credited with all the good things that happen to animals, but never any of the bad things. Bruers is thus charmed by the fact that kerosene replaced whale oil, but unimpressed that the whales were hunted to near-extinction to accumulate capital for the shareholders of the whaling companies. Few if any of his other examples in fact demonstrate what he thinks they do. For example:
*Draft horses replaced by cars for transport: Bruers ignores the fact that the automobile since its introduction has killed and maimed billions of animals directly, while its accompanying highway and road system has fragmented and destroyed the habitat for billions more. Draft horses meanwhile continue to be exploited for their labor throughout the world (though admittedly not in as great numbers as before).
*Messenger pigeons replaced by telephones: Fact: for every one messenger pigeon "saved" by Alexander Graham Bell, a million passenger pigeons were killed in European colonial, capitalist expansion. (Use of pigeons for messaging was anyway itself an avis raris--never a common means of communication.)
*Laboratory rabbits--replaced by human skin tissues for cosmetic testing: Fact: more animals are suffering and dying in scientific (capitalist) laboratories today than ever before--hundreds of millions. Meanwhile, the technologies for exploiting animals have only proliferated, so that animals now have their very ontologies violated, through bioengineering of their DNA.
*Pigs--replaced by recombinant DNA bacteria for insulin: Fact: use of pigs in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical and industries appears to be at all-time high, with pigs treated routinely killed in surgery practice, or to test products, or to serve as "vessels" for xenotransplantation, etc. As elsewhere, Bruers cherry-picks the examples that suit his argument, while ignoring the wider picture.
*Bees--beeswax replaced by light bulbs for lighting: Fact: beeswax candles--widely used in Europe from the medieval period on--were replaced not by the electric bulb, but first by an extract of stearic acid--i.e. another animal product, derived from the fatty acids of animals--and later (the 1850s) by paraffin wax, derived from petroleum.[5] Why though does Bruers credit capitalist technology with benefiting the bees with electric light, while ignoring other capitalist technologies--e.g. neonicotinoids, a class of herbicides manufactured by BASF and Bayer AG--that have killed billions of honeybees and are presently driving them to extinction?
*Sheep--wool replaced by synthetic fibers: This will surely come as welcome news to the 70 million sheep being raised today for wool (and slaughter) in Australia--as well as to the millions of captive sheep in hundreds of other countries.
*Movie animals--replaced by computer animated CGI-animals: The only reason that horses aren't still being tripped and crippled in Westerns, etc., is because animal advocacy organizations fought for those changes, not because CGI came along. (In any event, live animals continue to be exploited by filmmakers in various ways.)
Et cetera.
Bruer also quotes Dinesh Wadiwel's remark on this site that it "is highly problematic to expect tech industries to come up with solutions to injustice, just as we would not expect technologies to deliver solutions to wealth inequality, racism, patriarchy, ableism or homophobia...." Bruers' surprising reply is that, "when it comes to patriarchy, there are technologies that empowered women and hence reduced patriarchy: the washing machine, the pill (birth control), and even the computer...." Suffice it to say, however, that such a statement represents a vast misapprehension of the complex history of women's experiences of technology. War technology, biotechnology, computerization, domestic technology (appliances), etc., arose out of male-dominated culture and have by and large served to strengthen patriarchal relations rather than to diminish them.[6] To credit technology--rather than women--with having "reduced patriarchy" is like saying that Black American sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South were "empowered" by the cotton gin, the internal combustion engine, and fertilizers.
Evidently a techno-utopian of some stripe, Bruers is unable or simply unwilling to acknowledge the dialectical nature of capitalist technology--as a force for harm as frequently as it is a force for good. Bruers thus continues to be an outspoken proponent of GMO foods and nuclear power. We only wish he showed as much skepticism towards those destructive technologies as he shows towards, for example, feminism (which he attacks in some of his other online essays).
We fear that a crypto-technological determinism in fact hangs over Bruers' whole analysis. E.g., Breuers writes: "it is not self-evident that traditional actions against homophobia always will remain more effective than those technologies or make those technologies obsolete. Traditional campaigns did not deliver the solutions against racism or homophobia so far, so they are not clearly top-effective." It is hard to know, exactly, what Bruers means by "traditional actions" against racism and homophobia. But presumably he means social movements. If so, then Bruers' argument is based both on a logical fallacy and on a mistaken understanding of the history of social change and of the sociology of social movements. First, it is a non sequitor to conclude that because racism and homophobia persist, therefore they are not "effective." Second, to suggest that technology has played, or will play, or can play, a key role in overturning oppressive political and societal structures is not supported by the evidence of the last 200 years of social movement theory and practice (as studied by the sociologists of social movements).
We believe, on the contrary, that only by challenging the fundamental premise of the economic system--namely, that humans need to exploit the bodies of animals, and have a right to do so--can we begin to dismantle the system. We therefore find faith in the corporate lobby promoting cellular meats to be severely misplaced. If change is to come, it will come from activists, not from the inside of a vat.
It is symptomatic of Bruers' uncritical stance towards capitalism, finally, that he identifies closely with the so-called Effective Altruism movement, a supposedly "rational" approach to social change--funded by billionaires--that ignores the actual history of social movements, assumes that social change can be plotted out on a graph based on marketing surveys, and suggests that the future can not only be predicted by corporations but determined by them, such that human behavior, norms, and values can be (and should be) massaged and manipulated at will to correspond to profit projections. We believe that our website shows the erroneous nature of such assumptions. Oppressive social structures and systems of violence are overthrown by human beings--mobilized citizens working together--not by technologies and by for-profit corporations.
Fake Diamonds: The Question of Authenticity
Regarding our analogy between Zirconium diamonds and naturally occurring diamonds, we concede Bruers' point that the chief reason natural diamonds are more desirable than artifical ones is due to their scarcity (or, in Marx's terms, the value deriving from the amount of labor time needed to produce them). It is also true that the market for laboratory-grown diamonds--which currently hovers at only 15-20% of the total world diamond market--is poised to grow substantially in the years ahead, due both to falling production costs and to rising consciousness of the ecologically and socially destructive nature of the natural diamond business.
This said, however, no one yet is predicting that synthetic diamonds will fully replace natural diamonds, even years from now. As Kristina Buckley Kayel, Managing Director for the Diamond Producers Association of North America, points out: "Natural diamonds obtain their value from their uniqueness and rarity as billion-year-old precious gems.” Because of the "uniqueness" of natural diamonds, it seems certain that a significant market for them will continue to exist, even 50 years from now. DeBeers and other industry producers are counting on just this. As journalist Pamela Danziger has observed in Forbes, "the linchpin in the mined-diamond industry’s efforts to hold back lab-grown’s competitive threat is [therefore] to raise the value perception of mined diamonds and depress the value of lab-growns." We expect companies that traffic in live animals to do the same thing--"raise the value perception" of meat from animals. Indeed, they already are doing so.
If cellular meat successfully comes to market, meat from living animals will still be viewed as the "unique" and "authentic" alternative to the "artificial" kind, grown in vats. And, ironically, the cheaper cellular meat becomes, the "scarcer"--hence dearer--becomes meat from living farmed animals. Bruers is largely correct when he notes that "authenticity" is a function of "scarcity." But we maintain that the semiotics of meat are much more complex and ambiguous than he maintains, leaving Clean Meat vulnerable to other dynamics besides relative scarcity. Target, Walmart, Marshall's, and other large discount chains, for example, sell "genuine leather" belts and wallets--products that are extremely inexpensive. The supply of dead skins from animals is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, not "scarce" at all. Yet owing to the panoply of cultural, psychological, historical, and even "existential" associations we have with animal products, leather appears to most consumers as desirable precisely for having come from a unique living animal. Leather evokes cowboys, the American West, tradition, masculinity, frontier and settler culture, self-reliance, simplicity, and so on. Synthetic wallets and belts are generally no more expensive than leather ones; but they as they do not have the aura of the authentic surrounding them, they are seen as less desirable commodities.
Bruers admits that it "is possible that a minority of meat eaters strongly value the authenticity of animal-based meat, and when animal-based meat becomes more scarce and more expensive, those people start to value that animal meat even more, just like mined diamonds. Hence, cell-based meat can strongly decrease animal-based meat consumption, but possibly not eliminate it. Elimination probably requires animal rights activism....[So] cell-based meat can make the final push by animal rights activism more effective." This is an important concession on Bruers' part, and we welcome it. Unfortunately, however, the cellular meat lobby has so far been actively undermining veganism and animal rights activism.[7] This is a "consequentialist" observation: if we are ever to eliminate all or even most forms of violence against animals, then we need to raise consciousness about why such brutality is morally unacceptable. And it does not advance our cause when the GFI makes fun of plant-based foods ("spongy blocks of tofu"), belittles vegans as "fringe" elements, praises the supposed moral probity and "courage" of some of the biggest killers of animals on the planet, gives a "pass" to small-scale animal agriculture, promotes the myth that flesh is an "essential" life good, or actively seeks to take the "ethics off the table" in conversations about food and animals.[8]
Greenwashing and Veganwashing
In our critique, we expressed concern that big meat companies like Tyson's--whose management Bruce Friedrich and Paul Shapiro have praised as "courageous" leaders--are using their investments in cellular meat technology as the equivalent of "greenwashing." Bruers disagrees. "Greenwashing," he holds, "occurs when a corporation makes a product a tiny bit more sustainable in order to increase sales in such a way that total environmental impact increases...." By contrast, he says, when "corporations sell more sustainable and animal-free products, and when this results in a decrease of unsustainable and animal products, it is not greenwashing."
Here, however, it would be helpful to review the meaning of "greenwashing." According to Merriam-Webster's, greenwashing is the effort to make "people believe that you company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is." Investopedia offers a similar but more precise definition of the term, viz. as "the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company's products are environmentally friendly."
Defined in either of these ways, there's no question that companies like Tyson's and Cargill are already using their extremely minor investments in cellular meat technology in part to cover up their ecologically catastrophic and immoral and violent practices.
Furthermore, Bruers is also wrong to accuse us of "inconsistency" for not also suggesting that meat companies that sell vegan products are guilty of "veganwashing." When a vegan food company is bought up by a large meat company (as when Field Roast was acquired by Maple Leaf Foods, Canada's largest meatpacker), veganwashing is indeed occurring. By cornering the vegan market, the meat industry can control the marketing and distribution of vegan products, to ensure the "normalization" of a "diverse protein portfolio" that will include a little bit of everything. Meat companies are not issuing press statements boasting of their vegan product lines, whereas they have issued releases boasting of their investment in cellular meats. That's because promoting veganism cuts against their main product--animal flesh--whereas promoting cellular meats is seen as a complement to their existing production system, not as an alternative to it.
Of "Bad" Genocides and "Good" Ones
As we have noted, the evidence suggests that the meat industry will continue to modernize and expand its factory farming operations, even as it invests in and sells synthetic meat. The meat industry expects animal agriculture and the live fisheries to remain huge markets for decades to come: according to best industry estimates, even a highly successful roll-out of cellular meats will only have the effect of cutting or halting the rate of increase in the overall killing of animals. Whatever else it is, then, cellular meat is not a strategy of general animal liberation.
Bruers however looks to this future and likes what he sees. His faith is certain--it has him by the collar. Bruers writes: "Extrapolating the AT Kearny expectations beyond 2040, it is likely that cell-based meat takes an increasingly large share of the global meat market, such that say in 2050 animal-based meat consumption will be lower than in 2020...." In other words, if all goes according to plan, and if this untried, untested technology and investment juggernaut proves an unmitigated success; and if cellular meat continues on its projected (but entirely fictional) growth curve over the next twenty years--if all this holds true--then it is only "likely" that the overall amount of meat (and, by extension, number of dead animals) will be "lower" than it is today.
Let's rewind that. Even under the ideal scenario presented by the "clean meat" lobby, the best we can hope for in 30 years is that the total number of animals killed will be at least "lower" than it is today. In the meantime, as many as 30-100 trillion additional animals (at present rates of mass slaughter on land and sea) will die horrific deaths. And even under industry consultants' rosiest of scenarios, cellular meat won't end the confinement and killing of billions of animals for perhaps a century or two. By then, of course, the ecology of the planet will long since have given way.
If there is one issue on which we diverge the most from Bruers' position, in this connection, it concerns the true nature of the speciesist system and the question of what is to be considered an "acceptable" outcome for animals. We ask: what does it mean that the animal rights movement has been effectively hijacked by entrepreneurs who have unilaterally determined that the killing of billions of animals decades from now is an acceptable long-term goal? In our view, it is wrong--wrong ethically, and wrong from the perspective of movement strategy--to start from a position of defeat and to work backwards from there. It is not "success" to save billions while losing billions. We can do better, and we must.
Bruers asks: would it not have been better for "only" three million Jews to have been murdered by Nazis, rather than six? Even if we were to agree that it would have been in some sense "better," such a "smaller" Holocaust would have remained an unspeakable crime and a moral stain on humanity for all of eternity. No sane person would consider suffering and mass trauma on such a "smaller" scale a "success," nor a "good" or positive thing. Should we not also be "relieved" that Hitler killed "only" six million Jews in Europe, rather than all eleven million?
Bruer accuses us of rejecting consequentialism because we reject a welfarist stance that would attempt to "minimize the size of the genocide in order to save as many lives as possible." For the record, however, the contributors to this website are a mix of consequentialists and deontologists, and we do not--as a group--eschew consequentialism. Indeed our main argument is consequentialist: namely, that cellular meat, as it now stands, is unlikely to lead to the liberation of animals from human exterminationist violence. In other words, we are claiming that cellular meat is wrong because it leads to bad consequences for animal advocacy.
Mistaking our views, Bruers proceeds to tutor us in game theory, suggesting that "opposition [to] cell-based meat reflects an extreme, irrational high level of loss aversion." He writes: "With a high probability, cell-based meat will enter the market, have a positive impact and replace animal-based meat to some degree, such that every year 1000 animals are spared, for say 100 years. This is a bet.... If we don’t play this game, 100,000 animals are exploited. Especially when it comes to doing good and helping animals, extreme loss aversion is irrational because the animals do not share such loss aversion preferences. Hence, not playing this game."
This is another of Bruers' false dilemmas. Either cellular meat is allowed to enter the market--with a "high probability" of replacing enough meat from living animals to save at least "some" of their lives--or we do nothing at all, proceeding merrily on our way to planetary oblivion. (Like other proponents of this technology, Bruers assumes, without evidence, that synthetic flesh has "a high probability" of having "a positive impact" and reducing meat from living animals "to some degree.") In any event, there is nothing in our argument to suggest that we are "risk averse" (a straw argument). We are not saying that the risk "is not worth taking." Rather, we are arguing on consequentialist grounds that the approach being taken by the cellular meat lobby is likely to undermine animal rights and the movement to transform the human diet. We are saying that the assumptions and values embedded in this project are not good ones, and we are skeptical that those leading this lobbying machine can or should be entrusted with the well-being of nonhuman animals, and with the direction of our movement.
Unfortunately, so-called pragmatists like Bruers conceive of society in static terms, as a fixed system of "facts." They consequently think of politics as consisting of calculated, instrumental manipulation of existing people and institutions in order to achieve "realistic" objectives. The problem is, if one sets out in the world believing that the world already is what it is, rather than believing that it can be transformed into something other than it now is, something that it ought to be, then the game is already over before it's properly begun. The pragmatist takes a look at the way things "really are," then adjusts his or her expectations and goals to suit the existing reality. He or she looks out upon a world whose underlying elements seem immutable. Seeing the enormous power of the animal industry, and realizing the low-level of public consciousness around animal rights, for example, the pragmatist may sponsor legislation to end the use of gestation crates, say, rather than seek an end to the reproduction of pigs for slaughter. What the pragmatist fails to grasp, however, is that what we can know depends upon the exertion of our will, and therefore too upon our dynamic and creative actions. "Only the man who wills something strongly," Antonio Gramsci observed, "can identify the elements which are necessary to the realization of his will."[9] The neat division of reality into "what is" versus "what ought to be" (a just world) is therefore false. What exists is certainly real; but reality is itself an open field of possibilities to the activist or politician or movement who wishes to change it. What we call "reality," therefore, "is a product of the application of human will to the society of things." And knowledge of reality and of the "possible" cannot be arrived independently of action and will, since "strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and make intuition more penetrating."[10]
We do not consider the continued suffering and violent deaths of billions of animals for the next thirty, forty, or fifty years to be acceptable. The fact that some proponents of "Clean" Meat do seem to find that much suffering and trauma in some sense to be acceptable speaks to a problematic epistemological and moral framework that is Cartesian, positivist, masculinist, and unfeeling. The "bloodless" nature of such discourses--which often hinge on writers distancing themselves from (feminine) "sentiments" concerning the real suffering of real flesh and blood animals--is problematic on its own terms.[11] Societal change has never come about through "effective altruism," but through fierce, passionate social struggle.
Conclusion: Beyond Clean Meat
The main problem with Bruers' critique is that he begs the question of whether cellular meats in fact offer the only or the best strategy for challenging human mass violence against animals--animal agriculture and speciesist violence. Since he offers no evidence for his conclusions, however, his argument poses a false dilemma. Either we all get on the bandwagon, pinning our collective hopes to an untried and untested new technology, or we can expect to make no progress in the decades ahead from an animal rights advocacy perspective. Join or die. Or join or watch the animals die.
Bruers accuses us of selective thinking on the grounds that, while we doubt the efficacy of the cellular meat strategy, we don't express an "equal doubt" or skepticism vis-a-vis "traditional animal rights campaigns." This conclusion too, however, is a non sequitor. Our views of animal rights campaigns have no bearing on the validity of our remarks concerning the inconsistencies and fallacies we see in the cellular meat position. This said, we would like to be clear that the contributors to this website strongly do support the development of new strategies for animal liberation, not "business as usual." None of us uncritically affirm past or present movement approaches.
In a way, the dispute between ourselves and the Clean Meat lobby turns on a disagreement about the nature of the animal rights critique and therefore too about the purpose of animal advocacy. As we understand the problem, speciesism is a system of ruthless mass violence and exploitation, rooted in an ideology and practice of human supremacy. On our view, then, animal liberation requires us to envision a new way of being human, one in which compassion, love, and respect for other life forms replaces today's dominant paradigm, which is one of cruelty, sadism, and masculinist fantasizes of control and domination. Bruers, Friedrich, Shapiro and other animal welfarists, by contrast, believe that these existing ideas and practices can be effectively overcome simply by introducing new commodities to the market. The benefit of their approach, as they see it, is that animal liberation (or, at least, partial mitigation of the harms we inflict on animals) can be won "on the cheap," without disturbing any of the economic or cultural institutions or beliefs of existing society.
Even taken on their own terms, however, their arguments are contradictory. Bruers states that "cell-based meat does not require that people change their deeply entrenched personal consumption habits." But that is untrue. Industry analysts have concluded all along that it remains to be seen that the public can be easily convinced to start eating flesh grown in vats. As one 2015 study of attitudes towards cellular meat concluded:
"...insights from the present study indicate that public and consumer acceptance of the technology and the resulting end product cannot be taken for granted. In line with other research around new and emerging agro-food technologies, this study indicates that cultured meat is characterized by a lack of stabilized scientific knowledge and that consumers respond to this uncertainty with perceptions of risk, analogies to other risks, constructions of what they believe is natural, and concerns over adverse long-term consequences of a shift from traditional to cultured meat production and consumption."[12]
Other studies have come to similarly cautious conclusions about the potential of synthesized flesh to become a widely accepted commodity.
"With cell-based meat," Bruers avers, "traditional meat eaters do not even have to change their identities." To this we say, yes--and that's just the problem. It is our belief that so long as we human beings remain unable to conceive of our identities differently, as something other than "the little god of earth" (Goethe)--as overlords who have a right to master, control, and kill animals at will--then we will never be on the road to genuine animal liberation, and billions of animals will continue to suffer and die in economic production for the foreseeable future.
If cellular meats are unlikely to solve the problem of animal agriculture and speciesist violence more generally, then what will? Bruers writes that we and other doubters of the Clean Meat lobby "should equally doubt whether traditional animal rights campaigns are effective. One should not only consider the effectiveness of one side (cell-based meat), but also of the alternative sides (other vegan campaigns)." Again, we agree. Traditional animal rights campaigns have not been nearly effective enough. Do we ourselves have a grand strategy for overcoming the human exterminationist project? We do not. That is the work that needs to be done--developing a vision of a post-speciesist world, and of how to get there. But the mania for cellular meat is getting in the way of that.
_________________________________________________
[1] Bruers disagrees with our view that "depicting animal flesh as having a paramount aesthetic and even “existential” value, a value that so enhances human life that giving it up would surely amount to a hardship...makes it that much harder for vegans and animal advocates to shift consumers away from meat obtained by killing animal,” denying that there is any "evidence for such a strongly counterintuitive claim." In fact, decades of scholarship, particularly by ecofeminists like Carol Adams, has demonstrated the importance of understanding the semiotics of "meat" as a cultural object, and the way it is tied in to social structures such as patriarchy.
[2] We have expressed our concern that the Clean Meat lobby "may be locking us into a future in which humans remain as attached as they are today to the fraudulent belief that we can only thrive on the bodies of other animals–including living ones.” Bruers, however, maintains that "[t]here is simply no evidence that the promotion of animal-free meats reinforces that fraudulent belief." In fact, we do provide evidence of this, showing that proponents of cellular meats continue to highlight the pleasures of eating products made up of animals' bodies.
[3] Here we note, as an aside, that up until the early 20th century "meat" was used in reference to any foodstuff, not only or even primarily to animal flesh.
[4] Dara Homer, "If We Want to Prevent the Next Pandemic, We Need to Change the Meat We Eat," Tulsa World, Sept. 29, 2020 (https://tulsaworld.com/opinion/columnists/dara-homer-if-we-want-to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-we-need-to-change-the/article_8b24325c-025a-11eb-b750-c3a32334138c.html)
[5] European Candle Association (https://www.eca-candles.com/interesting-facts-service/history/).
[6] See Judith Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
[7] On a related topic, Bruers writes, "As demand for recycled paper remains low (even after all those decades), the concern is that demand for cell-based meat will remain low as well. Again, the same can be said about demand for vegan, plant-based meat.... When people don’t recycle paper, recycled paper becomes scarce and expensive. Cell-based meat on the other hand does not rely on behavior of consumers that can create scarcity." It's true that one problem facing the recycled paper market is inelasticity in the supply of recycled fibers--a problem which, presumably, would not afflict the production of cellular meats, which could be scaled up or down depending on market demand. We therefore agree with Bruers that cellular meat would be unlikely to experience the same kinds of supply price fluctuations that we see in the recyled paper market. However, Bruers seems to miss our wider point, which is that, in the absence of a robust, pro-environmentalist culture, demand for recycled paper will remain low. Similarly, in the absence of a robust animal liberation movement--which is being undercut by cellular meat discourse--we can probably assume a certain inelasticity of demand for cellular meats. What seems likely to happen--though much uncertainty remains about this untested technology--is that demand for cellular meat products will quickly expand, at first, and then stabilize or fall off.
[8] Bruers claims that "cell-based meat proponents did and still do educate the public about animal agriculture and ethics, and do not see speciesism as a mere technical problem." To back up his claim, he notes that KFC-Russia issued a press release noting that "'the production process does not cause any harm to animals.'" While that was encouraging to hear, the example is unrepresentative. As we noted, the Clean Meat lobby's most well-known proponent, Bruce Friedrich, has described the intent of the Good Food Institute, which he runs, as "[taking] ethics off the table for the consumer."
[9] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 171.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Bruers observes that "Bruce Friedrich does care about animals in the sense that he believes animals have rights and he does things in order to satisfy the preferences of animals, but not in the sense that he feels a personal sentimental or emotional connection with those animals." Even to the consequentialists among us--or perhaps especially to the consequentialists among us--such a statement is all too telling about the masculinism of the people who have been in charge of animal advocacy for so long. The notion that animals could ever be liberated without people caring about them seems to us both immoral and--ironically--impractical.
[12] Wim Verbeke, et al., "'Would You Eat Cultured Meat?': Consumers' reactions and attitude formation in Belgium, Portugal and the United Kingdom," Meat Science, Vol. 102, April 2015, 49-58.
It is a welcome sign that this website has finally begun to attract the attention, as well as the ire, of some within the multi-million dollar corporate and philanthropic juggernaut known as the "Clean Meat" lobby. The lengthiest criticism we have received so far is a blog entry from Stijn Bruers, entitled, "Opposing Cell-based Meat: A Serious Irrationality in the Animal Rights Movement" (October 2020).
In his essay, Bruers cites the growth of "dangerous irrational beliefs" in society, and laments that such "irrationalities" are also to be observed among the anti-capitalist, feminist, and animal justice movements. As "Exhibit A" of irrationality in animal rights circles, Bruers cites this very website, saying that our arguments are riddled with logical fallacies, including inconsistencies, bad analogies, selection bias, and cognitive bias. Bruers then outlines our myriad errors (as he sees them), all the while affirming his own belief that cellular meat is the best, most "efficient," and most effective strategy for reducing the number of animals in animal agriculture. In our reply below, we show that it is in fact Bruers who commits a variety of fallacies, including straw argument, false dilemma, use of equivocal terms, bad analogy, and non sequitor, in his unconvincing defense of cellular meat.
"One-Sided Reasoning"
Bruers accuses us of "one-sided reasoning" for not considering all of the "positive" impacts that he presumes will accrue from sales of lab-grown meats. We find it odd that the authors of a website entitled "CleanMeat-Hoax.com" should be faulted for declining to present the pro-industry perspective on its subject. Be that as it may, if everyone who writes on this subject is required to give "both sides" of this story, then proponents for Clean Meat--who have tens of millions of dollars to spend to promote their project, while we, collectively, have spent only $70 on this website--are presumably doing even worse than we are, having chosen to ignore our criticisms of their project. Will Bruers now also ask the Good Food Institute to leave off its own "one-sided thinking," perhaps by posting some of our objections to Clean Meat on the GFI website? We hope so.
As further evidence of our "one-sided" thinking, Bruers wonders why we don't acknowledge that purchases of cellular meat products will help the animal cause by providing alternatives to meats from slaughtered animals. To this we have two responses. First, his argument assumes that investments in animal-free meat will cause a reduction of animal suffering and killing, and this assumption in turn relies on the as yet unanswered empirical question of whether investment in animal-free meat will actually cause a reduction in animal suffering. (And it's not at all clear that it will.) Second, Bruers misses our larger point, which concerns the structure of the capitalist market. Whatever "good" comes of buying cellular meat products from meat companies, an unintended consequence is to reinforce the meat system as a whole, by providing new opportunities for companies to expand their existing factory farming operations.
One example we give to bolster this point is that of Cargill, the largest and arguably most destructive agribusiness on the planet, which has invested in cellular meats (see "Clean" Meat Won't End Factory Farming). In a recent press release, we noted, Cargill declared that it remains "committed to growing our protein portfolio. This includes investing in, and growing, our traditional protein businesses"--i.e., meat from animals raised in intensive animal agriculture. In the same release, Cargill then went on to illustrate its "commitment" to factory farming by announcing that it had just invested more than half a billion dollars "in conventional protein in North America alone, including the acquisition of Five Star Custom Foods, modernization of our turkey hatchery in Virginia and the conversion of our Columbus, Neb., plant into a cooked meats facility." In addition, Cargill also stated that it had acquired "Southern States Cooperatives’ animal feed business" and invested in "the NouriTech FeedKind facility in Memphis." All of these investments were cited in the release as "further underscor[ing] Cargill’s overarching commitment to animal protein...."
As this example suggests, whether or not cellular meats will reduce the number of animals being killed in the long run, right now there is no intention on the part of industry to replace live animals. Whatever "benefits" accrue from having some consumers buy some cellular meats, then, those benefits are likely to be outweighed by the damage that will be done--is already being done--in helping the meat industry navigate an industry path which (at this writing) is explicitly intended to maintain global animal production at or near present levels for decades to come. Proponents of cellular meats have led many animal advocates to see it as the "solution" to the problem of human violence towards animals. (The Good Food Institute, for example, claims that "better alternatives will replace conventional animal agriculture.") However, this is not how the meat industry and its investors see the matter. As one industry analyst observed last year: "Alternative proteins — from insects to legumes to cell cultures -- are not something to view as a replacement for animal proteins, but just another competitor in a huge global protein market." ("How Alternative Proteins Can Support the Animal Agriculture Industry," Tri-State Livestock News, March 2019).
Reinforcing Meat Culture
Bruers disagrees with our view that the cellular meat lobby often reinforces norms and myths about meat (see "Clean Meat Discourse Reinforces All Meat Culture"),[1] writing that cellular meat companies do not "have to reinforce meat culture lies and myths." However, whether or not such companies "have to" do so, the fact is that they are doing so.[2] Aleph Farms, to take one of our examples, has promoted its products by stating, "we believe meat is one of life’s pleasures, to be celebrated and enjoyed." By claiming that meat "is one of life's pleasures," one that should be "celebrated," Aleph and other cellular meat companies are reinforcing the idea that not eating animal products is to deny oneself an essential good--a good without which life would be less enjoyable and perhaps even less meaningful. In short, they are strengthening the idea of meat qua meat.
Laboratory synthesized meat involves the literal reproduction of the cells of animals' bodies; the bioengineering of the flesh of chickens, pigs, cows, fish, and so on. It is therefore difficult to know what to make of Bruers's claim that "Cell-based meat does not conceptualize animals as meat [but only]... conceptualizes cell-based meat as meat." In any event, proponents of cellular meats cannot have it both ways: they cannot on the one hand claim that cellular meat products will be identical to the products derived from the bodies of slaughtered animals (under a microscope, they will be virtually indistinguishable), and, on the other, deny that those products have anything to do with animals at all.
Certainly, with the bioengineering of flesh in laboratories, we all find ourselves at the limits of ontology, struggling to find a language for new entities that do not correspond neatly to intelligible natural categories such as "plant" and "animal." Nonetheless, Bruers muddies rather than clarifies the issue with his equivocal use of the term "resembles." "Another worry [of Clean Meat critics]," he writes, "is that cell-based meat strongly resembles animal-based meat, such that consumers are likely to want the 'real thing.' But the same goes for plant-based meat that strongly resembles animal-based meat." He continues: "opponents of cell-based meat are worried that cell-based meat reinforces the myth that meat is essential. But if these arguments are correct, then vegan animal rights activists should also criticize" vegan products that also "strongly resemble animal products."
This is a false analogy. Unlike plant-based foods, cellular meat is animal-based meat. Look at it, touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it: the consumer can only conclude that what lies before them is animal flesh. Cellular meat is animal flesh--it does not merely "strongly resemble it." Bruers thus creates a false equivalency between vegan foods and cellular ones. If there were no difference between the two, then why are he and other proponents of so-called Clean Meat representing the technology as the "solution" to the problems of animal agriculture? Why not just promote plant-based foods, which are more ecologically sustainable, more ethical, and don't evoke ontological confusion?
One problem with Clean Meat discourse is that it positions cellular meats as somehow more "real" than plant-based foods--as "authentic" meat, because it's flesh.[3] Proponents thus play to the public's anti-vegan and anti-animal rights prejudices, by bashing plant-based foods as inferior to "the real thing"--i.e. meats synthesized from the cells of animals. The GFI's enthusiasm for cellular meats at times even undermines its own advocacy for plant-based foods. For example, GFI staff member Dara Homer, making the case for a high-tech foods revolution, writes: "This doesn’t mean grabbing the crispy bacon from your plate and replacing it with spongy blocks of tofu or taking jobs away from American farmers. This means producing the foods we know and love in modern, safe and sustainable ways."[4] Tofu has been a pejorative cultural metonym for vegetarianism for at least half a century--a trope used to ridicule animal advocates, vegetarians, and vegans. Why then are GFI staffers perpetuating the trope?
Bruers states that the goal of cellular meat proponents "is stopping people to eat animal-based meat, not keeping people [from eating] meat." But by "meat," let us be clear, he means animal flesh, not vegetable meat. So he is effectively saying, "the goal is to stop people from eating animal-based meat, not to keep people from eating meat made of animal flesh" that is more sustainable, etc. If that sounds contradictory or just plain confusing, imagine how confusing it will seem to consumers. The benefit of plant-based food alternatives to traditional flesh is that they there is no ambiguity about them: they symbolize a post-animal future in ways that cellular meats simply do not and cannot. There is a clear alternative to cellular meat, and it's called veganism. Only in shifting away from animal products altogether--that is, a shift to a plant-based diet--can we put an end to animal agriculture, animal suffering, and the speciesist economy.
This summer (2020), the Beyond Meat company put out a terrific TV ad that explicitly underscored the fact that we can all enjoy a hearty, ecologically healthy meal without consuming animal flesh. "What if we took this cow off the table," the ad copy reads, "and just make friends with her?...What if taking the animals out of the meat made us and our planet healthier?" Though Beyond Meat's marketing efforts are not themselves beyond reproach (the problem with all such advertising is that they elide the structural violence underpinning our economy), the ad was nevertheless praiseworthy for having created a critical-utopian image of a world without animal products and without the domination of animals. The unambiguous message of the advertisement is that we can and must stop thinking about animal products as something necessary, desirable, and inevitable.
Unfortunately, cellular meat companies cannot put out so straightforward a message, owing to the fact that they have not taken "the animals out of the meat" because the meat is literally made of animal flesh. Beyond Burger and other plant-based products challenge the hegemonic paradigm of animal production in ways that cellular meats do not and cannot.
Yes, the new vegan meats "strongly resemble" meat from animals. But the resemblance is ultimately superficial, "ontic" rather than ontological. Anyone who purchases a Beyond Burger comes to the product grasping the elemental distinction between plants and animals. They comprehend that Beyond Burgers have nothing animal in them. The problem with the cellular meat strategy is that it blurs these foundational natural categories. Contrary to Bruer's argument, then, one cannot "swap out" our cellular meat in our argument and replace the term with "vegan meat" (as Bruers suggests that one can), because they are different kinds of things.
Capitalism and Technology: Good for Animals?
One of the more fundamental points of disagreement between ourselves and Bruer is over the nature of capitalism and of the technologies it produces. Bruers argues that a "strategy that fights against animal exploitation is a priori less likely to succeed if that strategy requires extra things that are difficult to achieve, for example requiring the destruction of the capitalist system, or requiring that people start putting 'ethics on the table.'" But this begs the question. If capitalism, as a system, is indeed one of the fundamental bases of animal exploitation, not merely "accidentally" but constitutionally, then we cannot envision animal liberation within its framework. And that is a theoretical as well as empirical question, one that Bruers fails to address in a substantive or convincing way. Instead, Bruers repeatedly demonstrates his misplaced faith in the virtues of the "free market" and the technology that comes out of it:
"In the past, technologies realized strong reductions of basic rights violations of draft horses (replaced by cars for transport), oxen (replaced by tractors for plowing), hunted whales (whale oil replaced by kerosene for oil lamps), messenger pigeons (replaced by telephones for communication), laboratory rabbits (replaced by human skin tissues for cosmetic testing), pigs (replaced by recombinant DNA bacteria for insulin), bees (beeswax replaced by light bulbs for lighting), sheep (wool replaced by synthetic fibers) and movie animals (replaced by computer animated CGI-animals), without having to fight against capitalism, corporations, governments, ideologies, myths, beliefs or stubborn human attachments."
As this list suggests, in Bruers' eyes, capitalism and technology are to be credited with all the good things that happen to animals, but never any of the bad things. Bruers is thus charmed by the fact that kerosene replaced whale oil, but unimpressed that the whales were hunted to near-extinction to accumulate capital for the shareholders of the whaling companies. Few if any of his other examples in fact demonstrate what he thinks they do. For example:
*Draft horses replaced by cars for transport: Bruers ignores the fact that the automobile since its introduction has killed and maimed billions of animals directly, while its accompanying highway and road system has fragmented and destroyed the habitat for billions more. Draft horses meanwhile continue to be exploited for their labor throughout the world (though admittedly not in as great numbers as before).
*Messenger pigeons replaced by telephones: Fact: for every one messenger pigeon "saved" by Alexander Graham Bell, a million passenger pigeons were killed in European colonial, capitalist expansion. (Use of pigeons for messaging was anyway itself an avis raris--never a common means of communication.)
*Laboratory rabbits--replaced by human skin tissues for cosmetic testing: Fact: more animals are suffering and dying in scientific (capitalist) laboratories today than ever before--hundreds of millions. Meanwhile, the technologies for exploiting animals have only proliferated, so that animals now have their very ontologies violated, through bioengineering of their DNA.
*Pigs--replaced by recombinant DNA bacteria for insulin: Fact: use of pigs in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical and industries appears to be at all-time high, with pigs treated routinely killed in surgery practice, or to test products, or to serve as "vessels" for xenotransplantation, etc. As elsewhere, Bruers cherry-picks the examples that suit his argument, while ignoring the wider picture.
*Bees--beeswax replaced by light bulbs for lighting: Fact: beeswax candles--widely used in Europe from the medieval period on--were replaced not by the electric bulb, but first by an extract of stearic acid--i.e. another animal product, derived from the fatty acids of animals--and later (the 1850s) by paraffin wax, derived from petroleum.[5] Why though does Bruers credit capitalist technology with benefiting the bees with electric light, while ignoring other capitalist technologies--e.g. neonicotinoids, a class of herbicides manufactured by BASF and Bayer AG--that have killed billions of honeybees and are presently driving them to extinction?
*Sheep--wool replaced by synthetic fibers: This will surely come as welcome news to the 70 million sheep being raised today for wool (and slaughter) in Australia--as well as to the millions of captive sheep in hundreds of other countries.
*Movie animals--replaced by computer animated CGI-animals: The only reason that horses aren't still being tripped and crippled in Westerns, etc., is because animal advocacy organizations fought for those changes, not because CGI came along. (In any event, live animals continue to be exploited by filmmakers in various ways.)
Et cetera.
Bruer also quotes Dinesh Wadiwel's remark on this site that it "is highly problematic to expect tech industries to come up with solutions to injustice, just as we would not expect technologies to deliver solutions to wealth inequality, racism, patriarchy, ableism or homophobia...." Bruers' surprising reply is that, "when it comes to patriarchy, there are technologies that empowered women and hence reduced patriarchy: the washing machine, the pill (birth control), and even the computer...." Suffice it to say, however, that such a statement represents a vast misapprehension of the complex history of women's experiences of technology. War technology, biotechnology, computerization, domestic technology (appliances), etc., arose out of male-dominated culture and have by and large served to strengthen patriarchal relations rather than to diminish them.[6] To credit technology--rather than women--with having "reduced patriarchy" is like saying that Black American sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South were "empowered" by the cotton gin, the internal combustion engine, and fertilizers.
Evidently a techno-utopian of some stripe, Bruers is unable or simply unwilling to acknowledge the dialectical nature of capitalist technology--as a force for harm as frequently as it is a force for good. Bruers thus continues to be an outspoken proponent of GMO foods and nuclear power. We only wish he showed as much skepticism towards those destructive technologies as he shows towards, for example, feminism (which he attacks in some of his other online essays).
We fear that a crypto-technological determinism in fact hangs over Bruers' whole analysis. E.g., Breuers writes: "it is not self-evident that traditional actions against homophobia always will remain more effective than those technologies or make those technologies obsolete. Traditional campaigns did not deliver the solutions against racism or homophobia so far, so they are not clearly top-effective." It is hard to know, exactly, what Bruers means by "traditional actions" against racism and homophobia. But presumably he means social movements. If so, then Bruers' argument is based both on a logical fallacy and on a mistaken understanding of the history of social change and of the sociology of social movements. First, it is a non sequitor to conclude that because racism and homophobia persist, therefore they are not "effective." Second, to suggest that technology has played, or will play, or can play, a key role in overturning oppressive political and societal structures is not supported by the evidence of the last 200 years of social movement theory and practice (as studied by the sociologists of social movements).
We believe, on the contrary, that only by challenging the fundamental premise of the economic system--namely, that humans need to exploit the bodies of animals, and have a right to do so--can we begin to dismantle the system. We therefore find faith in the corporate lobby promoting cellular meats to be severely misplaced. If change is to come, it will come from activists, not from the inside of a vat.
It is symptomatic of Bruers' uncritical stance towards capitalism, finally, that he identifies closely with the so-called Effective Altruism movement, a supposedly "rational" approach to social change--funded by billionaires--that ignores the actual history of social movements, assumes that social change can be plotted out on a graph based on marketing surveys, and suggests that the future can not only be predicted by corporations but determined by them, such that human behavior, norms, and values can be (and should be) massaged and manipulated at will to correspond to profit projections. We believe that our website shows the erroneous nature of such assumptions. Oppressive social structures and systems of violence are overthrown by human beings--mobilized citizens working together--not by technologies and by for-profit corporations.
Fake Diamonds: The Question of Authenticity
Regarding our analogy between Zirconium diamonds and naturally occurring diamonds, we concede Bruers' point that the chief reason natural diamonds are more desirable than artifical ones is due to their scarcity (or, in Marx's terms, the value deriving from the amount of labor time needed to produce them). It is also true that the market for laboratory-grown diamonds--which currently hovers at only 15-20% of the total world diamond market--is poised to grow substantially in the years ahead, due both to falling production costs and to rising consciousness of the ecologically and socially destructive nature of the natural diamond business.
This said, however, no one yet is predicting that synthetic diamonds will fully replace natural diamonds, even years from now. As Kristina Buckley Kayel, Managing Director for the Diamond Producers Association of North America, points out: "Natural diamonds obtain their value from their uniqueness and rarity as billion-year-old precious gems.” Because of the "uniqueness" of natural diamonds, it seems certain that a significant market for them will continue to exist, even 50 years from now. DeBeers and other industry producers are counting on just this. As journalist Pamela Danziger has observed in Forbes, "the linchpin in the mined-diamond industry’s efforts to hold back lab-grown’s competitive threat is [therefore] to raise the value perception of mined diamonds and depress the value of lab-growns." We expect companies that traffic in live animals to do the same thing--"raise the value perception" of meat from animals. Indeed, they already are doing so.
If cellular meat successfully comes to market, meat from living animals will still be viewed as the "unique" and "authentic" alternative to the "artificial" kind, grown in vats. And, ironically, the cheaper cellular meat becomes, the "scarcer"--hence dearer--becomes meat from living farmed animals. Bruers is largely correct when he notes that "authenticity" is a function of "scarcity." But we maintain that the semiotics of meat are much more complex and ambiguous than he maintains, leaving Clean Meat vulnerable to other dynamics besides relative scarcity. Target, Walmart, Marshall's, and other large discount chains, for example, sell "genuine leather" belts and wallets--products that are extremely inexpensive. The supply of dead skins from animals is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, not "scarce" at all. Yet owing to the panoply of cultural, psychological, historical, and even "existential" associations we have with animal products, leather appears to most consumers as desirable precisely for having come from a unique living animal. Leather evokes cowboys, the American West, tradition, masculinity, frontier and settler culture, self-reliance, simplicity, and so on. Synthetic wallets and belts are generally no more expensive than leather ones; but they as they do not have the aura of the authentic surrounding them, they are seen as less desirable commodities.
Bruers admits that it "is possible that a minority of meat eaters strongly value the authenticity of animal-based meat, and when animal-based meat becomes more scarce and more expensive, those people start to value that animal meat even more, just like mined diamonds. Hence, cell-based meat can strongly decrease animal-based meat consumption, but possibly not eliminate it. Elimination probably requires animal rights activism....[So] cell-based meat can make the final push by animal rights activism more effective." This is an important concession on Bruers' part, and we welcome it. Unfortunately, however, the cellular meat lobby has so far been actively undermining veganism and animal rights activism.[7] This is a "consequentialist" observation: if we are ever to eliminate all or even most forms of violence against animals, then we need to raise consciousness about why such brutality is morally unacceptable. And it does not advance our cause when the GFI makes fun of plant-based foods ("spongy blocks of tofu"), belittles vegans as "fringe" elements, praises the supposed moral probity and "courage" of some of the biggest killers of animals on the planet, gives a "pass" to small-scale animal agriculture, promotes the myth that flesh is an "essential" life good, or actively seeks to take the "ethics off the table" in conversations about food and animals.[8]
Greenwashing and Veganwashing
In our critique, we expressed concern that big meat companies like Tyson's--whose management Bruce Friedrich and Paul Shapiro have praised as "courageous" leaders--are using their investments in cellular meat technology as the equivalent of "greenwashing." Bruers disagrees. "Greenwashing," he holds, "occurs when a corporation makes a product a tiny bit more sustainable in order to increase sales in such a way that total environmental impact increases...." By contrast, he says, when "corporations sell more sustainable and animal-free products, and when this results in a decrease of unsustainable and animal products, it is not greenwashing."
Here, however, it would be helpful to review the meaning of "greenwashing." According to Merriam-Webster's, greenwashing is the effort to make "people believe that you company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is." Investopedia offers a similar but more precise definition of the term, viz. as "the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company's products are environmentally friendly."
Defined in either of these ways, there's no question that companies like Tyson's and Cargill are already using their extremely minor investments in cellular meat technology in part to cover up their ecologically catastrophic and immoral and violent practices.
Furthermore, Bruers is also wrong to accuse us of "inconsistency" for not also suggesting that meat companies that sell vegan products are guilty of "veganwashing." When a vegan food company is bought up by a large meat company (as when Field Roast was acquired by Maple Leaf Foods, Canada's largest meatpacker), veganwashing is indeed occurring. By cornering the vegan market, the meat industry can control the marketing and distribution of vegan products, to ensure the "normalization" of a "diverse protein portfolio" that will include a little bit of everything. Meat companies are not issuing press statements boasting of their vegan product lines, whereas they have issued releases boasting of their investment in cellular meats. That's because promoting veganism cuts against their main product--animal flesh--whereas promoting cellular meats is seen as a complement to their existing production system, not as an alternative to it.
Of "Bad" Genocides and "Good" Ones
As we have noted, the evidence suggests that the meat industry will continue to modernize and expand its factory farming operations, even as it invests in and sells synthetic meat. The meat industry expects animal agriculture and the live fisheries to remain huge markets for decades to come: according to best industry estimates, even a highly successful roll-out of cellular meats will only have the effect of cutting or halting the rate of increase in the overall killing of animals. Whatever else it is, then, cellular meat is not a strategy of general animal liberation.
Bruers however looks to this future and likes what he sees. His faith is certain--it has him by the collar. Bruers writes: "Extrapolating the AT Kearny expectations beyond 2040, it is likely that cell-based meat takes an increasingly large share of the global meat market, such that say in 2050 animal-based meat consumption will be lower than in 2020...." In other words, if all goes according to plan, and if this untried, untested technology and investment juggernaut proves an unmitigated success; and if cellular meat continues on its projected (but entirely fictional) growth curve over the next twenty years--if all this holds true--then it is only "likely" that the overall amount of meat (and, by extension, number of dead animals) will be "lower" than it is today.
Let's rewind that. Even under the ideal scenario presented by the "clean meat" lobby, the best we can hope for in 30 years is that the total number of animals killed will be at least "lower" than it is today. In the meantime, as many as 30-100 trillion additional animals (at present rates of mass slaughter on land and sea) will die horrific deaths. And even under industry consultants' rosiest of scenarios, cellular meat won't end the confinement and killing of billions of animals for perhaps a century or two. By then, of course, the ecology of the planet will long since have given way.
If there is one issue on which we diverge the most from Bruers' position, in this connection, it concerns the true nature of the speciesist system and the question of what is to be considered an "acceptable" outcome for animals. We ask: what does it mean that the animal rights movement has been effectively hijacked by entrepreneurs who have unilaterally determined that the killing of billions of animals decades from now is an acceptable long-term goal? In our view, it is wrong--wrong ethically, and wrong from the perspective of movement strategy--to start from a position of defeat and to work backwards from there. It is not "success" to save billions while losing billions. We can do better, and we must.
Bruers asks: would it not have been better for "only" three million Jews to have been murdered by Nazis, rather than six? Even if we were to agree that it would have been in some sense "better," such a "smaller" Holocaust would have remained an unspeakable crime and a moral stain on humanity for all of eternity. No sane person would consider suffering and mass trauma on such a "smaller" scale a "success," nor a "good" or positive thing. Should we not also be "relieved" that Hitler killed "only" six million Jews in Europe, rather than all eleven million?
Bruer accuses us of rejecting consequentialism because we reject a welfarist stance that would attempt to "minimize the size of the genocide in order to save as many lives as possible." For the record, however, the contributors to this website are a mix of consequentialists and deontologists, and we do not--as a group--eschew consequentialism. Indeed our main argument is consequentialist: namely, that cellular meat, as it now stands, is unlikely to lead to the liberation of animals from human exterminationist violence. In other words, we are claiming that cellular meat is wrong because it leads to bad consequences for animal advocacy.
Mistaking our views, Bruers proceeds to tutor us in game theory, suggesting that "opposition [to] cell-based meat reflects an extreme, irrational high level of loss aversion." He writes: "With a high probability, cell-based meat will enter the market, have a positive impact and replace animal-based meat to some degree, such that every year 1000 animals are spared, for say 100 years. This is a bet.... If we don’t play this game, 100,000 animals are exploited. Especially when it comes to doing good and helping animals, extreme loss aversion is irrational because the animals do not share such loss aversion preferences. Hence, not playing this game."
This is another of Bruers' false dilemmas. Either cellular meat is allowed to enter the market--with a "high probability" of replacing enough meat from living animals to save at least "some" of their lives--or we do nothing at all, proceeding merrily on our way to planetary oblivion. (Like other proponents of this technology, Bruers assumes, without evidence, that synthetic flesh has "a high probability" of having "a positive impact" and reducing meat from living animals "to some degree.") In any event, there is nothing in our argument to suggest that we are "risk averse" (a straw argument). We are not saying that the risk "is not worth taking." Rather, we are arguing on consequentialist grounds that the approach being taken by the cellular meat lobby is likely to undermine animal rights and the movement to transform the human diet. We are saying that the assumptions and values embedded in this project are not good ones, and we are skeptical that those leading this lobbying machine can or should be entrusted with the well-being of nonhuman animals, and with the direction of our movement.
Unfortunately, so-called pragmatists like Bruers conceive of society in static terms, as a fixed system of "facts." They consequently think of politics as consisting of calculated, instrumental manipulation of existing people and institutions in order to achieve "realistic" objectives. The problem is, if one sets out in the world believing that the world already is what it is, rather than believing that it can be transformed into something other than it now is, something that it ought to be, then the game is already over before it's properly begun. The pragmatist takes a look at the way things "really are," then adjusts his or her expectations and goals to suit the existing reality. He or she looks out upon a world whose underlying elements seem immutable. Seeing the enormous power of the animal industry, and realizing the low-level of public consciousness around animal rights, for example, the pragmatist may sponsor legislation to end the use of gestation crates, say, rather than seek an end to the reproduction of pigs for slaughter. What the pragmatist fails to grasp, however, is that what we can know depends upon the exertion of our will, and therefore too upon our dynamic and creative actions. "Only the man who wills something strongly," Antonio Gramsci observed, "can identify the elements which are necessary to the realization of his will."[9] The neat division of reality into "what is" versus "what ought to be" (a just world) is therefore false. What exists is certainly real; but reality is itself an open field of possibilities to the activist or politician or movement who wishes to change it. What we call "reality," therefore, "is a product of the application of human will to the society of things." And knowledge of reality and of the "possible" cannot be arrived independently of action and will, since "strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and make intuition more penetrating."[10]
We do not consider the continued suffering and violent deaths of billions of animals for the next thirty, forty, or fifty years to be acceptable. The fact that some proponents of "Clean" Meat do seem to find that much suffering and trauma in some sense to be acceptable speaks to a problematic epistemological and moral framework that is Cartesian, positivist, masculinist, and unfeeling. The "bloodless" nature of such discourses--which often hinge on writers distancing themselves from (feminine) "sentiments" concerning the real suffering of real flesh and blood animals--is problematic on its own terms.[11] Societal change has never come about through "effective altruism," but through fierce, passionate social struggle.
Conclusion: Beyond Clean Meat
The main problem with Bruers' critique is that he begs the question of whether cellular meats in fact offer the only or the best strategy for challenging human mass violence against animals--animal agriculture and speciesist violence. Since he offers no evidence for his conclusions, however, his argument poses a false dilemma. Either we all get on the bandwagon, pinning our collective hopes to an untried and untested new technology, or we can expect to make no progress in the decades ahead from an animal rights advocacy perspective. Join or die. Or join or watch the animals die.
Bruers accuses us of selective thinking on the grounds that, while we doubt the efficacy of the cellular meat strategy, we don't express an "equal doubt" or skepticism vis-a-vis "traditional animal rights campaigns." This conclusion too, however, is a non sequitor. Our views of animal rights campaigns have no bearing on the validity of our remarks concerning the inconsistencies and fallacies we see in the cellular meat position. This said, we would like to be clear that the contributors to this website strongly do support the development of new strategies for animal liberation, not "business as usual." None of us uncritically affirm past or present movement approaches.
In a way, the dispute between ourselves and the Clean Meat lobby turns on a disagreement about the nature of the animal rights critique and therefore too about the purpose of animal advocacy. As we understand the problem, speciesism is a system of ruthless mass violence and exploitation, rooted in an ideology and practice of human supremacy. On our view, then, animal liberation requires us to envision a new way of being human, one in which compassion, love, and respect for other life forms replaces today's dominant paradigm, which is one of cruelty, sadism, and masculinist fantasizes of control and domination. Bruers, Friedrich, Shapiro and other animal welfarists, by contrast, believe that these existing ideas and practices can be effectively overcome simply by introducing new commodities to the market. The benefit of their approach, as they see it, is that animal liberation (or, at least, partial mitigation of the harms we inflict on animals) can be won "on the cheap," without disturbing any of the economic or cultural institutions or beliefs of existing society.
Even taken on their own terms, however, their arguments are contradictory. Bruers states that "cell-based meat does not require that people change their deeply entrenched personal consumption habits." But that is untrue. Industry analysts have concluded all along that it remains to be seen that the public can be easily convinced to start eating flesh grown in vats. As one 2015 study of attitudes towards cellular meat concluded:
"...insights from the present study indicate that public and consumer acceptance of the technology and the resulting end product cannot be taken for granted. In line with other research around new and emerging agro-food technologies, this study indicates that cultured meat is characterized by a lack of stabilized scientific knowledge and that consumers respond to this uncertainty with perceptions of risk, analogies to other risks, constructions of what they believe is natural, and concerns over adverse long-term consequences of a shift from traditional to cultured meat production and consumption."[12]
Other studies have come to similarly cautious conclusions about the potential of synthesized flesh to become a widely accepted commodity.
"With cell-based meat," Bruers avers, "traditional meat eaters do not even have to change their identities." To this we say, yes--and that's just the problem. It is our belief that so long as we human beings remain unable to conceive of our identities differently, as something other than "the little god of earth" (Goethe)--as overlords who have a right to master, control, and kill animals at will--then we will never be on the road to genuine animal liberation, and billions of animals will continue to suffer and die in economic production for the foreseeable future.
If cellular meats are unlikely to solve the problem of animal agriculture and speciesist violence more generally, then what will? Bruers writes that we and other doubters of the Clean Meat lobby "should equally doubt whether traditional animal rights campaigns are effective. One should not only consider the effectiveness of one side (cell-based meat), but also of the alternative sides (other vegan campaigns)." Again, we agree. Traditional animal rights campaigns have not been nearly effective enough. Do we ourselves have a grand strategy for overcoming the human exterminationist project? We do not. That is the work that needs to be done--developing a vision of a post-speciesist world, and of how to get there. But the mania for cellular meat is getting in the way of that.
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[1] Bruers disagrees with our view that "depicting animal flesh as having a paramount aesthetic and even “existential” value, a value that so enhances human life that giving it up would surely amount to a hardship...makes it that much harder for vegans and animal advocates to shift consumers away from meat obtained by killing animal,” denying that there is any "evidence for such a strongly counterintuitive claim." In fact, decades of scholarship, particularly by ecofeminists like Carol Adams, has demonstrated the importance of understanding the semiotics of "meat" as a cultural object, and the way it is tied in to social structures such as patriarchy.
[2] We have expressed our concern that the Clean Meat lobby "may be locking us into a future in which humans remain as attached as they are today to the fraudulent belief that we can only thrive on the bodies of other animals–including living ones.” Bruers, however, maintains that "[t]here is simply no evidence that the promotion of animal-free meats reinforces that fraudulent belief." In fact, we do provide evidence of this, showing that proponents of cellular meats continue to highlight the pleasures of eating products made up of animals' bodies.
[3] Here we note, as an aside, that up until the early 20th century "meat" was used in reference to any foodstuff, not only or even primarily to animal flesh.
[4] Dara Homer, "If We Want to Prevent the Next Pandemic, We Need to Change the Meat We Eat," Tulsa World, Sept. 29, 2020 (https://tulsaworld.com/opinion/columnists/dara-homer-if-we-want-to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-we-need-to-change-the/article_8b24325c-025a-11eb-b750-c3a32334138c.html)
[5] European Candle Association (https://www.eca-candles.com/interesting-facts-service/history/).
[6] See Judith Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
[7] On a related topic, Bruers writes, "As demand for recycled paper remains low (even after all those decades), the concern is that demand for cell-based meat will remain low as well. Again, the same can be said about demand for vegan, plant-based meat.... When people don’t recycle paper, recycled paper becomes scarce and expensive. Cell-based meat on the other hand does not rely on behavior of consumers that can create scarcity." It's true that one problem facing the recycled paper market is inelasticity in the supply of recycled fibers--a problem which, presumably, would not afflict the production of cellular meats, which could be scaled up or down depending on market demand. We therefore agree with Bruers that cellular meat would be unlikely to experience the same kinds of supply price fluctuations that we see in the recyled paper market. However, Bruers seems to miss our wider point, which is that, in the absence of a robust, pro-environmentalist culture, demand for recycled paper will remain low. Similarly, in the absence of a robust animal liberation movement--which is being undercut by cellular meat discourse--we can probably assume a certain inelasticity of demand for cellular meats. What seems likely to happen--though much uncertainty remains about this untested technology--is that demand for cellular meat products will quickly expand, at first, and then stabilize or fall off.
[8] Bruers claims that "cell-based meat proponents did and still do educate the public about animal agriculture and ethics, and do not see speciesism as a mere technical problem." To back up his claim, he notes that KFC-Russia issued a press release noting that "'the production process does not cause any harm to animals.'" While that was encouraging to hear, the example is unrepresentative. As we noted, the Clean Meat lobby's most well-known proponent, Bruce Friedrich, has described the intent of the Good Food Institute, which he runs, as "[taking] ethics off the table for the consumer."
[9] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 171.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Bruers observes that "Bruce Friedrich does care about animals in the sense that he believes animals have rights and he does things in order to satisfy the preferences of animals, but not in the sense that he feels a personal sentimental or emotional connection with those animals." Even to the consequentialists among us--or perhaps especially to the consequentialists among us--such a statement is all too telling about the masculinism of the people who have been in charge of animal advocacy for so long. The notion that animals could ever be liberated without people caring about them seems to us both immoral and--ironically--impractical.
[12] Wim Verbeke, et al., "'Would You Eat Cultured Meat?': Consumers' reactions and attitude formation in Belgium, Portugal and the United Kingdom," Meat Science, Vol. 102, April 2015, 49-58.