“Step right up, folks, and bite into the wondrous future of meat!”

Cheap meat! Ethical meat! Animal meat you love – beef, chicken, pork, fish, etc. – all produced without animals! It’s the miracle of “meatless meat” – a viscous mass derived from “fetal bovine serum,” then grown not on ranches, but in huge vats in corporate factories. Science marches on!

Until it meets reality. Just three years ago, lab-meat hucksters had bedazzled high-tech investors, and gullible media commentators into believing the food future was now. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and other tech billionaires had jumped in with big bucks, as did Tyson Foods and global hedge funds. A New York Times editorialist exulted, “This isn’t just science fiction,” demanding that President Biden “supercharge this industry” by putting our government’s “money and muscle” into “a moonshot for meatless meat.”

So… years later, where’s the beef?

Still on the hoof. The wondrous claim that food futurists could “grow” millions of tons of meat in only 15 days from a single drop of cells was just another pile of bovine excrement. They were raising money rather than doing science, so their billions of dollars and industrial vats of “cell slurry” have only produced a few sad strands of cultured protein. That’s not a hamburger… much less a future.

Even if these monetized technocratic “geniuses” could eliminate animals from animal agriculture, that’s not real change, for it leaves the monopolistic industrial structure and the profiteering anti-democratic ethic of today’s food system in place. Moreover, agriculture is not a technology, it is a rich blend of culture, history, family, and community. Change will not come from the hubris and dull imaginations of plutocratic tech billionaires, but from long term cultivation of these organic, grassroots sources of progressive policies.

Photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr

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