This is actually a thing on the horizon: meat created in vitro by a 3D printer. “2,500 chicken breasts, please. I’ll be back in an hour or so.” Which is cool and all, but I think we’re pretty much past the point of being shocked by the capabilities of 3D printing. When I see a live puppy spit out by one of these machines, then maybe I’ll start freaking out about the technology again, but, in the meantime, I’d like to just ask: what is meat? The machine, proposed by Missouri-based startup Modern Meadow, would be outfitted with a collection of all the different sorts of cells one might find in a piece of meat — like colors in a typical 2D, non-science fiction printer — and we know how meat is structured with one supposes unlimited resolution, so I guess it’s just a matter of programming some meat-CAD tool. And, squish and splort, there’s your meat piece. Or it’s a piece of something, anyway.There is no animal generating the meat, however, and, personally, I don’t think my steak needs to be hacked from the butt of a cow for it to be meat. I think largely in first-world Western society we think of meat-giving animals as meat production mechanisms and much less so animals with powerful life-presences (or however you want to describe the property of being alive and aware), even in these days of free-range cuddle-cows. So what difference does it make if the same steak is being generated by a printer as being generated by bovine fertilization, in utero development, birth, six to 10 months of being a calf, and some period of being an overfed grown-ass cow (a heifer) before eventually getting an air gun hole in the head?Or you might argue that that’s a false dichotomy and we really need to just be thinking about cows differently, not as meat-producing organisms but sovereign beings that we sacrifice humanely for the sake of our paleo diets. But I’m not a big believer in our capability of having it both ways — having our meat and worshiping it too — not anymore anyway. We live in a massively, near-unfathomably overpopulated world with many very large populations that are currently dying because they don’t have food.And cows are terribly inefficient at providing food for humans, whether they’re being managed in terrible super-industrial stockyards or grazing on the side of some hillside eating the most delicious grass on Earth. Worth noting in this here drought is that animal agriculture is the leading water consumer in the United States. Meanwhile, nearly half of all of the grain grown in the world is fed to livestock. And if you took all of the grain that the U.S. feeds to its livestock in a year, it would be enough to feed 800 million people, by one 1997 estimate. In short, if we’re going to feed Earth’s expected nine billion person population by 2050, we need to eat a lot less meat. Or at least we need to eat a whole lot less inefficient meat, which is meat created by cows.Modern Meadow, in a filing to the United States Department of Agriculture, lays it out: “Successful in vitro meat engineering addresses a number of societal needs, thus the commercialization of the method has high market potential. The consumer acceptance of such products may not be without challenges. We expect it will first appeal to culinary early-adopter consumers and the segment of the vegetarian community that rejects meat for ethical reasons. With reduction in price, it can reach the masses with religious restrictions on meat consumption (people restricted to Hindu, Kosher, Halal diets) and finally populations with limited access to safe meat production.” The company just received a £160,000 to £220,000 grant for their work, which should hopefully yield its first edible bite (and just a bite) of meat in the short-term.One imagines some time in a not-too-distant when the notion of livestock is as quaint as hunting and gathering, a primitive and horribly wasteful exercise that helped level a great deal of the Amazon rain forest, contributed to global warming on numerous levels, and was generally unethical and frequently cruel. There is indeed an uncomfortable admission about our techno-future in the idea of 3D meat printing — that we’re not getting out of this great big mess without technology, and that makes us dependent on it — but delaying that inevitability doesn’t benefit much of anyone.
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