In Vitro Meat: A Vehicle for the Ethical Rescaling of the Factory Farming Industry and In Vivo Testing or an Intractable Enterprise?

Abstract

The factory farming industry is the invisible proprietor of the modern Western entitlement: one predicated on and distinguished by unsustainable excess.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2007 over 10 billion terrestrial food animals were slaughtered in the U.S., thus "account[ing] for nearly 25% of the total non-aquatic animals killed for food in the world" (Pluhar 2009, pp. 456).   Additionally, we are becoming increasingly addicted to meat; "[t]he American appetite for flesh has grown from 234 pounds per capita in 1980 to 273 pounds in 2007" (pp. 456).  This unrequited excess comes with several grave consequences: the desensitizing and excessively brutal slaughter of millions of food animals, development of antibiotic resistant pathogen strains in immune-compromised animals, and environmental repercussions of raising livestock including pollution from their excrement and massive emissions of methane that contribute to global warming. 

Emerging in the wake of the necrotic factory farming industry is a new biotechnological enterprise, in vitro meat, which enables the production of meat from cells taken from food animals via biopsy that are cultured using advanced tissue engineering techniques. Ultimately, in vitro meat may make an appreciable contribution to a more sustainable world and effectively combat the anthropocentrism that not only endangers other life on Earth but hinders us as well.