A Meat and Dairy Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Jon Hochschartner reflects on the incredible impact that even low levels of adoption of cultivated meat could have on animal suffering and the importance of funding research into this new protein.

Fund cultivated-meat research to save animals
From Jon Hochschartner, Slaughter-Free America, slaughterfreeamerica.substack.com
April 2025

Photo from Canva

In the chaos of the current political moment, it’s easy — even for me, as a vegan activist — to forget about the most vulnerable and exploited group on the planet. I’m talking about animals, who we kill by the billions every year for food alone. As terrible as human injustices are, none come close to matching this level of suffering. We have a moral duty to prioritize the mitigation of such evil.

I frequently feel overwhelmed considering the scale of violence against animals. Undoubtedly, these types of emotions play a role in mainstream resistance to including nonhumans within our circle of ethical concern. To open oneself up to the full breadth of animal suffering is to open oneself up to various feelings of psychological distress, including helplessness, an emotion I struggle with.

It’s true the system of nonhuman exploitation is vast and deeply entrenched. The number of people working to end these horrors is small. Some triage is necessary. That’s why I believe anyone who cares about animals should be working to accelerate the development of cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, the revolutionary protein is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter.

This isn’t a plant-based alternative. Cultivated meat is identical to slaughtered meat at a cellular level. For instance, if you’re allergic to conventional seafood, you would be allergic to cultivated seafood. Perhaps the new protein won’t upend the existing agricultural system. However, even low adoption rates of cultivated meat would save more creatures than traditional animal activism ever has.

Say cultivated meat only ever captures one percent of the current global meat market. My math skills are pretty bad. But if we assume the current meat market kills one trillion aquatic and land creatures every year, which I gather is a relatively conservative estimate, this hypothetical low-adoption rate of cultivated meat would save 10 billion animals annually, according to my calculations.

In addition to the technology’s potential humane benefits, it also could be a boon to the environment and public health. Many people are unaware that animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of global warming and pandemics. Experts believe, when the field of cellular agriculture is more mature, it will greatly reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions and exposure to zoonotic viruses.

Despite progress made by the private sector in developing the science of cultivated meat, significant technological barriers remain to mass production and cost competitiveness. These can be overcome with a hefty infusion of public funding into cellular-agriculture research. Such an investment could be paid for by taxing the rich or redirecting existing subsidies provided to factory farms.

Last year, the Massachusetts government devoted more than $2 million to help launch a cultivated-meat development center at Tufts University. This was on top of $10 million invested by President Joe Biden’s Department of Agriculture. We should be creating research facilities like this all across the country, including at every agricultural school. They will lay the groundwork for a new food system.

“We’re proud of the advances Massachusetts is making in cellular agriculture, leveraging our biomanufacturing infrastructure and research expertise to address the challenges of climate change and shifting supply chains,” said Massachusetts Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao. “We’re fostering innovation and creating new opportunities for our workforce in this emerging field.”

Much of the disorder of President Donald Trump’s second term directly impacts animals. At the most basic level, I don’t believe we can create the kind of change we need under a right-wing authoritarian state, which I fear Trump is trying to build. That said, I think it would be an abdication of our moral responsibilities to completely subsume efforts on behalf of animals to the anti-fascist struggle.

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Posted on All-Creatures: April 14, 2025
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