WIRED OPINION
ABOUT
Dr. Liz Specht is the associate director of science and technology for The Good Food Institute and is working to eliminate the biggest scientific roadblocks to the commercialization of cultivated meat. Dr. Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow in political science at Johns Hopkins University whose research focuses on the politics of food production.All of this is being framed as protecting our food supply chain. The problem, however, isn’t the whole supply chain but its weakest link: industrialized animal farming. Is this really an industry we should save? Or should we read the tea leaves of this pivotal moment in history and build a more resilient replacement?
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The current system has failed, and building back better should start with a wholesale shift to plant-based alternatives and real meat cultivated from cells. Incumbent companies, startups, and the government should work together to transition to animal-free protein production rather than fighting to maintain an unsustainable and unsafe status quo.
For its various failings, the great strength of the conventional food system is its capacity to distribute food in large quantities and at low cost through a complex and relatively robust value chain. Despite widely shared photos of empty shelves, supermarkets have actually been able to stay remarkably well-stocked. Consumers have had no trouble continuing to purchase bananas freighted from Central America, confections from Europe, and fresh produce from California’s Central Valley. While there have been limited cases of onions and potatoes being plowed under for lack of a suitable buyer—as these vegetables are more heavily consumed in restaurants and cafeterias than at home—we haven’t yet experienced shortages of plant-based foods. To the contrary, plant-based meat brands are successfully stepping up to meet unprecedented demand .
Got a coronavirus-related news tip? Send it to us at [email protected] .Applying an industrialized, economies-of-scale model to animal production is a recipe for disaster. As elucidated by the term “factory farming,” industrial animal agriculture involves not just rearing animals in huge numbers but also regarding them as literal “animal machines,” to quote the late British writer Ruth Harrison, to produce milk, eggs, and meat. But unlike manmade machines, animal machines can’t simply be switched off in times of economic disruption, making them vulnerable to market volatilities.
This is why slaughterhouses are trying desperately to keep running despite being Covid-19 transmission hubs and why dairy farmers are milking cows despite a collapse in the market for milk. Bottlenecks such as slaughterhouse closures have serious ripple effects, threatening product availability and processor profitability while forcing farmers and breeders to cull multiple generations of animals that they can’t sell. This problem is compounded by the short shelf life of most animal products and limited cold storage capacity, meaning that even temporary disruptions in either production or demand have an outsized effect on the industry’s operations and bottom line. In business terms, this is a demand responsiveness problem.
Producing protein this way also comes with inherent inefficiencies and risks. Generating protein from animal sources requires at least an order of magnitude more inputs than deriving protein directly from plants. We have historically overlooked these inefficiencies because their true costs were never felt by the consumer. Damage to the environment and to public health is a debt we levy on future generations, and the economic unviability of this system has been mitigated by decades of government-enacted price supports, insurance schemes, and subsidies. This in turn has created a culture in which cheap meat is abundant, and access to it has achieved the aura of an inviolable human right.