About Lab Grown Meat
Showing Up Way Too Late But Still Giving My Thoughts
“Florida is fighting the WEF agenda.”
“Florida has banned Klaus Schwab’s scheme.”
“Florida takes a stand against the wOkE deep state.”
I am so fucking glad that your concern for your fellow American and food is wrapped up in a conspiracy about some creepy old rich fuck.
That’s fine. I’m here so you can pivot and stop acting like a weirdo, but I’m also here so that people who are pro-lab-grown meat can have some food for thought. There’s an actual discussion to be had that doesn’t involve sperging out about some old German dude.
In order to support lab-grown meat, both in terms of buying the stuff and the policy concerning it, you have to start asking yourself some questions. Not questions like “Do I want animals to be treated more humanely?” because you’ve probably already answered that question. You have to start asking yourself and policymakers some actually difficult questions.
Is factory farming inhumane?
Yup.
That’s not one of the tough questions; you’ll know when we get to those. I do have to acknowledge some background before I dig into the meat of the issue. Most of your food comes from a factory farm, especially if you consume dairy, eggs, and poultry. That can’t be avoided, we have to feed 336 million people at home and who ever we export to abroad. With the vanishing availibility of farm land, we don’t have a choice. Unless you want animal products to become an expensive, hard to get, luxury factory farms are the only way to go.
Which is why lab-grown meat is such a big breakthrough. No animal misery, no environmental impact, more available land, and it might be cost-effective so you can still enjoy a burger.
How does lab-grown meat relate to regular meat?
Do we slap a label on it and sell it next to the real stuff? Does it become like imitation meat? Do we let the consumer decide? This is the most likely outcome, but I have to ask. The government could ban real meat outright, but unfortunately, you’ll not only catch the ire of spergy conservatives but also almond moms and people who don’t like GMOs or processed foods. The politics of those people run the gamut, and Democrats would risk alienating the suburbs and upper-class people. You know, regular people.
“What happens to the workers?”
I’m going to start spitting some numbers, so pay attention.
Hired farm laborers make up less than one percent of workers in the US, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.
That number is just hired farm laborers. Despite making up less than one percent of the population, these workers contribute $1.530 trillion to the US economy. That’s about 5.6%. Not that big, right? Well, a farm is more than its labor.
Tractors, vaccines, medicine, veterinarians, botanists, butchers, and other sorts of laborers are also involved. Once you count these people, the ones indirectly connected to agriculture, the numbers start going up. Feeding the Economy estimates that 24 million jobs, about 15% of the job market, and $9.6 trillion dollars of output, that’s almost 20% of GDP are connected in some way to agriculture.
So lab-grown meat wipes out the real meat market. I understand not all of the above numbers have to do with meat (everyone loves to talk about farms, smfh). Fortune Business Insights says $170 billion of that is tied up in meat, while Statista states around $130 billion in revenue.
Now remember. These are direct numbers; there are more indirect jobs connected to meat.
What happens to them?
Most of it would be gone, wiped out.
Some of the jobs could pivot. Truck drivers, veterinarians, food scientists, mechanics, and other jobs could find new work elsewhere. What about the actual labor? Ranch hands and meat packers? Many of them have spent their lives doing this job; they are going to be tossed into a job market that is dog shit with barely any marketable job skills. They don’t make very much money, so they might be homeless for a while. What about the towns? The communities? The lifestyle?
It wouldn’t be the first time an occupation has died from technological innovation, but agriculture helped bring us out of the caves and begin this wild experiment called civilization. It's been integral to the human experience since we could record it. It would just be gone, like tears in the rain.
Maybe you’re sitting there smug as can be thinking “Well I just don’t give a shit. Those dirty, poor Republicans can learn how to code.” Let me ask you another question.
What happens to the animals?
Ten billion animals are grown in the US each year for consumption. What’s the plan for those 10 billion animals? Is there one last generation? A dwindling number of animals till the last generation is shipped off to the meat packing plant. A final hail Mary to the several millennia of animal raising?
I doubt anything quite so storybook would happen, except for that dwindling number part.
So what happens to the animals after that?
Pigs are pretty safe here. They can transition to being pets, like dogs or cats. Chickens can occupy the pet/hobby herd niche. If you have a big enough yard, you can raise chickens for pets, meat, and eggs.
Cows are a different story. Hobby herds exist but they require a boat load of land, food, and water.
I ask because the federal government has fucked this up before. In Quit Making Environmental Policy From the Heart, a big issue I focus on is wild horses.
After the world left horses behind, they became a massive pest. They became wildly overpopulated and currently overgraze all the range land they inhabit. This leaves no grass for cows, sheep, or native species and that lack of vegetation contributes to erosion.
I can see the same story happening to cattle. They are turned loose, hunted by opportunists, and put under the protection of the federal government, only to destroy the range by trampling and eating it all. When someone tries to step in and handle the fucking problem, some bleeding heart activist will show up, make big sad cow eyes, and demand they be left alone.
So are rural and small-town people about to get fucked over twice? Do they have to witness the economic and environmental destruction of their communities? Do they have to helplessly watch as the world around them melts into dust with no recourse to fix it? I've written about rural rage before, and congratulations! This won’t help matters at all.
Blah, blah, blah, liberal hypocrisy, blah, blah, blah, if they were of color, etc. etc. Yeah, of course the liberals are going to be hypocrites about this. They do not care about these communities. They won’t do anything about this. The GOP will pretend to care until Trump, his successor, or the lobbyist money tells them otherwise.
I’m fully ready to admit that this is me just shouting at clouds, raging against the dying of the light. But I’ll be damned if I go gentle into the good night.
Until next week.