Meat is now being grown in labs, but it won't solve the world's food problems

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There are several issues with companies that create 'kill-free' meat from animal cells using a 'feed the world' pitch to promote it.

For a start, lab meat, or “clean” meat, as the manufacturers love to call it, has an “ick” factor. But this aspect is background noise. The bigger conversation seems to be about whether it will be feasible to make the stuff en masseMaybe, maybe not; perhaps they can make mountains of it, perhaps it will even taste delicious. But the much more important question is whether the ability to make synthesised animal protein by the ton translates into an effective food solution.

Let’s get real: food security is, and always has been, pretty much unrelated to the amounts of food that exist on the globe, so why would quantity be the defining issue in the future? We know full well that the issue is far more complex and rests almost entirely in the intertwined tentacles of politics and economics.

Famine and starvation have mostly been a result of war, displacement, wealth and power inequality, geographical challenges and natural disasters. In our current centralised system, this is more the case than ever before. It’s a system which honours capitalism’s logic of favouring short-term gain over long-term sustainability, and which has ensured the desertification of vast tracts of the globe’s potentially usable arable land through reductionist, industrial farming of both animals and crops.

 

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