This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine.
Recently, Ron DeSantis backed a law in Florida that bans the production and sale of, if you will, lab-grown meat and vegetarian options that are being pursued synthetically in the lab. DeSantis basically said that he's for having a steak. He doesn't want people developing pink goop in lab dishes and then telling us we have to eat that.
In a rare show of bipartisan support, Democrat Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania agreed. He basically said that he supports this. He's in the ribeye caucus, not the pink goop caucus. When it comes to dinner, he wants to have steak or prime rib.
I couldn't agree less with this push to try and throttle the development of cell-grown meat or artificially synthesizing meat from fetal cells or adult cells of animals in dishes, using maybe stem cell technologies or other techniques so that you wouldn't have to kill a cow. You'd be able to grow a steak or grow a pork chop from cells obtained from these animals, and use them in bioreactors and biosynthesizers to basically substitute these as meat alternatives.
I think that is absolutely worth pursuing. I'd go further and say that it's a moral duty to pursue alternative sources of meat. If your patient comes to see you now, I do think it's appropriate to have a discussion of diet and suggest that a meat-based diet is not good. It's not healthy in terms of the way a diet that is heavy on meat impacts our health. It's absolutely not good for the planet. If you can go vegetarian, even now, it's certainly morally desirable.
By the way, I'll confess that I eat less meat, but not 100%. I'm still somewhat in the "I grew up with meat, and I do like it" camp, but reduction is better.
If we could grow our meat in ways that don't require the agricultural practices that are out there, I think we ought to be pursuing that. Everybody ought to be aware that 80% of our arable land in the world is either used to feed animals directly or grow crops like alfalfa and corn, which we feed to our animals.
It's a hugely inefficient way to make meat. The animals themselves are factory farmed and suffer a great deal. There are billions of them every year that suffer miserably in bad conditions, whether they're chickens or veal calves.
We have a large amount of pollution because of these, if you will, 19th-century agricultural practices. Much of the gas emissions in the atmosphere come from our animals. We have run-off into our water supply. The animals themselves are drinking tons of water directly or through the crops that they need to live. We're in a water shortage in many parts of the US and the world.
If you're talking about what you want to ban, prohibit, or discourage, it has to be — sorry, Governor DeSantis and Senator Fetterman —getting rid of current agricultural practices, which aren't healthy for us; pollute the environment; and are, in a way, causing huge amounts of animal suffering.
Getting rid of that is a goal. Not tomorrow, not next year, and nobody has to worry that they're going to give up their steak overnight, but we should wean ourselves off of these last-century agricultural practices and try to develop meat products that might be healthier and less fatty, contain more nutrition, and may be cheaper than what you have to do to create a cow, a pig, or another animal in order to get its meat.
I think the case is overwhelming for spending money and aggressively pursuing new ways to create meat, whether it's from fish, chickens, cows, lambs, you name it. I think the politicians are taking a stance that looks like the buggy whip industry in the 19th century, trying to say, don't invent cars or pursue them because we won't be able to sell anything to anybody who owns a carriage drawn by a horse. That's not the way to go, Governor, Senator.
The way to move forward is to be innovative, move into 21st-century agricultural practices, save the planet, improve our health, and diminish animal suffering. Let's go with those industries. Maybe we'll all be able to sit down with a nice steak 15 years from now that's created by cultured meat and feel pretty good about it.
This is Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Thanks for watching.
COMMENTARY
Laboratory-Developed Meat: Ethicist Says It's Worth Pursuing
Arthur L. Caplan, PhD
DISCLOSURES
| July 22, 2024This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine.
Recently, Ron DeSantis backed a law in Florida that bans the production and sale of, if you will, lab-grown meat and vegetarian options that are being pursued synthetically in the lab. DeSantis basically said that he's for having a steak. He doesn't want people developing pink goop in lab dishes and then telling us we have to eat that.
In a rare show of bipartisan support, Democrat Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania agreed. He basically said that he supports this. He's in the ribeye caucus, not the pink goop caucus. When it comes to dinner, he wants to have steak or prime rib.
I couldn't agree less with this push to try and throttle the development of cell-grown meat or artificially synthesizing meat from fetal cells or adult cells of animals in dishes, using maybe stem cell technologies or other techniques so that you wouldn't have to kill a cow. You'd be able to grow a steak or grow a pork chop from cells obtained from these animals, and use them in bioreactors and biosynthesizers to basically substitute these as meat alternatives.
I think that is absolutely worth pursuing. I'd go further and say that it's a moral duty to pursue alternative sources of meat. If your patient comes to see you now, I do think it's appropriate to have a discussion of diet and suggest that a meat-based diet is not good. It's not healthy in terms of the way a diet that is heavy on meat impacts our health. It's absolutely not good for the planet. If you can go vegetarian, even now, it's certainly morally desirable.
By the way, I'll confess that I eat less meat, but not 100%. I'm still somewhat in the "I grew up with meat, and I do like it" camp, but reduction is better.
If we could grow our meat in ways that don't require the agricultural practices that are out there, I think we ought to be pursuing that. Everybody ought to be aware that 80% of our arable land in the world is either used to feed animals directly or grow crops like alfalfa and corn, which we feed to our animals.
It's a hugely inefficient way to make meat. The animals themselves are factory farmed and suffer a great deal. There are billions of them every year that suffer miserably in bad conditions, whether they're chickens or veal calves.
We have a large amount of pollution because of these, if you will, 19th-century agricultural practices. Much of the gas emissions in the atmosphere come from our animals. We have run-off into our water supply. The animals themselves are drinking tons of water directly or through the crops that they need to live. We're in a water shortage in many parts of the US and the world.
If you're talking about what you want to ban, prohibit, or discourage, it has to be — sorry, Governor DeSantis and Senator Fetterman —getting rid of current agricultural practices, which aren't healthy for us; pollute the environment; and are, in a way, causing huge amounts of animal suffering.
Getting rid of that is a goal. Not tomorrow, not next year, and nobody has to worry that they're going to give up their steak overnight, but we should wean ourselves off of these last-century agricultural practices and try to develop meat products that might be healthier and less fatty, contain more nutrition, and may be cheaper than what you have to do to create a cow, a pig, or another animal in order to get its meat.
I think the case is overwhelming for spending money and aggressively pursuing new ways to create meat, whether it's from fish, chickens, cows, lambs, you name it. I think the politicians are taking a stance that looks like the buggy whip industry in the 19th century, trying to say, don't invent cars or pursue them because we won't be able to sell anything to anybody who owns a carriage drawn by a horse. That's not the way to go, Governor, Senator.
The way to move forward is to be innovative, move into 21st-century agricultural practices, save the planet, improve our health, and diminish animal suffering. Let's go with those industries. Maybe we'll all be able to sit down with a nice steak 15 years from now that's created by cultured meat and feel pretty good about it.
This is Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Thanks for watching.
Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
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