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Science Created Factory Farming. Science Could End It.
Alternative meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger could upend conventional agriculture by out-innovating it
Humans have raised domesticated livestock for meat for millenia, but factory farming as we know it today — that is, raising poultry, pigs, or cattle in close quarters and under rigidly controlled conditions — is less than a century old. It was made possible by science and technology.
As historian Yuval Noah Hariri has written: “With the help of vaccinations, medications, hormones, pesticides, central air-conditioning systems, automatic feeders, and lots of other novel gadgets, it is now possible to cram tens of thousands of chickens or other animals into tiny coops, and produce meat and eggs with unprecedented efficiency — but also with unprecedented misery.”
Supporting small-scale farms or embracing natural foods — whatever that might mean — won’t end that misery. More science just might. A new breed of scientists say that their work on what’s being termed “clean meat” has the potential to replace factory farms, which produce lots of cheap meat but do incalculable harm to the environment, to human health, and to the well-being of farm animals.
Much of the initial progress in developing alternatives to meat has been driven by scientists at startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which make plant-based protein products marketed as burgers and sausage and sold in restaurants and supermarkets. Other researchers work at Silicon Valley startups like Just Inc. and Memphis Meats that are developing cell-based meat — meat biologically identical to the real thing that is grown from a few cells cultured from live animals. Academic research into meat alternatives is also growing, fueled by philanthropic and corporate funding that amounted to more than $6 million in 2019.
In an effort to advance the field, the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes clean meat, awarded $3 million to 14 scientists to research plant-based and cell-based meats earlier this year.
