Hugh Fearlessly Eats It All by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Author:Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2006-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

June 2003

It is increasingly hard to be shocked by the megalomania of the global business behemoths, or the ambitions of the scarily brilliant men-in-white-coats whose research they fund. But it’s not impossible.

The petri-burgers are coming

So they’re going to start growing meat in a laboratory. Beef without cows, pork without pigs, chicken without … chickens. Animal protein by proxy – muscle tissue from a Petri dish. Apparently, according to ‘researchers’ from the University of Maryland, it’s going to be the answer to the world’s food shortage, and the moral dilemmas of meat production and factory farming, all in one blissfully brilliant technological stroke. Is this genius? Does a Nobel Peace Prize beckon?

No! This is moronic! These are short-sighted, power-crazed, intellectually degenerate, self-serving, morally empty imbeciles! They believe they hold in their hands the beginnings of a brave new world of cruelty-free meat. I don’t think so. It’s more like the final eradication of any vestigial sense of responsibility, or duty of care, to the animals we use for food. Take it to its logical conclusion, and it consigns to oblivion 10,000 years of a relationship that has shaped civilisation – the contract of good husbandry between man and his domesticated livestock.

Now I am the first to admit that that contract is already in crisis, undermined by the inherent cruelty of our factory farming systems. The need to repair it, and restore and rebuild the respect of our own species for the species that we farm and eat, is desperately urgent, both for the sake of their welfare, and our own moral health.

And I can readily appreciate the overwhelming temptation to see an apparent solution offered by this extraordinary technology. It looks frighteningly like a watertight ethical syllogism: you can’t be cruel to anything inanimate, i.e. without a central nervous system. Petri-meat will have no such system. Therefore Petri-meat will be cruelty free. It must seem like a no-brainer (if you’ll excuse the pun) – especially to those investors and researchers temporarily blinded by the flash of pound signs, and the anticipated blaze of glory (whichever burns the brighter).

But it isn’t like that, and it will never be like that. If you accept factory farming against your own stated moral position, as most of us resignedly do when we begin to load up our shopping trolley, and then you accept the technology that promises to replace it, then you also inevitably accept everything in between. After all, who’s got time to check up on what these guys are really up to in the lab?

It seems to me far more likely that this Petri-meat technology will never really replace factory farming; it will only ever augment it, in the most grisly, Mengelean way imaginable. After all, another absurdly overfunded group of white coats (with butcher’s aprons on top) have already given us the featherless chicken – no plucking required. They are also working on the brainless bird – ‘too dumb to suffer’, and have pledged to follow up with ‘vegetative’ versions of pigs, sheep and cows.

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