My advice: Don’t watch the videos. Don’t Google the terms “factory farms” and “undercover video.” The deluge of covert recordings exposing the brutal treatment of chickens, turkeys, beef cattle, dairy cows and pigs will butcher your appetite. Don’t think about the 900,000 cows, 3.8 million pigs or the 202 million chickens consigned to American slaughterhouses each day, else the ghastly numbers spoil the notion that farm animals are raised in pastoral serenity. Farms aren’t even farms anymore. They’ve been redesignated CAFOs, an acronym for “confined animal feeding operations,” the large-scale corporate entities that account for 90% of the meat production in the United States. The modern version of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” would replace the stoic farmer and daughter with a grinning lawyer and a hedge-fund manager. Old McDonald has sold out to Cargill. Elsie the Contented Cow spends her miserable life confined to a concrete paddock. Porky Pig never sees the outdoors. CAFO animals live miserable, abbreviated lives held with brutal efficiency in cages, crates and pens. Egg-laying hens reside in enclosures with less floor space than a sheet of paper. Genetically manipulated turkeys acquire so much bulk so fast they’re rendered virtually immobile. Veal calves spend nearly all of their very short lives in a 22-inch-wide pen, unable to walk or turn about or lie down. Future generations will surely regard a society that abides such treatment with revulsion and puzzlement, much the way contemporary Americans struggle to understand how professed Christians could fight a war defending slavery. No, I’m not a vegetarian evangelist. I’m not demanding a ban on cheeseburgers (however much that might please your cardiologist). This is about the Florida Legislature advancing a measure that would outlaw a meat delivery system that doesn’t require torture and slaughter. Identical bills moving toward passage in both the House and Senate would outlaw “the manufacture, sale, holding or offering for sale, or distribution of cultivated meat in this state.” The forbidden process grows animal muscle cells in a nutrient soup. Cells proliferate until they form a certain mass. Except this meat is harvested in a laboratory, not a slaughterhouse. But the Florida Legislature seems intent on banning a potentially world-changing technology. Maybe biotech meat seems too damn Californian. In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued the nation’s first permits for the production of lab-grown meat, allowing two Northern California companies to market cell-cultured chicken. A month later, an acclaimed San Francisco restaurant, the very trendy Bar Crenn, became the first American restaurant to serve cultivated chicken “fried in a Recado Negro, infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli with edible flowers and greens.” (Lab grown meat has been legal since 2020 in Singapore, where Huber’s Butchery and Bistro offers biotech chicken pasta and sandwiches.) The New York Times reported that about 100 companies worldwide are hoping to mass produce profitable lines of cultured meat. (Profits remain elusive.) The industry was valued at about $247 million in 2022. The international consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that the industry could be worth $25 billion by the end of this decade. Tufts University, in partnership with four other universities — none, of course, in Florida — has established the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture “to create an engine of innovation at the intersection of science, engineering and food policy.” Lab meat is no longer a fantasy. But the Florida Cattlemen’s Association apparently has convinced influential friends in the legislature to pretend otherwise. The news site Florida Politics reported Wednesday that the association has raised concerns about “consumer safety.” (Nothing about avoiding future competition with Silicon Valley techies.) Maybe Florida cowboys ought not broach consumer safety, given the havoc the cattle industry inflicts on consumers. They account for somewhere between 15% and 40% of the methane that’s exacerbating global warming. Nutrients from millions of tons of manure generated by livestock contaminate waterways. Factory farms consume 75% of America’s medically important antibiotics to promote rapid growth and ward off diseases that fester in jam-packed paddocks. The World Health Organization warns that “a lack of effective antibiotics is as serious a security threat as a sudden and deadly disease outbreak.” Public health docs worry that deadly zoonotic diseases — the next pandemic — will be spawned from these noxious animal factories. It’s hard to imagine that the entrees served at Bar Crenn and Harry’s Bistro are more dangerous for Floridians than the inhumane industry that’s threatening both the environment and public health. So far, biotech meat pioneers have yet to achieve economies of scale. It could be years before slaughterhouses and factory farms are rendered obsolete. But maybe AI-powered technology, evolving at hyperspeed, will devise a quick fix and revolutionize meat consumption. Not in Florida, of course. Something to do with consumer safety. Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at [email protected] or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.
This content was originally published here.
