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Jul142010

Test-tube steaks and Bad-faith foodies

Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 11:30AM

Critics of the modern, capitalist, consumer-driven economy like to point to its negative effects. It is wasteful and unsustainable, it is bad for the environment, it promotes global inequality, contributes to global warming, and so on.

But it is hard to avoid feeling that what bothers many critics about consumer society is not these effects, but consumer society itself. To put it tendentiously (but, I don’t think, inaccurately), what they dislike about the modern world is its aesthetics. It is big, loud, chaotic, industrial, and nothing like the small-scale, local, community-based society that many of these critics claim to prefer.

A useful test for determining whether a critic’s complaints are genuine, as opposed to a disguised way of plumping for their own preferred lifestyle, is to ask them what they would say if we could find a way of both having and eating our cake. What if we stumble upon some clean energy miracle – would our car economy be Ok then? What if we become so efficient at recycling that we run no danger of running out of stuff – would there be any objection to mass consumerism? In short, if we could solve all of the social, economic, and environmental problems that get gathered under the term “sustainability,” would there remain any serious objections to the modern economy?

A new debate over lab-grown meat is serving up a useful field experiment in moral honesty. The hazards of eating meat on an industrial scale are well-known. It’s wasteful, bad for the environment, is probably unhealthy, and – not least of all – involves killing sentient beings. These are all serious objections, and I’ll confess that I deal with them, for the most part, by ignoring them.

But one technology promises to eliminate all these objections in one blow: in-vitro meat. Over on his Atlantic blog, James McWilliams lists all the benefits of synthetic meat, and says “it almost sounds too good to be true”.

And for many interest groups, it is. As McWilliams points out, the prospect gives us the bizarre case of agribusiness teaming up with the locavore crowd to fight down the threat of fake meat. Agribusiness doesn’t want to lose their big business, while the small-farm crowd argues that it would be “unethical” to put so many small farms out of business.

This boggles the mind, and reveals the basic intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the locavore movement. It isn’t about saving the earth or even saving the animals; it is about promoting their own preferred version of how humans ought to live: "The knowledge that science and technology could have the potential to fundamentally redefine (and improve) the very agricultural tradition that so many organizations are designed to protect is knowledge we can hardly expect interested parties to evaluate in fair terms."