Reviewing a review

The weekend Wall Street Journal has a Review section that is probably my favorite thing to read all week.  This week, a book entitled Clean Meat was reviewed by Matthew Scully.  If you know anything about Matthew Scully, you know that animal rights are his hobbyhorse and that he comes at them from a Christian perspective.  The book apparently deals with lab-grown meat as the future and an alternative to slaughtering actual animals.

The concept of eating "meat" grown from "[a] bit of muscle tissue placed in some tank akin to a fermenter" with "electrical currents to warm and stimulate" it kind of turns my stomach now; but people were creeped out by Dolly the sheep twenty years ago, and now cloning barely raises an eyebrow.  The repulsion will naturally ebb as the technology advances.  But if the technology is so promising, surely a book advocating for the process is unnecessary? 

My suspicion is that the technology is, in fact, not as sure a bet as Paul Shapiro and Scully would like.  They admit that lab-grown meat is "getting closer in flavor and texture," which is hardly a ringing endorsement.  Also, the technology is capable of producing only ground meat at present.  And despite assurances that as the industry grows, per-ounce prices will drop, "[w]e're told ... that a burger might soon be made for $11" [my italics].  That might sound affordable to Scully, a former presidential speechwriter, but to people used to fast food, a burger approaching eleven dollars from the high side doesn't sound like a terrific bargain. 

The most utopian part of Scully's argument is that, once they are freed of farms and no longer needed for food, "[w]e could begin to appreciate pigs, cows, chickens, and others as creatures instead of just commodities."  Could we?  In what context?  What is the "natural habitat" of a farm animal which has been bred for meat for centuries?  Are we to put these animals in zoos?  Let them wander our neighborhoods and highways?  In 2015, there were 98.4 million cattle in North America.  If we're no longer butchering them or raising them for milk (another product that is to be lab-grown to free the animals from servitude), where does Scully suggest we put them all?  Last March, there were 71 million pigs and hogs in US farms.  That many animals couldn't survive in the wild -- if any could, after generations of domestication. 

Surely, driving them out of their barns and letting nature take its course would be an act of cruelty that would lead to nearly as many deaths as the farm industry itself.  I suppose one could argue that it would be one last act of cruelty that would free the descendants of any surviving animals, but it seems more likely to me that, instead of leading to the appreciation of farm animals as creatures, it would lead to the extinction of the domesticated species.