Sex Robots and Vegan Meat
Page 9
Paul is right: since the turn of the millennium, there has been a proliferation of expressions of different kinds of sexuality and gender identity, a kaleidoscope of possibilities beyond the heterosexual that have been accepted and embraced like never before. It’s a good thing, and we probably have technology to thank for it: social media has drawn people together, given them strength in numbers and a platform to speak to the world, and to each other, that could never have existed before.
But the same digital revolution has left us less prepared for face-to-face interactions, less able to relate in the real world, sexually liberated but socially stunted. It’s normal to be Facebook friends with someone and follow them on Twitter but bury your face in your phone to ignore them if you happen to see them in your train carriage. Technology has isolated us, but our solution to our loneliness appears to be more technology. It’s superficially alluring, but it makes no sense. Just like the earplugs in my Las Vegas hotel room, we are solving a problem with an extra layer of complexity instead of dealing with the cause of the problem itself.
So many of the arguments against sex robots focus on their impact on women, but the rise of the sex robot is going to affect us all. It’s not just about the objectification of women – although the robots do objectify women. It’s not only about men being given an opportunity to act out rape fantasies and misogynistic violence – although a small number may well want a sex robot for that reason. It’s about how humanity will change when we can have relationships with robots. This is a humanist problem as much as a feminist one.
When it becomes possible to own a partner who exists purely to please his or her owner, a constantly available partner without in-laws or menstrual cycles or bathroom habits or emotional baggage or independent ambitions, when it’s possible to have an ideal sexual relationship without ever having to compromise, where the pleasure of only one half of the partnership matters, surely our capacity to have mutual relationships with other people will be diminished. When empathy is no longer a requirement of a social interaction, it will become a skill we have to work at – and we will all be a little less human.
PART TWO THE FUTURE OF FOOD
Clean meat, clean conscience
CHAPTER FIVE Cowschwitz
I smell it ten minutes before I see it. I’ve been driving up the Interstate 5 for three hours, and the desolate parched grass and brittle earth beside the highway is a repetitive and monotonous landscape, but the sharp stench of ammonia and sulphur – of piss and shit – jolts me to attention like a punch in the nose. By the time it swings into view I can feel it in my eyes, even though my car windows are shut.
A hundred thousand cows are crammed on the dull dust of the Harris Ranch feedlot – dust made up of the trampled manure of generations of cattle, baked in the California sun. Under a yellow haze stretching out to the horizon there are black cows, tawny cows, mottled white cows, clustered flank against flank, tagged ear against tagged ear, their tongues lolling, their legs caked in filth. They are not here to roam around; their sole purpose is to slurp grain, to quickly grow fat enough to turn into some of the 200 million pounds of beef produced by the Harris Ranch every year. As the cows throng too close together along endless steel troughs, they’re no longer living creatures; they are items on an industrial production line.
This is the largest cattle ranch on the West Coast, and a hellish sight from my car window, but there are thirteen larger ones in the US alone, and it’s small potatoes compared to the vast feedlots of Texas, Nebraska and Kansas, or the supersized dairy farms of China and Saudi Arabia. This window into the world of industrial agriculture is remarkable only because it’s so transparent: located bang up against the highway, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, there is nothing for it to hide behind. The Harris Ranch is notorious among American journalists, environmental campaigners and animal rights activists (some of whom destroyed fourteen tractors in an arson attack here in 2012). They prefer to call it by its nickname: ‘Cowschwitz’.
I turn off the I-5 and head towards the Harris Ranch Restaurant and Inn, the affiliated high-end rest stop and shrine to beef. I check into a room filled with fat sofas upholstered in tan leather. The leather-bound room guide tells me I can order raw beef to take away, delivered direct to my door from the hotel’s meat department. There is an inner courtyard with a turquoise swimming pool and Jacuzzi surrounded by empty sun loungers. No one is sitting outside and no one is standing on the balconies while the cloying, sweet smell of cow shit hangs thick in the air. Beef is on the menu for every course of every meal in the three restaurants here. You can start the day with a coffee-crusted ribeye, corned beef hash, the Breakfast Ranch Burger or smoked beef bacon. There are non-meat options, but diners are encouraged to ‘Beef Up Your Salad by Adding Your Favourite Steak’.
I am no vegan. I like beef as much as the next carnivore – more, probably. For me, meat makes a meal, and steak is the king of foods, something to order on my birthday, the dinner my husband cooked for me the night we got engaged. I love the way it tastes, the way it feels in my mouth and in my stomach. And I eat it even though I know the meat industry is revolting, cruel, untenable, indefensible. Like the vast majority of the 95 per cent of the world’s population who eat meat, I am happy to turn away from how meat is made, to shut my eyes when I open my mouth.
Veganism and vegetarianism might be more popular and accepted than at any other time in history, but those of us who do eat meat are consuming more than ever before. Take chicken: the amount of poultry eaten per person in the world’s wealthiest countries increased by 50 per cent between 1997 and 2017. As the most populous countries get wealthier, they are becoming more carnivorous: in China, nearly twice as much beef was eaten per capita in 2017 than twenty years previously, and poultry consumption in India more than trebled between 1997 and 2017. The US alone eats 26 billion pounds of beef a year, which, converted into a stack of hamburgers, would stretch to the moon and back twice over, with plenty to spare. Yes, meat and dairy are good sources of protein, calcium and iron, but we’re living in an age when we have the means and the knowledge to get the nutrition we need from plants and B12 supplements. Every year, 70 billion animals are killed for us to eat, not because they are good for us, but because we think they are tasty.
There are few worse things you can do for the health of humans, animals and the planet, for our earth, water, air and atmosphere, for the environment both within and outside our bodies, than eat meat. The evidence for this is unequivocal and monumental, and I’m sorry, fellow carnivores, but I’m going to break down exactly why.
First, climate change. The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust from every form of transport on the planet combined. The world’s three biggest meat companies emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than the entire nation of France. The emissions come from animal feed production, the conversion of forests and grassland to pasture and cropland, and methane from cattle digestion (yes, cow farts). And we’re talking about the very worst kind of emissions: methane is a far more dangerous contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide. For every 100 grams of beef, 105 kilograms of greenhouse gases are produced, not including those emitted when animals are transported to slaughter, or when their feed is transported to them, or the carbon dioxide they breathe out. If you add all of that together, as some environmentalists have done, then it’s possible to argue that industrial agriculture is responsible for more than 50 per cent of global greenhouse emissions.
Second, medicine-resistant superbugs. In the UK, the NHS is trying to get us to take fewer antibiotics, because the more bacteria are exposed to them, the more opportunity they get to mutate into superbugs adapted to resist them. Got tonsillitis that feels like a medieval plague? Stick it out with some paracetamol, we’re told. But that’s a fat lot of use when 52 per cent of all the antibiotics used in China and 70 per cent of all those used in the USA are currently given to animals that aren’t even sick. Antibiotics are rou
tinely administered to make animals put on weight more rapidly and to prevent disease; animals crammed together with their own excrement, on top of the excrement of generations of others who have lived out their short, accelerated lives in the same tiny space, would be getting sick and dying faster than we could eat them if they weren’t prophylactically dosed up. We might do things differently in Europe, but China and the USA combined produce twice the quantity of meat Europe does every year.
Without effective antimicrobial protection against infection, routine procedures like hip replacements, diabetes management, chemotherapy, organ transplantation or caesarean sections will become incredibly dangerous. Pneumonia and tuberculosis are already becoming difficult to treat, and the last resort of medicine for gonorrhoea (third-generation cephalosporin antibiotics) no longer works in at least ten countries, including the UK, France, Australia, Austria, Japan and Canada. If nothing changes, antibiotic resistance is predicted to kill ten million people a year by 2050.
Third, a carnivorous diet is a ridiculously inefficient way to put calories into your body. Instead of getting our energy from plants, we are getting it from animals that get it from plants. As well as producing the flesh that we eat, animals also make bone, blood, feathers and fur, they walk around and mate and chew or peck, they flap their wings. A lot of the energy they consume will never make its way to us. It takes thirty-four calories to produce just one calorie of beef, and eleven calories to produce one calorie of pork. The most efficient meat is chicken, and it still takes eight calories to get one calorie back out.
Fourth, water. The signs above the sinks at the Harris Ranch Inn and Restaurant might say, During our extreme drought conditions please join us and limit your use of water, but the management knows there are few more wasteful things you can do than use water to raise livestock. It takes 43,000 litres to produce the feed, drinking water and service water that ends up as one kilogram of beef – enough for a forty-eight-hour shower. If you think of it in terms of protein produced, you see how absurdly inefficient meat of all kinds is: it takes 112 litres of water to produce a gram of protein from beef, 57 litres to produce a gram of protein from pork and 34 litres to produce a gram of protein from chicken, but only 19 litres to produce a gram of protein from pulses. Hundreds of people have been killed in recent wildfires caused by drought that’s become a normal part of life in California, but water continues to pour into the Harris Ranch feedlot.
And then there’s water pollution. Outbreaks of E coli and norovirus linked to salad and other vegetables are almost always traced back to the shit of farm animals contaminating irrigation water. Eutrophication, when manure and fertilizer leach into nearby water supplies and cause algae to grow and suffocate other aquatic life, has been found on 65 per cent of Europe’s Atlantic coast and 78 per cent of the coastline of the continental US. We are killing fish when we eat meat.
Fifth, the sheer amount of land it takes to produce all that meat and dairy. Almost 80 per cent of all the planet’s agricultural land is being used to graze animals or grow their feed, rather than to grow plants for our consumption. Up to 80 per cent of deforestation is estimated to be the result of agricultural expansion. Instead of being a vital asset for absorbing the carbon produced by animal agriculture, vast swathes of the Amazon have been burnt to the ground to make way for more grazing cattle and soya for animal feed. Researchers at Oxford University have calculated that if we were to stop consuming meat and dairy we could reduce global farmland by more than 75 per cent – equivalent to the landmass of the US, China, the European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the planet. We could use that land to grow trees or create solar farms or build homes or play laser tag: anything would be better than using it for industrial agriculture.
Sixth, meat gives us cancer, strokes, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, vCJD (the human form of mad cow disease), salmonella, listeria and E. coli. Eating animals is killing us.
So there you have six pretty cast-iron reasons why meat is indefensible, without a single mention of animal welfare, of how the vast majority of farm animals live short, horrible lives, and even those lucky enough to be treated well still have to die in order to satisfy our taste for meat. But you knew about all of that anyway. We might be able to ignore what our meat is because it’s available in nice, sanitized, de-animalized packaging, but the undeniable fact is that eating meat is unjustifiable.
But it’s also a fundamental part of human culture. To stop eating it would be to change the definition of a human diet, and to lose mankind’s self-appointed role as master of the animals. One of the foundational pillars of human experience has become a threat to our very existence. There will be 9.7 billion humans living on the planet by 2050, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates there will be a 70 per cent increase in the demand for meat by that time. As much as most of the world’s population would like it to, this can’t go on without making the only known inhabitable place in the universe uninhabitable.
But, as well as being the birthplace of the Harris Ranch coffee-crusted breakfast ribeye, California is also home to the meat problem’s most groundbreaking solution. Another three hours north along the I-5, a new wave of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say we can carry on eating meat without any consequences, because they can produce it without raising animals. Not Quorn, or mock meat, or any kind of clever reconfigured plant protein that acts as a meat substitute; not the pea-and-coconut-oil-based Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger that ‘bleeds’ fake blood. This is real meat, grown outside animal bodies: born in a flask, grown in a tank and harvested in a laboratory. The Silicon Valley start-ups are promising us flesh without the blood, meat unconnected to the land, meat that doesn’t stink of shit, meat with a clean conscience. They are calling it ‘clean meat’. And I’ve been invited to California so that I can be one of the first people in the world to taste it.
* * *
Lab-grown meat isn’t a new idea (although not quite as ancient as Pygmalion). In his essay, ‘Fifty Years Hence’, first published in the Strand magazine in 1931, Winston Churchill ruminated on the direction in which scientific progress was taking mankind, and concluded that, by 1981, ‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.’ (This piece of writing has become so totemic in Silicon Valley that one of the venture capital funds that invests in food technology has named itself ‘Fifty Years’.)
And disembodied flesh has been kept alive in laboratories since long before Churchill started thinking about it. On 17 January 1912, the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Alexis Carrel prised a live chicken embryo from its egg and sliced a fragment out of its beating heart, then managed to keep the heart muscle tissue pumping away for over twenty years by bathing it in a special nutrient bath. When NASA wanted to find a way of producing fresh meat for consumption during extended space exploration, it funded the bioengineer Morris Benjaminson to conduct an experiment involving strips of goldfish meat, which were successfully grown in his laboratory in 2001. Benjaminson and his researchers cooked what they grew, but stopped short of eating it (although they did give it a sniff, and apparently it smelled tasty). The big shot in the arm for lab-grown meat came in 2004, when the Dutch government awarded €2 million to a group of universities in the Netherlands to research meat grown in vitro. But the funding ran out five years later, and it began to look like a pipe dream.
The world’s first artificially grown hamburger was tasted at one p.m. on 5 August 2013, at a high-profile press conference for an invited audience of 200 journalists and academics in London. Made by the Dutch professor Mark Post, a physiologist at Maastricht University, the burger cost €250,000 to produce (around £215,000, or $325,000) and was bankrolled by Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest men. The burger was a proof of concept rather than the beginning of a business, billed as ‘the first recognizable meat product created using cu
lturing techniques’.
It made headlines around the world that day. I saw it on the news, and the footage has stuck in my mind ever since. Professor Post unveils the burger by theatrically removing a silver cloche to reveal a puck of thin, pink squiggles of flesh in a Petri dish, 20,000 muscle strands grown in his laboratory (plus a little egg powder and breadcrumbs, he explains, and some red beet juice and saffron to get the colour right). A chef dressed in immaculate double-breasted whites fries it in a little butter, basting it regularly, and it’s finally tasted by the food writer Josh Schonwald and food trends researcher Hanni Rützler, who pronounce it ‘bland’ and ‘dry’, but with a bite that had ‘a kind of density that was familiar’. It wasn’t quite right, but it was a triumph.
The launch was as corporate as it gets for an academic project, and an equally slick promotional film accompanied it. ‘Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view our world,’ Brin says over reverberating guitar notes, managing to look both futuristic and completely dated in his Google Glass headset. ‘I like to look at technology opportunities where the technology seems like it’s on the cusp of viability, and if it succeeds there, it can be really transformative for the world.’
The video then cuts to Richard Wrangham, Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. ‘We are a species designed to love meat,’ he says. ‘It’s been fantastically beneficial for us. Once we started cooking meat, that enabled us to have lots of energy. That energy enabled us to have big brains and become physically, anatomically human.’ It’s OK to love eating meat, it’s human nature, and it’s made us human too. ‘Hunters and gatherers all over the world are very sad if, for a few days at a time, the hunters come back empty-handed. The camp becomes quiet. The dancing stops. And then somebody catches some meat!’ he exclaims, his fists clenched with delight. ‘They bring the meat into the camp – or nowadays someone’s back garden with a barbecue. Everybody gets excited.’