Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  The first regulatory issue clean meat has to deal with is its name. The FDA doesn’t like it, and although Mike once told a reporter that clean meat is a great term because it will mean a ‘clean conscience’ for carnivores, it turns out he always hated it. ‘It doesn’t make sense in any other language. In Chinese, it sounds like you’ve dipped it in bleach and scrubbed it. But I was eventually convinced that the term itself doesn’t matter – consistency is more important. So I changed my view and I started using it.’ Mike prefers ‘cell-based meats’. ‘There’s animal-based meats, there’s plant-based meats and there’s cell-based meats. It’s neutral.’ But it’s also nonsense, because both plants and animals are also made of cells. ‘It needs to be called fish, no matter what, because fish is an allergen. We need to have the word fish clearly on the packaging, and what type of fish it is. But I do want there to be a firm delineation, because what we make is better. There are so many advantages to what we’re doing, I want people to buy it on purpose.’

  Mike is sure that one day the meat being grown in labs, whatever it is called, will replace conventional meat. ‘First it’s going to be small, it’s going to be an ingredient, it’s going to be part of a plant-based product, a hybrid product, and eventually it will be what people really want it to be. People think scientists have a lot more figured out that we actually do – we do not.’

  I think about the bit in the JUST chicken video when Josh boasts, ‘We’ve figured out how life really works,’ and realize what a breath of fresh air Mike is in this Silicon Valley ash cloud, and how there might be some real substance to this industry, after all, if there are more scientists like him in it.

  ‘There’s a lot of hype,’ he continues. ‘It’s going to be slower and smaller at first than people think. But it’s definitely going to happen. I’m not saying Finless Foods is inevitable, but the technology is inevitable, and this is how people are going to eat, unless we wipe ourselves out first.’

  ‘I’m going to make a terrible pun,’ I say. ‘Are you a fish out of water, in this Silicon Valley start-up world? Do you fit in here?’

  ‘I fucking hate it,’ he says. ‘We’ve been trying to leave since the second we got here. The culture here is weird. Sometimes we’re in these meetings with people and it just feels like they’re aliens. Hopefully we can be somewhere else, eventually.’

  But his foreignness goes beyond being from the other side of the US. As well as being a CEO, he tells me he is also a communist. ‘I wouldn’t say that a lot of our investors love communism,’ he smiles.

  ‘Do you love communism?’ I ask. ‘Are you properly a communist?’

  ‘I would say so, yeah.’

  ‘How can you be a communist entrepreneur?’

  ‘I’m trying to build a technology that I think is important. I’m trying to do something that I hope will shape the way that we eat, for the better. The current mechanism to do that is a start-up. I wish there was a different system. I wish we had a better way to do this, but currently we don’t.’

  ‘Do you really not care about making money?’

  ‘In order to make sure the relationship with our investors stays good, it does need to be a profitable business. For me, personally? Not really. I already make more than I need. I give a lot of it away. I make, like, $85k, which is fine. I’m not married, don’t have kids. My co-founder and I make among the lowest salaries in the company.’

  ‘Transparency is supposed to be so important in the clean meat world, but when I actually try to talk to people there’s not a lot of it,’ I say. ‘How come you are so happy to tell me all this?’

  ‘I think a lot of our story is the fact that we are more genuine. That’s how this will win,’ he replies. ‘Look at trends in terms of what millennials and Gen Z are interested in: we get revolted by bullshit. Anything that seems even a little bit corporate, a little bit polished, we reject. We don’t look corporate here. We are trying to be genuine, and it’s our brand.’

  In other words, Mike’s openness is a deliberate branding exercise, another way to differentiate the company from other start-ups in order to ‘win’ the market as the millennial meat makers.

  But there’s one thing that remains profoundly opaque about Mike Selden: his veganism. Even though he speaks in the language of animal rights and has effused about his veganism in every previous interview I’ve managed to find with him, today he tells me he is not vegan anymore. ‘I buy entirely vegan groceries. I mostly eat at vegetarian and vegan restaurants. But I just don’t call myself vegan in part because I don’t want to be nitpicked, now that I am a mildly public figure.’

  And then he tells me a story about how he was speaking at a conference recently, and a woman approached him afterwards to ask what app he used to pick his wine. Mike told her he didn’t use any app, so she told him that meant he couldn’t be vegan, and he said, ‘OK, then: I’m not vegan.’

  ‘The vegan community is like the most self-absorbed group of people who are so unable to see outside of their own thing. It’s incredibly white, it’s incredibly wealthy, incredibly privileged, and it’s super unaware of what it does. I just didn’t want to be associated with that,’ he says.

  Mike clearly is vegan, but he knows how impossible it is to be a perfect vegan, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being a bad vegan, so he’d rather say he isn’t vegan. I feel sorry for him, grateful that I have never claimed to be more than a heartless carnivore, and glad to be too old to be part of Gen Z, where any perceived transgression can leave you outcast. You’d have to be a contortionist to live a pure enough life.

  But however he defines himself, Mike thinks veganism is going to be obsolete once this inevitable technology gets worked out. ‘We don’t want it to be seen as vegan, we want this to be food. My hope is to make everybody vegan without changing their habits.’

  * * *

  Hardcore vegans don’t do things by halves. In 2004, English animal rights extremists targeted a family-run Staffordshire farm that bred guinea pigs for scientific research. They sent fake bombs to their cleaner, leafleted the neighbours of the man who delivered their fuel defaming him as a convicted paedophile, and spelled out the name of a farm labourer in shotgun cartridges outside his home. When that wasn’t enough to close the farm, they dug up the corpse of Gladys Hammond, the deceased mother-in-law of one of the brothers who owned it, and left messages saying her remains would only be returned once the farm was shut down. Three activists were eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison each.

  Animal rights campaigners have mellowed in recent years, but only a bit. A month before my visit to Mike, Whole Foods took out a restraining order against Berkeley-based vegan activists Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), who were planning to protest the welfare conditions of Whole Foods chickens in their local branch, ten minutes away from Finless Foods. DxE had previously acted out scenes of animal slaughter in the meat and dairy aisles, and splattered eggs with fake blood. Elsewhere in Berkeley, DxE activists lay naked, soaked in yet more fake blood and wrapped in plastic outside a family-run butcher every week for months, accompanied by sound recordings of pigs squealing in terror, until the owners agreed to put a sign in the window that read, ATTENTION: Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust, no matter how it’s done.

  So I was expecting there to be some kind of backlash from more militant vegans against the clean meat industry; after all, clean meat actively encourages people not to change their eating habits, and to continue living at the expense of animals, albeit the greatly reduced number required to provide starter cells. Accepting clean meat would mean condoning a technology developed using animal experimentation and FBS, and buying it will line the pockets of big meat companies, like Tyson and Cargill, who have invested heavily in the clean meat start-ups and have been responsible for the slaughter of billions of animals worldwide. I thought at the very least there’d be some kind of online campaign, perhaps a bit of chanting and protesting in the Bay Area, maybe even some entre
preneurs being drenched with mock foetal bovine serum on the way home from the lab.

  But there has been barely a squawk from the vegan community. When Mark Post presented his burger to the world in 2013 there were a few rumblings that the idea was a bit gross; the Dutch Vegan Society put out a poster campaign pointing out how much more appealing a veggie burger looks compared to a slab of flesh in a Pyrex flask. And that has pretty much been it, in terms of organized opposition to clean meat. I call the Vegan Society in the UK, and the press officer says they think clean meat is ‘very exciting’. I ring up Wayne Hsiung, DxE’s co-founder, to see what their take is on the industry blossoming in their back yard, and he tells me it’s ‘part of the solution’ to animal exploitation. ‘As long as it doesn’t obscure the consequences of using animals,’ he says nebulously, ‘it’s going to be beneficial.’ Militant vegan YouTubers are cautiously optimistic about the technology. I scour the normally uncompromising comments underneath their vlogs on clean meat. Nothing.

  It is only when I plunge the deepest depths of Google that I find a 2010 paper written by an outlier, a lone dissenting vegan voice: a British sociologist called Dr Matthew Cole. ‘IVM [in vitro meat] ignores the powerful vested interests and social forces that create “demand” for meat and that routinely stigmatize veganism,’ it reads. ‘In fact IVM further stimulates “demand” for meat by perpetuating a myth that meat is and will always be intrinsically desirable.’

  These words were written years before clean meat start-ups ever existed, but they say something very prescient, because the entire clean meat industry is built on the premise that the desire for meat is natural.

  At JUST, Josh Tetrick had said to me, ‘I miss meat. I love meat. I want to move towards it and smell it and look at it.’ When he tried JUST chicken for the first time, he told me, ‘In a primal way, I was experiencing the thing that I really miss.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a primal thing?’ I’d asked. ‘That we’re primed to enjoy meat?’

  ‘I do think there’s an element of it. Human beings have been using spears to kill animals for thousands of years and building symbols and artefacts and cultures and community around ideas around that. You can ignore it or you can go with it.’

  But could the belief that our taste for meat is hard-wired really be nothing more than a myth?

  I meet Matthew Cole at the headquarters of the Open University in Milton Keynes – a modernist, grey campus, empty of students; a kind of academic ghost town. Matthew is waiting for me at reception. He’s short and slim, bald, with smile lines. We head to the cafe to pick up a coffee from one of those fancy self-service machines, and I’m just about to ask him where the milk is, before I stop myself and decide to have it black.

  Matthew is a vegan sociologist, in every sense. His work specializes in the sociology of human–animal relations, how children are socialized into accepting human domination of animals, and how vegans are represented in the media. He’s shot a few videos for the Open University’s YouTube channel. There’s one entitled Dr Who Should Be Vegan. ‘Love for life in all its forms is one of the central messages of Dr Who and a great reason for its popularity,’ he says, unsmiling, looking directly into the lens. ‘The time is long overdue for a fully morally consistent and vegan Doctor.’ The top-rated comment reads, ‘This guy looks like he could do with a steak.’

  ‘You wrote something in 2010 on in vitro meat. Do you still call it that?’ I ask.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it sounds bad,’ he grins. ‘The terminology that we use to describe in vitro meat, cultured meat, whatever it might be, is part of a discursive game, or battle, or war, if you like, to construct the meaning of what this substance is. From my point of view, it’s a bad thing.’

  Matthew is worried about ‘the class dimension’ of meat grown in labs: that it will be sold as an elite product that will lead to a moral hierarchy, where the affluent people who can afford it will be able to reinforce their superiority over the people and nations that can’t. ‘Here’s the rational white man going around the world saying, “Our methods are superior to your barbaric ways,”’ he explains. It also stops us questioning the human drive to subjugate everything around us. ‘Nothing needs to change for in vitro meat. That’s why it has this appeal: everything else could remain unchanged. It will not change the fundamental relationship of human beings to animals, to the environment, to the natural world; it would still be a relation of domination.’

  ‘Why hasn’t there been a big backlash against it from vegans?’

  ‘It’s alluring. The superficial promise of it is to eliminate 99 per cent of animal agriculture – obviously, I can see that is exciting. And I suspect a lot of activists see that as a quick win. We’ve put in all these decades and decades of effort, we don’t seem to be getting as far as we’d like nowhere near quick enough; maybe this could short-circuit that struggle.’

  Matthew has written papers on what he calls ‘vegaphobia’: the stigmatization of veganism and vegans. It’s interesting to me, now that I’ve met so many people who want to keep their veganism under wraps. Matthew has put the negative vegan stereotypes that circulate in the mass media into five distinct categories: ‘Vegans can be portrayed as hostile, soppy, wishy-washy, just following a trend, or just flat-out ridiculed.’

  ‘Is this something you have experienced yourself?’

  ‘Yeah. Especially through doing my academic work, in terms of doing public things – YouTube videos or articles for The Conversation. You just have to look at the comment threads. There was a paper that I wrote with Kate Stewart, who is my partner as well as my colleague, about the film Sausage Party. I don’t know if you are aware of it?’

  It’s an R-rated spoof Pixar film about a talking sausage called Frank and his girlfriend, a talking hot dog bun.

  ‘Sounds great,’ I say.

  ‘I cannot recommend it,’ he replies, gravely. ‘We wrote a paper critiquing it – a vegan critique of this film. And it was picked up by a Twitter account that tries to lampoon academics. They trawl for articles that look stupid and say, “Isn’t this funny? Ha ha ha.”’

  I don’t want to stereotype Matthew as a hostile vegan, but he definitely doesn’t see the humour in any of this.

  ‘Vegans are aware of those kinds of negative stereotypes being out there,’ he continues, ‘and sometimes there is anxiety about being seen to reproduce them.’

  ‘Why do these stereotypes exist?’

  ‘There are loads of vested interests behind animal exploitation. They are huge and immensely powerful, with a long history behind them. A huge amount of cultural labour has gone into reproducing, legitimizing and defending animal exploitation in popular culture, but that’s underwritten, supported, by state activity – by nutritional education. It’s all interconnected. It’s massive. And sometimes it feels impossible to defeat it.’

  But surely the desire for meat goes beyond those vested interests. We are hunter-gatherers, after all. It’s human nature to kill animals and eat meat. ‘Haven’t we evolved to like the taste of meat? Isn’t it natural?’

  ‘No. Humans are highly adaptable creatures, inventive and creative. We have transcended biological and environmental limits in many ways.’ He gestures to the sleet falling behind the window. ‘You could argue we shouldn’t be living here – it’s too cold for the human organism. The same is true of our consumption of animal products. Nothing about that is natural.’

  ‘So where does our desire for meat come from?’

  ‘It’s a cultural construct. The availability of animal products is self-evidently an outcome of social processes. It is not natural. There could never be anywhere near enough edible non-human animals on this planet to sustain the current level of human consumption of them without artificial intervention. And drinking the milk of another species is completely bizarre. There’s nothing natural about that, whatsoever.’

  And I think of my one-year-old daughter, who I last saw, smili
ng, with a beaker of cows’ milk in her hand as I waved her goodbye this morning, and something that seemed the most natural thing in the world is suddenly disturbing.

  ‘Eating meat is literally rammed down our throats before we can even speak,’ Matthew goes on. ‘We feed it to our children, and we reward children for eating meat. Before you can speak, the idea is given to you that this is the tasty thing. The message is very powerful – it comes from your mother.’

  I know from my own experience that Matthew is right. Milk, eggs, cheese, fish and meat are promoted in government campaigns and parenting books as essential foods to give to your children. When I first became a mother, I went on a free weaning workshop run by my local council. The message there was that parents shouldn’t leave it too late to introduce meat, and that a vegetarian diet wasn’t healthy for babies because they need iron for their brain to develop properly, and it was almost impossible to get the right amounts from anything apart from red meat. So I stuffed both my children full of bolognaise before they even had proper teeth to chew it.

  Matthew says it’s well established that vegan diets are nutritionally adequate for babies, children and adults alike.

  ‘If that message is wrong, why was the council giving it to me?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s down to the sheer weight of cultural labour that’s gone into establishing animal products as essential, as natural. For many people, still, it seems unthinkable that you would deviate from that. It does look like deviance, from that perspective. You are a deviant for not feeding your child meat.’

  That night, as my daughter is enthusiastically scoffing the shepherd’s pie I am spooning into her mouth, I think about how I have rammed the taste for animals down her throat, and I feel a shiver of disgust. Surely it is that feeling that needs to be harnessed and cultivated if we want to solve the problems caused by animal agriculture, not the emerging technology to grow meat in labs.