The Backlash Against Cellular Agriculture Arrives--in All its Incoherence

I have recently had occasion to remark that technological hype (not just about single products, but the rate of progress generally) tends to rise and fall in cyclical fashion, with boom followed by bust. Back in the mid-'10s we had a big bubble indeed, with huge expectations regarding artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and much else. This has, of course, long since fallen through, though the shift from treating them as all but inevitable in the very near term to sneering at the thought that they would ever appear set in earlier with some elements of the package than others. Certainly self-driving vehicles were just such a case, the dismissals already commonplace years ago. By contrast the sneers at cellular agriculture were slower in coming--but intense negativity has since got the upper hand, with a significant element in this Joe Fassler's article about it over at The Counter, which has seen some drawing comparisons between the cellular agriculture startups and Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos. (Ouch!)

Still, while all this would certainly seem to be part of the downward turn of that familiar cycle the backlashes against particular technologies, just as they tend to have their own particular timing, tend to have their own particular features. Certainly this was the case with self-driving cars, which many influential persons and interests find objectionable for reasons having absolutely nothing whatsoever at all to do with infeasibility or practical shortcomings.

So does it go with cellular agriculture. Certainly there is no arguing the reality of overoptimism, evident in how supposedly by 2022 people would have been buying the stuff off the market for years, whereas in 2022 the promises of the bullish still have it an indefinite way off as those looking for substitutes to conventional meat are instead offered the non-meat of plant-based products that remain unconvincing to the discerning meat-lover (the more frustrating as, in spite of their lower resource inputs, they never seem to offer no relief to the wallets of hard-pressed consumers). Yet there is also the reality of a "culture war" between those who hope for technological solutions to the world's ecological and other problems, and Luddite-Malthusians disdainful of the same; and in particular the culture war within the culture war ongoing between meat-eaters hoping for "meat without guilt" and vegans treating veganism as an end in itself, such that even if we could have sustainable, eco-friendly, totally animal cruelty-free meat they would still refuse it, and carry on with the missionary work encouraging others to do the same.

As is always the case when issues get sucked into kulturkampf the result is a muddle--with perhaps the most obvious aspect of such the reality that cellular agriculture is not solely about meat production--that while meat due to its greater inputs, higher price and other problems has been the more obvious first target for producers cellular agriculture can equally be used to produce "clean veggies" and "clean fruit," which ought to be of concern even to vegans. After all, contrary to what some seem to believe the ecological problems of modern industrial agriculture do not begin and end with meat production. Meanwhile societies everywhere face the hard facts of growing populations, more uncertain weather and a rising risk from pests due to climate change, a looming nitrogen and phosphorus crisis, an ever-more volatile international financial scene ever-ready to wreak havoc with commodity prices, and the disruptions attendant upon that resurgent danger about which far too many people seem to me to be far, far too casual, war. (How much are we hearing about the risk of a major war over Ukraine hitting global food supplies? Not nearly enough.) In cellular agriculture we have a technology with the potential to delink the production of essential foodstuffs from open-field production in particular geographic locales, an object of a significance far beyond "meat-lovers vs. vegans," and that so many seem to think of the issue in the latter terms is yet another depressing reminder of the lousy job the media does in its science and technology reporting, and the equally depressing consistency with which cultural conflicts drag the discourse down, down, down far below the lowest intellectual common denominator.