StemCell Therapy

What is meat?

That question is unlikely to be asked along with the usual ones Medium or well-done? Cheese or no cheese? over grills being fired up all over the United States this summer. (Unless, of course, you invite a philosopher to your barbecue.) But it is a timely one and how we answer it how we ultimately define the word meat could have a significant impact on the future of our food supply, our health and the health of the planet.

Its no secret by now that the case against meat keeps getting stronger. The social, environmental and ethical costs of industrial agriculture exacerbated by a pandemic being traced back to a live animal market, and a vulnerable meat processing industry have become too obvious and damaging to ignore. Yet Americans on average consume more that 200 pounds of animal flesh each year. And, like it or not, it is still part of how the United States sees itself cultural icons, from cowboys and ranchers to the Golden Arches, express the countrys long, tragic love affair with meat.

But just as the meaning of American identity has changed over time, so too has the food people eat to celebrate it. Fifty years ago, few barbecues included burgers made of tofu or lentils for the stray vegetarians found in so many families today.

For centuries, the definition of meat was obvious: the edible flesh of an animal. That changed in 2013, when the Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled the first in vitro hamburger. By bathing animal stem cells with growth serum, Dr. Post and his colleagues were able to grow a hamburger in their lab. Their burger had essentially the same composition as a normal hamburger but a different origin. Although Dr. Post estimated that the first in vitro burger cost about $325,000 to create, the price has come down significantly and his team is one of several groups seeking to commercialize in vitro meat and bring it to market. (Dr. Posts first burger was grown using fetal bovine serum, a slaughterhouse byproduct; his team and others have sought out animal-free replacements.)

This prospect has triggered opposition from the agriculture industry, which in the past three years has petitioned lawmakers in some 25 states to introduce bills to prevent alternative meat products being labeled meat.

The timing of these bills is not coincidental. Lawmakers know that plant-based meat substitutes have become big business: In 2019, plant-based meat sales totaled $939 million, an 18 percent increase over the year before, while sales for all plant-based foods reached $5 billion. The real reason for the meat industrys interest in grocery labels is that it is threatened by this surge in popularity.

Missouri was the first jurisdiction where such a bill became law and it has already been subject to a first-amendment challenge, a fate that most likely awaits its counterparts in other states.

The debates now going on in many different state legislatures and courthouses all revolve around this question: What is meat? The best answer, in my view, is one that takes the arrival of in vitro flesh as occasion to reconceive and broaden our idea of meat.

A helpful distinction is drawn by Jeff Sebo, the director of the animal studies program at New York University, between a food items origin, substance and function. The traditional view of meat holds that its must originate in the body of an animal. The substance of meat is what it is physically made of: muscle tissue composed of protein, water, amino acids and the rest. Meats function is on one level something that we experience the familiar combination of taste and texture in the mouth. Nutritionally, meats function varies it can affect our health for better or worse, depending on how we prepare it or how much we consume.

A new framework that would allow us to classify lab grown meat as just meat would involve rethinking those principles. In vitro meat generally satisfies the last two requirements substance and function but not the first, origin. (I dont include plant-based products here because they do not meet any of the three conditions.)

It may seem like cheating to consciously redefine meat in order to accommodate the lab-grown version. In fact, history is full of this type of conceptual revision. Someone asking 100 years ago what a car is could be forgiven for offering a definition that mentioned an internal combustion engine or a human driver. In the age of self-driving and electric cars we recognize that these are no longer defining features of cars. Similarly, the commonly accepted definition of marriage was that of a union between a man and a woman. When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States that version was reclassified as but one option among others, all equally legitimate.

Revised understandings of cars and marriage involve the same kind of shift. In the jargon of philosophers, we realized that we had long been mistaking one particular conception of cars or marriage for the very concept. Revising our understanding of meat to make room for in vitro meat involves a similar move. We should strip down our understanding of meat so that an element previously deemed essential in this case, being sourced in an animal carcass is no longer strictly necessary. On this updated, more minimalist understanding, all that is necessary for something to qualify as meat is that it has a meaty substance and function. Just as Model Ts and Teslas both qualify as cars, animal-sourced and lab-grown versions would then both qualify as real meat.

Two considerations support trimming the conceptual fat from our understanding of meat in this way. The first is intuitive. Imagine you are served two pieces of steak, one from a slaughterhouse the other from a lab, which have an identical taste and nutritional effect. Food is by definition what we eat, and if our experience of eating the two morsels is the same surely they warrant a common concept.

The second is linguistic. We use the word milk to classify fluids from cows, coconuts and nursing mothers, among other sources. If milk can have more than one origin, why not meat?

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued in Philosophical Investigations that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Given that the term in vitro meat and its synonyms (lab-grown meat, cultured meat) are already widely used, it is tempting to go the full Wittgenstein and cite common usage as grounds to declare the case for in vitro meat closed. But, to be fair, a conceptual debate should not come down to a popularity contest: same-sex marriage was once unpopular, yet that hardly settled the dispute over the nature of marriage. A more cautious handling of the linguistic evidence takes it to place the burden of proof on those who would define meat to exclude the in vitro version. Our default presumption should be that it is meat, barring good arguments otherwise.

Such definitions are disingenuous, motived by financial considerations rather than a good-faith inquiry into the meaning of terms.

Our ancestors regarded animals in a host of different ways as currency, transportation, even objects of religious veneration that may now seem strange to us. In vitro meat holds out the possibility that our descendants may someday feel the same way about eating them.

Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and is the author of Duty and the Beast: Should we Eat Meat in the Name of Animal Rights?

Now in print: Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments, and The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Is Meat Grown in a Lab Really Meat? - The New York Times

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