Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: February 12, 2025
Give Clean Meat a Chance!
China just made its largest-ever investment in alternative proteins - but some U.S. states are actually banning this incredibly promising industry.
Tell your governor and state legislators to Give Clean Meat a Chance!
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Reasons For Hope
The industrialized meat industry is one of the most harmful aspects of human civilization on Earth, a major driver of global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and many other planetary threats. Oxford statistics project Our World in Data has calculated that the production of beef causes more than six times as much greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram as pork or chicken, and 10 to 50 times as much as grains, fruits, vegetables, and other plant-based foods.
Beef production in particular uses a disproportionately large amount of land1; one study found that switching to a beef and mutton-free global diet (with dairy cows and other meat still included!) would reduce global agricultural land use from 4.13 billion hectares to 2.21 billion hectares. Moving further away from mass meat cultivation would free up even more land.
Yet despite all this, the environmental movement tends to avoid calling out beef, or the meat industry more broadly. Even tentative suggestions about eating less meat tend to evoke strident “culture war” attacks. This is deeply understandable; relatively few people have a deep emotional attachment to a coal plant, but many people have treasured memories of grilling burgers with their family.
The good news is, we have a wide range of options to sustain meat-related cooking and culture without devastating the planet! Raising cattle in regenerative landscapes like silvopasture can slash land-use emissions, and simply adding seaweed to cattle feed can substantially reduce the methane emissions from their digestive systems. And from traditional mushrooms and legumes to Beyond and Impossible-style plant-based meats to the exciting new frontiers like cell-cultivated (aka lab-grown) “clean meat,” there have never been more ways to enjoy the protein-rich umami deliciousness of burgers and bolognese without the catastrophic environmental impacts of the beef industry!
Clean meat, animal cells grown without the animal, might even be on the verge of a big takeoff. In the Fengtai District of Beijing, China has just opened its first-ever alternative protein research center. The New Protein Food Science and Technology Innovation Base will focus on emerging technologies like no-kill cultivated clean meat and microbe-fermented proteins (like Finland’s Solein). China has a history of rapidly scaling up promising new technologies to a world-transforming level, so the potential here is IMMENSE!
“One cannot overstate the significance of Asia’s largest economy putting cultivated meat and other novel ingredients at the centre of its national food strategy.
“Given that China’s earlier commitments to accelerating clean energy technologies are what ushered in a worldwide shift towards electric vehicles and solar power, China’s heavy involvement in the ‘future food’ sector has the potential to single-handedly drive down global production costs and turn niche products into mainstream staples.”
— Mirte Gosker, Good Food Institute
There are early opportunities for the U.S. to lead on cultivated meat as well; in June 2023, America became the second country in the world (after Singapore) to approve cell-cultivated clean meat for sale, thanks to the hard work of the USDA and FDA! There’s a bunch of innovative American startups in the space, but the only place clean meat has actually been sold in the U.S. so far is in small batches at restaurants. The potential is extraordinary - but it might be stifled before it gets a chance to grow. Cell-cultivated meat hasn’t even gotten the chance to appear on a single supermarket shelf yet, but it’s already become the target of a relentless attack from the industrialized meat industry (a sector also known for its widespread abuses of workers).
Extremist Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kay Ivey of Alabama have already signed into law bills banning the production and sale of cell-cultivated clean meat in their states, and it looks disturbingly likely to become a trend in Republican-controlled jurisdictions.
This is outrageously un-American: these politicians are strangling a promising new technology in its crib to maintain the monopoly of existing industrial slaughterhouses, letting China take the lead on entire new industries. Not only is this anti-innovation and anti-national security, it also flies in the face of the free-market principles that these same politicians claim to uphold!
Americans deserve a chance to try cruelty-free sustainable proteins and decide for themselves what they think about clean meat.
We need to rally our state governors and federal & state legislators to keep an open playing field for new meat alternatives, and fight ongoing industry attempts to unfairly hobble the growth of America’s brand-new cell-cultivated clean meat industry.
Tell your governor and state legislators to Give Clean Meat a Chance!
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In addition to such civilization-scale impacts, local landscapes around the world are devastated by the beef industry. Manure runoff from cattle feedlots pollutes waterways and people’s wells. More than two-thirds of deforested land in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest has been converted to cattle production. And communities in the Texas Panhandle are being choked by giant fecal dust storms from cattle feedlots, causing substantial health problems for residents while spreading dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It may sound radical, but we here at CAN are firmly anti-poop-storm.