Is animal care due for an update?

Canadians will fiercely defend nearly any Canadian-made thing, and we have an uncanny ability to keep track. Insulin? Discovered by a Canadian. The telephone? Also Canadian. Sir Sandford Fleming and his time zones? Canadian too. Tom Cruise? Spent his childhood here.

At the philosophy symposium here in September on ethics and animals, I learned of yet another point of pride: our national body governing the care of animals in research was one of the first in the world. Although the first official law to prevent cruelty to animals was passed in Britain in 1876, and the US had its Animal Welfare Act a few years before Canada’s Council on Animal Care (CCAC) was official, the CCAC had its beginning in the early 1960s – and it was revolutionary at the time.

But is it due for an update?

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Chicken of the trees

This month has been an eye-opener for me. Two weeks ago, I was rubbing shoulders with animal rights activists. One week later, I was hunting at the Croskery farm. And last night, we dined on the spoils – a fantastic squirrel stew that gave Thanksgiving dinner a run for its money.

How did it happen?

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Cultured tastes

Dinner in Shippagan, New Brunswick. Photo by Charlie Croskery.

We drove halfway across the country for the party, but the main course alone was worth the trip. When the pig was finally hauled out by a crew of strapping male relatives, the guests at Anne-Claire and Martin’s wedding converged at the carving table. Small children, I’m told even a Jewish person or two – nobody could resist a taste of warm skin ripped straight off with a knife. Not after seeing (and smelling) the thing turn that entire August afternoon.

I doubt we would have made the cross-country trip if charlem was on the menu. That’s what Vladimir Mironov, an expert in stem cell and tissue science, calls his latest culinary invention. Mironov’s product is grown right in his lab at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston – hence the name, short for Charleston engineered meat.

In a handful of labs around the world, scientists like Mironov are working on a curious agricultural problem: how to generate edible meat products without the farm – or the animals1,2. Their solution is to grow meat from animal stem cells. Some use cells taken from embryos, while others, like Mark Post at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, are looking into the feasibility of growing muscle satellite cells taken from adults1. These can be extracted from domestic pigs or fowl with a quick and painless biopsy, and used to seed in vitro cell cultures.

In the future, this could be an easier way to serve a crowd. Like human cancer cell lines immortalized in a Petri dish, satellite cells can potentially go on multiplying forever in the lab, so long as you give them enough growth medium. Vladimir Mironov sees industry ultimately growing “charlem” – his cultured turkey – in bioreactors the size of football fields that he likes to call “carneries”. He imagines a world where fresh charlem is also grown at your local grocery store, in miniature appliance-size versions of the bioreactor machines3.

His work is, in part, funded by PETA, in an effort to stem the unmeasurable output of animal suffering caused by industrial agriculture. In 2008, the animal rights group also announced their in vitro chicken prize for the first person to develop a commercially viable product and sell it in at least 10 US states. To be eligible, the chicken also has to pass a panel of tasters when breaded and fried. The $1 million dollar reward is still up for grabs3,4.

No doubt this is a noble goal*. Large-scale meat production is an environmental scourge. The North American “meat guzzler”, as Mark Bittman calls it, is not sustainable6. Influential food writers like Bittman and Michael Pollan, and others including star chef David Chang, have been urging us to rethink our eating habits for years7. Environmentally, there’s a lot to be said for the alternatives: we could save a lot of resources by switching to the Asian practice of using small amounts of meat to complement dishes where vegetables and grains are the main event.

According to Nicholas Genovese from Vladimir Mironov’s lab, “Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system.”3

He’s right, of course. But his last point also happens to be the very reason charlem will never make it: meat from an animal is more than the sum of its in vitro parts. Want nutrients? We’ll have to add those in at the factory. Vitamin B12 and iron – two of the main nutritional reasons for eating animal protein in the first place – come from gut bacteria and blood1. You can’t get them from muscle tissue in isolation. Want taste? Let me see if we have an additive for that too…

Scientists may figure out how to culture meat efficiently in the lab, but it won’t be a viable solution to our agricultural problems, at least not anytime soon. The trouble with fake meat is that it’s up against evolution on two fronts, and, ironically, morality on a third.

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