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Just because the first in vitro hamburger cost $335,000 to produce doesn't mean we shouldn't start thinking about how factory-grown meat might transform our food system, the environment, and even our culture.
On August 5,2013, the first hamburger grown from stem cells in a laboratory, and not in a cow, was served in London. This event was not merely a milestone in the development of the scientific and technological capability to produce factory-grown, or cultured, meat; it was a proof of concept for a foundational emerging technology. If this technology continues to evolve and is deployed at scale, it will have significant social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications. How ought a democratic society begin to understand and prepare for such changes?
Despite the high level of uncertainty regarding the outcomes of technology choices, economic winners and losers, ethical debates, and so forth that are associated with any radical new technological pathway, it is by no means premature to begin a systemic effort to explore possible future consequences of the development of factory meat. The aim of such work, however, should not be to try to develop accurate predictions of what will actually occur as this technology matures, which is probably impossible. Rather, it is to develop and play with scenarios that can enable more adaptive and responsible policy and institutional responses to the unpredictable and far-reaching social consequences of a transition to the production and consumption of factorygrown meat.
Indeed, with the first meat-production facility, or "carnery," probably only a few years away, an optimistic scenario might suggest that rapid public acceptance of its products could attract investors and soon lead to expanding industrial capacity for producing factory meat. The shift of meat production from field to factory could in turn significantly reduce global climate change forcing and lessen human impacts on the nitrogen, phosphorous, hydrologic, and other cycles, while reducing the land required to produce animal feed could mean more land for producing biofuels and other biological feedstocks for, for example, plastics production. All of which would, of course, be accompanied by an equally rapid realization of unintended consequences. Yet an opposite scenario is, at this point, equally tenable: that for a number of reasons such as inability to reduce costs of production...