[C]ultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It provides a potential solution to a number of seemingly intractable problems. I’m specifically talking about the animal-welfare, public-health and environmental costs of our food system, which are enormous, when you begin to consider them.

The successful commercialization of cultivated meat would help reduce the number of aquatic and land animals we kill every year for consumption, which conservative estimates place at over a trillion. The amount of suffering this represents is almost impossible to imagine.

[C]ultivated meat offers a wide variety of potential benefits. My worry is unscrupulous actors in Silicon Valley will so alienate the general population that public and private funding for cellular-agriculture research will dry up even more than it already has. If the general population only sees examples of new technologies making the world worse, it’s hard not to believe such a backlash is inevitable.

In my view, cultivated meat will be commercialized at some point, but there’s a decent chance a widespread backlash against technological development could significantly delay the milestone.

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