There’s a criticism which I see with some frequency in the animal-rights movement which argues those who view cultivated meat as means of reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death are engaged in technological solutionism. I’m sympathetic with the criticism to a certain extent, in that I don’t believe cultivated meat will end animal agriculture on its own. Still, I think accelerating the development of cellular agriculture has the potential to move us further in that direction than any other strategy currently available to us.

Vegan activists will be needed to help secure public funding for cultivated-meat research, defend the nascent industry from incumbent attacks, promote acceptance of the new protein, push for greater institutional support for the technology, and, hopefully, sometime in the future, create a popular mandate for taxing and finally outlawing slaughtered meat. Even if much of this doesn’t come to pass, we must remember very low adoption rates of cultivated meat would save billions of creatures annually.

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