Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Research Articles
Submitted: 2020-10-28
Published: 2021-06-22

Sanctuary to Table Dining: Cellular Agriculture and the Ethics of Cell Donor Animals

Concordia University
NYU
ethics cellular agriculture animal sanctuaries meat animal liberation

Abstract

Cellular agriculture – the process of growing animal tissue from stem cells – is a novel technology touted as a potential alternative to conventional animal agriculture. While it is frequently described as cruelty-free or animal-free, however, cellular agriculture will, for the foreseeable future, require living livestock as a source of cells. The arguments in favor of cellular agriculture, usually rooted in utilitarianism, are clear: its widespread adoption would reduce the harms caused by animal agriculture, including reducing the number of animals killed for food. What is less clear is whether cellular agriculture offers a path toward animal liberation or decommodification, least of all for cell donor animals. This article examines how the use of cell donor animals might be ethically justified and practically enacted. We argue that cell donor animals should be raised in settings akin to animal sanctuaries where minimal harm can be squared with a broader goal of decommodification.

References

  1. Abrell, E. (2019). Sanctuary-making as rural political action. Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 22(2), 109–11.
  2. Abrell, E. (2021a). Saving animals: Multispecies ecologies of rescue and care. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  3. Abrell, E. (2021b). From livestock to cell-stock: Farmed animal obsolescence and the politics of resemblance. Tsantsa, 26, 36–49.
  4. Adams, C. J. (2018). Burger. New York, NY: Blooms-bury.
  5. Akhtar, A., Greger, M., Ferdowsian, H., & Frank, E.. (2009). Health professionals’ roles in animal agriculture, climate change, and human health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 36(2), 182–7.
  6. Albrecht, C. (2018, April 16). Shojinmeat is growing a DIY clean meat community. The Spoon. https://thespoon.tech/shojinmeat-is-growing-a-diy-clean-meat-community/
  7. Animal Welfare Institute. (2014). Label confusion: How “humane” and “sustainable” claims on meat packages deceive consumers.” Washington, D.C.: Author.
  8. Appadurai, A. (1986). Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things (pp. 4–63). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Benatar, D. (2007). The chickens come home to roost. American Journal of Public Health, 9(7), 1545–1546.
  10. Bernstein, J. & Dutkiewicz, J. (2021) A public health ethics case for mitigating zoonotic disease risk in food production. Food ethics, 6, Article 9. doi:10.1007/s41055-021-00089-6
  11. Blanchette, A. (2020). Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  12. Blattner, C. E., Coulter, K., & Kymlicka, W. (Eds.). (2019). Animal labour: A new frontier of interspecies justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  13. Blattner, C. E., Donaldson, S., & Wilcox, R. (2020). Animal agency in community: A political multispecies ethnography of VINE Sanctuary. Politics and Animals, 6, 1–22.
  14. Bryant, C. & Barnett, J. 2018. Consumer acceptance of cultured meat: A systematic review. Meat Science, 143, 8–17. doi:10.1016/j.meatsci.2018.04.008
  15. Bryant, C., Szejda, K., Parekh, N., Deshpande, V., & Tse, B. (2019). A survey of consumer perceptions of plant-based and clean meat in the USA, India, and China. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 3(11). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00011
  16. Buller, H. & Roe, E. (2012). Commodifying animal welfare. Animal Welfare, 21(1), 131–135.
  17. Carrington, M. J., Neville, B. A., & Whitwell, G. J. (2010). Why ethical consumers don’t walk their talk. Journal of Business Ethics, 97, 139–58.
  18. Cole, M., & Morgan, K. (2013). Engineering freedom? A critique of biotechnological routes to animal liberation. Configurations, 21(2), 201–229.
  19. Coulter, K. (2016). Animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
  20. Coulter, K. (2017). Humane Jobs: A political economic vision for interspecies solidarity and human–animal wellbeing. Politics and Animals, 3, 31–41.
  21. Donaldson, S. & Kymlicka, W. (2015). Farmed animal sanctuaries: The heart of the movement? A socio-political perspective. Politics and Animals, 1, 50–74.
  22. Dunayer, J. (2001). Animal equality. New York, NY: Lantern Books.
  23. Dutkiewicz, J. (2013). “Postmodernism,” politics, and pigs. PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, 8(2), 296–307.
  24. Dutkiewicz, J. (2018). Transparency and the factory farm. Gastronomica, 18(2), 19–32.
  25. Dutkiewicz, J. & Dickstein, J. (2021) The ism in vegan-ism: The case for a minimal practice-based defini-tion. Food ethics, 6, Article 2. doi:10.1007/s41055-020-00081-6
  26. Dickstein, J., Dutkiewicz, J., Guha-Majumdar, J., & Winter, D. (2020). Veganism as left praxis. Capitalism Nature Socialism. doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2020.1837895
  27. Eat Just, Inc. (2017). Cultured meat: Vision of the Future. https://vimeo.com/226196373
  28. Emmerman, K. S. (2014). Sanctuary, not remedy: The problem of captivity and the need for moral repair. In L. Gruen (Ed.), The ethics of captivity (pp. 213–230). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  29. Fischer, B. (2019). The ethics of eating animals: Usually bad, sometimes wrong, often permissible. New York (NY): Routledge Press.
  30. Francione, G. (2010). The abolition of animal exploitation. In G. Francione & R. Garner, The animal rights debate: Abolition or regulation? (pp. 1–102). New York City: Columbia University Press.
  31. Francione, G. (2012). Animal welfare, happy meat and veganism as the moral baseline. In D. Kaplan (ed.), The philosophy of food (pp. 169-189). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  32. Francione, G. & Garner, R. (Eds.). (2010). The animal rights debate: Abolition or regulation? New York City, NY: Columbia University Press.
  33. Gillespie, K. (2018a). The cow with ear tag #1389. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  34. Gruen, L. (2011). Ethics and animals. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  35. Gruen, L. (2016 June 3). Shifting toward an ethics of sanctuary. Humans and Nature. https://www.humansandnature.org/shifting-toward-an-ethics-of-sanctuary
  36. Grunert, K. G., Hieke, S., & Wills, J. (2014). Sustainability labels on food products: Consumer motivation, understanding and use. Food Policy, 44, 177–89.
  37. Heidemann, M. S., Molento, C. F. M., Glufke Reis, G., & Phillips, C. J. C. (2020). Uncoupling meat from animal slaughter and its impacts on human-animal relationships. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1824. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01824
  38. Hopkins, P. & Dacey, A. (2008). Vegetarian meat: Could technology save animals and satisfy meat eaters? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 21(6), 579–596.
  39. Horta, O. D. (2010). What is speciesism? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23(2), 243–266.
  40. International Food Information Council Foundation. (2019). 2019 Food and Health Survey. Food Insight. https://foodinsight.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IFIC-Foundation-2019-Food-and-Health-Report-FINAL.pdf
  41. Johnston, J.. (2008). The citizen-consumer hybrid: Ideological tensions and the case of whole foods market. Theory and Society, 37(3), 229–70.
  42. Jones, M. (2014). Captivity in the ontext of a sanctuary for formerly farmed animals. In L. Gruen (Ed.), The ethics of captivity (pp. 90-101). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  43. Jönsson, E., Linné, T., & McCrow-Young, A. (2019). Many meats and many milks? The ontological politics of a proposed post-animal revolution. Science as Culture, 28(1), 70–97.
  44. Kolkmann, A. M., Post, M. J., Rutjens, M. A. M., van Essen, A. L. M., & Moutsatsou, P. (2020). Serum-free media for the growth of primary bovine myoblasts. Cytotechnology, 72, 111–120.
  45. Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things. In A. Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things (pp. 64-91). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  46. Le Guin, U. K. (2017). The unreal and the real: The selected short stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. London: Saga Press. Original novel published in 1973.
  47. Lance, S. (2020). The cost of production: Animal welfare and the post-industrial slaughterhouse in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Journal of Science Fiction, 4(1), 60–74.
  48. Mattick, C. S. (2018). Cellular agriculture: The coming revolution in food production. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 74(1), 32-35
  49. Mattick, C. & Allenby, B. (2013). The future of meat. Issues in Science and Technology, 30(1), 64–70.
  50. Maurer, B. (2006). The anthropology of money. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 15–36.
  51. Melzener, L., Verzijden, K. E., Buijs, A. J., Post, M. J., & Flack, J. E. (2021). Cultured beef: from small bi-opsy to substantial quantity. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 101, 7–14.
  52. Milburn, J. (2016). Chewing over in vitro meat: Animal ethics, cannibalism and social progress. Res Publica, 22, 249–265.
  53. Miller, J. (2012). In vitro meat: Power, authenticity and vegetarianism. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10(4), 41–63.
  54. Pachirat, T. (2011). Every twelve seconds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  55. Palmer, C. (2010). Animal ethics in context. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  56. Parker, C. (2013). Voting with your fork? Industrial free-range eggs and the regulatory construction of consumer choice. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 649(1), 52–73.
  57. Patel, R. & Moore, J. (2017). A history of the world in seven cheap things. Oakland, CA: The University of California Press.
  58. Pellow, D. N. (2014). Total liberation. Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  59. Pluhar, E. B. (2010). Meat and morality: Alternatives to factory farming. Journal of Agricultural and Environ-mental Ethics, 23(5), 455–468.
  60. Poirier, N. & Russell, J. (2019). Does in vitro meat constitute animal liberation? Journal of Animal Eth-ics, 9(2), 199–211.
  61. Polinski, M. (2020, October 13). Is coronavirus accelerating the growth of plant-based meat? Food Dive. https://www.fooddive.com/news/coronavirus-plant-based-meat-growth/585433/
  62. Mouat, M. J. & Prince, R. (2018). Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(4), 315–329.
  63. Mouat, M. J., Prince, R., & Roche, M. M. (2019). Making value out of ethics: The emerging economic geography of lab-grown meat and other animal-free food products. Economic Geography, 95(2): 136–158.
  64. Next Nature Network. (2014). The in vitro meat cookbook. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: BIS Publishers.
  65. Regan, T. (2004). The case for animal rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Original work published in 1983.
  66. Santo, R. E., Kim, B. F., Goldman, S. E., Dutkiewicz, J., Biehl, E. M. B., Bloem, M. W., Neff, R. A., & Nachman, K. E. (2020). Considering Plant-Based Meat Substitutes and Cell-Based Meats: A Public Health and Food Systems Perspective. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4, 134. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.00134
  67. Schaefer, G.O. & Savulescu, J., (2014). The ethics of producing in vitro meat. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 31(2), 188–202.
  68. Schlottmann, C. & Sebo, J. 2019. Food, animals, and the environment: an ethical approach. New York, NY: Routledge.
  69. Sciopini, J. (2020, December 18). This restaurant will be the first ever to serve lab-grown chicken (for $23). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/singapore-restaurant-first-ever-to-serve-eat-just-lab-grown-chicken.html
  70. Sinclair, R. (2016). The sexual politics of meatless meat: In(edible) others and the myth of flesh without sacrifice. In B. Donaldson & C. Carter (eds.), The future of meat without animals (pp. 229–248). London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
  71. Singer, P. (2009). Animal liberation. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Original work published in 1975.
  72. Springmann, M., Clark, M., Mason-D’Croz, D. et al. (2018). Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Nature, 562, 519–525.
  73. Stanescu, V. & Twine, R. (2012). Post-animal studies: The future(s) of critical animal studies. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10(4), 4–19.
  74. Steiner, G. (2013). Animals and the limits of postmodernism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  75. Stephens, N. (2013). Growing meat in laboratories: The promise, ontology, and ethical boundary-work of using muscle cells to make food. Configurations, 21(2), 159–181.
  76. Stephens, N., Di Silvio, L., Dunsford, I., Ellis, M., Glencross, A., & Sexton, A. (2018). Bringing cul-tured meat to market: Technical, socio-political, and regulatory challenges in cellular agriculture. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 78, 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2018.04.010
  77. Stephens, N., Sexton, A. E., & Driessen, C. (2019, July 10). Making sense of making meat: Key moments in the first 20 years of tissue engineering muscle to make food. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00045
  78. van der Weele, C. & Driessen, C. (2013). Emerging profiles for cultured meat: Ethics through and as design. Animals, 3(3), 647–662. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani3030647
  79. van der Weele, C. & Tramper, J. (2014). Cultured meat: Every village its own factory? Trends in Biotechnology, 32(6), 294–296.
  80. van Dooren, T. 2014. Flight ways. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  81. Vialles, N. (1994). From animal to edible. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  82. Wadiwel, D. (2002). Cows and sovereignty: Biopolitics and bare life. Borderlands e-Journal, 1(2). http://borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/wadiwel_cows.html
  83. Watson, E. (2018, December 11). JUST strikes deal in Japan to bring cell-cultured Wagyu beef to market. Food Navigator. https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2018/12/11/JUST-strikes-deal-in-Japan-to-bring-cell-cultured-Wagyu-beef-to-market#
  84. Weis, T. (2013). The ecological hoofprint. London, UK: Zed Books.
  85. White, R. (2009). Introduction. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 7(1), 4–8.
  86. Wilkie, R. (2010). Livestock/deadstock. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
  87. Wolfe, C. (2003). Animal rites. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  88. Wolfson, D. & Sullivan, M. (2004). Foxes in the hen house: Animals, agribusiness, and the law. In C. Sunstein & M. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal rights: Current debates and new directions (pp. 205–226). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  89. Wurgaft, B. A. (2019). Meat planet: Artificial flesh and the future of food. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.