Edgy Veggie
By Anand Shah
The State of Affairs Today
The case for calling modern-day animal agriculture one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time seems pretty airtight.
Between concerns of sustainability and energy efficiency, maintaining global food security in a meat-eating world is suspect. The acceleration of climate change, brought on in no small part by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from factory farms, endangers the billions who will live on coasts, through droughts and in poverty in the coming decades. Regularly given massive doses of antibiotics, the farm animals of today house tomorrow’s antibiotic-resistant superbugs in their guts and waste.
And this all tips the scale without even considering what is often the young Jain’s greatest concern: the uncontroversial moral status of animals as thinking, feeling jiva, and the evil inherent in their coercion and murder. These are all part of the reason I think it’s clear that we need a global cultural revolution in the way we think about food and that non-violence has to be the guiding light.
Thinking of Solutions
Luckily, the Jain community is famous for its strict adherence to a non-violent lifestyle, historically moving beyond vegetarianism to consider violence done even to root vegetables like potatoes, carrots and onions. I wonder, though, if our conception of what a global nonviolent diet looks like needs to adapt further. A lot of ink has already been spilled by Jain scholars and activists on the need for our community to pioneer making veganism mainstream — I think a lot of these arguments are brilliant and pretty compelling, but it’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to consider a dimension of meat-alternatives that leaves a lot of our hearts (and stomachs) divided: plant-based and cell-based meat.
Both plant-based and cell-based1 meat are on the rise. Between rollout at grocery stores and restaurants across the nation, plant-based meat companies, like Beyond Food and Impossible Foods, have enjoyed a lot of success in the last year. And, while less obvious, I think cell-based meat isn’t so far behind either. It’s moderately easy to make cell-based meat in a lab — you just obtain a painless cell sample from the desired animal (something like a mouth swab or a biopsy about half the size of a grain of rice), set conditions like pH, temperature, and nutrient levels for optimal growth, and mostly let time take care of the rest. Figuring out how to scale this process commercially is the puzzle institutes like the Good Food Institute (GFI) are trying to figure out, but experts like Marie Gibbons (a researcher with GFI exploring large-scale clean meat production methods at Harvard Medical School) think it’s only about 5 -10 years before cell-based meat is commercially viable, which is really not so far away. And, these substitutes seem all the more appealing as a vision for the future, considering that public health and animal advocacy groups have been trying for years to convince the U.S. to reduce its meat consumption with little success (average per capita meat consumption has been increasing pretty linearly over the last six decades2).
Now, if this all doesn’t have you jumping into your Honda Odyssey for the Impossible Burger, I don’t blame you. But, I also don’t think the buck stops at consumption. The coffers of many in the Jain community are deep, and if a few strategic donations are what it takes to give the plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives a fighting chance, then I think it’s worth seriously thinking about these alternatives. Even beyond funding, history has shown us time and time again that paradigm shifts and social movements are built in the minds and hearts of consumers and activists. Just starting a critical dialogue that treats plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives seriously might be enough to bolster friends into research or advocacy with a huge downstream impact. It may all seem kind of fantastic to read now, but I genuinely believe that, as a community, we should consider our relationship to plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives much more carefully.
Some Philosophical Thoughts
Of course, there are a few serious concerns. The most obvious is whether these plant and cell-based meats are actually still meat. That is, does consuming them generate paap in the same way consuming meat does? There is also the non-trivial assumption that I’m sure a ton of you are already thinking — what if plant-based meat generates less paap than cell-based meat? Why should the two substitutes even be on the same moral plane?
In response to these questions, I have a few philosophical feelings that I’d love to see bashed on YJAxReflect.
Get Young Jains of America (YJA)’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My first intuition is that, in terms of moral status, plant-based meat and cell-based meat shouldn’t really be too different from one another and, also, that plant-based and cell-based meat are not evil. My guess here comes from two arguments.
The first is that there is not really too much violence inherent in the creation of plant-based and cell-based meat — plant-based meats only harm one-sensed jiva (the plants themselves) and cell-based meats proliferate from a cell sample that requires no himsa at all. This argument should be persuasive if you think the biggest reason that eating meat is bad is because animals are caused to suffer to produce meat.
The second argument is that both plant-based and cell-based meat substitute for a more violent alternative, so supporting plant-based and cell-based meat makes the world better on net. If you believe King Megharath did a good thing in sacrificing his flesh to save the dove, maybe you’ll find this argument persuasive. King Megarath inflicted violence (upon himself) as a means to decreasing the total violence in the world (Read the full story here!); similarly, even if you’re unsure about the status of the meat alternatives, you should definitely be able to agree that Impossible Foods inflicts less violence on the world than Oscar-Meyer, so you should support meat alternatives proportionally to how much you think they’re marginally better than their meat industry counterparts.
Some Ending Thoughts
As I step back and re-read these arguments, though, I have to acknowledge that I have some intrinsic discomfort around even thinking about cell-based meat. For me, at least, this is definitely vestigial from a lifelong commitment to vegetarianism. In fact, as a last philosophical note, I think this personal comfort might also be morally relevant in a Jain ethical system. This is mostly because Jainism puts weight on your bhav, or mental passions, at the time of action. If you’re thinking of eating meat every time you bite into an Impossible Burger, you’re probably contracting negative karmas. The imitation in shape is evoking some negative bhav, which, in turn, makes your consumption paap. (I find this argument similar to when people say Jains shouldn’t eat animal crackers, Goldfish, or gelatin-free gummy bears.) I’m really curious to see how much of this intrinsic discomfort goes away as I become more accustomed to plant-based alternatives, and I’m wondering whether other people have had this experience!
Whatever your feelings about plant-based and cell-based meat, I think this conversation around alternatives to factory farms is just starting, and I think as cell-based meat comes closer to commercialization, we’ll have some more reckoning to do.
I look forward to hearing what y’all have to say! If I said anything incorrect or hurtful, Micchammi Dukkadam.
1: Plant-based and Cell-based meat
In plant-based protein products, protein is extracted and isolated from the plant, then combined with other plant-based ingredients with the goal of making the product as meaty as possible.
In cell-based meat, an animal cell is extracted from an animal and grown in a lab culture to create a piece of meat.
2: “Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1960 to Forecast 2020, in Pounds.” The
National Chicken Council,
