Author Alice Oven discusses cultivated meat

As well as writing and blogging about animal ethics, Alice Oven is co-author of The Clean Pet Food Revolution: How Better Pet Food Will Change The World, a book aimed at dog and cat owners interested in alternative proteins for their pets. It explores the problems associated with conventional animal meat in pet food and looks for kinder, safer alternatives, from plant-based diets for dogs to cultivated mouse meat for cats.

Day to day, Oven works in academic publishing at Taylor & Francis Publishing, commissioning Life Science and Veterinary books under the CRC Press science imprint for professionals and students. If you’re interested in being interviewed for Slaughter-Free America or writing something for the site, send an email to JonHoch87@gmail.com.

SLAUGHTER-FREE AMERICA: When and how did you first learn about cultivated meat?

ALICE OVEN:  I first became interested in cultivated meat as a viable alternative to both conventional animal meat and plant-based alternatives back in 2017, when I heard Open Philanthropy’s Lewis Bollard speak about it on a podcast called 80,000 Hours. You can still listen to the episode here.

Bollard’s enthusiasm and optimism for cultivated meat as the most feasible way to bring factory farming to an end was infectious, and it came at exactly the right time for me; I had just become vegan and was applying to study for my Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law MSc at Winchester.

I was consuming everything I possibly could about animal welfare and ethics, and a lot of that material was very depressing and pessimistic. The concept of cultivated meat was different – it felt like a genuine solution to a problem, a way of using technology to remove animals from the equation, as opposed to using it to manipulate and harm them further.

SFA: How did you come to support cultivated meat?

AO: The more I read about cultivated meat after hearing Bollard’s interview, the more convinced I became that this could be a game changer for farmed animals. I began with Paul Shapiro’s Clean Meat and went on to attend conferences like New Food Conference in Berlin, where experts discussed the challenges and possibilities for cultivated meat production.

I became especially interested in how the public would receive so-called ‘lab-grown meat’ and read a lot of research by Chris Bryant and colleagues on consumer attitudes to the novel food, based on language used, framing and so on. I also wrote some blogs of my own, on the morality of consuming cultivated meat (arguing against abolitionist vegans who condemn the product) and the significance of texture in meat analogues.

Mid-way through my MSc, I was approached by an old friend, veterinarian Ernie Ward, to co-author a book that combined this passion for cultivated meat with another long-term interest – companion animal ethics. Since we published The Clean Pet Food Revolution in 2019, which explores the potential of cultivated meat for pet food, this has been the focus of my writing, and led me to recently publish the results of my MSc dissertation, which explores cat and dog guardian attitudes to feeding cultivated meat to their animals (versus eating it themselves!)

You can read our findings for yourselves here. Essentially, we confirmed that the potential market for cultivated meat for pet food is markedly different from the potential market for cultivated meat from human consumption. That is, it includes a significant number of vegan and vegetarians, who are traditionally less likely to be interested in cultivated meat alternatives.

SFA: Once cultivated meat is cheaper than and indistinguishable or superior in taste to slaughtered meat, what sort of impact might it have on animal agriculture?

AO: Huge! Harm is reduced exponentially when we switch to clean meat. It was once predicted that a piece of turkey muscle the size of a sesame seed could produce enough cultured turkey to supply the global annual meat demand for more than two thousand years. That’s not a small reduction in animals used, it’s a greater than 99.99% reduction.

I also personally think that removing slaughter from the equation could be a way to break down people’s cognitive dissonance, creating a more compassionate society. If people are no longer consuming cheap intensively farmed meat or any slaughtered animal flesh, they are no longer culpable and the guilt is removed, meaning they should be more willing to make connections between their food choices and potential animal suffering.

Indeed, perhaps keeping domestic cows, chickens and pigs in existence in a cruelty-free way is preferable to getting rid of these animals (as we know them) altogether. Cultivated meat could foster a greater human-animal bond, a deeper connection than would be possible if the farmer had to eventually slaughter the cow or chicken. We might see farmed animals valued far more closely to how we value dogs and cats now, with similar protections.

SFA: What would you say to animal activists who are skeptical about cultivated meat?

AO: As I wrote in one of my blogs, ultimately, cultured meat represents a major disruption to a system that has more victims in a single day than in all wars combined in human history. We should embrace the fact that traditional meat companies are investing in these new products and helping consumers reframe their concept of ‘protein’. Sure, clean meat doesn’t challenge wider ideologies of speciesism (we are still using animals for food), but it does challenge some of the worst cruelties in these systems.

I firmly believe that ending the immediate suffering of animal victims is more important at this stage than focusing on broader moral wrongs, and clean meat is a weapon to help do this. It offers a way to end the injustice of the meat industry – not necessary an ‘ideal’ way, but a way that’s more practical and impactful than preaching abolitionism to deaf ears.

SFA: Would you eat cultivated meat, or is it just something you want available for others?

AO: Personally, I would try it out of interest, but meat isn’t something I miss or require for my health, so it wouldn’t become a regular part of my diet. But as a vegan, I’m not the target market for cultivated meat for human consumption! I would, however, feed it to my carnivorous cat, if I had one.

SFA: Do you think activists should expend energy and resources to help advance cellular agriculture, by pushing for more government funding for cultivated-meat research?

AO: Yes, absolutely, for all the reasons above! I think cultivated meat is one of the only ways we’re going to see real progress in feeding the world’s growing population in a sustainable, humane way.