Ro Khanna, cell-ag champion, should be California’s next senator
I’ve read with interest recent reports about the race to succeed Dianne Feinstein as the next senator from California. Feinstein is next up for re-election in 2024, but she’s now 89 years old. Her cognitive decline is an open secret amongst her colleagues. I appreciate their desire not to hurt her feelings, but I believe her millions of constituents, who deserve competent representation, should take precedence.
In my view, Representative Ro Khanna is the clear choice to succeed Feinstein. He’s the progressive candidate in the race, which has so far taken place behind closed doors. Khanna was the co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, which, among other things, makes clear where his ideological loyalties are.
As an animal activist, I’m most excited about Khanna’s bold leadership on the issue of public funding for cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. In addition to its environmental and public-health benefits, this revolutionary protein offers the best chance to reduce the horrific suffering and death we inflict on our fellow creatures.
About a year ago, Khanna sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, asking that $50 million of the department’s American Rescue Plan Act funding be set aside for alternative-protein development. “USDA’s recent grants to Tufts University to establish a National Institute for Cellular Agriculture is a welcome step for cultivated meat research,” he said, in a message co-signed by a number of his colleagues. “We encourage USDA to build on this work.”
Cultivated meat requires a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that raising livestock does. The same can be said in regards to fresh water and land. Meanwhile, since cultivated meat is produced in a closed system, there is no runoff of agricultural waste into rivers and oceans.
“Industrial livestock agriculture — raising cows, pigs and chickens — generates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all cars, trucks and automobiles combined,” Greenpeace states. “Cattle ranchers have clear cut millions of acres of forests for grazing pastures, inhibiting the landscape’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.”
Of course, we’re living in the wake of a global crisis caused by the zoonotic virus known as COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people in this country alone. In recent years, we’ve seen a number of diseases make the leap from animals to humans. You might know some of them as bird flu or swine flu. Cultivated meat removes such risk from food production.
“Both farmed and caged wild animals create the perfect breeding ground for zoonotic diseases,” Liz Specht wrote for Wired. “Extraordinarily high population densities, prolonged heightened stress levels, poor sanitation, and unnatural diets create a veritable speed-dating event for viruses to rendezvous with a weakened human host and transcend the species barrier.”
Finally, the benefits to animal welfare derived from cultivated meat should be obvious. There is no debeaking, forced molting or mechanized slaughter. There are no battery cages, gestation crates, or livestock trucks. All of these can be relegated to a less kind, less enlightened past.
“The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue,” Yuval Noah Harar wrote in The Guardian. “It concerns the majority of Earth’s large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but which live and die on an industrial production line.”
I believe Ro Khanna is a true progressive. Any Democrat will find a lot to like in his record. For me, his advocacy of public funding for cellular-agriculture research is most inspiring, but for others it could be any number of things. Regardless, Khanna should be the next senator from California.