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Is cultivated "meat" unnatural? Is meat today natural?

May 09, 2024 Season 3 Episode 8
Is cultivated "meat" unnatural? Is meat today natural?
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Is cultivated "meat" unnatural? Is meat today natural?
May 09, 2024 Season 3 Episode 8

While many wonder about the technological hurdles preventing cultivated meat from entering commercial markets, fewer ask a more basic question: will people actually eat it, or will they find it too unnatural? In this episode, we're joined by Cor van der Weele, emeritus professor in philosophy from Wageningen University, who has had a front-row seat to the past 15 years of shifting perceptions of this technology. We'll dive into how a philosopher thinks about “naturalness”, what are the public concerns and the idealistic visions of a cultivated meat future, and why mixed feelings about this innovation could be a healthy sign of progress. 

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode62

Guests

  • Cor van der Weele, Professor Emeritus Endowed Chair at Wageningen University.

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Show Notes Transcript

While many wonder about the technological hurdles preventing cultivated meat from entering commercial markets, fewer ask a more basic question: will people actually eat it, or will they find it too unnatural? In this episode, we're joined by Cor van der Weele, emeritus professor in philosophy from Wageningen University, who has had a front-row seat to the past 15 years of shifting perceptions of this technology. We'll dive into how a philosopher thinks about “naturalness”, what are the public concerns and the idealistic visions of a cultivated meat future, and why mixed feelings about this innovation could be a healthy sign of progress. 

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode62

Guests

  • Cor van der Weele, Professor Emeritus Endowed Chair at Wageningen University.

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Matthew

Across the world, demand for meat continues to rise. We typically
agree that a real urgency is needed to address the extraordinary scale of
animal production today, and its associated environmental and social impacts.
But we don’t always agree on where to put our energy and resources. Should we
encourage shifts towards more plant-forward diets, make livestock systems more
efficient, make animal farming more compassionate, OR should we try to satisfy
this craving for meat, but do so without the environmental and ethical baggage. 

I’m talking here about “cultivating meat” in labs. This involves
taking cells from the animals’ bodies, growing them in bioreactors, and
creating a product so similar to meat, it shares the animal’s DNA. There’s some
big questions about whether it’s even  technically possible to
commercially scale this type of production, but that’s not what his episode is
about. Instead, I’m asking a more personal question - if you had a piece of
cultivated meat on a plate in front of you, would you eat it?

As we continue to explore how natural our food and farms should
be, we now ask: Is cultivated meat seen by consumers as natural or unnatural?
And does that even matter?

Welcome to the nature season of Feed, a food systems podcast
presented by TABLE . I’m Matthew Kessler. And if you’re not a new listener,
you’ll recognize this as a topic that we explored in depth last year with the
Meat the four Futures series. If you enjoyed that, I imagine you’re going to
like the fresh take you’ll hear in this episode, which is from a philosopher on
the unnaturalness of cultivated meat.

Cor

So my name is Cor van der Weele and I'm calling from the
Netherlands. I live in Oosterbeek, a village near Arnhem. And I'm a retired
professor of philosophy at Wageningen University, which is close by.

Matthew

Cor van der Weele has had a front seat to see how these debates
have evolved over time. From a meeting in Sweden in 2011 when the technology
was called in vitro meat, to when the Dutch scientist Mark Post developed the
first lab-grown burger, to the ongoing focus groups she conducted to better
understand consumers’ hopes and fears for a ‘cultivated meat’ future. 

Matthew

We're going to talk today about a potentially groundbreaking
transition in food, a shift from eating meat from slaughtered animals to meat
cultivated from animal cells in labs. And even though this is getting more
attention lately, it's not exactly a new idea. Maybe a good place to start
is.around the release of the book diet for a small planet, by Francis Moore
Lappé. Can you talk a little about what this book was and what its impact was?

Cor

Yeah, it was a book that argued for a diet which was more friendly
to the planet and more friendly to feeding the planet. She argued fiercely that
we are eating far too much meat. She added to that there is in fact, and there
has been for 1000s of years a perfect alternative, namely, pulses.

Matthew

Pulses are edible parts of legume plants- so beans, lentils
chickpeas. This book ‘Diet for a small planet’ came out in 1971. It was a
bestseller that even included vegetarian recipes as a way to make it easier for
people to change their diets. Cor really enjoyed this part of the book, but it
wasn’t only the recipes that she connected to.

Cor

Linking that to myself. I come from an arable farm where my family
grew  wheat and barley and peas and potatoes, etc. And I've always been
convinced or feeling that I've always been seeing plants as the most basic kind
of food. So to me, this book by Francis Moore Lappe, was, well, it was immediately
completely convincing, I thought this was clearly what we should do. And I did
not realize at all that the book was in fact far too unconventional and
revolutionary at that time. And it went against important trends, which was to
increase meat consumption all over the world. So it had started in the West to
this increase after the Second World War. And now this was spreading all over
the world. As soon as countries got a little bit richer, their meat consumption
grew. 

Matthew

This call, now 50 years ago, to eat less meat, and replace it with
pulses, didn’t exactly pan out. Since then our population has doubled and, as a
global average, we eat twice as much meat per person. This means we’re
producing and eating four times as much meat than we did half a century ago..

Cor

So in the decades that followed, despite all the protests,
especially against factory farming, meat consumption only continued to grow,
and pulses declined ever further. And this was a worldwide phenomenon. So
people simply love meat and plant-based protein sources that was also a growing
conviction among researchers, simply didn't resemble meat enough to be a real
success. 

Matthew

So now we fast forward to the early 2000s, where Cor first came
across a 2003 art installation called  Disembodied Cuisine

Cor

When I heard about cultured meat around 2007, through the work of
an artist, a bio artist. I immediately became interested because this was an
alternative which promised to be meat. So I thought, “Ah, this might finally
help.” It promised to be real meat because it would be made, it was not
available yet, but it would be made from animal cells. So the end product
ideally could not be distinguished from real meat. 

Matthew

Cor describes the 2003 project that Bioartist Oron Catts presented
in L’Art Biotech museum in France. 

Cor

This artist Oron Catts had skilled himself in laboratory practices
and was able to grow cells a little bit. So he took some cells from a frog and
was able to keep them alive and even let them grow a bit, and then made quite a
performance of that.

Matthew

This was the first I’ve heard of this project, so of course I had
to look up the exhibition, and I found a photo of it.  In it you see the
setting of a white tablecloth dinner. 3 chairs on each side. A bottle of wine
on the table, alongside some glasses, plates, silverware. And at the head of
the table, is a small aquarium. This is where the frog lived, and was present
during the dinner. And on the diner’s plates were little frog steaks,
cultivated from the cells of the same frog that they were sitting next to.

Did I mention that the dinner table is also behind a quarantined
room, with yellow tape wrapped around the outside? 

The artist was really doubling down on the unnatural, potentially
dangerous, bio-hazard feeling of this whole experience.

Cor

So I thought this is a wonderful idea. And from then on, I have
been actively interested in the protein transition. Because for me, cultured
meat was not a goal in itself. But a potential trigger for that transition.

Matthew 

I find the experiment where the artist was culturing frog cells
really interesting, because it really confronts people both with the fact that
an animal is being eaten and then, which is not something we have when we just
have a piece of flesh on our plate, something maybe that doesn't even look
anything resembling the animal. And also that there's a possibility of eating
meat, while the animal is not harmed in the process, which seems like quite a
revolutionary idea. 

So the focus of our season is on naturalness in food. And I'm
going to ask you about whether cultivated meat from animal cells is natural.
But first, you're a philosopher. How do you think about natural and
naturalness? 

Cor

Well, a great source of clear thinking for me about this issue is
philosopher John Stuart Mill. He wrote in 1874, an essay on nature. And the
starting point was that back then, naturalness, like now, had very positive
connotations. What is natural is good. That was the main feeling. And at the
same time, it was also clear that it had very different meanings, and sometimes
confused meanings. So what Mill did, he gave an overview of all the historical
uses of the word. And he concludes that with a distinction in which nature
either means everything, including mankind, so everything under the sun, so to
say. Or it refers to things as they would be without human intervention. And
when you have the first sense of the word, so everything is natural, then
living a natural life is a senseless norm. Because it's not possible not to
live a natural life. 

And in the second sense that we should not intervene in nature.
Then he says, it is both irrational and deeply immoral. It is irrational, he
says, and I think you could also say, impossible, because everything we do,
alters the spontaneous course of nature. And it's immoral in his view, because
it would then for example be bad to intervene in any disease. He says that the
forces of nature are not always beneficial. And that it's up to us to cooperate
with the beneficial forces and to amend the course of nature for the sake of
justice and goodness. So it's up to us how we want to work with nature. And I
think these words are still powerful.

Matthew  

That's interesting, that natural, then if it means everything,
then it's essentially meaningless, or it becomes a really normative concept.
The word itself is very, very ambiguous in general.  

Cor  

Yeah it is. It still is. Yeah. And apparently has always been. 

Matthew  

I want to say, for the record, meat alternatives are not new.
There's a recipe for a mock lamb dish that goes back to China over 1000 years
ago. Many companies have been creating alternative meat products for the last
40 years. And in the last five to 10 years, there's been a lot more research
and development and certainly media coverage on cultivated meat. And just like
these meat alternatives aren't new, attitudes to these products are also
changing over time. So you've been following that and tracking that with
various focus groups. But I want to ask, going back a decade or so, how have
philosophers and ethicists been thinking about this question about whether meat
alternatives are natural? 

Cor  

So as you mentioned, meat alternatives come in different kinds.
And at least some technology is always involved. Like, by the way it is in meat
itself. There's a lot of technology involved in producing meat from animals.
Perhaps you could say the least technological of all is perhaps pulses. But
even here, there's a lot of agricultural technology in improving the seeds, in
sowing and harvesting and distributing. 

Cooking is, of course, simple, but it's still a technology. So
well, I mentioned technology, because technology is often closely associated
with something being unnatural. Although it's not, of course, not precisely the
same. 

Let's concentrate on cultured meat,  where suddenly more
frontline technology is being used than in most other meat alternatives.
Frontline technology about understanding and controlling cell growth and
scaling that up eventually. It is still uncertain, by the way, whether it really
can become a technological and commercial success. But my view has been and
still is that it's at least worth trying. 

So okay, naturalness. Then, in 2008, there appeared a paper
written by Hopkins and Dacey. They see they made a moral plea for cultured meat.
And the naturalness, or unnaturalness of cultured meat was one of the themes.
They straightforwardly argued that since many aspects of our normal or
traditional meats are so unethical. So they thought about factory farming and
slaughtering practices. In this case, it might be precisely the unnaturalness
of cultured meat that we are looking for. So they said what is natural is not
automatically good.

Matthew

This was similar to the argument made by John Stuart Mill - that
while natural is pleasing to us, it doesn't necessarily steer humans on a
better course, for ourselves or for the environment. We’ll link in our
shownotes to the Hopkins and Dacey 2008 paper and other research Cor discusses
in our conversation.

Cor

So another further perspective on the cultured meat and
naturalness that I will want to mention is that we could wonder what cultured
meat would mean for our relations with animals and with nature. Here, I think
that relations with animals could improve greatly if cultured meat helps us to
eat less traditional meat and get rid of factory farming, for example. And
another great promise is that cultured meat would free large amounts of land.
At least that's what all the calculations say. And that can be rewilded and
given back to nature. And that would be good for the desperately needed space
for wild animals and good for biodiversity in general.

Matthew  

I can just jump in here to say, because this field is still pretty
new. There's not tons and tons of papers and evidence on what are the impacts
of cultured meat compared to other forms of production. But I think all these
studies do point to a significantly reduced land footprint, water footprint, a
smaller amount of greenhouse gas emissions depending on which animal production
system you're comparing it to. And the bigger question is around energy use,
and that also depends on whether or not renewable energies are used.

Cor

That remains the biggest, the biggest worry, but of course these
numbers are still evolving.

Matthew  

We’re going to next take a tour of the development of cultivated
meat across the last 15 years as witnessed by Cor van der Weele. To give you a
sense of how much this industry has grown, we’ll start at the Chalmers
University of Technology in Western Sweden, where a workshop was being hosted
to set the research agenda for the future of cultivated meat. 

So I want to just  jump into a very specific moment in time,
which was in Gothenburg, Sweden. How big was this field back then in 2011? 

Cor

All in all, not more, more than 12 or 15 people. And when we
estimated how many people were working on cultured meat at that moment. Our
estimate was that there were not more than, let's say, two handfuls of full
time jobs for making cultured meat at that moment worldwide. 

It was a time in which it was very hard to get money for research
on the subject. So that was our main, main subject of discussion, actually. And
also, when we decided that cultured meat would be a better name, than in vitro
meat, as it was called earlier. But we were not so very optimistic at that
point.

Mathew

That's extraordinary, to say that one more time. When the industry
was called in vitro meat back in 2011, there were less than 20 people employed
to think about and develop this technology. Now in 2024, barely more than a
decade later, there have been over 3 billion dollars of investment in
cultivated meat and seafood companies - most of which has come from private
funding sources. And there’s 174 publicly announced companies focused on
cultivated meat inputs or products.

Matthew  

And I guess the industry is now moving towards the name of
cultivated meat, which again, is similar - not to say in vitro or lab grown -
not tap too much into that imaginary of what that means, but just hint at it a
little bit. So two years later, in 2013, the Dutch scientists Mark Post was
behind the famous 250,000 Euro lab grown burger. 

Mark Post (Clip)

What we’re going to see is a world first. This is the first time
ever a hamburger from cells grown outside of the cow is being made and
presented.

Cor  

That changed a lot indeed. And in fact, already in Gothenburg,
that was the only point of hope that we had that he had. We knew that he had
found this private investor for making this hamburger. 

Clip continued

Everyone is sitting here with bated breath dying to see what’s
underneath the cloche, so can you do the honors and lift the lid on your creation.

Cor

Yeah, so then, and he did it, because his technology was still
very primitive, then he could only make very small parts of meat. But he did it
1000s of times. And his explicit goal was to ask for more attention and for
more money to put it more on the map.

Matthew  

Yeah, I guess also a bit of a proof of concept. And I think it
worked too, right. It certainly attracted a lot of media headlines, and a lot
of coverage on the back of it.

Cor  

Sure. I was present with the presentation. And the next day, I
bought all the English newspapers. And they all were very big.

Matthew

NY Times “A Lab-Grown Burger Gets
a Taste Test
” ; Economic times: “World's first lab-grown burger is now ready
to be served!” 

The voice you heard earlier was the Dutch scientist Mark Post and
then a clip from the actual press conference held in London. During this
presentation a decade ago, he said the technology could be about 10 years away. 

Matthew 

So you were conducting some focus groups around that time? I'm
curious to hear what were people's attitudes then? 

Cor

With my colleague Clemens  Driessen in early 2013, we had
different kinds of groups, older people, younger people, mixed ages, people who
professionally were involved with food. Well in all of them, because cultured
meat was not so well known as it is now. Everybody found it very strange at
first. But I had already learned in interviews, that first responses are just
that first responses and that it's more interesting what happens next. So I had
interviewed people and asked them what they thought of cultured meat and I
remember very vividly the first interview the very first person said, yuck. But
immediately continued by saying, Oh, but wait a minute, if I imagine what it
means for animals, it already looks quite different. So I thought so much for
first impressions, this changes when people start to think more, and so I
decided to do these focus groups instead of for example, surveys or whatever. 

Matthew  

Right, because surveys could give a misleading impression of
people just offer, “Oh, I think this is gross, and I'm moving on with my life.”

Cor  

In almost every group, there was always someone who asked, “but
isn't this very unnatural?” And then there was always someone else who said,
“Yeah, but how natural is our traditional meat?” And then the discussion went
back and forth between meat and cultured meat and people, more or less
discussed a lot of the attractive and the unattractive things of meat. Most
people, their primary objection was always about factory farming. 

So what you can see from this is that cultured meat turned out to
be a trigger for thinking back and forth between cultured meat and ordinary
meat, People started saying such things as “hmm, isn't it actually strange that
we find it normal to raise and kill animals and eat them and then find it
strange to raise a few cells and eat them.” We saw that happening before our
eyes actually. 

Matthew

I was personally pretty surprised to hear of this shift in such a
short time period.  Cor and Clemens Driessen documented this change in an
article called 'How normal meat becomes stranger, as cultured meat becomes more
normal.”

Cor

They say wouldn’t it be too technological and too unnatural.
Wouldn't it alienate us further from our food? And wouldn't it put
further  power in the hands of big companies. And then in one of the early
groups, the ideas spontaneously came up to make cultured meat on a small scale,
so not by big companies. But on a neighborhood scale. So the idea came up that
you have a few pigs, say, on a children's farm or in a backyard or in a city
park, you take a biopsy, that is to say, a few cells from those animals every
week. And then there is a small local factory to turn those cells into meat. 
And the first group in which this idea arose was simply euphoric. It was very
interesting to see. 

So they said, “Well, this is so good, you are in contact with the
source of your food, but you're also closer to the animals because you're with
them, and you don't have to kill them. So you can also love them without losing
them.” It's also local, and it connects you to your neighborhoods. So they were
- they found it almost too good to be true. And maybe it is too good to be
true. I mean, we called the scenario “the pig in the backyard” and a backyard
is probably not a very realistic way to realize this.

Mathew

So once the focus group participants started to use their
imaginations and think about new possible futures, they came a long way from
their initial "yuck" reaction. Because unnaturalness wasn't just
about the use of technology."

Cor

Doing it on a small scale made such a difference.  All the
ideas of cultured meat being too unnatural or being too technological has
simply disappeared from their thoughts. 

Matthew

If you’re like me, you may have been wondering this whole time,
what do livestock farmers think of this? Since they’re the ones who are perhaps
most threatened by this technology. But when you consider this pig in the
backyard approach, there could be a different way to bring income to the farm -
by raising the genetic material that goes into these cultivated meat products.
Cor also spoke with livestock farmers to understand their views on cultured
meat.

Cor

I think many people found it strange or they were skeptical
anyway. And the people who did come, skepticism was still a very prominent
thing. And I could easily understand that because, well, actually how you would
do that is still so vague and uncertain, the technological side of it, the commercial
side of it. But there were also enthusiasts who wanted to start as soon as
possible. And one of them is actually now working towards realizing a real
cultured meat farm with cow cells, he has cows that roam free in nature, and
then he wants to - he doesn't want to kill them anymore. He wants to use their
cells for cultured meat production. And farmers spoke well, in the course of
those groups, they also they spoke about lots of things, and also lots of lots
of worries. For example, irritations about consumers who say that they want to
pay more for more animal welfare, and then don't do it. Or about the government
that comes with evermore rules that they have to comply with. 

Matthew

From 2018-2020, Cor conducted another set of focus groups. She realized
across all these groups the importance of the concept of ambivalence. Instead
of flattening the human experience, she wondered how conversations around
cultivated meat would change if we embraced  the fact that people hold
many conflicting views all at once.

Cor  

 It's very often seen as something negative, you ought to be
of one mind. Many consumer scientists, they implicitly seem to assume that
there is a clear ranking of values, and one is on top. And it's all very
straightforward and non ambiguous and non ambivalent. But what we had seen in
the focus groups is that there came a lot of ambivalence to the surface. 

So many people who said “well, on the one hand, I have wanted to
be a vegetarian so many times. But then on the other hand, I love meat so much,
that I find it really very hard.” And people struggling with these things and
struggling with different values. Also, for example, saying that, “Well, I'm
very sensitive to animal welfare, and I would be tempted to try alternative
meats, but then my partner so hopes to get meat on the plate” that this is also
a value conflict that people were struggling with.

I approached this question about ambivalence about meat by asking
people what they want to know about their food. And when it came to meat, a
typical answer was, “Well, if you want to eat meat, you shouldn't know too much
about it.” And this may look like a paradoxical answer, but it was
nevertheless  in various forms very frequent.

Matthew

It's like a coping mechanism. 

Cor

Yeah, it’s really a coping mechanism. So people know, or suspect,
then when you really start thinking about it, and you are confronted with hard
choices, and you therefore keep the subject a little bit at a distance
instinctively. Although that is hardly a conscious choice, people find it very
easy to recognize as they do it. And it has a name, this phenomenon, it's
called strategic ignorance. It's all around. Not only about meat, but about all
kinds of things that we are not ready for, and that are coming with unwelcome
choices that we might feel we should be perhaps responsible for. So it's a way
of protecting ourselves for unwelcome responsibilities. 

Matthew

So strategic ignorance is a tool people use to avoid being faced
with a moral decision. That could mean either not seeking out infoRmation or
deliberately protecting yourself from information that is deeply confronting to
you. For example, you might block out any negative information about a
politician you like, or choose to not learn more about where the factory meat
you eat comes from.

Cor

And, of course, strategic ignorance becomes more difficult when
the environment changes. When information goes on and on. And when more
attractive products become available as alternatives, or when these products
become better, or cheaper. So gradually, it becomes more difficult to remain
strategically ignorant and more easy to make alternative choices. 

Matthew  

This brings me to a question I have. We talked about different
attitudes in focus groups, but I'm curious about actual buying patterns. So
when you're in a market, and you see all these options in front of you, it's a
different environment than when you're having conversations around a table in
this, more structured manner, where you have time to open up and reflect on
your values and how you see the world as opposed to a split second decision. So
do the focus groups that you've conducted, do you think they reveal anything
about the future of purchasing patterns of these products?

Cor  

People will actually in the focus groups reflect on their own
behavior in supermarkets that they realized they were part of the problem. And
it's, of course, indeed, well known, the so called paradox that people say that
they want to buy other things, but then they don't do it. And you often hear
that, that people say or that researchers say, “Well, those are then empty
words, when you say your intentions are to be different.” Or they call it
hypocritical, or they call it unexplained paradox or whatever, they find it
something very negative. 

And I'm tempted to see it as something more positive, namely, a
sign of change. A sign that people are in the process of change, they are
ambivalent. But it takes time. And in the beginning, it's only the pioneers who
stick out their neck and, and make different choices. Most people really love
to be in harmony with their environments. So as long as meat is still the dominant
environmental choice. That's also a value for them. So they're really stuck in
a very ambivalent situation. The time for that things remain invisible and
under the surface and the dominant norm is still everywhere. It's almost ending
I think.

Matthew  

So there's a really interesting dynamic here where, yes, there's a
dominant trend and that dominant trend is being questioned. And I think people
in that dominant trend feel threatened. And there's a bit of a backlash to it.
So, if you look at, say, Italy, where the Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, she
recently banned the import of meat alternatives and sought to stop their
production in the country. And she did this as a way to protect Italian food
culture and also Italian farmers. And this is here, showing that there’s people
really excited about these meat alternatives. And there's other people who are
really terrified of what it represents. So just curious if you could reflect a
little on these trends.

Cor 

Yeah, so on the one hand, it looks threatening. And on the other
hand, as real transition experts tend to say, this is precisely what you can
expect, when it becomes serious. When change becomes serious, then there will
be a backlash because interests will be threatened. The old is really, really
now under a lot of pressure. This is a phase that cannot be avoided. The only
thing you can avoid, I think, and that would be my feeling about it, that is
why I find ambivalence so important. That if this turns into a polarized
situation, then what happens is actually that a lot of people suppress part of
what you really think. I mean, most people who have a firm position in fact,
also having other thoughts, even if only now and then. So you lose a lot of
information, and you lose a lot of potential for connection if you live in a
culture where you are, perhaps for good reasons, but often are also because you
think that's what you should do - only have firm opinions for or against
something. And in reality, people are seldom of one mind. Values are not neatly
ranked from high to low, so they can clash, and they can clash in messy ways.
So cutting the knots is something that you can do, but it's not a way that
brings you into contact with yourself or with the other half of yourself, I
should say, or with other people with whom you can then try to find common
ground or try to find exchange values that you perhaps can both share. So I
think what is important in those times of backlash is well, when you are
working on those alternatives, is to remain open to the worries and to the
obstacles. And to not buy into this polarizing game.

Matthew  

So wrapping up, does naturalness matter? Is it something that is
going to affect the cultural acceptance of these products?

Cor  

If we for one moment, go back to Mill. Let's remember that, for
him pure naturalness would be either senseless or silly and unethical. I deeply
agree that purity is indeed not what we should be looking for in value issues.
Because we have so many values, and we have to fight to do justice to as many
as possible of that.

I think although Naturalness is partly unhelpful, it's also
worthwhile to see what might be behind it, what people really mean when we use
the word. And having said that, I think overall, it's of course not helpful to
think in either/or ways, that we should be either natural or unnatural is a bit
strange. 

And here to John Stuart Mill was in fact saying good things he
said, “nature is not purely beneficial”, and it's up to us to work with the
beneficial parts of nature and, and amend them for our purposes.

For example, cultured meat might help us to eat less meat. And
then if we feel encouraged to go further then at least, perhaps start eating
more pulses, and then cultured meat need not be the endpoint.

Matthew

Cor, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Cor 

It was a pleasure.

Matthew

A big thanks to Cor van der Weele for speaking with us. You can
visit the episode’s webpage to see photos of the 2003 disembodied cuisine
exhibit, clips from the press releases of the world’s first lab-grown
hamburger, and the many articles written by Cor and others on the perceived
naturalness of cultivated meat. 

And if you’re interested in hearing more about meat alternatives
and the future of meat and livestock in general, you can listen to the podcast
series we produced last year called Meat the four futures. All of this is in
our episode shownotes and on our webpage: tabledebates.org/podcast.

This episode was edited and produced by me Matthew Kessler, with
special thanks to Hester van Hensbergen, Tamsin Blaxter, and Tara Garnett.
Music by Blue dot sessions. We’ve got a few more episodes left in our nature
season, but I’ll need some time to finish editing them! It’s been both a sprint
and a marathon staying on top of weekly episodes. I’ll talk to you soon.