A few things lend a particularly zeitgeist-y heft to this Graun essay about “cellular agriculture”, better known (perhaps to its due detriment) as “lab-grown meat”.

One of those things is, of course, its being very much of a piece with the more general trend of disillusionment with regard to the brash promises of technological progress to be delivered by venture capital; that it has been (re)published in the immediate aftermath of the striking volte face of the US midterms serves only to sharpen the point. This passage makes a pretty fine job of the jab:

There is a widespread feeling in the US that everything is a hoax or a Ponzi scheme, and this feeling is only reinforced by the news. The news that self-driving taxis, when they become confused, are actually operated remotely from the Philippines. The news that the mysterious invention that could scan your blood for any number of disorders was an era-defining scam. The news that the crypto entrepreneur who pledged to secure the longtime survival of the human race was actually stealing $8bn of his customers’ money to fund his polycule in the Bahamas. I became paranoid, standing in front of the abandoned car park, that cultivated meat was just another lie, or a semi-lie, or a bluff. That the reason the meat was so difficult to get my hands on was that it did not exist. The possible implosion of [cellular agriculture start-up] Believer was disappointing not just because it represented a setback in the quest to reduce our carbon emissions and fortify our food systems against climate collapse, but because it seemed to confirm that we live in a cheap, mendacious world, where what passes for progress almost always turns out to be a confidence game.

Selah. Also of particular professional interest is that we’ve reached a point where venues like the Graun (or Harpers, where this piece first appeared) are happy to run material in which the author engages with a framework such as Gartner’s well-known (but rarely well understood) Hype Cycle without simply taking it at face value; it’s early days, admittedly—and hell knows we’ve all been burned before!—but perhaps these are the green shoots of a journalism that has finally learned to mistrust all futurisms on principle, especially those most closely and obvious entangled with the tawdry litany of Business Bullshit?

Well, you can’t fault a guy for dreaming.

I would note in passing that I’ve always found the ethical argument for lab-grown meat to be quite spectacular in its contradictory incoherence. If what we call “factory farming” is bad—and I agree wholeheartedly that it is appalling!—then enthusiastically backing a form of farming in which the “factory” part is no longer metaphorical but literal seems very strange, for starters.

But to go from “this is a terrible thing to do to anything with a brain-stem” to “so how about we Do Science and brew up living animal tissue that never touches a nervous system at all!” is, for me at least, utterly insane. I assume it has something to do with a desire not to cause pain to creatures capable of feeling such, but it speaks to a rather underdeveloped ethical faculty that we get hung up on the suffering of individual creatures and fail to progress from there to the more systemic problem, namely the assumption that the “problems” of “nature” can be “solved” by “science”. Factory farming is an appalling indictment of the philosophy implicit within it; however, the worldview implied by “cellular agriculture” is more monstrous still, by orders of magnitude.

At every level, from the most simple to the most complex, life feeds on other life; all of these schemes, however well intended, have their root in an attempt to deny this truth, or to wish it away. It is only when we accept it, and accept at the same time our own mortality, that our agricultural ethics—and our ethics in general—will change in a substantive way.