Lab-produced meat will transform the world for the better. What are we waiting for?

Suppose we could create meat without exploiting other species?

Here’s a challenge. The next time you eat meat, try to think about what happens in an abattoir. I’m not asking you actually to visit one before you tuck in – most of us are well past the point where we could do that. I’m simply asking you to conjure in your mind the animal that made your burger: prematurely separated from its mother, castrated, its horns cauterised, fattened up, led to the slaughter.

We generally don’t think of these things when we lift a delicious bun-encased pattie of beef to our lips, any more than, when we listen to the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth, we contemplate the creatures whose guts made the violin strings. We like animals and we like eating animals. Uneasily aware of the contradiction, we tell ourselves that farming is more humane than it used to be.

It would be odd, indeed, not to like eating animals. Meat-hunger is a physical as well as a cultural phenomenon.

Many hunter-gatherer peoples have a specific word for it: “dyikioilu” to the Bantu, “nagi” to the Yanomami, “ubukashya” to the Bemba. In evolutionary terms, we are all hunter-gatherers: a few thousand years of agriculture have barely dented our primal impulses. We need protein, so we crave meat. Our modern minds may understand that Quorn is an adequate protein source, but our Stone Age genomes are not easily thrown off.

Peter Singer, the father of the animal rights movement, saw human progress as being about expanding circles of recognition. Our earliest ancestors would happily massacre people from outside the kin-group but, as our ethical sense developed, our moral circles widened to encompass tribes, then whole nations, then all humanity and, recently, even other species – apes having been granted legal entitlements in New Zealand.

You might regard bestowing rights on apes as silly but, to see how our circles have widened, ask yourself whether you’d enjoy eating a chimp. I put it to you that, however tasty its meat, its mournful, rubbery face would haunt you with every forkful.

Meat-hunger has prevented our circles expanding much further. Most scientists believe sentience (the capacity to feel subjectively) is common to mammals: there is no reason to assume that a cow’s pain on having her calf taken away is qualitatively different from any other mother’s. But – there’s no getting away from it – burgers are delicious.

Suppose, though, that there were a way to – as it were – square the circle. Suppose we could create meat without exploiting other species. Suppose that this new form of meat would free up millions of acres – not just from pastureland, but also from the wide spaces set aside for the production of feed grain. Suppose, further, that it would lead to a decline in greenhouse gas emissions.

Such a wonder may occur sooner than we think. Muscle cells from animals can be placed in a nutrient-rich medium to replicate indefinitely. What results is not a meat substitute, but actual meat, grown without all the animal parts that, from the point of view of the consumer, are surplus, such as eyes, hooves and a brain that can feel discomfort.

So far, the structure of animal meat hasn’t been replicated. Cultured beef – which is created by harvesting and multiplying muscle cells from a living cow – makes delicious mince, but can’t yet mimic a steak. But it surely won’t be long before that hurdle is cleared. Five years ago, a burger made from lab-produced meat cost £200,000; today, it has fallen to £8.

A new paper published by the Adam Smith Institute considers the revolutionary impact of the new technology. Around 85 per cent of Britain’s total land footprint is associated with animal products, and a shift from animal husbandry to cultured meat would mean a 99 per cent reduction in the surface area required.

Think what we could do with all that space. Some countryside would doubtless be kept as it is now, because of its beauty; much might be rewilded and reforested; and there would be plenty of room left over to solve our housing crisis definitively, easing the restrictions that cramp and impoverish us.

Livestock is responsible for 15 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, and the volume is rising as meat becomes more common in poor countries.

A study published in the Environmental Sciences and Technology Journal estimates that a move from animal husbandry to pure meat would cut agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by between 78 and 96 per cent

What stands in the way? American cattlemen have – understandably, I suppose – mobilised against their rival. There may also, at least initially, be a “yuck factor” about laboratory grown meat – although, if you think about it, it is less yucky by any definition than what happens in a slaughterhouse, as well as more hygienic and – as a bonus – less reliant on the use of antibiotics.

The main obstacles, though, are simply that researchers have not yet replicated the authentic texture of meat – muscle, fat, blood and the rest interleaved – and that costs have yet to fall.

But the gains – ethical, ecological and economic – are potentially so vast that it is surely only a matter of time before factory-made meat is on our supermarket shelves.

London is financing much of the research although, oddly, little of it is happening in this country, despite our world-beating universities and innovative biotech sector. What are we waiting for?