BY JON HOCHSCHARTNER
Crossposted with Animal People Forum
Amidst all the suffering of the human world, there's an ongoing tragedy of incomprehensible scale that we choose to ignore. I'm talking about what we do to animals. We kill billions and billions of them for food every year. These sentient beings are raised in the most torturous conditions imaginable, before meeting their end on a mechanized slaughter-line.
It's a moral crime with which there are few parallels in history. Most of us know there's something wrong with our treatment of animals, but we try not to think about it —burying such concern deep in the back of our mind. We dismiss our compassion as misplaced sentimentality and create elaborate, frequently-unconscious rationales for why we should ignore it.

The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering.
What many are not aware of is an emerging technology that will make aligning our values and actions easier. Cultured meat is grown from animal cells without slaughtering nonhumans. It has the potential to remove unimaginable misery from our food system with little to no sacrifice on our part. In some ways, this sounds too good to be true, like promises on a late-night infomercial. But the science is real.
Dr. Mark Post created the first cultured-beef hamburger in 2013. It cost a whopping $280,000. Soon he thinks that price could be reduced to $10. Still, more research is required to make cultured meat economically competitive. This is too important to leave to the private sector. We need federal funding for cultured-meat development.

Cows in a large farm standing in feces. Animal agriculture, especially on a large scale, is a significant public health risk. Image credit Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals. (Courtesy Animal People Forum)
All captions by the editors not the authors
Meet the New Meat—Dr Mark Post
Cultured beef for food-security and the environment
^3000US citizens have no real political representation.
We don't live in a democracy. And our freedom is disappearing fast.
I don't want to be ruled by hypocrites, whores, and war criminals.
What about you? Time to push back against the corporate oligarchy.
And its multitude of minions and lackeys.