In August 2013, Mark Post, a professor of physiology at Maastricht University, held a press conference in a television studio kitchen in London. Lifting the silver lid from a platter, he revealed a creation that seemed very humble by culinary-TV standards: a round, palm-size patty of dark pink hamburger meat. But as Post explained, his burger was no ordinary chunk of beef. Instead of coming from the flesh of a slaughtered cow, the muscle fibers in the meat had been grown from cow cells in a lab. A chef pan-fried a few and served them to a panel of food critics, who praised the meat’s dense texture and the way the outside browned up in the pan, lamenting only the lack of salt, pepper, and ketchup.



The burgers were the result of cellular agriculture, an emerging field of biotechnology that uses tissue engineering to produce the edible products—fats, proteins, and trace minerals—that have traditionally come from livestock and farming. It is this technology (referred to variously as lab-grown meat, in vitro meat, animal-free meat, and clean meat), along with plant-based substitutes, that Jacy Reese’s The End of Animal Farming argues will put livestock farms out of business, without necessarily meaning the end of meat. In the future that Reese envisions, consumers will be able to choose from a variety of real meats, cultured in facilities resembling beer breweries, with no animals harmed in the making.

THE END OF ANIMAL FARMING by Jacy Reese Beacon Press, 240 pp., $27.95

Reese, an animal rights advocate from rural Texas, now lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée, their dog, and two rescue hens. (The hens, saved from factory farms, are medicated with something analogous to birth-control so that they won’t lay eggs, which, Reese says, lets them live longer and happier lives.) He came to animal advocacy circuitously, through his interest in effective altruism—using data analysis to figure out what actions will yield the greatest positive impact on the world. From there it was a short intellectual journey to his concern for the widely overlooked but vast issue of animal suffering. “Atrocities,” he writes, “rely on the exclusion of certain sentient beings from our moral consideration.” If we considered the treatment of the more than 100 billion farmed animals alive on the planet at this moment, most of which will be born into lives of miserable confinement, we would see our current industrial system of animal farming, Reese writes, as “a moral catastrophe.”

On matters of strategy, however, he differs sharply from other animal rights advocates, and has criticized PETA for its provocative publicity tactics, including the use of fat-shaming to promote a vegan diet, and a campaign to eliminate anti-animal language (which suggests substituting the saying “kill two birds with one stone” with “feed two birds with one scone”). “The word ‘PETA’ has become a pejorative for stunts, gimmicks, and putting feelings over facts when it comes to animal issues,” he wrote in the conservative publication Quillette last December. Reese believes, instead, that technology could render animal farming obsolete; rather than focusing on change at the grass roots, he makes scientists and entrepreneurs the heroes of his narrative. In the literature of meat-eating ethics—in which Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is the philosophically rigorous canonical text, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals the sentimental journey toward vegetarianism, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma the gourmand’s effort to balance conscience and appetite—Reese has carved out his own niche: the business-friendly techno-utopian optimist.

His approach resonates with a set of growing concerns about the effects of animal farming. Between warnings of livestock’s contributions to climate change and environmental degradation and increasing public awareness of the cruelties of factory farming, meatless tech is on the rise. In recent years, the Impossible Burger—made from a meaty-flavored, genetically engineered soy—launched to much buzz. You can now get them in a White Castle slider. The Economist declared 2019 the year of the vegan and forecast a plant-based future: A quarter of adults aged 25 to 34 say they are vegetarian or vegan. And the market is following their lead, with clean-meat startups and agribusiness giants investing in alternatives to animal protein. Noting that even Tyson Foods has bought a stake in a “plant-based meat” company, The Economist’s John Parker wrote that “even Big Meat is going vegan.”