He went to church, loved his children and paid his gambling debts. He simply lived in a world where a certain kind of cruelty was so ordinary that it became invisible. Today, we look back on it in disbelief. A hundred years from now, someone will look at us in exactly the same way, and it will most likely be because of animals.<\/p>
The numbers are almost impossible to comprehend. Every year, between 72 and 80 billion land animals are killed in slaughterhouses worldwide, about 95% of them chickens. We can’t even count the fish: estimates run into the hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions, each year. This isn’t some marginal corner of the economy. It’s practically an economy of its own\u2014a state within a state.<\/p>
Then there’s the sheer arithmetic absurdity. A widely cited analysis by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, published in Science in 2018 and based on data from nearly 39,000 farms, found that animal products use about 83% of the world’s farmland and account for most food-related emissions, while providing just 18% of the calories we consume. We’re eating the planet to produce a modest amount of protein in an extraordinarily inefficient way.<\/p>
And this is precisely the economy that’s beginning to creak at the seams, because an alternative has emerged that doesn’t require killing and is much friendlier to the planet. In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in the world to approve bioreactor-grown meat for sale: Eat Just chicken grown from cells, without the bird. The United States followed in June 2023. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave its approval on June 21, and by July 1, cultivated chicken was being served at two restaurants. One was run by Dominique Crenn, a chef with three Michelin stars, the other by Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s. So this wasn’t some underground tasting for activists. It was closer to fine dining.<\/p>
Speaking of fine dining, the obvious question is: how much does it cost? The first lab-grown burger, unveiled in London in August 2013 by Mark Post’s team, cost \u20ac250,000 and was funded by a Google co-founder. Post now works at Dutch company Mosa Meat, which announced in late 2025 that it had cut production costs by 99.999% compared with that first prototype. A bioreactor-grown patty is now down to the low tens of euros and is aiming for restaurant menus. Mosa Meat is already working with 1,000-liter tanks in Maastricht.<\/p>
That’s a pace worth dwelling on. The cost curve is falling the way the cost of genome sequencing or solar panels once did. And when something cheaper also becomes morally easier to live with, history usually knows which way it’s going. Just a decade ago, cell-cultivated meat was a laboratory curiosity for billionaires. Today, though still exotic, it can already be found on restaurant menus.<\/p>
Science fiction, as usual, got there first. In her novel Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood imagined ChickieNobs, brainless growths raised solely for meat: no heads, no eyes, nothing that could suffer or protest. Readers recoiled in disgust. Twenty years later, it turns out that the version without the grotesque part\u2014meat grown in stainless steel rather than inside an animal’s body\u2014is already on sale. Paolo Bacigalupi went further in his collection Pump Six and Other Stories (2008), depicting a world in which nature has been redesigned from scratch and animals, in the old sense of the word, have become museum curiosities. Both visions share one idea: the animal as a source of protein is becoming an anachronism.<\/p>
So let’s return to my favorite perspective: a person from the 26th century reading about our times. \u201cWait. They raised sentient creatures in cramped sheds, then slit their throats on an assembly line, by the billions, every year? Even though they had the technology to produce exactly the same meat without killing anything? And they kept doing it because it was cheaper and because that’s what they were used to?\u201d<\/p>
The answer is yes. Just as our ancestors had their teeth drilled without anesthesia, reeked after going weeks without bathing and drank cholera-contaminated water because that’s what they were used to.<\/p>
I’ve written that we should call our era the late-animal age, because we still live like animals: finding food, getting sick and dying. But the term has another layer. We’re late-animal also because we’re only just learning not to eat other animals. The slaughterhouse will end up in a museum alongside the latrine, the dental drill and the shackles. And our descendants will ask, as they always do: seriously, they really lived like that? The bioreactor is already bubbling.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1789, a respectable European could own another human being and sleep soundly at night. He wasn’t a monster…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":20320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[832,796,805],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-20355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-picks","category-hai-premium-2","category-law-and-ethics"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20356,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20355\/revisions\/20356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20355"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=20355"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=20355"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=20355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}