The meat industry is one of the biggest contributors to warming. It has had such a harmful impact on climate change ‘roughly equivalent to all the driving and flying of every car, truck and plane in the world’ – Greenpeace, which is quite a terrifying fact. It is detrimental to the forests and is a direct cause of deforestation and the cause of wildfires, deforestation, in turn, releases tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere further impacting our climate change crisis.

The meat industry not only has caused huge harm to the environment, but it has also caused harm to us humans, people get protective and violent over their land and animals and it has resulted in the death of many people. Furthermore, the hygiene of meat production and meat markets a lot of the time is abysmal and alongside deforestation is a huge cause of the spread of disease, not only within animals themselves, but to us humans like the COVID pandemic which has killed over 6 and a half million people.

‘Piglets are crowded in the nursery phase at Greg Boerboom’s farm in Marshall, Minn. on May 11, 2020. Coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants.’ 

We either need to cut out meat entirely, worldwide, and live off a plant based diet or we find some sort of solution to the over fed, over crammed, livestock situation. One alternative to this, which I found when researching, could be cultured meat. This is meat that is scientifically created through exponential cell growth in bioreactors. The cells are extracted from a living animal, who will continue to go on living after the extraction, thereby solving the need for the incessant killing of animals. The cell is then fed with a media which radiology increase the number of cells, finally resulting in the muscle and fat cells, the scaffolding of meat. This is still meat in every sense, it is just potentially an unconventional, process which would take a lot longer to create then just killing an animal. However, it would directly save the lives of both animals and humans alike and is a lot more sustainable.

The meat industry / Matilda Tidmarsh / Environmental Design: Materials, Ecologies, Futures (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0