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It's official - the coldest day in hell since Charlton Heston made good on his promise to deliver a firearm in his cold dead hands: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it supports "meat."

Far from just supporting meat, PETA is promoting a $1 million prize for any organization that can produce and market volumes of in vitro meat by June 2012. In vitro meat is meat tissue grown in culture in a controlled environment rather than in an animal body in a pasture, lot, sty or cage.

The echoes of Heston and "soylent green" are creepily present in the challenge to produce the nondescript tissue mass, though we are told that the cultures will be bred from stem cells of animals that we already traditionally eat, like chickens, cattle and swine.

The New York Times reported that PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has been "hoping to get the organization involved in advancing in vitro meat technology for at least a decade." However, the announcement has shocked PETA to its core as the "meat is murder" mantra will now be complicated by the idea that meat without skeletal, circulatory and nervous systems may not exactly be in a position to be murdered.

The Times further reported that Newkirk understands the move has initiated a "civil war" within PETA, with one PETA Vice President, Lisa Lange, maintaining the philosophy that "animals are not ours to eat," while Newkirk defends the support of body-less meat tissue in terms of actions that will lead to conditions in which "fewer animals suffer."

I am at once pleased, shocked and appalled by the announcement and the implications of separating our meat production from animals' bodies. The decision of what to eat has social, economic and environmental repercussions that need to be addressed. We have to consider the question of whether or not we should support further industrialization of meat-type food products, because in the answer we will at once betray and realize a belief in either pastoral or industrial narratives of utopian ideals.

PETA's problematic move only further complicates this discussion. In order to try to make itself relevant again, PETA has imposed its argumentative claim of animal ethics and rights directly into the midst of dialogue on livestock production's role in global climate change. Earlier this month there was an inaugural in-vitro meat symposium in Norway. The press surrounding this event seems to have provided the right conditions for PETA to impose itself in such a fashion and, in effect, attempt to hijack collective concern about climate change.

Continued...

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