First cultivated hamburger, 2013. Photograph Source: Mosa Meat – CC BY 4.0

Like most progressives, I was thrilled by the results of the November 4 elections, which featured Democratic victories in just about every competitive race. Perhaps none was as inspiring as democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral vote. President Donald Trump and his fascist cronies seem to be unaware their authoritarian escalations are creating a left-wing backlash that will make the New Deal look like the Reagan years.

When we eventually dislodge these would-be tyrants from power, much will need to be done to ensure a similar right-wing power grab is never possible again. At a minimum, Democrats must prosecute fascist lawbreakers, regardless of who Trump might pardon, pack the openly-corrupt Supreme Court, which is deeply out-of-step with the American people, and add potentially liberal-leaning states to the union, like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Amidst this whirlwind of necessary reform, it’s my sincere hope Democrats will direct a massive infusion of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It offers a number of animal welfare, public health, and environmental benefits over slaughtered meat. The technology exists to create this protein, but it’s currently too expensive to mass produce.

The animal-welfare benefits of cultivated meat should be self-evident. Ideally, cellular agriculture would eventually displace animal agriculture, ushering in a more compassionate world, without battery cages, livestock trucks or slaughterhouses. However, even low adoption rates of cultivated meat have the potential to eliminate a greater amount of nonhuman suffering and premature death than traditional animal activism ever has up to this point.

Zoonotic diseases — which can spawn deadly, global pandemics — frequently trace their origin to close contact between humans and sick animals, as often occurs in the livestock industry. Since animals are removed from the process of creating cultivated meat, there would be no pandemic risk associated with its production. For this reason and others, such as the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals, the new protein would be a boon for public health.

Finally, many people aren’t aware that animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change. Any serious environmentalism must address the issue. Cheap, tasty cultivated meat provides a scalable solution to the problem. While the technology is, of course, still being developed, leading scientists believe the protein will eventually require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that raising and slaughtering animals does now.

After we defeat the fascists currently occupying the White House, Democrats should allocate a huge investment of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. The money could come from any number of places, including existing subsidies given to factory farms. In the meantime, Democrats at the state level should be funding cellular-agriculture development, as California and Massachusetts already have. Forward-thinking states should follow their lead.

We can create a kinder, healthier and more sustainable world. Accelerating growth of the nascent cultivated-meat industry will go a long way to helping us achieve this. Yes, technological hurdles remain for the protein to be successful, but there’s no reason to believe these can’t be overcome with further publicly-funded research. Democrats should build facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture at every farm school in the country.

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