Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture

Synthetic meat products promise to serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that can replace meat made through conventional animal agriculture. At least some of the excitement about these products stems from ethical and moral concerns regarding animal welfare, environmental costs, and human health. A governing idea behind the creation of substitute meat is that consumers will recognize the ethical and moral concerns of conventional production and substitute one (better) product for another (worse) product. This approach, however, overlooks a much more practical complication: the problem of indifference. That is,–consumer demand does not in practice greatly hinge on the well-known moral issues in conventional animal agriculture, as evident by the immense scale of the current meat market. In this paper, we ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. We suggest that thinking about the challenge in this way reveals powerful presuppositions that confuse our thinking about the potential of synthetic meat. Rather than understanding synthetic meat in terms of its substitution value, we propose approaching the challenge of synthetic meat from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes the complications of “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems. We argue instead that synthetic meat offers an exciting and novel product, but likely not a substitute that will displace the conventional protein industry.