By Paul Shapiro
Robots, unlike human workers, can’t catch covid-19. And in a world where in-person workplaces are increasingly difficult to manage, experts are predicting an oncoming wave of automation designed to reduce the risk of pandemic spread among employees.
Take for example, Flippy. A smart arm made by Miso Robotics, Flippy can not only flip burgers at fast food joints without fear of infecting its coworkers, it can use thermal imaging to determine if meat is undercooked. And of course, you don’t have to worry about whether Flippy washed its hands (or in its case, singular hand) before touching the food about to be served. Already, White Castle is reportedly testing Flippy at select locations.
While it’s certainly welcome that Flippy won’t risk spreading covid-19 in fast food kitchens, raising animals to produce the burgers Flippy is working on is actually a major pandemic risk in its own right. And the remedy to that risk is, ironically, more automation.
If ever there were a need for a safer, more automated food production process, it’s in our meat industry. Right now, we breed into existence billions upon billions of farm animals each year, living creatures who require extensive resources (food, water, land, etc.) for months or years before we slaughter them. The inefficiency of this system is well-publicized, as is the fact that it’s a leading driver of deforestation, antibiotic resistance, climate change, biodiversity loss, animal welfare concerns, and more.
But factory farming of animals is also an amplifier of pandemic risk. Cramming thousands of animals beak-to-beak or snout-to-snout inside of windowless warehouses where they live in their own waste gives illnesses like bird flu and swine flu an easy pathway to becoming human-infectious. Such an outbreak could potentially make covid-19 look like a dress rehearsal.
That’s why a large group of scientists, including Jane Goodall, recently sent an open letter to the world’s biggest financial institutions urging them to stop funding industrial animal agriculture. These experts argue that if we raised fewer animals for food, among other benefits, we’d reduce the risk of the next pandemic.
Just one problem: Humanity keeps demanding more and more meat. Per capita meat consumption is on the rise around the globe, including the U.S., and the current pandemic has only accelerated that trend.
So if our species seemingly can’t get enough meat but our planet isn’t big enough to produce all that meat sustainably, what to do? Turns out that automating meat production by divorcing it from animals is among the best solutions.
It’s helpful to remember that few people eat meat because of the fact that animals are raised and slaughtered for it. In reality, many people eat meat in spite of that fact, and they’d be just as happy to eat meat if it didn’t come out of a once-living animal’s body.
That’s why hundreds of millions of dollars have recently been pumped into “cultivated meat” start-ups, those ventures that are growing real meat from animal cells rather than from animal slaughter. Admirably, even the federal government is investing in this cleaner meat future, with the National Science Foundation recently awarding UC-Davis $3.5 million for cultivated meat research.
Such automation of meat production, in which we bypass the factory farm altogether in favor of just growing the meat we want in clean, humane, and efficient conditions, would go a long way toward safeguarding humanity.
Other companies are pursuing strategies not of growing animal cells into burgers and nuggets, but of just making foods that look and taste like meat, yet are made from plant protein rather than animal protein. Hardly a month goes by that we don’t hear of a major meat company releasing its own brand of plant-based meat that it claims will satisfy the most diehard fans of carnivory. Several meat companies are also going the Prius route, hybridizing their animal meats with plant protein to improve efficiency and reduce their footprint.
All of these steps are welcome advancements in the effort to build a safer, more resilient meat production system.
Sure, there may be some consumers who want meat produced tomorrow the way it was yesterday. There are still print film enthusiasts today and no one’s stopping them from developing their gelatin film reels in darkrooms. But many people are quite happy to fulfill the same purpose—documenting our memories—in the more efficient and automated way that digital film allows. Similarly, many people will be quite content to enjoy foods that fulfil the same pleasures meat brings in a more automated and efficient way too, especially when the environmental, animal welfare, and pandemic prevention benefits are so clear.
So bring on Flippy. We should welcome ways to keep our lives as safe as possible in these times. But let’s also think about the burgers Flippy is cooking and embrace safer, more automated meat production to make those burgers a lot safer, too.
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.