Photo by John Gress /
After my interest was piqued by her recent lengthy article in The Guardian, “Behind China’s ‘pork miracle’: how technology is transforming rural hog farming”, I decided to read Xiaowei Wang’s intriguingly titled book “Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside”. The US-based researcher, artist and activist provides a highly readable account of how digital technology is increasingly being applied to farming in China.
There is a growing awareness around the world of the economic benefits of better animal welfare on farms, with research that links highly industrialized meat production with environmental concerns, infections and particularly the potential spread of animal viruses to humans in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the case of China, the country has been able to use factory farming of some animals, particularly pigs, to scale up food production. What has allowed it to go from being a net importer to having sufficient surplus to not only cover its huge internal market, but also to export to other countries, are factories run more like consumer electronics plants — using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, traceability, etc. — than farms.
At the same time, new technologies are being used to grow meat in laboratories: Singapore has just been authorized the sale of chicken nuggets that have never been part of a live animal or near a feather, having been grown in in bioreactors from cell lines obtained from animal tissues.
A Dutch company, Meatable, says it can create pork in a laboratory with organoleptic characteristics similar to bacon; another, Memphis Meats, is producing chicken and duck meat. These meat alternatives have yet to find wide acceptance among the general public, but we can expect to see more products in our supermarkets or at fast-food chains from companies like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and many others dedicated to creating meat-like products from plants. The constraints posed by the pandemic and supply chain problems in the meat industry have led to an increase in the popularity of these alternatives, with the idea that by 2040, most of the meat we consume will not come from slaughterhouses.
The evidence shows that our unsustainable levels of meat production is contributing to the climate emergency, meaning we will either have to eat much less, with calls for factory farming to end before the end of the century. But what’s going on in China suggests the opposite: increasing industrialization, to the point of turning farms into assembly lines.
Which one of the two approaches is more reasonable: animals reared under relatively stress-free conditions but within vast complexes of factory farms, or meat obtained from cell culture in laboratories that has no connection to an animal? Will we accept either scenario if the survival of the planet depends on it?
