Jobs, land and lab-grown meat

There have been a slew of articles in recent weeks about lab-grown meat (‘schmeat’), a development looking ever less like science fiction and more like something we’ll be chowing down on in the next couple of years. As a guilty but enthusiastic consumer of meat, this is obviously welcome news. But it also raises major questions — what happens to people’s jobs when technology rides roughshod over yet another industry, and what the hell do we do with all that land?

Far from being an industrial disaster in the making however, schmeat may well present us with an almost unrivalled opportunity — not just to mitigate the effects of climate change through reduced methane gas emissions and farming-industry energy consumption — but even to roll back climate change, improve food security, boost the economy and solve our housing crisis too.

Freed up farming land could be converted to woodland, lakes and meadows. Trees are far and away the easiest and most reliable form of carbon capture, whilst ‘re-wilding’ land provides opportunities for threatened flora and fauna to flourish and spread through the expansion of habitats and the creation of new biological corridors between existing habitats. Rewilding has been shown to have widespread environmental benefits, delivering cleaner water and reducing soil erosion. Local people and economies benefit too, as tourism booms and new and more diverse jobs are created, as the case of the National Forest has demonstrated. Other locations could be used to host huge solar power plants, harnessing the sun’s energy and reducing or eliminating reliance on coal, oil and gas (not to mention our reliance on a series of dodgy regimes). Farming land in suitable locations could be converted to use for fruit and vegetable growing, massively reducing Britain’s reliance on imported produce and reducing food miles to boot. And the release of so much farming land, much of which is environmentally neutral at best, coupled with the rewilding of many locations, could reduce understandable squeamishness about building on the green belt, finally allowing constrained major cities to expand as they see fit. Coupled with some smart town planning and environmentally-aware architecture, our new neighbourhoods could set new standards for energy efficiency, water use and reliance on petrol-fuelled cars, creating a new generation of ‘climate jobs’.

Perhaps I’m dreaming. Perhaps it’s too late. But I do wonder if schmeat might deliver more than a guilt-free burger.