Alex Crisp is a prolific writer with a background in law, education, and activism. He hosts a podcast called Future of Foods Interviews, in which he discusses the food landscape in the near and distant future with academics, business leaders, and industry influencers.
In this opinion piece, Alex reflects on his early experiences growing up on a dairy farm and makes a compelling case for the adoption of cell-cultivated dairy. Alex explores how this revolutionary biotechnology could liberate animals from the food chain, address ethical dilemmas, and create a more compassionate and sustainable future — without asking humans to sacrifice the foods they love.
Why I Believe in Cell-Cultivated Meat and Dairy
By Alex Crisp host of Future of Foods Interviews
I grew up on a dairy farm in central England on which my step-father was a Dairyman – which means he milked the cows, using the ‘sucking machines’. The dog and I regularly huffed down through the fields in wellies (me in wellies, not the dog) at 5am, to rouse the cows for milking so that he, my step father, could have an extra hour in bed.
I spent a good deal of my time during these early foggy romps trying to work out why the cows put up with it, why they didn’t decide between themselves to stage an uprising. I would have sided with them if they had. It was obvious how much bigger than us they were, that there were more of them and that they didn’t enjoy being woken up so early.
If they had risen up and stampeded, they’d have caused all sorts of trouble – broken fences and bones, etc and perhaps caused a national emergency. Instead, and without fuss, they lifted from their sleep, relieved themselves in torrents, and trudged begrudgingly up the muddy track to the parlour for breakfast. This they did 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with no time off for holidays or good behaviour.

Often, I’d lean on the gates which penned them in and communicate my confusion. Whispering words of encouragement, “Rise up cows, rise up and escape!” – whispering for fear of upsetting those locals worried about cattle-led revolution. But, I often wonder how things might have been different if I had shouted instead of whispered. If I’d insisted on making my voice heard, would things have been different?
Because, bovine incitement has never been a public order offence and so I was within my legal rights to shout. If I had had the courage as a boy, we could now have cows in the Cabinet Office or attending UN committee meetings – maybe even they’d be in positions of real power like Prime Minister or President or in charge of Twitter (X). Perhaps then we could expect real change.
The limits of animal liberation
But, I’ve learned over time that despite it being perfectly legal to try, rousing cows to rebel against their farmer captors is about as easy to achieve as teaching Ravens to swim and even harder when you whisper.
Ever since these early morning walks, the idea of cow emancipation, through guilt or conviction, has stayed with me. But now, with the more mature realisation that the cows cannot (or refuse to) liberate themselves, I’ve become curious about how we humans can do it for them.
We are on the brink of something significant in our food production, something big enough to be called a revolution. So, could such a revolution lead to a massive leap forward in human evolution?
In my view, the following two statements are true.
- Mass human behaviour is hard to control or change. Politicians and advertisers have spent billions trying to do so and still haven’t achieved 100% success. Although they seem to be getting closer.
- Persuading people absolutely, to stop ‘enjoying’ doing something that they’ve been enjoying for thousands of years, seems like a largely impossible thing to achieve.
So, when I learned that there was a way of liberating the farm animals, without limiting what humans can enjoy or asking them to change their behaviour – it seemed like a very good idea. This new ‘way’ involves biotechnology – and includes cultivated meat/dairy and precision fermentation. Such technology, with which animal products such as meat, milk and leather can be grown from the cells of animals, outside of the animals.
This technology is altogether more efficient than the animals themselves. It promises a world in which we get to love the animals and eat them, too – a world in which we can drink the milk of a cow without taking away its calves. In this new biotech-rich world, humans can care about the animals they love without hypocrisy, and they don’t need to change a single thing about what they enjoy doing. They get to enjoy all those things they love with no guilt. As I understand humanity, we (most of us at least) don’t enjoy killing animals, we’d rather not kill, hence why all the brutal stuff takes place behind closed doors where we can ignore it. If there were regular school trips to the local abattoir, I’d bet my last pound that most of the population would be vegetarian.

Reframing “natural”
The idea of eating meat grown in a laboratory produced by men in white coats can sound worrying and perhaps unnatural too, to many. It appears to be a common perception that the past is ‘natural’ and the future, as it develops further away from the way things ‘used to be’, is unnatural. So, the more we develop technology, the less natural we become. With this in mind, perhaps the only natural way to eat meat is to run around in a loin cloth and spear the animal to death before tearing the meat from its bones.
It’s been a good long while since most people have engaged in this sort of food shopping. These days this sort of behaviour is left to the toffs in jodhpurs. How natural does it seem to drink milk from the teat of another species? The whole thing seems kind of weird when you think about it. But because we’ve become accustomed to it – it’s now normal and natural to us. Discussing the naturalness of meat grown from cells versus the naturalness of meat gathered up from a conveyor belt of death seems to me to be a bit of a misnomer.
In my view, the following two statements are true:
- Unless there is some state-sponsored reason for it, steps are taken to taper human’s ability or desire to be violent towards another human. That state-sponsored reason is war.
- Most civilised countries prohibit cruelty towards animals unless the cruelty is for the purpose of food.
“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Technology as a tool for compassion
Imagine that a technology existed which meant humans no longer had a reason to be violent towards other humans. I’d like to think, despite what Dostoevsky said, that most decent people would pour all their time and money into developing this technology to its maximum capacity and that in this aim at least, they would ignore the usual sociopaths pushing in the other direction.
As I see it, this is what’s happening now, but it’s technology to release animals from violence. Technology exists, which means we no longer need to kill animals for food. So do the same rules apply – are most decent people willing to pour their time and money into developing the technology, or are we letting the sociopaths win the battle over minds? Yes, it will take time and expense to perfect and scale the technology, but if the end result is a world with less violence – be it human-focused or animal-focused – what is the good reason not to do it – profit for farmers? Are we more interested in going to Mars or in making cowboys richer than we are in encouraging a more compassionate society?
“If we chose to stop killing when the opportunity presents itself, it suggests that there is a light for us as human”
We are at a crossroads in regards to which future we choose for the animals. If we choose, even with all the viable alternatives, to continue to slaughter them for food, it implies that we just enjoy killing, and that our bloodlust is inherent and irreversible and that Dostoevsky was right. It implies that perhaps there’s no hope for us. But if we chose to stop killing when the opportunity presents itself, it suggests that there is a light for us as humans – and perhaps we can build on that because I genuinely believe that most humans are good and decent people who want to do the right thing.
So, is it further and larger industrial farming, growing the brutal animal factories, in order to accommodate the growing global demand for protein? Or do we move towards removing animals from the food chain by using precision fermentation and cell cultivation and thus look towards becoming a more efficient and compassionate human race?