Religion, Animals, and Technology
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Issue Date
2022-05-18
Authors
Krone, Adrienne
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Keywords
Animals , Cultured meat , Technology , Judaism
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Abstract
Most beef cattle in the United States start their lives on pasture and finish them in crowded feedlots, releasing hundreds of pounds of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, before they are transported to a slaughterhouse, where they are killed and their bodies are sliced into steaks and ground into hamburgers. Until recently, the alternatives to this system were either meat produced in the less sustainable but more humane method of raising cattle solely on pasture and utilizing smaller-scale slaughterhouses or plant-based meat substitutes. The development of the first cultured beef burger in 2013, produced through tissue engineering, raised the possibility of a newer and better alternative. In this article, I use the example of cultured meat to argue that religion and technology are co-constitutive, that they shape and reshape each other, and that the intersection between religion and technology in meat production has had and continues to have a direct impact on animals raised for meat. Kosher meat, industrial or cultured, exemplifies the complexities in the relationship between religion, technology, and animals and will serve as the example throughout this article.
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Department
Philosophy and Religious Studies
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License
© 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Citation
Krone, A. Religion, Animals, and Technology. Religions 2022, 13, 456. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13050456
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Honors
Publisher
MDPI