3046. The Ever-Present Danger of Nuclear Holocaust

By Sergey Radchenko, The New York Times, October 9, 2018

President Richard Nixon speaking with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the Middle East crisis during a meeting at the White House in October 1973. Photo: Harvey George/Associated Press.

Editor's note: Humanity faces three existential threat: climate catastrophe, the Sixth Extinction, and a nuclear holocaust.  This Op-Ed piece from The New York Times is about the ever-present danger of a nuclear war as it almost happened in October 1973. When the United States detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, reciting a passage from an ancient Hindu text said: “Now I become death, destroyer of worlds.”  On August 6 and 9, the United States detonated two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Soon, the Soviet Union also acquired the bomb and today several other countries have many nuclear weapons.  In October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union were facing off with nuclear weapons. On May 4, 2018, it was reported that President Trump had considered attacking North Korea known to be armed with nuclear weapons. On October 6, The New York Times reported a proposed plan in 1968 to use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war.  And these are only the episodes we know about.  We must demand an end to all nuclear weapons beginning in the United States which is currently on a one trillion dollars plus program of expanding its arsenal.  KN

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A nuclear standoff. One leader is drunk. The other is delirious. The underlings scramble to avoid the worst. This is not an end-of-the-world Hollywood thriller, or an episode in President Trump’s erratic diplomacy. It is a story of how the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on a collision course in the Middle East.

The Yom Kippur War, fought over several weeks in October 1973, was a tumultuous conflict between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria. The war ended with a decisive victory for Israel, but even 45 years later, questions about the roles played by the two Cold War superpowers remain.

Now, new documents, collected and translated by the Wilson Center, show the Kremlin in disarray, desperately trying to help Egypt, one of its most important client states. For many years we thought the aggressive Soviet behavior during the war was a ploy to undercut American influence or gain access to oil or warm-water ports. The new evidence suggests it was simply a case of bad crisis management.

On the morning of Oct. 6, 1973, taking advantage of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria began a coordinated assault on Israel in a bid to retake the territories lost in the Arab-Israeli War six years earlier. Bolstered by a Soviet airlift, the Egyptians and the Syrians made early gains before Israel reclaimed the initiative on the battlefield. Ignoring a United Nations Security Council call for a cease-fire, the Israelis pressed on.

Two weeks later in Washington, while the war continued, President Richard Nixon forced out his attorney general and deputy attorney general, then fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox. This Saturday Night Massacre unleashed a political firestorm and Mr. Nixon, bending in the face of all the fury, sought solace in drink.

Late in the evening of Oct. 24, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received an alarming letter from the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, addressed to the president. The situation in the Middle East had reached a dangerous point, Mr. Brezhnev told Mr. Nixon. Moscow and Washington had to act jointly to rein in the Israelis. And if the Americans demurred, the Soviets might act unilaterally and send in troops.

When Mr. Brezhnev’s message arrived, Mr. Nixon was reported to be indisposed; Mr. Kissinger and the White House chief of staff, Alexander Haig, decided not to wake him up. Instead, Mr. Kissinger called together a meeting of principals to consider America’s response. They moved the nuclear alert level to Defcon 3, the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.

Declassified documents reveal that the move was not just a reaction to mounting Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean, as was long reported, but to intelligence reports of a Soviet ship with nuclear cargo heading for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The obvious conclusion was that Moscow was opportunistically using the Watergate scandal to make inroads at Mr. Nixon’s expense. As Mr. Kissinger put it, “The Soviets see that he is, in their mind, nonfunctional.” As American forces around the world went on heightened alert, there were unanswered questions: Why would Mr. Brezhnev do something like this? Was he just bluffing?

Some of these questions now have answers. We know today that Mr. Brezhnev’s threat to send in troops was not the only crazy idea he had. At the height of the crisis, prodded by incessant pleas for help from Egypt’s president, Anwar el-Sadat (calls came in the middle of the night), the irate Soviet leader asked the Politburo to consider additional measures, like parking a Soviet naval force off Tel Aviv, or allowing Egypt to strike deep inside Israel with Soviet-supplied rockets.

These aggressive moves were very uncharacteristic of Mr. Brezhnev’s generally cautious approach to foreign policy. What happened? His daily schedule — recently declassified — tells a part of the story.

Since the outbreak of the fighting, Mr. Brezhnev often worked virtually around the clock, holding Politburo meetings during the day, receiving delegations at night and speaking to Cairo on the phone in between. On Oct. 22, he went to his favorite hunting lodge, Zavidovo, to recuperate. But according to his secretaries, he stayed up at night, even calling his Kremlin office at 2 a.m. It was at Zavidovo that Mr. Brezhnev composed his letter to Mr. Nixon, and also his request to the Politburo, calling for tougher measures.

The letter was sent. But the tougher measures were quietly torpedoed. Someone in the Soviet leadership realized that the general secretary was going off the rails.

Then, on Oct. 29, the head of the K.G.B. (and Mr. Brezhnev’s eventual successor), Yuri Andropov, sent his boss a curious letter, warning him that the Americans and Mr. Sadat had conspired to overwork him by constantly keeping him engaged in difficult decision-making. This was “sabotage,” Mr. Andropov argued, pure and simple. The Americans and the Egyptians were trying to “keep us focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict, creating overstrain for all, and especially for you.”

Mr. Andropov knew what Mr. Kissinger did not: Mr. Brezhnev had developed an addiction to sleeping pills that, combined with alcohol, was undermining his ability to think straight. Mr. Andropov learned of the addiction weeks before the war in the Middle East but refused to intervene. Mr. Brezhnev’s erratic behavior during the war convinced Mr. Andropov of the dangers of inaction. Some of the details remain murky but Mr. Andropov and possibly other senior leaders evidently played a quiet role in keeping their country’s leader from sleepwalking into a world war.

Mr. Brezhnev soon recovered his mental faculties. The American escalation to Defcon 3 had a sobering effect on him. The last thing he wanted was a nuclear war with the United States courtesy of an unreliable, trigger-happy Middle Eastern client.

Go beyond the headlines and behind the curtain with Frank Bruni’s candid reflections on politics, culture, higher education and more every week.

Before too long, however, the Soviet Union was embroiled in conflicts in Africa and in 1979 invaded Afghanistan. It is doubtful that Mr. Brezhnev, his health worsening by the day, even realized the gravity of the situation. When he died, in November 1982, the Soviet empire was impossibly overextended and internationally isolated. All of that happened on Mr. Brezhnev’s watch, or, rather, while he slumbered.

Forty-five years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union managed to avoid a war. Some of that was thanks to intervention by Mr. Andropov and others, but at least some, undoubtedly, was pure luck for the Soviets. If there is a lesson today’s leaders should heed, it is that in the end, luck always runs out.

3045. The EPA and the Chemical Industry: A Cosy Alliance

By Jonathan Latham, Against the Grain, October 10, 2018

Editor's note: The Environmental Protection Agency is tasked with safeguarding the public from toxic exposure.  But Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Research Project, says that The Poison Papers — an enormous trove of documents — indicate that the EPA and the chemical industry often work hand in hand to mislead us into thinking that toxic chemicals are safe for human use. The program is one hour but very much worth listening to. Latham's writings have been featured on Our Place in the World before.  KN

Audio link: https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=296190

3044. A War on Wildlife

By Dominic Jermey, The Guardian, October 4, 2018

Around 100 million sharks are killed a year, mostly for their fins.
Above shark fins on the rooftop to keep them out of sight. 

Civil war is devastating. Until the Taliban booted me out of Afghanistan in 1998 – I was the last western diplomat to go – I had a front-row seat on the impact that sustained war has on a people and an economy. I returned to work in Afghanistan twice in the years after that expulsion, and by the time I left Kabul last year, after a stretch as the British ambassador to Afghanistan, I had seen change for the better.

Coming to the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), I have a front-row seat on a different kind of war: the war on wildlife. The illegal wildlife trade has catastrophic impacts on people and animals. The annihilation of wildlife by organised criminal gangs is violent, bloody, corrupt and insidious. It robs communities of their resources, their independence, their opportunities and their dignity. It strips their homes of beauty and diversity. It may even cost some people their lives. And we are all losers as the creatures with which we share this planet are pillaged to extinction.

While war and terrorist atrocities make daily headlines, the horrors being waged on wildlife slide under the radar: 100 million sharks killed every year, mostly for their fins; 20,000 African elephants slaughtered annually for their ivory; more than 1,000 rhinos poached every year from South Africa alone. And there has been a huge decline in the size of wildlife populations since 1970. In human terms, that’s like losing the entire population of Asia from the world. Wildlife crime is a key factor in those losses, sharing blame with overpopulation, deforestation and agriculture, to name but a few.

Perhaps the illegal wildlife trade lacks the visceral fear factor of novichok or terrorism to wake the world up to the harm being perpetrated. But while we dither, more species are being wiped out – an elephant is killed for its tusks every 25 minutes. The growth of the illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest causes of extinction. It is driven by well-armed and resourced criminal gangs operating on an industrial scale.

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Next week the government is convening an international conference on the illegal wildlife trade in London. It is a critical opportunity to shine another spotlight on the atrocity of wildlife crime and to ensure the international community works together on collective solutions.

What we don’t need is to negotiate more treaties or agreements. We have already got the mechanisms we need to halt the trade. We need political will and action to implement the laws that are already in place and to address demand. China’s closure of its domestic ivory market is welcome, but only a first step. We also need to support the people on the frontline – the rangers who risk their lives to protect wildlife, and the communities reliant on wildlife to survive. This is a war that, together, we can win.

3043. We Need to Talk About Technology: A Response to Leigh Phillips Techno-Fix "Solutions"

By Simon Pirani, The Ecologist, October 5, 2018

Low-Energy Housing

Housing for working people is becoming as central an issue for labour and social movements in the twenty first century as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth. And not just decent housing, but housing that is comfortable, aesthetically pleasing – and, crucially, low energy, zero energy or even energy positive. 

Here is a wonderful opportunity for our movement to get a grip on technology. We can and should find ways to bring the experience of architects and energy conservation engineers into discussions about housing among community activists and building workers.

A good example of how not to do this is the call for mass installation of air conditioners, made by Leigh Phillips in his article, In Defense of Air Conditioning published by Jacobin. 

Improved design

The problem that Phillips purports to address – the cruel effect of heat on millions of urban residents, during summers such as 2018’s – is real enough.

The need to provide ourselves with homes that shelter us from extreme heat as well as colder weather – something ruling classes down the ages have never done for working people – is indisputable. 

But Phillips’s techno-fix – mass AC installation, supported by a grand expansion of nuclear and hydro power – is not the answer. He sounds like someone proposing the state-funded distribution of armour-plated BMWs to parents demanding safe cycle routes to school for their children.

Better temperature control can and should be achieved not in the first place by AC, but mainly by better building design, better insulation and better urban planning, in the context of better ways of living generally.

This ABC of AC is widely understood by three groups of people, ignored in Phillips’s article, who spend time thinking about our homes: community groups organising on housing issues; building workers and architects; and energy conservation researchers. 

Radical municipalism

Community groups in London, where I live, are battling against right-wing Labour councils that neglect social housing for working people and strike deals with profiteering property developers.

A grass roots alliance last year defeated such a deal in Haringey and reprioritised social housing: the potential for 'radical municipalism', to renew cities for their people in ecologically sustainable ways, was spelled out by Gordon Peters, one of the group’s organisers. 

Owen Hatherley, a socialist writer on architecture, in a recent call for the Labour Party to get its act together on housing, argued that Labour “ought to look at scaling up the small-scale experiments made in low-energy and zero-carbon construction” by community groups in Leeds and Bristol. 

This potential for low-energy and zero-carbon building seems to have passed Phillips by.

Low-energy housing

Building workers and architects, by contrast, are well aware of these potentialities.

In the UK labour movement, the example of City Building in Glasgow, a union-linked co-operative that builds low-energy housing stock, is often mentioned. It uses site-appropriate combinations of solar thermal, photovoltaic, combined heat and power, ground and air source heat pumps and optimisation technologies. 

Architects understand perfectly that while AC may sometimes help to cool buildings, it is usually the wrong answer.

When The Economist, that bible of neoliberalism, last month gave qualified support to expanding AC, Richard Lorch of Building Research & Information responded, in a letter to the magazine, that “cities often exacerbate high temperatures” by the heat-island effect; that the micro-climate of streets had to be taken into account; that “it is far better to create cities and buildings that can provide thermal comfort with little energy demand”; and that “the capabilities and technologies exist to provide an alternative to AC”. 

Passive techniques 

Energy conservation researchers have been writing about those capabilities for at least 40 years.

Amory Lovins, in his classic 1977 pamphlet Soft Energy Paths, estimated – relying partly on analysis by the American Institute of Architects – that design improvements could save 50 percent or more of energy use in offices and 80 percent in some new houses.

The passage of time, and the ballooning of the property development and construction industries, has only amplified this point. 

Researchers have repeatedly argued that good insulation, high-reflective materials, shading, windows with low solar heat gain, and “passive” techniques such as underground earth pipe cooling can be combined, in most conditions, to give as good temperature control as energy-intensive heating and cooling systems.

Engineers have proposed that, where AC is essential, oversize systems be avoided and solar power be used.

A research group at Cambridge University synthesised years of advances in building and materials use and reached similar conclusions. 'Passivhaus' techniques could reduce energy consumption in buildings, mostly for heating and cooling, by 83 percent, they showed. 

Electricity networks

The Global Energy Assessment (2012) summarised dozens of academic publications on building design, and concluded that they can achieve reductions in gross energy requirements of upwards of 75 percent in new buildings, and upwards of 50 percent in existing buildings.

It is not that that labour and social movements might never want AC fitted anywhere. But it is a myopic and outdated place to start.

Phillips's approach to electricity generation is little better. He acknowledges that AC is very energy-intensive, but claims that nuclear and hydro – and, as he specifies in another article, with a co-author, “a vast build-out of dependable base-load electricity” from those sources – can easily provide the necessary non-fossil energy.

He seems unaware of, or uninterested in, the last 30-plus years of changes in electricity networks, towards decentralised renewable generation and better-integrated distribution.

The trend towards ever-bigger, more centralised, generation started to reverse in the 1980s, with combined-cycle gas turbines (which can easily be used in power stations smaller than earlier coal- or gas-fired ones), and cogeneration (i.e. plants that produce electricity and heat).

Decentralised generation 

Since the turn of the century, a much greater degree of decentralisation in generation, and better ways of integrating intermittent renewable sources (i.e. wind that doesn’t always blow and sun that doesn’t always shine), have become possible, thanks to networked computing. 

Phillips objects to what he calls “a return to the small and local”, and portrays it as an approach by “greens”, who want to replace multinationals with small businesses.

This is a misrepresentation of where electricity technology is at. The discussion among electrical engineers has, for several years now, focused on further step-changes in computing (so called “smart grids”), that pave the way for systems dominated by renewables and help deal with the always knotty problem of storing electrical energy. For a summary, see Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley; for details see e.g. the multiple volumes edited by Fereidoon Sioshansi.

There is potential both in decentralised generation and in more integrated – and in that sense, centralised – networks. The main obstruction to this potential is the corporations that control the systems.

Why, then, should socialists focus on nuclear power - almost always, and everywhere, linked to militarism - and centralised hydro - which has time and time again been fought against by people in the global south, and indigenous people in Canada, for example, whose communities have been threatened, or wrecked, by it?

Fighting back 

As many people who think about electricity – from social democratic enthusiasts for energy cooperatives, to engineers working on off-grid systems in the global south – are well aware, the danger is not decentralised generation technologies, or integrated (centralised) networks, but that the multinationals will find ways of enclosing it and commodifying these.

How to fight back against them? That is the discussion that matters. 

Phillips’s arguments on AC are underpinned by four ideological fixations about technology that can only obstruct the development of socialist thinking. 

First, Phillips identifies an element of good living – being able to keep cool in the summer – with a consumer product, AC. A convincing riposte to Phillips, by Aaron Vansintjan in The Ecologist, deals with this point.

Vansintjan wrote: “Let’s not confuse ‘the right to be cool’ with the right to a consumer good [...] There are plenty of cool alternatives, involving rethinking urban design and how we use public space.” The way towards these alternatives, Vansintjan argued, is “a political movement that links people’s needs to their capacity to have more control over their own lives”.

Capitalist control 

Second, Phillips falsely paints each and every expression of doubt about the efficacy of AC as part of a pro-austerity, anti-worker environmentalism. People who advocate passive cooling systems, or suggest that some rich world citizens could turn the AC down a little, are lumped together with Pope Francis, who cited AC as a “harmful habit of consumption”.

Having a go at the Pope is an easy crowd-pleaser in a socialist publication. And of course there are strands of environmentalism that focus on moralistic appeals to reduce individual consumption, rather than the technological, social and economic systems through which fossil fuels are consumed.

But the discussions among community housing activists, building workers, architects and energy researchers are streets ahead of this, i.e. they almost always assume that both improving living standards, and harmonising the relationship between human society and nature, are desirable aims.

One essential contribution socialists could make to this discussion is to underline that, as long as technologies are controlled by capital, they will primarily be directed neither at making people’s lives better, nor at overcoming the rupture between human society and the natural world, of which global warming caused by fossil fuel use is a key element.

The potential of progressive trends in urban planning and building design, or decentralised renewables-based electricity networks, can never be fully realised, or even understood, as long as these processes are controlled by the now-dominant centres of wealth and power.

Superior alternatives 

Third, rather than questioning technologies that have been shaped by urban development under capitalism, and thinking about why alternatives have been squashed or sidelined, Phillips appears to see technologies as socially neutral.

He claimed that AC is an “essential, life-saving part of public health” – as though it is the only way to keep cool (it isn’t), and as though its absence is the main reason that people die in heat waves (the research Phillips himself cites shows that AC is a minor issue among many, including the effects of poverty and ill health).

AC, like other technologies, has been shaped by the capitalist social relations in which it emerged. It took off in the USA from the 1920s, and was diffused across the rich world in the post-war boom, not only because it was a way of keeping people cool, but thanks to the profiteering of corporations who produced it. I wrote about this in History Today recently.

Just as car manufacturers lobbied against rail networks and public transport, so AC makers lost no opportunity to favour their product over less energy-intensive alternatives.

We can’t know what a socially just society would have done with AC, but we know that the architects’ superior alternatives have for decades been pushed aside by property and construction companies.

Imaginative optimism 

Fourth, Phillips is ideologically committed (a) to action through the state, rather than by society independently of the state, and (b) to economic expansion as a prerequisite of “progress”. He advocated these principles in his book Austerity Ecology (2015). 

In the case of AC, this means action through the currently dominant capitalist state. Phillips wrote: “New buildings must come with AC as part of any ‘Green New Deal’”. 

His declaration that “we [who?] are capable right now” of producing more electricity is telling. The really urgent thing, in fighting for a socially just society, is not to produce more electricity, but to take electricity out of the corporations’ hands, and transform the way it is distributed and used.

I am very optimistic that, by using it rationally, society as a whole could manage with less, not more. But this will only become clear as and when society takes hold of technological systems.

Phillips said: “Nothing’s too good for the working class”. Too right. So leave your dogmatically contrived techno-fixes at home!

Building on what community groups, building workers, architects and energy researchers have done, give us a serious discussion about technology. Then we can aim at a good life, in cities so wonderful we can only begin to imagine them, built and supplied in ways that don’t deepen the horrible rupture between humanity and the natural world.  

3042. Beyond the Pale: The Earliest Agrarian States and “their Barbarians”

By James C. Scott, SOAS University of London, May 31, 2016

3041. Cuban President Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel Supports Same-Sex Marriage

By John Walsh, Business Insider, September 17, 2018

Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel became the country's first leader to publicly express support same-sex marriage.

Diaz-Canel, who replaced Raul Castro in April, said that he is in favor of recognizing  "marriage between people, without limitation" in order to eliminate "all types of discrimination in society."

"We've been going through a massive thought evolution and many taboos have been broken," Diaz-Canel said.

Cuban citizens will vote on the issue in a national referendum in February 2019.

Cuba currently operates under its 1976 national charter, which defines marriage as a "voluntary union of a man and a woman." In the proposed constitution, which was approved by the Cuban parliament in June, new language was added to define marriage as a union between "two people."

The shift in the Cuban leadership's attitude toward same-sex marriage is largely attributed to the efforts of Mariela Castro, the daughter of former Cuban president Raul Castro.

As the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, the younger Castro received international support for condemning homophobic attacks in Cuba and advocating for same-sex marriage.

3040. Clean Meat Anyone?

By Nathaniel Popper, The New York Times, September 30, 2018 

Clean meat is laboratory grown meat from stem cells of animals

BERKELEY, Calif. — Rabbi Gavriel Price has thousands of years of Jewish religious law to draw on when he is on the job, determining whether a new food item can get a kosher certification from his organization, the Orthodox Union.

But all the rules about meat and milk, and the prohibitions on eating pork and sciatic nerves, are of limited use for Rabbi Price’s latest assignment.

The rabbi is in charge of figuring out how the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifying organization in the world, should deal with what is known as clean meat — meat that is grown in laboratories from animal cells. This brings him in touch with a possibility for Jewish cuisine that had previously seemed impossible: kosher bacon.

Clean meat is still not available in stores, but start-ups working on it say it could be by next year. When it is, they want a kosher stamp on their product, which indicates it adheres to quality and preparation standards and follows a set of biblical laws. That brought Rabbi Price, a tall, lanky father of eight, to Berkeley recently, to meet with companies in the business.

Clean meat, also known by names like cell-based agriculture, begins with cells taken from an animal, often stem cells that are primed to grow. Once these cells are isolated, they are put into a solution that mimics blood and encourages the cells to replicate.

This process is very new. The first hamburger produced in a lab was served with great fanfare in 2013 and cost $325,000. But the number of companies competing to create the first commercially available product is growing rapidly.

Rabbi Price’s investigation touches on questions that anyone might have when confronted with clean meat. What exactly is it? And should we want to eat it someday?

His first stop was a lab operated by Mission Barns, a start-up with six employees and millions of dollars in funding. It is growing duck, chicken and pig meat in clear flasks, lined up inside temperature-controlled incubators.

He looked through a microscope at a dish of long, pointy duck cells and peppered the scientists with basic questions about where the cells had come from, and what was in the red liquid that was helping the cells to replicate and grow.

“I’d like to spend more time, because I think it’s an important process to understand in a deep way, and there’s no precedent for it really,” Rabbi Price said after the tour.

The issue he is addressing is much more complicated than the kosher designation of plant-based meat substitutes already available in grocery stores.

Perhaps the best-known company of its kind, Impossible Foods, has created a burger that is made from all-vegetarian ingredients but tastes more like meat thanks to a chemical process involving yeast and soy. Like most vegetarian foods, these burgers have received a kosher stamp.

Mission Barns, the start-up in Berkeley, is focused on creating animal fat, where much of the distinctive flavor of meat resides. It recently mixed the fat with other ingredients to create duck sausages that it served to investors and employees. Creating more structured meat products, like a duck breast or a steak, is expected to take much longer.

Environmentalists and animal activists are proponents of the technology because it could produce the flavor of hamburgers and sausages without the greenhouse gases and animal suffering of the factory farming system.

Saam Shahrokhi, left and Mr. Maciag in the Mission Barns lab in Berkeley, Calif. Mission Barns is focused on creating animal fat, where much of the distinctive flavor of meat resides.

“I’m extremely excited about it,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, who leads the kosher certifying division of the Orthodox Union. “The impact for us will be very profound, in terms of the economics of kosher meat.”

There are polls that show that many Americans are turned off by the prospect of lab-grown meat. And the technology has already generated questions far beyond the Jewish community.

The United States Cattlemen’s Association requested this year that American authorities allow the meat label only on products that come from slaughtered animals. While large meat companies have pushed back against the cattle ranchers, in part because they are developing their own clean meat products, it is unclear if regulators will handle lab-grown meat with the same rules they use for traditional meat.

Jewish authorities have been studying this because several synthetic meat start-ups are based in Israel.

A number of Israeli rabbis told one start-up, SuperMeat, that previous rulings in religious law might allow clean meat to be categorized as pareve, a religious label that is applied to things that are kosher but not derived from animals.

A pareve label would mean that observant Jews could eat it with dairy products, like cheese, which cannot be eaten with traditional meat. In other words, a kosher cheeseburger might be possible.

Rabbi Genack, Rabbi Price’s boss at the Orthodox Union, initially thought clean meat could be pareve, based on his belief that clean meat was created from an animal’s genetic code. But because the process involves an animal cell, replicating itself millions of times, he now believes the product should be thought of as meat.

When Rabbi Price visited the Mission Barns labs, he asked questions specific to kosher certification. He wanted to be sure, for instance, that the pork cells growing in one incubator never come into contact with the duck cells in the incubator next to it, and that the centrifuge where the meat cells are processed is cleaned thoroughly between processing.

He also wanted to know if the cells in the flasks changed as they replicated, to be sure that they do not morph into something that no longer resembles the original animal cells.

“The identity of a given cell, and ensuring that its identity is preserved and verifiable, would be crucial to our being able to certify a product,” the rabbi said.

The day after his visit to Mission Barns, Rabbi Price attended a conference held by the Good Food Institute, an organization that is encouraging the move away from animal meat.

He dived into long conversations with people working for the food start-ups. They discussed topics as diverse as the kosher status of gelatin, the religious rulings of venerated medieval rabbis and the ingredients of the solution that encourages lab-grown meat to grow.

“Does that cell need to consume all kosher ingredients for it to be kosher?” the rabbi was asked by Aryé Elfenbein, the founder of Wild Type, a start-up in San Francisco that is focused on lab-grown salmon.

The rabbi explained that just as kosher cows can eat non-kosher insects, he is working from the assumption that the growth solution will not have to be certified as kosher as long as it is cleaned from the surface of the final cells.

Flasks of cell culture media at the Mission Barns lab. When Rabbi Price visited the lab, he wanted to know if the cells in the flasks changed as they replicated, to be sure that they don’t morph into something that no longer resembles the original animal cells.

Many of the questions came back to the original cells that go into the solution. The rabbi said those cells would have to be kosher, from an animal that was properly slaughtered and not scraped off a live animal. (There is a Jewish law against eating live animals.)

This was not well received by some of the clean meat companies, which want to produce something that does not involve killing any animals.

The liveliest conversation grew out of research that is looking into whether clean meat might be derived from cells in animal saliva or hair.

The rabbi said those substances are not meat, so they might be used to produce clean meat that would not be categorized as meat by Jewish law.

Eitan Fischer, the chief executive of Mission Barns, said he was hopeful that through some creative chemistry, his company could grow pork that would get a kosher designation.