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Our Taste for Flesh Has Exhausted the Earth
爱吃肉已经耗尽了地球的资源
More than almost anything else we put into our mouths, meat matters.
肉比我们吃进嘴里的其他任何食物都更重要。
What flesh we eat — or forsake — tells the world who we are, what class and caste we belong to, what gods we believe in.
我们吃什么肉——或不吃什么肉——向世界表明了我们是谁，属于什么阶级和种姓，信仰什么宗教。
Halal or kosher. Pure-veg or paleo. Hormel or farmers’ market.
清真还是犹太洁食。纯素还是旧石器饮食。荷美尔食品公司还是农贸市场。
Worldwide, 80 billion animals are slaughtered every year for meat.
在全球范围内，每年有800亿只动物被宰杀食用。
Raising all those animals has already claimed most of the world’s farmland.
饲养所有这些动物已经占用了世界上的大部分农田。
It has led to zoonotic diseases and vast deforestation.
导致了人畜共患的疾病和大规模森林砍伐。
It has polluted air and water and spewed planet-heating gasses into the atmosphere.
污染了空气和水，并向大气中排放了使地球变暖的温室气体。
It has also enabled many more people to eat meat more often than ever before, which has in turn put pressure on governments to both keep meat prices affordable and reduce its climate hoofprint.
生产食用肉还使更多的人比以往任何时候都更频繁地吃肉，这继而又给政府带来压力，既要保持肉类价格让人买得起，又要减少其气候足迹。
What will all of this mean for the $1 trillion global meat industry?
这一切对价值1万亿美元的全球肉类产业意味着什么？
A new kind of factory farming is on the horizon, one that grows meat in giant steel vats, either from real-live cells taken from real-live animals or from tiny microorganisms.
一种新型工厂化养殖即将出现，这种养殖方式是在巨大的钢桶中培育肉，要么从活体动物身上提取活细胞而培育肉，要么用微小的微生物培育肉。
This new industry has many names — lab meat, cellular meat, cultivated meat, precision fermentation.
这个新产业有许多名称——实验室肉、细胞肉、培育肉、精准发酵。
I think of it as chicken without wings.
我把它看作没有翅膀的鸡。
Its fans praise its extreme efficiency: feet, tails, feathers, snouts are eliminated.
推崇这个行业的人称赞其效率极高：脚、尾巴、羽毛、鼻子都被去除了。
Its detractors say it’s a threat to culture and livelihoods.
批评这个行业的人说，这是对文化和生计的威胁。
To some people, it’s just uncanny, or maybe it’s just the natural next step in how uncannily the modern food system has denatured meat.
对一些人来说，这种肉很诡异，或者这也许只是现代食品系统诡异地使肉失去自然属性的下一步。
The commercial future of cellular meats is still unclear.
细胞肉的商业前景仍不明朗。
And even if it takes off, it’s unclear whether it’s any better for our health or the health of the planet than the industrially produced meat most of us eat today.
即使它流行开来，也不清楚它是否比现在大多数人吃的工业生产肉类对我们的健康或地球的健康更好。
The one certainty is this: Our taste for flesh has already exhausted the Earth.
但有一点是肯定的：爱吃肉已经耗尽了地球的资源。
Our relationship to meat is, once again, changing.
我们与肉的关系正又一次发生变化。
Meat, Revolutionized
肉类的变革
Years ago, on a reporting trip in Darfur, I was traveling with a group of rebel fighters sustained by cornmeal.
多年前在苏丹共和国达尔富尔地区报道新闻时，我与一群靠吃玉米粉维生的叛军战士一路同行。
We were zigzagging through an arid valley in a pickup truck, when an unlucky bustard — a gangly bird with twigs for legs — ran across the sand.
我们乘坐皮卡车在干旱贫瘠的山谷中曲折前行，这时一只倒霉的鸨——一种腿像树枝的瘦鸟——跑过沙地。
My companions shouted with delight.
我的旅伴们高兴地大喊。
They chased it and shot it deftly with one not-to-be-wasted bullet.
他们追上鸨，不浪费任何多余子弹，熟练地一枪射中了它。
They feathered it, skinned it, roasted it on an open fire.
然后他们给它拔毛、剥皮、放在明火上烤。
They shared what tiny filaments of flesh they could pull off that bird’s bones.
把从那只鸟的骨头上仅能撕下的一点点肉丝分着吃了。
It had been a long time since they’d eaten meat.
他们已经很长时间没有吃肉了。
It filled them, most of all with joy.
这点肉让他们吃饱了，主要是喜悦填饱了他们的肚子。
This drove home for me the difference between those of us who take meat for granted and those who do not.
这让我深刻地认识到，我们这些把吃肉视为理所当然的人和那些吃不到肉的人之间是不同的。
When it comes to meat, millions of people around the world eat very little of it.
对于肉，世界各地有数以百万计的人很少能吃到。
Our earliest forebears trapped or hunted what meat they ate.
我们最早的祖先靠设置陷阱或捕猎获取肉。
When we learned to domesticate animals, we raised them on our land, or we roamed the land with our herds.
当我们学会驯化动物时，我们在自己的土地上饲养它们，或者带着畜群在土地上游牧。
No matter which tribe we belonged to, whether farmers or pastoralists, our animals were our assets.
无论我们属于哪个部落，无论是农民还是牧民，牲畜都是我们的资产。
We ate their flesh in small portions, and we ate almost every bit of them, especially the poorest among us. Guts, feet, heart.
我们把它们的肉分成小块吃掉，几乎一点都不剩，尤其是最穷苦的人。内脏、脚、心脏都吃掉。
