Cultivated Meat and the Prayer of Saint Francis

[douglas9]

When my mother went to England two decades ago, she came back with a framed illustration of the Prayer of Saint Francis, which still hangs in her kitchen. It’s a beautiful painting by the Scottish artist Alison Merry. I hadn’t put much thought into the words until recently, when I began my own spiritual journey.

While the passage is frequently attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, it actually appears to have been written by an anonymous author in the lead-up to the First World War. The misunderstanding can be traced back to a mass-produced prayer card featuring an image of the Italian friar with the relevant text.

Whoever wrote it, the passage offers a great deal of timeless wisdom in a small number of densely-packed lines. The opening is particularly important: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” As someone who cares about our treatment of animals, especially those we use for food, I’ve thought about this quite a bit in recent months.

In the current moment, I don’t think there’s a more effective way to be an instrument of peace than pushing for federal funding for cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells, without slaughter. It has the potential to relegate so much violence to the history books.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/25/cultivated-meat-and-the-prayer-of-saint-francis/