It will be very difficult for cultivated meat to scale in a world where 99% of people and 99.99% of politicians just stick their heads in the sand and pretend the current systems—with massive animal suffering, climate damage, antibiotic use and increasing land-use—is sustainable.
Once we stop thinking of this as “can we make it work?” but as “we have to make this work!” we’ll discover solutions.
For example, regarding contamination (comments below), maybe the right approach is not to look for 0% risk of contamination, but to find the right sweet-spot, even if that means some batches need to be discarded. Remember that the correct comparison for this is not pharma, but rather factory farming, with animals often living in their own excrement and being pumped full of antibiotics to keep them “healthy”, with terrible consequences not just for the animals but also for antibiotic resistance, which is now a major cause of human deaths.
Yet, there are countries in the EU seeking to ban cultivated meat, or to stop it from being labelled “meat,” as politicians bow to the power of the powerful agriculture sector.
I don’t have a solution (I wish!), but with elections coming up in so many countries, I wonder if there’s an opportunity for many of us to ask politicians why they are not aggressively supporting and funding what is possibly the most important technological challenge the world is facing.
It will be very difficult for cultivated meat to scale in a world where 99% of people and 99.99% of politicians just stick their heads in the sand and pretend the current systems—with massive animal suffering, climate damage, antibiotic use and increasing land-use—is sustainable.
Once we stop thinking of this as “can we make it work?” but as “we have to make this work!” we’ll discover solutions.
For example, regarding contamination (comments below), maybe the right approach is not to look for 0% risk of contamination, but to find the right sweet-spot, even if that means some batches need to be discarded. Remember that the correct comparison for this is not pharma, but rather factory farming, with animals often living in their own excrement and being pumped full of antibiotics to keep them “healthy”, with terrible consequences not just for the animals but also for antibiotic resistance, which is now a major cause of human deaths.
Yet, there are countries in the EU seeking to ban cultivated meat, or to stop it from being labelled “meat,” as politicians bow to the power of the powerful agriculture sector.
I don’t have a solution (I wish!), but with elections coming up in so many countries, I wonder if there’s an opportunity for many of us to ask politicians why they are not aggressively supporting and funding what is possibly the most important technological challenge the world is facing.