March 26, 2018
Activities: Food / Agriculture / Nutrition
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Annual ROI: 0.0%
Image source: Unsplash
There’s no doubting the economic inefficiency of growing meat. It takes 38 pounds of feed and 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. Absent a natural way to improve these ratios, could lab-grown meat be the food of the future?
Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups.
Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from “fake meat,” like the soy protein “chicken” you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal. But lab-grown meat leads most skeptical diners to think of a big hurdle: taste.
Source: The Good Food Institute
The two most prominent investors in clean-meat technologies are Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
“Raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact,” Gates wrote on his personal blog, Gatesnotes.com, a few years ago. “Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.”
As the world population continues to grow, there need to be more economical ways to feed it. Ideas like indoor farming are one way to produce fruits and vegetables without taking up as much land. If meat can begin to be grown efficiently and safely without slaughtering animals, the amount of resources used and output created could be improved exponentially.
Improving the creation and delivery of food should be a top priority for governments and innovative individuals over the coming decades.
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