Three obvious things you can do to save the planet? Stop driving, flying and…eating meat. Plenty of studies confirm this. But just because something’s obvious, doesn’t mean it’s doable. Car use hasn’t crashed despite cataclysmic warnings of climate change. Likewise, people won’t stop eating meat just because the sky is about to fall. In fact, meat consumption is growing at a record rate as living standards rise around the world. So, are we cooked?
Bruce Friedrich , founder of the think tank, Good Food Institute, doesn’t think so. In his book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favourite Food – and Our Future , he says driving and meat are not the real problems. Driving is bad only because it pulls carbon buried underground millions of years ago, and releases it into the atmosphere, warming the planet. But now, we have a fix – renewable energy and electric cars. Meat is even worse for the environment, but only because of the way it is produced. If we find a better, more efficient, way to produce meat, that’s taken care of, too.
How do we fix meat? Start by seeing the damage it does. In 2006, world consumed 266mn tonnes of meat. Now, the number is 370mn tonnes – a 40% increase. All those animals need mountains of feed to survive, some 1.1bn tonnes of cereals alone in 2021. And growing crops for animals needs land on a scale you can’t imagine.
If meat consumption continues growing at the current rate, we’ll need another 3.3bn hectares to satisfy everyone. “Twice the area of India and China combined, plus Indonesia.” But, the real problem isn’t meat, it’s animals. Because they have to be fed for months, or years, before they become meat, meat production is inefficient. “You need 910 plant calories to make 100 calories of chicken, which is the most efficient animal at converting feed to meat.”
All those billions of animals packed together inhumanely are also a breeding ground for diseases. Remember Covid? So, 70% of global output of antibiotics – about 100,000 tonnes – is fed to keep animals alive and disease-free, giving rise to drug-resistant strains. There are many other problems, but the solution for all is obvious – make meat without animals.
It’s not a crazy idea. Thousands of scientists are working on it. One approach is to make meat-like food from plants. But biology makes it difficult. “Plant proteins are globular; animal proteins are fibrous. Plant oils are liquids at room temperature; animal fats are solids.” Hence, it’s hard to make a plant-based recipe taste like meat. But not impossible.
The other approach is to grow goat, pig, salmon – whatever you fancy – tissue, a.k.a. meat, in giant vats. The pharma industry does this kind of cultivation every day, but not on the scale needed to feed the world. Once the link between meat and animals is broken, die-hard vegetarians might also say yes to “cultivated” meat, so demand could be far higher than current trends.
How far are we from cultivated meat? In 2013, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had paid a small fortune for the first hamburger made from lab-grown meat. Last year, a Washington DC restaurant served Pacific salmon sashimi and chipotle meatballs – both lab-grown – to 60 diners. Singapore, Japan, Israel, US, S Korea and China, are all bankrolling research to scale up cultivated meat production, for their food security. It could be on your plate sooner than you think.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
