NOT MANY OF US give much thought to food and eat it hoping that it will always be around and in the way we like it – fresh, tasty and lots of it. Right now the thought seems okay but not for long. As population grows and climate change cuts into the available water and the amount of land that is available for farming, we may have to rethink this whole food thing. We may need to make more with less. That will mean getting smarter and more efficient about the way we make food.
It takes a lot of water and a lot of energy to produce a kilo of meat and therefore people are actually trying to find out ways to grow meat in a lab, one cell at a time. If successful it would end up cutting animals out of the food chain altogether, although it will take a long time to scale the whole thing to a commercial level.
Or maybe an alternative could be to start eating bugs. Companies in the West are offering cricket flour as cheap protein. It's easy to produce, and if people get used to sprinkling a little cricket on their pasta, it could make a big difference — assuming we can get over our collective insect issues. And so let's give some thought for food.In America, to produce 1 pound of beef, the friendly neighborhood farmer needs 13 pounds of grain and an estimated 2,500 gallons of water. If a 1,000-pound cow yields 600 pounds of beef, that cow used 1.5 million gallons of water and 7,800 pounds of grain. So, on a basic level, farming at this scale is pretty inefficient, when you could effectively feed thousands of people with just the grain and water it takes to produce that one cow.
It’s not that inefficient if you’re one farmer with a few cows and chickens (though it’s more expensive to raise animals that actually graze) and just your family to feed. But it’s a mathematically unsustainable equation.
Today, up to a third of earth’s landmass is used for grazing and growing crops. In the US, 70 percent of grain goes to feeding livestock. This has led to a critical situation where demand is expected to far outweigh supply in the next 50 years. But inefficiency isn’t nearly the only problem.
Man-made climate change, or global warming, is primarily caused by an increased concentration of greenhouse gasses (GHG) — water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone — in the atmosphere. Activities such as deforestation, burning fossil fuels, and yes, raising livestock emit greenhouses gasses, and all have been on a steep rise since largescale manufacturing processes were applied to various industries, including farming.
The levels of greenhouse gas emissions have seriously increased since the Industrial Revolution, and most scientists agree that we’re facing a devastating climate situation.
This is what people mean when they tell you, that factory farming is unsustainable. The population explosion means more mouths to feed, and meat consumption overall has been on the rise proportionally to the rest of our diets; this increases pressure to raise more animals, and more food to feed them, which in turn gravely stresses our environment. The huge number of animals produces waste and polluting byproducts, and eventually, we’re going to not only simply lack the livestock to meet demand, but will face the high environmental costs to boot. Most experts believe that our effect on climate change is reversible, but only if we act immediately
We have three options moving forward. We can all become vegetarians, we can continue to destroy the planet, or we can try something new
Vegetarianism is on the rise — by some estimates it’s at an all-time high of 10 percent in the United States — but it also feels fair to agree that it is the most likely way to address our problems, even as some meat eaters reduce their consumption.
Initiatives like Meatless Monday — which encourages families to replace meat in just one weekly meal — have proven quite popular. But, for most people, when you cut out meat, you need to replace it with something. Americans aren’t going to go for a plant-based diet that easily, right? And that’s where a handful of new, Silicon Valleyfunded companies swoop in.
To the vegetarian, it usually really doesn’t. Meatless meats have been around for a long time. But new companies trying to create meat alternatives, or meat replacements, aren’t really trying to go after vegetarians. The goal is to get everyone else on board.
For Beyond Meat, and a handful of other companies such as Hampton Creek Foods, a San Francisco-based startup that makes egg replacement products, the model is pretty straightforward. They work in concert with world-class food scientists to come up with meat alternatives — let’s call them Tofurkey 2.0 — for consumer products that aren’t only better-tasting than their ancestors, but they’re healthier, and often cheaper, and marketed in a way that meat eaters won’t be turned off of.
Hampton Creek Foods takes a similar approach, but it’s trying to convince people to replace eggs. An easier sell, if you consider that many doctors regularly suggest people limit their egg consumption anyway: with 184 mg of cholesterol, egg yolks contain one of the highest concentrations per serving of any food, which, in addition to foods high in saturated fat, raise cholesterol levels in the blood. But it’s also true that eggs are the most consumed animal protein in the world.
People have been using (egg-based) egg replacements for years, but a lot of those products aren’t good for baking or using in recipes, or they aren’t that much cheaper than eggs themselves. The goal of Beyond Eggs, Hampton Creek’s egg product, is to function just like an egg, regardless of how it’s being used, and still be cheaper than eggs. Their powdered egg alternative is made from peas and sorghum, among other things. It’s totally plant-based. Hampton Creek Foods is funded by Khosla Ventures, which routinely supports technology-based, environmentally disruptive businesses, and also by Gates himself, through Khosla.
For both of these companies, selling to consumers is only part of the equation. Selling wholesale to other, much larger food companies is also a big piece of their business. Tetrick is angling to change the world’s egg consumption the way that margarine changed the world’s butter consumption: by being much cheaper, while still behaving a lot like the original.
There’s a lot of money to be made in these startups: they’re nascent markets, ready for growth. Astute money men — people like Khosla or Gates — are often best at seeing the future, and in this case, they see tremendous market potential. They’re small companies which apply scientific methods and develop their products in labs and at universities. And they have the environment in mind.
But what about your hardliner? The person who, regardless of health, food safety, environmental, or ethical concerns, just wants a great burger, made of real beef, at his weekend brunch? He hasn’t been forgotten either. In fact, he’s getting arguably the biggest chunk of money and scientific research in food technology. Because in this case, the goal is nothing less than putting the egg before the chicken. Or more properly, the chicken breast before the chicken… or even: the burger before the cow.
Since the 1990s, the possibility of growing animal cells in a lab by using stem cells has become a viable prospect. NASA spent the early 2000s working with turkey stem cells, and the first edible specimen — cultured goldfish cells — were successfully produced in 2002. In the United States, the effort to grow meat in a lab has been most vocally supported by Jason Matheny, who in 2005 authored an influential paper in the journal Tissue Engineering, a paper responsible for renewed interest in the topic of growing meat in a lab in the US.
In 2009 he told the University of Chicago Magazine that cultured meat "will be the purest meat ever," lacking the additives, antibiotics, and growth hormones given to most livestock today. In 2004 he founded New Harvest, a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness of in vitro meat, also called test tube meat, or cultured meat. In 2008, Mark Post began investigating culturing meat in a lab with $4 million in funding from the Dutch government.
Around 30 labs in the world are working to create cultured meat .
Post estimates that within 20 to 25 years, we could have a commercial product: labgrown beef which is indistinguishable from that which comes from an animal, grown in a lab. Theoretically, one crop of stem cells could create a huge amount of meat, with no animals harmed, no grazing land needed, grown in a sterile environment.
The final challenge, however, is whether people will buy it. Can we get over our sense of how "weird" cultured meat is? Of course, there are those who say we don’t have 20 to 25 years left to address the environmental issues. For them, the in vitro meat project, even if successful, is just too far off, and they believe that people need to reduce their meat consumption now to impact the environment positively.
Two million years ago, there were probably naysayers too, laughing at the guy with the DIY spear running after a bear. And there were also probably plenty of people who disagreed when it was first suggested that you could raise massive quantities of animals, and that meat could be something which even poor people could afford to eat on a daily basis. At every turn, man’s innovative nature has answered the call to solve critical problems. Why should this time be any different?