By Bruce Friedrich, Executive Director, The Good Food Institute
In January of this year, I wrote an article for Innovators Magazine, Make money and save the world. In the article, I documented some of the many problems with how we currently produce meat, from the way that current systems contribute to global hunger to the link between the meat industry and environmental degradation. For more, please see this TED Talk: Markets & Food Technology Will Save the World.
Luckily, innovators around the world are creating better ways to produce meat. Some companies are breaking meat down into its constituent parts – amino acids, lipids, minerals, and water – and replicating all those elements with plants: plant-based meat. Others are making clean meat, taking a cue from Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1931: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
These clean meat companies have made tremendous strides. It was only five years ago this August that former Harvard Medical School professor, Dr Mark Post presented the first clean meat hamburger, courtesy of $1 million grant from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In the time since, there has been tremendous growth in the field. Nearly 20 clean meat companies have formed or are in the process of forming, from Silicon Valley to Israel to Japan. There have been tastings of clean meat meatballs, chicken, duck, steak chips, foie gras, fish, and more.
You can read the full article in our special edition being distributed at next month’s World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology in Philadelphia, which will also be online from 16 July.
