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Is cultured meat one of the “four futures?”

In a new article the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) has developed a look at what various groups consider the “meat problem”, and from there developed four extreme scenarios about the future of meat.

The issues they identified were a higher demand for food, the environmental cost of meat, the interest of sellers to maximize sales, the ideological and religious arguments for a certain diet, the price of meat, the health benefits and detriments, and the various implications for class strucutre.

Among the four futures they predicted was the “Architected Flesh” scenario.  It’s 2035, and after plagues of zoonotic (livestock-born) diseases and rising costs of meat, governments and consumers start to support mimic meats and milk.  In this future, big business follows suit, and the call for cultured meat is raised.  As more countries support cultured meat, the environment recovers, food restrictions based on religion are no longer an issue, and health goes up as meat is made healthier.  Meanwhile, better quality cultured meat becomes more available across all income levels.

The other futures include Calibrated Carnivory, Livestock on Leftovers, and Fruits of the Earth.

Calibrated Carnivory is concerned with the demand for food, and the demand for sustainability.  In this future, GMOs, antibiotics, hormones, and cramped living conditions are used to decrease the amount of feed, and increase the amount of meat on each animal.  Waste products are used as fertilizer and heating.  This future can be defined as “market driven” as chicken and fish are the easiest to raise in cramped conditions, and the easiest to sell as diet foods.  While some people in the future care about the animals’ rights, they are convinced to withhold their complaints because the price of meat decreases.

Livestock on Leftovers’ main concern is big business and a return to “the past.”  This future follows a paleo-style diet.  Cities are forsaken with for small farms, where animals are raised on non-arable pastures, eating inedible grasses, and manure is used as fertilizer for crops.  Hunting is also popular.  However, FCRN points out the inevitable problem with this model: as population grows, small farms do not produce enough meat or milk to meet the demand, and a return to large industrial farms is inevitable.  Although the FCRN avoided mentioning it, “Livestock on Leftovers” is likely to lead straight into “Calibrated Carnivory.”

The fourth future that the FCRN projected is one based on environmental impacts, and a government push for vegetarianism as a more sustainable method of feeding the world.  Meat is  a rarity, and livestock are kept only in nonarable plots, or places where their manure helps the harvest.  The land once used to grow food for livestock is now optimized to grow crops for human On this diet, the FCRN predicts better eating habits and health, but this future is rife with anxiety over the “ecological price” of food.

So which future do you want?  Or is there another option?

The article’s purpose is not to give consumers four options for the future.  The purpose is to identify the “issues with meat” and then demonstrate how different concerns lead to different outcomes.  Sustainability, supply and demand, humanitarianism.  The future will be shaped by what we choose to focus on.

Want to know more about how our top priorities shape the future?

Download the article pdf here.

On May 6th, Isha Datar spoke at the Empiricist League’s meeting about the food of the future.

But we start in the past: the history of biotechnology to make food favorites like beer, cheeses, yogurts, to create all the vegetables we know today.  More recently, it’s also been able to give us new medicines and eco-friendly products.

Nutrition, medicine, environment, what other problems can biotechnology fix?  How about the issues that go along with livestock: humanitarian concerns, environmental impacts, epidemics, supply and demands figures:

The solution?  Isha Datar says cultured meat.

Biotechnology has gradually turned the chicken from a bird:

To a meat making machine:

Feathers optional:

If we want a chicken breast, why not start from the cellular level?  Like Mark Post’s burger, made without a cow?

And why stop there?  Biotechnology can make leather, milk, and egg whites.

As biotechnology of food goes up, what goes down?

Cost.

To find out more about how biotechnology has, and is continuing, to make life better, healthier, and tastier, check out the full speech.

And thanks to the Empiricist League for hosting this event!

May 29th, New Harvest and Indie.Bio will be hosting a salon-style event to explore the new food bioeconomy.

Come to San Francisco, chat about Muufri, Clara Foods, and Pembient, and sample nibbles from Tomato Sushi and Alchemy breweries!

Check out details & register for the event here.

While in DC for the Bioeconomy and Climate Change Forum, Isha & Gilonne met with US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to discuss how New Harvest is addressing issues of climate change and public health.

Edible Bioeconomy Salon Discussion May 29 San Francisco / Overview of New Harvest in DC

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Maastricht, The Netherlands, site of the 1st International Symposium on Cultured Meat, Oct 18-20, 2015. 

The First International Cultured Meat Symposium: Speakers, Program, and Plans!

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Willem van Eelen, a pioneer of cultured meat, passed away on Feb. 24, 2015. Photo by Michael Hughes.

Gilonne D’Origny Hired As Developmental Director / Clara Foods Prepares To Reveal Egg White Prototype / Loss of “Godfather of Cultured Meat” / New York Event

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On February 24, 2015 the cultured meat movement lost one of its pioneers, Willem Frederik van Eelen.

Van Eelen (born on July 4th, 1923, in Dutch-controlled Indonesia) contributed an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity to this cause, catalyzing interest in the Netherlands and abroad and helping scientists to find the funding necessary to pursue their work. Van Eelen’s personal reasons for taking an interested in cultured meat have been widely publicized: a POW in Japanese camps in Indonesia during WWII, van Eelen was exposed to hunger (by his own report almost dying of malnutrition) and he witnessed his captors’ very cruel treatment of non-human animals. He took from these experiences a deep interest in food, and a sense of moral responsibility to work against unnecessary animal suffering (he did, notably, remain a meat eater). Following the liberation of the camps by the Allies, van Eelen returned to the Netherlands and studied psychology and medicine – and he subsequently witnessed medical experiments that inspired his later interest in cultured meat.

Indeed, van Eelen observed cells grown through tissue culture techniques in the late 1950s-early 1960s, a period when cell culture – as Hannah Landecker describes in her book Culturing Life – had moved beyond the early experiments by scientists like Alexis Carrel, and towards increasingly large-scale models of culture production. In other words, this was a time when cell culture was “scaling up,” as research grants and investments helped to build out industrial facilities and advance medical research into diseases like polio. It was not inconceivable that tissue culture techniques would continue to grow and develop.

While most of his career was spent in medical and public health pursuits, van Eelen continued to think about the potential for meat to be industrially produced without the conventional raising and slaughter of animals. In the 1990s he entered into partnerships to create an in vitro meat process, and while the resulting laboratory work was unsuccessful, towards the end of the decade van Eelen did file several patents for cultured meat techniques in the Netherlands and the United States. Beginning in 2000, van Eelen, then in his 70s, organized a consortium of Dutch researchers and helped them to obtain grant funding from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs – with additional help from a consortium of food companies and universities. This led to four years of research, between 2005 and 2009, and while progress was never fast enough for van Eelen’s taste, it did produce not only very high-quality scientific work, but also the seeds of later projects, including Mark Post’s very well known work on the 2013 hamburger, funded by Sergey Brin.

Van Eelen’s desire to live long enough to see cultured meat appear in markets, was well-known. But we also know full well that biotechnology research moves more slowly than our visions of the future. Assuredly, if cultured meat production becomes part of our food system in years or decades to come, van Eelen will be recognized as one of the crucial architects of its creation.

Many thanks to Henk Haagsman for additional details regarding van Eelen’s life. And thanks to New Harvest community members who can offer additional details regarding van Eelen’s life and work.

Written by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Photo by Michael Hughes

We just hired Gilonne d’Origny to be our new Development Director!

Gilonne has worked in corporate responsibility/sustainability, investment and fundraising strategy, and business development. Most recently, Gilonne worked with On Demand Books, a company disrupting the publishing industry with a on-the-spot book printer. She’s also been a lawyer, made a film, and worked in the UN’s Climate Change Unit.

New Harvest: Hey Gilonne! What brought you to New Harvest? 

Gilonne: I was working with Joshua Katcher (who makes vegan menswear) on a project at Parsons, The New School, in NYC. We were working on putting together a Board for a textiles institute, and he suggested Isha. I saw there was an announcement on the New Harvest website that they were looking for a Development Director, and (serendipitous timing) I had come to a time where I wasn’t going to be working for my old company anymore. So I spoke to Isha and here I am!

New Harvest: Tell us a little more about your background, what were you doing before this?

Gilonne: Well, I’m coming from a company (On Demand Books) that was disrupting the publishing supply chain.  We were producing a machine that prints a perfect paperback when you need it, for the same price as one produced offsite. Even with things like the Kindle, paper books are here to stay, but they’re incredibly wasteful. Publishers must estimate the demand for a book and stock shelves accordingly – any books that aren’t sold y the end of the year are pulped to make room for the next year’s bestsellers. So that company does a very similar thing to what cultured meat is trying to do, introducing a more efficient technology to improve a supply chain.

New Harvest: Do you have any prior experience with cultured meat? 

Gilonne: No, I had just heard about it in the news. I’m not coming from a science perspective; I’m coming from more of the bigger standpoint in terms of the rights of animals and the precautionary principle, which is that we should do nothing irreversible, and nothing to harm. Climate change was my specialty in law and also business—corporate responsibility and that kind of stuff. Cultured meat is crucial to environmental responsibility, not just for climate change but also biodiversity, so in that way this is just an extension of my sustainability advocacy.

New Harvest: Are you a vegetarian or vegan? Have you always been interested in animal rights? 

Gilonne: I stopped eating meat when I was 15, and for 15 years afterwards I was either vegetarian or vegan. I also went into this raw food phase, which was very difficult to maintain. But when I was 30, I was training for the 15 peaks challenge in Wales. I was getting into shape for that, it was very demanding, and my trainer tested me and said I had a blood type that thrived on meat. I was very upset by that.

New Harvest: That sounds horrible…

Gilonne: I’m afraid to say I think he’s right—that my metabolism thrives on animal protein. I was dreaming about steak once a week. So now I’m a very careful eater. I don’t eat meat often, and I’m very careful to know that it came from—a proper farm, not a gruesome slaughterhouse, those sorts of things. A friend told me recently that they only eat meat when they know who killed the animal, and I think that’s a very good attitude to have.

New Harvest: What have you been doing so far as Development Director? 

Gilonne: Climbing up the learning curve! It’s a lot to take in. I’ve also been talking to people in the New Harvest community, about the activities they’re involved in right now and how they will fit into the future. I’m thinking about ways to grow and develop. There’s a big opportunity to cultivate a big network in the coming years.

New Harvest: What exciting things do you see in New Harvest’s future? 

Gilonne: This is very tentative and not fully formed, but it looks like the direction we’re going in is to focus on getting academic research and labs set up this year. Mostly, I plan to focus on expanding our community, education, and exchange of ideas. And of course, raising money for research.

New Harvest: You produced a movie—what was it called? 

Gilonne: It’s a documentary called “Stealing Klimt.” There’s actually a Hollywood version of it out right now called “Woman in Gold.”

New Harvest: Wow! Any other cool hobbies? What do you like to do outside of work? 

Gilonne: I have a dog named Sophie who comes to work with me everyday. She’s wonderful and very sweet. I used to ride horses competitively and did horse shows until I had to go to college. And I like being outdoors, but I don’t like playing team sports because I always feel like I bring the team down. Too much responsibility. But things like tennis and running I like because then the onus is completely on me.

Other than sports, I like to think I work well in teams.

New Harvest: It sounds like you will be a wonderful addition to the New Harvest team! 

Gilonne: I hope so! It’s a great privilege.

Feel free to welcome Gilonne to New Harvest at gilonne@new-harvest.org

Dr. Mark Post’s first cell cultured hamburger, tasted August 2013.

New Harvest Sends $50K to Mark Post’s Lab to Improve Cultured-Meat Burger / Upcoming Events / Job postings

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New Harvest takes a crack at chicken-free eggs.

Chicken-Free Eggs In The Works / Meet the Community / Upcoming Events

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