Many people feel weird about eating innovation, as if Big Biotech is ramming science down their throats. They cringe at the concept of “lab-grown meat,” as [Jimmy] Fallon called it, even though Upside’s meat will be grown in steel tanks like the ones already used to brew beer, not in labs.
There’s still a vague ick factor that I at least get, but we need to get over it if we want to stop eating the earth. Our food system is responsible for about a third of our climate problem, most of our biodiversity and deforestation problems, and a slew of other problems, from antibiotic-resistant superbugs to the mistreatment of billions of animals.
If all 8 billion of us were willing to subsist on whole grains and kale, we wouldn’t need to solve those problems with genetically modified crops or CRISPR-edited cows or cultivated meat brewed in fermentation tanks. But if we care about protecting the Amazon rainforest and poor families in Bangladesh’s low-lying floodplains, we’re going to have to make some changes — and our diets rarely seem to change. The average American eats 220 pounds of meat a year and doesn’t even like the insinuation that there’s anything wrong with that.
Cultivated meat is just one example of techno-innovation’s amazing potential to help fix our food and agriculture problems.
