There is no sacred cow...

Technology is leaving no stone unturned in its hunger to innovate.

Part of the mission of this newsletter is to highlight the ways media attempts to manipulate and craft narratives that support specific outcomes. Media also has a tendency to extrapolate these “negative” trends linearly into the future.

One such narrative is “eating meat will destroy our planet” and the accompanying “Earth is running out of food unless we all eat beans and rice for every meal”.

This website is a perfect example of this. You can see how it extrapolates current trends into the future without any regard for innovation, new discoveries, or changes in behaviors. It’s doom and gloom porn at its finest. 

The website above makes the claim that western countries need to reduce beef consumption by 90% and simultaneously eat five times more beans and pulses.

They claim the impact of meat consumption will get far worse as global population increases.

And they quote researchers saying “a global shift to a “flexitarian” diet is needed to keep climate change under 2C, let alone 1.5C. This flexitarian diet means the average world citizen needs to eat 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling consumption of beans and pulses and quadrupling nuts and seeds.”

First off, tripling the amount of beans and quadrupling the amount of nuts we eat is terrible dietary advice. And, “facts” like the ones above are being used to drum up support for restrictions, regulations, and compromises to our personal and economic freedoms.

Therefore, I feel passionate about highlighting the innovation, discoveries and changes that bend the curve and send us in the direction of an abundant future. 

One such area I’m interested in and is hitting exponential growth is “lab grown” meat. The world just saw its first commercial approval to sell lab-grown meat in Singapore. These “chicken nuggets” were grown in a bioreactor from cells taken from a live chicken. And, Singapore just became the first country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat commercially. 

This is the beginning of an entire industry being born. 130 million chickens are slaughtered for meat daily. That’s an insane number. 60% of the mammals on earth by weight are livestock! 

The raising, slaughtering, butchering, refrigerating, transporting, and selling of meat is a massive business. And, it’s about to be smacked by the exponential curve of technological innovation bringing with it massive creative destruction and positive environmental changes. 

Current methods for mass-producing meat are destructive to the environment. We cage, crowd, and confine billions of animals in order to create cheap meat. This creates breeding grounds for viruses, massive toxic run-off into the environment, and poor quality of food. Finding an alternative to feed billions of people with the highest caloric and macronutrient dense food (meat) is a massive win for our planet and species. 

Lab-grown meat will help us create a more sustainable food system. Supply can be better managed to meet demand. There will be less stress on the physical environment as ranchers and farms don’t need to chop down thousands of acres of trees to increase their production (inflation!). 

And, most interesting, we could potentially feed millions or billions of people with just one animal supplying the cells (deflation!). Companies are working on growing meat outside of the physical body from cows, chickens, rabbits, ducks, shrimp, and tuna. As the technology matures I don’t think it’s unreasonable to estimate that no meat is off the table, ethical elephant steaks anyone? 

The process to grow the meat is relatively straightforward to understand. Starter cells are taken from a live animal. These can be from already formed tissues or stem cells. These cells are then dropped into a petri dish and given liquid “growth medium” which is fancy talk for food. 

Cells begin to replicate and then are moved into a bioreactor where they’re fed more proteins, vitamins, sugars, and amino acids. All the same stuff muscle tissue needs to grow inside a living body. Then, they’re given a “structure” to help them form into the desired end shape. After the meat has grown, it is harvested by being removed from the bioreactor and is now ready to be cooked! 

One thing is clear... lab grown meat will be a savior to our environment. Current meat production is devastating to our forests, soil, water, and many other aspects of our environment. Reducing the amount of land needed for cows, pigs, and chickens will be a huge inflection point for the land and sea.

The advances in lab-grown meat is a perfect example of technological innovation creating deflation. The first lab-grown hamburger from Mosa Meat cost over $300,000 in 2013 and took 2 years to create. 

JUST created a chicken nugget which cost $50 in 2020. Mosa Meat now estimates that it will be able to sell burgers for $10 a piece and they will hit shelves this year.

In 2030 you’ll be able to get a 10 pack of “clean meat” nuggets from McDonalds for the same price or cheaper than whole-body meat.

As meat grown in a lab proliferates across the world the need for more land, more resources, more everything to create more supply of food decreases. As the demand for all of those resources decreases so do prices. It’s not out of the question to estimate that in the far future lab-grown meat is far cheaper than anything that’s grown from an animal’s body. 

I’m excited for the rapid transition away from mass-produced meat and factory farms. The amount of environmental stress and damage to our health that these “stuffed under the rug” institutions cause is huge. Removing these from our food system is going to be a huge win.

Add in the growing surge of regenerative farming and I can see a future where we’re partnering with the land to raise the highest qualities of meat and creating plenty of lab-grown meat to satisfy the mass-demand. 

My prediction is that meat grown from the body of an animal will be a luxury good in 25 years just like a car you drive yourself. It’s a weird and confusing thought but this innovation train has already left the station.

I do have concerns over the definition of “real” meat that’s going to take place and the battle between lab-grown meat and whole-body meat will cause. We’ll hear terms such as “conventional meat” to refer to meat that came from a living whole-body animal and “clean meat” to refer to lab-grown alternatives.

I’m also not convinced that because two items are chemically identical it makes them identical. There’s so much we don’t know about the benefits and necessities of having bacteria and other microbes and viruses in our food. Growing meat in a sterile tank is going to have unintended consequences just like everything else in life.

My one paragraph take: Lab-grown meat is coming faster than we realize. It’s necessary to sustain the food demands of a growing population and the scarce resources of our planet. It will be far healthier than plant-based alternatives (ew!) but I question if it can stack up to the real thing because it’s grown in a sterile environment outside of the context of a living being.

Some interesting questions I’m pondering:

Is lab-grown meat artificial? 

Is sterile meat actually better for our health? 

Is it possible that meat raised outside of a conscious body could be materially different than meat from a living animal? 

What will happen when companies are modifying the macro and micronutrient profiles of meat? 

And finally, what kind of crazy types of meat will we be eating in 50 years that would be unconscionable today?