Will ‘Meatless’ Meat save us from hunger and climate crisis?
Tags: Tech, Meatless Meat, Foodtech, Clean Meat, Climate

There are a lot of reasons why ‘meatless’ meat could be our panacea and a solution to feeding 10bn people all over the world for the next decades but due to lack of data and our inability to accurately project future, it’s hard to tell, looking at it today, whether this really is as viable an option as ‘meatless’ meat industry proponents make out.

They call ‘meatless’ meat, a meat alternative, either lab-grown meat from a biopsy taken from a living animal and/or vegetarian meat substitutes made synthetically from plants to resemble and taste like meat. Alternative protein industry is also wider than meat and encompasses seafood substitutes as well as insect proteins.

The world’s population is expected to reach 10bn in the next 30–40 years; if we continue at the current phase of consuming meat (approximately 95 pounds of meat per capita), then we won’t have enough resources to feed the world. We are already growing a staggering number of animals for food: (there are over 30 million head beef cows in the US, and 21 million pigs in Iowa alone). (Source: CB Insights). The status quo is clearly unsustainable as we cannot continue farming animals at this or increasing rate.

Current meat production practices are bad for the environment while in contrast alternative meat is potentially more environmentally efficient and reduces negative environmental impact not only in terms of emissions but also water and land use.

Prevailing farming practices account for circa 15% of greenhouse-gas emissions if we count the land that is used up in grazing and/or producing animal feed and the logistics of moving products around from farms to consumers. We have lost 1/3 of arable land over the last 40 years due to these agricultural practices. Moreover, according to the UN report on Biodiversity “land use now appears as the major driver of the biodiversity collapse, with 70% of agriculture related to meat production”.

The figures above paint a damning picture, which makes ‘meatless’ meat claim of reversing pollution more so palatable. However, an interesting study done at the University of Oxford casts some doubts on this claim. The scientists ran climate models over 1000 year horizon and found that over very long time frames the production of cultured meat at scale may result in more damage to climate due to emission of CO2 gases, which stay in the environment for millennia versus gas emissions from cattle farming, which mainly emit methane, that has short life span and disappears much quicker (12 years) from the atmosphere. The conclusion is that lab-grown meat could lead to less warming in the short term but over long-term lab-grown meat would cause more warming than cows. The study was loaded with many caveats, hence, weakening the conclusion in certain respects.

On the other hand, it seems ‘meatless’ meat claims significant improvements in other areas of the environment besides emissions such as water and land use. Again, these figures have yet to be borne out, because the clean-meat or ‘meatless’ meat industry doesn’t yet exist.

Another pertinent argument in favour of ‘meatless’ meat concerns an ethical aspect of slaughtering and mistreating so many animals at an unprecedented scale. If we were to feed 3bn more people this trend has to increase. Hence, the solution to stop killing animals and instead producing meat from cells or plants seems like a great option, except, the current solution is not without its ethical issues. At the moment, lab-grown meat is dependant on fetal bovine serum (FBS) which is extracted from the heart of a calf fetus when its mother is pregnant. There is a lot of R&D currently to find alternative methods.

Apparently, only 5% of Americans describe themselves as vegetarians. It’s not clear why would vegetarians switch to eat ‘meatless’ meat products, so it would follow that the target market for ‘meatless’ meat would be carnivores. And the next question is how likely is it for these people to stop eating meat and switch to meat replicas? No conclusive evidence is given in this respect. There are other hurdles as well to scaling this product such as proving the safety of these products and surmounting the psychological “ickiness” barrier of eating artificial meat. Also, consumers are now health conscious and would want to know the ingredients of their food. Hence, it’s not evident that ‘meatless’ meat will pass this test especially because of so many genetic and chemical modifications to make meat look and taste like real meat.

In the end, it’s not obvious that ‘meatless’ meat is our panacea. There are many compelling reasons as to its benefits, but the questions still remain about what the future holds. Perhaps, one way to look at this is to acknowledge that technology is just one small avenue of solving this problem and yet another approach is needed to solve this problem at a global scale (e.g. education and widespread campaigns) on stopping or at least reducing our meat intake. Effective Altruism may offer some alternative ways to deal with such problems (which could be a topic of another article).