The next global agricultural revolution Bruce Friedrich
In 2019, humanity received a warning:
30 of the world’s leading scientists
released the results
of a massive three-year study
into global agriculture
and declared that meat production
is destroying our planet
and jeopardizing global health.
One of the study’s authors explained
that “humanity now poses a threat
to the stability of the planet …
[This requires] nothing less than
a new global agricultural revolution.”
As somebody who’s spent
the last two decades
advocating a shift away
from industrial meat production,
I wanted to believe that this clarion call
was going to make a difference.
The thing is, I’ve seen this sort of thing
again and again and again for decades.
Here’s 2018 from the journal “Nature,”
2017 from “Bioscience Journal,”
2016 from the National
Academy of Sciences.
The main point of these studies
tends to be climate change.
But antibiotic resistance
represents just as big of a threat.
We are feeding massive doses
of antibiotics to farm animals.
These antibiotics are then
mutating into superbugs
that threaten to render
antibiotics obsolete
within all of our lifetimes.
You want a scare?
Google: “the end of working antibiotics.”
I’m going to get one thing out of the way:
I am not here to tell anybody what to eat.
Individual action is great,
but antibiotic resistance
and climate change –
they require more.
Besides, convincing the world
to eat less meat hasn’t worked.
For 50 years, environmentalists,
global health experts and animal activists
have been begging the public
to eat less meat.
And yet, per capita meat consumption
is as high as it’s been
in recorded history.
The average North American last year
ate more than 200 pounds of meat.
And I didn’t eat any.
(Laughter)
Which means somebody out there
ate 400 pounds of meat.
(Laughter)
On our current trajectory,
we’re going to need to be producing
70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050.
This requires a global solution.
What we need to do is we need to produce
the meat that people love,
but we need to produce it
in a whole new way.
I’ve got a couple of ideas.
Idea number one:
let’s grow meat from plants.
Instead of growing plants,
feeding them to animals,
and all of that inefficiency,
let’s grow those plants,
let’s biomimic meat with them,
let’s make plant-based meat.
Idea number two: for actual animal meat,
let’s grow it directly from cells.
Instead of growing live animals,
let’s grow the cells directly.
It takes six weeks to grow
a chicken to slaughter weight.
Grow the cells directly,
you can get that same growth
in six days.
This is what that looks like at scale.
It’s your friendly
neighborhood meat brewery.
(Laughter)
I want to make two points about this.
The first one is, we believe we can do it.
In recent years, some companies
have been producing meat from plants
that consumers cannot distinguish
from actual animal meat,
and there are now dozens of companies
growing actual animal meat
directly from cells.
This plant-based and cell-based meat
gives consumers everything
that they love about meat –
the taste, the texture and so on –
but with no need for antibiotics
and with a fraction of the adverse
impact on the climate.
And because these two technologies
are so much more efficient,
at production scale
these products will be cheaper.
But one quick point about that –
it’s not going to be easy.
These plant-based companies have spent
small fortunes on their burgers,
and cell-based meat has not yet
been commercialized at all.
So we’re going to need all hands on deck
to make these the global meat industry.
For starters, we need
the present meat industry.
We don’t want to disrupt
the meat industry,
we want to transform it.
We need their economies of scale,
their global supply chain,
their marketing expertise
and their massive consumer base.
We also need governments.
Governments spend tens of billions
of dollars every single year
on research and development
focused on global health
and the environment.
They should be putting some of that money
into optimizing and perfecting
the production of plant-based
and cell-based meat.
Look, tens of thousands of people
died from antibiotic-resistant superbugs
in North America just last year.
By 2050, that number is going to be
10 million per year globally.
And climate change represents
an existential threat
to huge portions of our global family,
including some of the poorest people
on the face of the planet.
Climate change, antibiotic resistance –
these are global emergencies.
Meat production is exacerbating
these emergencies on a global scale.
But we are not going
to decrease meat consumption
unless we give consumers alternatives
that cost the same or less
and that taste the same or better.
We have the solution.
Let’s make meat from plants.
Let’s grow it directly from cells.
It’s past time that we mobilize
the resources that are necessary
to create the next global
agricultural revolution.
Thank you.
(Applause)