Isha Datar How we could eat real meat without harming animals TED
Diners in Singapore are eating
chicken nuggets
made from a chicken who was never killed.
How is this possible?
Through the power of what I call
“cellular agriculture.”
For the past decade, I’ve been an advocate
for growing meat in a lab.
To me, this chicken nugget,
this hamburger, this sausage –
all made from cells instead of animals –
aren’t just fast-food products.
They’re our ticket to a new food system.
Here’s how it works.
Rather than raise a whole chicken
with beaks, feathers, sentience,
we grow the meat directly
from muscle cells.
We take a small biopsy
from a living animal,
and then extract the cells of interest.
They’re probably muscle cells,
but they could be fat
or connective tissue as well.
Now, muscle cells in particular,
love to attach onto surfaces.
It helps them grow and elongate
into those long muscle fibers
that we’re so familiar with.
So we might provide
a scaffolding material
for those cells to adhere onto.
And then, of course, we have to feed
the cells something.
So we put them in a liquid medium
that provides all the nutrients
that these cells need to grow and divide:
carbohydrates, amino acids,
growth factors and more.
Lastly, the cells
on the scaffold in the medium
all grow within a bioreactor,
which is kind of like a large
stainless steel tank –
looks a lot like brewing equipment
and can be just as big as well.
And the bioreactor really just provides
that constant stable environment
that those cells need to flourish in –
stable temperature, pressure,
inflows, outflows, etc.
And after those cells get a chance
to proliferate and differentiate,
mature into muscle fibers,
we might harvest the cells and the tissues
and then turn them into a nugget,
a nugget that was boneless and skinless
and all white meat to begin with.
Now, this wouldn’t just be better
for chickens and cows and pigs
and the people who have to farm them
and slaughter them and process their meat.
This could be better for the whole world.
Think of this:
early estimates of cell-cultured
meat’s potential
show that cultured meat would require
99 percent less land,
96 percent less water
and produce 96 percent fewer
greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, those are still speculative
early estimates.
But think about the incredible potential
that this technology holds.
I mean, if this all works, this would be
a new subsistence strategy,
a new tool set for producing food.
It wouldn’t just be
a new product category.
And I think it’s our
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to get a second chance at agriculture,
to do things better
and to learn from our mistakes.
What do I mean by mistakes?
After all, this is a food system
that keeps billions of people alive, yes.
But look at what has happened to chickens
in just 50 years.
By simply picking which two chickens
to breed with one another,
chickens went from this on the left,
a bird that’s from 1957,
to this on the right, a broiler.
These chickens are the same age.
Broilers have been optimized so much
for meat production
that they must be slaughtered
at six to eight weeks,
because if they live beyond that,
their legs will not be able
to hold up their bodies.
That is real suffering.
What about farms?
Today, animals are
packed together so closely
that the risk of antibiotic resistance
and epidemic viruses
are at all-time highs.
Did you know that 2018 was the beginning
of the largest farmed
animal pandemic ever?
African swine fever has already killed
an estimated one in four pigs on Earth.
One in four pigs,
that is hundreds of millions
of pigs lost from our food supply.
Animal agriculture is simply
too big to not fail.
What about our changing climate?
Did you know that our global herd
of farmed animals
is one of the biggest drivers
and victims of climate change?
On one hand,
cows alone produce nine percent
of all greenhouse gas emissions.
On the other hand,
climate chaos is seeing
more and more incidences of thousands,
sometimes tens of thousands of cattle
being lost overnight in rogue
storms, floods and fires.
Farming is always going to be
at the mercy of Mother Nature,
but climate change is rewriting
the rules of farming as we speak.
We need another way.
Lastly, our planet.
We dedicate more of this Earth
to feeding cows, pigs and chickens
than we do to anything else.
About a third of this planet, 27 percent,
roughly equivalent to all of North
and South America combined,
is dedicated to raising livestock.
Now, this could all change
with cellular agriculture.
Remember how I said it would
require 99 percent less land
to produce cultured meat versus beef?
Well, think about it: ranching
can’t go vertical, but cell culture can.
And if we can alleviate half,
even a quarter, of this land
and meet the global demand for protein,
well, imagine what we can do
with the rest.
Suddenly, it becomes possible
to choose to do things
like restore the Amazon rainforest,
which we continue to clear-cut for cattle,
or revive other ecosystems that have been
colonized by cows, corn and soy.
Or return stolen lands
to Indigenous peoples,
who can finally reclaim
their ancestral foodways.
The United Nations says that
we will have to restore nature
on land the size of China
if we are to achieve climate resilience.
Cellular agriculture actually
puts this on the table.
Not only could we alleviate
land for restoration,
we can also create the products we know
and love at a fraction of the emissions.
By farming cells, we could actually
proactively envision agriculture
for a climate-changed world.
And it’s not just meat.
Actually, by engineering biology,
we could theoretically grow anything
that might come from plants or animals
from cells instead.
Vanilla doesn’t have to be
rainforest farmed.
Egg whites don’t have to come
with a yolk.
Foie gras can be completely cruelty-free,
and leather and silk don’t
have to come off the back of an animal
or the home of a silkworm.
In fact, we already consume
cellular agriculture products
in our everyday lives,
just in supersmall quantities.
Several vitamins, flavors and enzymes
are already made in cell cultures.
In fact, rennet, which is
the set of enzymes used
to turn milk into curds and whey
for cheese-making,
used to come from the stomach lining
of the fourth stomach of calves,
baby cows.
And in 1990, a cell-cultured
version hit the market.
A version of the key enzyme, chymosin.
And today, only 30-ish years later,
90 percent of rennet
used for cheese-making
came from a bioreactor instead of a calf.
Now, imagine what might happen
if we expand beyond these small-volume,
high-value products like rennet
into commodity-level products like milk.
Well, it’s getting started.
Today, you can buy ice cream –
real dairy ice cream –
that was produced by cellular agriculture.
This is cows milk that never
came from a cow.
It came from a computer.
The gene for whey protein was looked up
in an open-source database, printed
and then inserted into the DNA
of an organism called trichoderma.
Now, just like in brewing,
where we feed sugar to yeast
to brew alcohol in a big
stainless steel fermenter,
we feed sugar to this
modified trichoderma
and out comes whey proteins
that we can put in yogurt,
cream cheese and ice cream.
Now, I have to admit that maybe
this is the easy stuff,
relatively speaking.
I mean, we have been modifying
microorganisms to make proteins for us
for decades now.
And tissue engineering, which is what
would be needed for meat production,
is a lot newer science.
I mean, animal cells are just a lot more
finicky than microbes in cell culture,
and growing a lot of animal cells
and achieving three dimensionality
is just no easy feat.
But we’re getting there.
Back in 2013,
it cost 250,00 euros
to produce this hamburger,
and today, I’ve seen estimates
of cell-cultured meats
cost as low as $50 per pound.
That’s one twenty-seven-thousandth
of what it was less than a decade ago.
And I can really only see the price
of cultured meat coming down,
and I can only see the price of meat
from animals going up.
I mean, think about it –
we’re still in the early days of R and D.
As scientific breakthroughs are made,
like recycling growth medium,
reducing the cost of growth factors
and achieving higher
cell density in vitro,
this curve is still going to go down.
Meanwhile, the price of meat from animals
is already artificially low
due to heavy subsidization.
It does not reflect
the cost to the public health
or to the environment.
And, in a world changed by COVID,
African swine fever
and a changing climate,
the price of meat from animals
can only go up.
In fact, I think that price parity would
be well within reach
if it were an even playing field.
On one hand, we have animal agriculture,
which is so heavily supported by public
funding and government support.
On the other hand, we have
this very promising technology,
which requires very intensive R and D
and needs a lot of infrastructure
and training support
but is left entirely in the hands
of the private sector and market forces.
In fact, I don’t think any
of the wonderful things
I just described about rewilding
the Amazon and so on will happen
if we leave this technology
solely in the hands
of technology and market forces.
There’s a real chance that cellular
agriculture could fail,
and it won’t be because
the science doesn’t add up.
It’ll be because we didn’t think about
what ownership should look like
or IP protection
or governance or policy –
you know, the business side
of mission-driven businesses.
And we’re going to have to be
very careful and thoughtful
about what this technology
needs around it
so we can maximize the positive impact
that it will have on this world.
Look, I’m here today because
animal products are just amazing,
and you would be hard-pressed
to find proteins in the plant world
that can do what animal proteins can do:
long, stretchy cheeses,
creamy custards, fluffy meringues,
the incredibly rich umami flavors
that you can find in meat and seafood …
But despite how amazing
animal proteins are,
they just don’t need to come
from animals anymore.
And yes, we’ve got a long way to go
to realize the potential
of this technology,
and it’s going to take ingenuity both
inside of the lab and outside of it, too.
But think about what we get in return.
We get a chance to usher in
a transformation as big for humanity
as our transformation from hunting
to agriculture some 12,000 years ago.
This could be a new era of abundance
in so many different ways.
I’m personally most selfishly excited
for the food products
that I can’t even fathom today,
because this is really a new tool
for culinary creativity as well.
I mean, we haven’t really seen this
since our ancestors discovered
fermentation a while back.
What I mean by that is,
we could have never looked at a glass
of milk before we fermented foods
and wanted it to be hard
and stinky and moldy.
You know, we could have
never envisioned cheese
or the hundreds of varieties
of cheese that we have today.
Similarly, meat is still defined
by the body of an animal.
We still describe it as cuts of meat.
But if we can grow meat from cells,
suddenly the boundaries for what meat
can be will totally change.
Meat could be thin and translucent.
It could be liquid.
It could be crunchy, it could be bubbly.
Burgers are the baseline and sausages
are just a starting point,
and nuggets are nowhere near
what’s possible with cellular agriculture.
Let’s dream up a bigger, bolder
future of food.
Thank you.
(Applause)