Why eating Tortoise could save the planet
the galapagos tortoise is the oldest
living tortoise species
in the world they can weigh up to 415
kilograms
live for up to 120 years
and they are incredibly delicious
so delicious in fact it took them over
300 years
just to get a scientific name no live
specimen
ever made it back to europe without
being eaten on the voyage
in 1850 u.s navy captain david porter
once declared
after tasting the galapagos tortoises
all other animal meats fell off greatly
in our estimation so if it’s so good
why is it not on the menu today well
dipping into existing populations would
completely decimate the numbers so to be
a
pretty limited time offer so today
i’m proposing the creation of industrial
galapagos tortoise farms
around a number of sites in australia
that’s a joke but we’ll come back to
that one later no hopefully by now it’s
raising another question in your mind
why is it that almost every mouthful of
meat that we eat comes from just five
different animals
to answer this question let’s go back in
time a little bit ten thousand years
we’ve just started to see the
domestication of plants and animals and
for perspective the
global population is between 5 and 10
million people
so take the population of new york today
and send it out across the whole globe
at this time there’s some theories that
we domesticated certain animals for
spiritual worship
and only when we got too efficient at
breeding them do we turn the surplus
into a
steady supply of dinner ingredients
others talk about a
criteria for domestication that made it
possible to domesticate some animals but
well frankly impossible to domesticate
others
but even beyond this criteria over time
there’s a certain group of animals
that expressed characteristics and
traits that simply made them
easier to farm and therefore cheaper to
produce and more widely available and
that ultimately makes for better eating
material
in fact it was our ability to scale our
production for certain animals that
allowed us to meet the growing demand
for meat
and also ensure that those animals
reigned supreme on our menus for a
century to come
in fact our ability to scale
industrial animal agriculture and the
efficiencies they’re
in is simply breathtaking
we’ve harnessed these incredible
breeding programs to
perfectly craft creatures who are made
for meat yield right down to a genetic
level
we’ve harnessed breakthroughs in
antibiotics so that we can take more
animals and put them together and have
them alive for longer periods of time
and our understanding of essential
nutrition and the role that it plays the
vitamins and the role they play
with animals means that we’ve now been
able to take a lot of our farming
and move it indoors away from the heavy
conditions of the outdoor world
constant and enduring advances over the
past century means that we can at any
given point have a hundred billion
animals
in our global food system so if you take
this and
mix it in with a growing population
maybe
10 billion by 2050 what you find is that
we have more people
with greater access to more protein than
ever before
is an incredible feat of human ingenuity
and it also poses one of the greatest
existential crises we have
ever faced as a human race
these breeding programs perfectly
optimizing animals altering their
genetics for more
yield and meat means that we have
created for billions of animals
lives that are not worth living from the
very beginning their legs breaking under
their weight
pigs on top of each other and cows very
much the same
it’s also leading to another kind of
breeding program one for antibiotic
resistant superbugs whose
pandemic potential around the globe far
outweighs that
of covert 19. and growing animals
to make meat contributes more greenhouse
gas emissions to the atmosphere
than all transport methods combined
that’s planes
trains and cars and clearing land
to grow crops to feed animals is one of
the leading causes of deforestation
and biodiversity lost around the world
we’re at the point
already right now where 96
of all of the mammals on earth they’re
either humans
or the animals that we grow to feed us
so let’s take this and mix it with a
grown population maybe 10 billion people
by 2050
and meat demands to double by that time
and what you find is the situation is
it’s catastrophic
and the existential crisis for us for
all of us is very
very real scientists have been warning
us for some time about
the relationship between our dinner
plates and this climate countdown crisis
that we’re facing
some studies say that as much as a 90
reduction in individual meat consumption
is required just to stop things from
getting worse
about three years ago i went on to an
exploration into my food choices and how
i was impacting this climate crisis
i learned about some of these facts and
these figures and about the state of the
current food production systems and
one day i made a decision to adopt a
plant-based diet
which as the name suggests means i
stopped eating meat
for two years i was strictly vegan
and then i wasn’t i started eating meat
again
at first it was just a one-off you know
a sense of culinary pleasure and then
this sincere pang of guilt
and then after that it was only on rare
occasions just to sometimes food i’ve
been very good
this year so i can have that and then
slowly but surely over time it it just
became a normalized habit
i’m quite embarrassed to get up in front
of a room full of people here and admit
that time and time again i cave to
temptation
and sometimes even when i know all of
the facts
my actions don’t reflect the wider
actions that i would like to see out
there in the world
the sad reality of it is i’m i’m not
alone
i record 72 percent of americans said
that
global warming is of personal importance
to them
in australia 79 of people say they’re
either fairly concerned or they’re very
concerned about climate change
and we’re the two biggest meat eaters in
the world
see for most there is this huge gap
between the righteous choice and
the more desirable one it’s an
everyday challenge that for most of us
even the most conscious of consumers it
causes us to turn a blind eye and really
not think about those everyday perils of
our food choices
and in a world where we’re constantly
fighting off temptation
be it from advertising or social media
or from social pressures around us
it’s just easier to eat the delicious
thing
there’s more information readily
available today than it
ever has been about the negative
consequences of industrial animal
agriculture
and eating meat but still meat
consumption globally it is on the rise
at a faster rate than ever before
studies show that as people get
wealthier they just consume more meat
and with the huge emerging middle
classes in places like africa and china
and other countries around the world
what we’re seeing is an explosion in
purpose and meat consumption
and that’s even more terrifying when you
realize that there’s over a billion
vegetarians in the world
and the vast majority of them are not
that way by choice
they’re that way by circumstance they’re
ready and they’re willing to eat more
meat as soon as it’s more affordable for
them to do so
and it makes sense meat is a phenomenal
product it is
very very good and this notion of
consuming meat being a pleasurable
act is something that is so deeply
ingrained
in the cultural fabric of societies and
the eating habits of billions of people
so what if i told you that we could have
our meat
and eat it too what if i told you that
we could feed billions of
new and existing meat eaters real
delicious meat products
but in a way that’s completely
sustainable what if i told you that
right
now we are on the brink of the most
important disruption in food and
agriculture
literally since we first domesticated
animals and plants 10 000 years ago
what i’m talking about is the next great
domestication
the domestication of the cell
right now around the world a number of
companies are producing real
animal meat products directly from the
cells of animals
instead of the animals themselves it’s
called
cultured meat and it might just be the
solution to our industrial
animal agriculture problems okay so how
does this work
you can take a small sample of cells
from an animal it’s a harmless biopsy
it’s about the size of an almond
and from that what you can do is isolate
the stem cells that are responsible
for building fat muscle and connective
tissue which really are just the
building blocks of all of the meat that
we eat today
what you can take is seed those building
blocks into a cultivator which
essentially is it’s a fancy beer brewery
it’s a big tank
in there they’re fed with salts and
sugars and amino acids which is all of
the essential nutrients
that they need to grow and they do
trillions
and trillions of cells divide and divide
and divide and then they come together
to form complex structures
and then after four to six weeks
you get real delicious meat products
like these that have been made with the
cells of animals
but not the animals themselves
okay so there’s at least a dozen
scientists around the world right now
who are rolling their eyes at how much i
just simplified that
in reality it is a scientific and
engineering challenge that demands
and continues to demand some of the
greatest minds in the world
but when you understand the payoff that
is available here
it’s so worth the challenge an early
study out of the university of oxford
suggested that by growing meat using the
cells of animals instead of animals
themselves
will result in a 98 reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions
it would result in a 99 less land use
and a 96 percent less water use
it also lowers the risk of any
animal-borne global pandemics
and by taking this production that’s not
impacted by climate
or seasons or weather suddenly
production
is available to countries that could
never have it before not just those who
have
large swathes of arable land like we do
and from 250 000 euros for just one
burger
back in 2013 it’s now being produced for
less than a thousand dollars a kilo and
that still sounds like a lot but it’s
projected to be less than any meat on
our shelves in the next 10 years
and for the foodies in the audience the
connoisseurs
it doesn’t stop there see by rethinking
food from the ground or
the cell up we can reimagine not
restricted by the criteria that we
started with in the old systems
this might be new creations like beef
that tastes like bacon
or it might be that we get pork cells
and lobster cells and we bring them
together and have a surf and turf burger
and truly it’s just as easy to grow the
cells of a galapagos tortoise
as it is a cow or what have we got
together cells that were naturally rich
in l-tryptophan
we brought them together to create this
meat product that naturally elevates our
mood
and then after which we drift off into
this nice rejuvenating rest
for everyone in the audience tonight
that would be a sleep steak
okay let’s fast forward a little bit
thinking about a world where we’re all
eating cultured meat
what we found is that it’s having
incredibly positive impact on global
hunger
on nutrition and general health for
billions of people
it sounds like an absolute no-brainer
right
well sometimes the greatest of food
staples don’t come to market for the
strangest of reasons
let me give you an example put up your
hand if you have had a food product with
potato in it in the last
week that should be most of you
statistically
each of us eat global as global citizens
each of us eat
34 kilograms of potatoes a year which if
you think about 7 billion people that’s
a lot of spuds
but it wasn’t always quick this quick to
catch on
in fact in 1748 france outright banned
the potato
across the whole country they thought
that it looked like a small hand that
had leprosy
and if you ate it then you were at risk
of contracting the same
they also believed that it would give
you rampant sexual urges but it’s
probably another ted talk
so look to overcome the technical
challenges that are associated with
bringing culture meat to market
we’re going to need some of the greatest
minds the greatest entrepreneurs
scientists engineers and policy makers
to start working together
but to get over the trappings of the
erotic potato leper myths
we need you guys to start talking about
it
my father’s in the audience tonight when
i was a kid
my father told me that almost all
problems could be solved by just simply
having better communication
he’d say start a conversation let’s just
see what happens
so when i found out in 2017 the culture
meet was a thing and that i could
have the need and not feel that guilt
and that also by being involved i could
potentially positively impact billions
of lives
i got obsessed i called everyone i could
in the industry and they told me
tim the verdict is very clear we need
more scientists
and if you don’t have a phd well you’d
better have an mba and for a university
dropout like me that was a pretty bitter
pill to swallow
so i did what i knew and had been taught
and i started a conversation
just around the corner actually in
sydney i started a panel discussion the
title why should australia get involved
in cultured meat
i invited as many people as i could i
was worried nothing would happen
and actually over 200 people came that
day it was incredible conversation
that the questions were intelligent the
energy in the room was
vibrant and out of that one conversation
that one day that one event i met my
future business partner
i met the lawyer who would end up
handling our patents and i met the
investor that
was connected with the investor who
actually ended up cutting our very first
check
and if he cuts to two years later it’s
not just me
we’re a team of 18 people and one of the
fastest growing culture meat companies
in the world
every single day we have some of the
smartest phd scientists from around the
world contributing to creating meat
products
directly from the cells of animals
instead of the animals themselves
you see the point i’m trying to
illustrate here is never
ever doubt the power of just one
conversation
you never know where that’s going to
lead so what i want you to do not
tonight you’ve already had your dinner
but
tomorrow when you’re having dinner with
someone else i want you to start that
conversation
i want you to ask them all right would
you eat a burger that’s made from the
stem cells of a galapagos tortoise
and when they look at you like you might
have lost your mind
just politely explain to them that it
might just save the planet
thank you