Our monthly roundup of everything protein, food, agriculture, and science.
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May 16, 2023
By taking the tools of tissue engineering and adapting them to work on a scale as large as agriculture, cell-cultured meat could change the world. But first, we need political will to fund foundational academic research in this field.
September 7, 2021
Japan is forging a unique development path for cellular agriculture — one in which no one is left behind and anyone interested can get involved in helping create an open, inclusive future for the technology. This is the story of the Shojinmeat Project and how a citizen science experiment came to have big impact on national policy.
August 10, 2021
Though opportunity in this space is abundant, government regulators have not yet caught up to the pace of new product innovation. Given the significant implications that new regulations and guidance can have for the alternative protein industry, it is important to ensure that the end results are inclusive and comprehensive.
June 16, 2021
Though perhaps not thought of as immediately as startup magnets like Silicon Valley, Singapore, or Israel, it would be a mistake to overlook the innovation culture of Canada — the outlook for cellular agriculture there is highly optimistic.
April 27, 2021
Although antibiotics are generally thought of in the context of treating infections within our healthcare systems, that’s not where most are actually used. Globally, around 73% of all antibiotics are used in animals grown for food.
June 23, 2020
On December 29, 2017, just two days before New Year’s Eve, Josh Tetrick, the CEO of JUST, and his golden retriever, Elie, boarded a nonstop KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight in San Francisco that would take him halfway around the world to Amsterdam, where he hoped to make the first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat. This article is an excerpt from BILLION DOLLAR BURGER: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy, with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Chase Purdy.
May 14, 2020
It’s a sick and tragic sight. Across the US, dairy producers are currently dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk into fields and lagoons, as demand continues to plummet. It makes me think about the country’s more than 9 million dairy cows, forced to live out their highly unnatural lives, in dark, cramped milk-making prisons, often sick and in pain — just to keep pumping out a useless commodity. The same could be said of the US meat industry, which slaughters 9.59 billion land animals a year. To make matters worse, President Trump ordered slaughterhouses to stay open despite the clear danger to public health. This is something we can fix.