Our monthly roundup of everything protein, food, agriculture, and science.
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April 22, 2025
In just four years, leading companies in the cultured meat sector have driven core production costs dramatically below what the Humbird TEA—and its surrounding media coverage—deemed possible.
December 19, 2023
Microalgae, those tiny organisms that thrive in water and sunlight, hold immense potential for addressing the world’s protein sustainability challenges. By tackling key cultivation bottlenecks and exploring alternative growth strategies such as mixotrophy, microalgae-based proteins may soon become more accessible to consumers, offering a valuable addition to our diets and food supply chains.
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.
March 7, 2023
The general assumption is that technology is intrinsically neutral — it can be used for either good or bad and the outcome depends on the person or group who uses it. However, history has shown us time and again that this is not entirely true.
June 23, 2022
Chitin- and chitosan-based scaffolds show promise for improving both the scalability and nutritional value of cell-cultured meat products.
March 15, 2022
What options are on the food-tech menu for achieving long-term protein security? Cell culture, plants, microorganisms, algae, and fungi may all have roles to play. But from a sustainability and resilience perspective, is there a clear winner?
March 1, 2022
Gene-recombinant biotechnologies aim to produce key animal proteins at a fraction of the cost of conventional animal husbandry. The implications for research, medicine, food systems, and the climate could be huge. But can these emergent technologies scale quickly enough to spur system-wide change?
September 14, 2021
Much attention has been given to the innovators producing plant- and cell-based alternatives to traditionally animal-based foods, but less recognized are the ones developing serums and mixes in which those proteins can grow. Some of the most creative are using ancient and simple components—including algae and mycelia—to make the foundations for animal protein alternatives.
April 13, 2021
What distinguishes a muscle cell from a fat cell or a skin cell? The answer is “gene expression.” Although genome sequencing and analysis has been employed vastly in the study of disease and pharmaceuticals, there has been little application in the emerging field of cellular agriculture.
March 24, 2021
How do you feed 10 billion people? The university that helped turn California’s wine industry from afterthought into economic juggernaut has set its sights on cultivated meat.
March 16, 2021
There is no shortage of intelligent and passionate people who want to get involved in cellular agriculture, but there are few resources directing them to the various pathways into the field. In order to solve this problem, Cellular Agriculture Australia has developed an online resource called “Pathways into Cellular Agriculture.”
October 29, 2020
An aquaculture researcher from the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) has secured a seed grant from US-based research institute New Harvest to develop cell-based crayfish meat.
October 6, 2020
Three late-stage PhD candidates have been accepted into a government-funded industry internship program to undertake cultivated meat research.
August 28, 2020
By optimizing culture media ingredients specifically for cultivated meat production, and by producing those ingredients at scale, costs may be reduced to as little as $0.24 per liter. This would enable cell-cultured meat produced in bioreactors to reach prices competitive with their animal-based counterparts. But investment and demand needed to reach those economies of scale remain a constraint on lowering cultivated meat production costs.
August 6, 2020
Cultured insect meat products might look more like normal burgers and steaks than you’d expect. But what is entomoculture, why might we need it, how does it work, and who’s leading the research? Prodigious young science writer and New Harvest summer intern, Avery Parkinson, answers all your questions.
July 20, 2020
A recently founded startup from Australia has developed a novel edible scaffold for cultivated meat production, addressing one of the key challenges facing the cellular agriculture industry. Perth-based Cass Materials has harnessed the natural fermentation processes discovered in the production of nata de coco — a coconut jelly commonly used in desserts in the Philippines — to manufacture a nanocellulose fiber matrix within which meat cells can adhere and grow.
July 15, 2020
In 2040, one third of the meat on our plates could be grown outside of animals, drastically reducing the leading sources of CO2 emissions and water pollution, while answering the question of how to feed a global population of nine billion. Cellular agriculture companies such as Memphis Meats, BlueNalu, and Mosa Meat are racing to bring their products to market, but they are still missing a key ingredient: affordable culture media available in large quantities. Brussels-based startup Tiamat Sciences believes their technology platform could become the best option to bridge that gap.
April 7, 2020
In an eponymous book published in 1968, Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich noted that the rate of population growth would outpace agricultural production, leading to widespread famine and subsequent suffering in the 1970s and 1980s. Many now look back at that prediction and shame it as another example of fear-mongering about a Malthusian catastrophe that has been often repeated throughout history but never come to pass. This post comes from my upcoming book, Cultivated Abundance, which will be published by New Degree Press in July 2020.