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 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 to
scare Google the end of working
antibiotics
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
on our current trajectory we're gonna
need to be producing seventy to a
hundred 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 take six weeks to grow a
chicken to slaughter wait grow the cells
directly you can get that same growth in
six days 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 in
cell based meat gives consumers
everything that they love about me 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 that 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
silvus meat has not yet been
commercialized at all so we're gonna
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 there
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
tastes the same or better we have the
solution
let's make meat from plants let's grow
it directly from selves it's past time
that we mobilize the resources that are
necessary to create the next global
agricultural revolution thank you
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you