The grain for one cow could feed 20 people directly.
We are feeding 7.5 billion people today.
The food exists.
The cake is not a lie.
And a large percentage eat inefficient, unsustainable
diets, which is fun for now, but it is short-sighted.
We are borrowing from the future to feed today.
But by 2050, for every four people eating today,
squeeze another one at that table,
with the same amount of food.
There will be 10 billion of us.
That's a bit less for everybody.
Or we could change our diets, and we
could live more sustainably.
Now we have plant-based meat.
Plants are cheaper to make, they're cheaper to buy,
and they're better for you.
We can still eat burgers, even the occasional steak.
We could do better.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We are borrowing from the future to eat
the way we're eating now.
The average American and Kiwi, slash, New Zealander
eats 222 pounds of meat a year.
That's 880 quarter-pounders, 2.5 every single day.
That is a lot of money, a lot of cow--
1.5 cows per person annually, because a 1,000-pound cow only
produces 440 pounds of edible meat.
Meat is delicious.
It's delectable.
But it's also deadly.
We make three times the amount of meat today
than we did in 1960.
That is nearly a 400 percent increase,
according to this adorable usda.gov document.
For every pound of beef that we make,
we have to use 1,910 gallons of water.
For every 1 gram of beef that we make, 220 grams of CO2
is created.
A 2019 study in The Lancet said that if we started farming meat
sustainably, we would see a 10-percent reduction
in greenhouse gas.
I bring that up because I don't want you to think
I'm shaming meat-eaters.
But if we did cut meat-eating, we
could reduce greenhouse gas by 50 percent by 2050.
But that might not be enough, of course.
If we really want to make the climate-change,
global-warming argument moot--
or moo-t, if you will-- we should cut meat-eating
by 90 percent.
90.
What if, instead of eating cows that were raised on pastures,
you ate cow meat grown in a plant or a bioreactor,
or plant meat that was grown on a farm near your house?
We could do better.
Also, it's cheaper to eat vegetables,
as we learned earlier.
So why not just grow 1,000 pounds of meat directly?
There's this stuff called synthetic meat.
You may have heard of it as lab-grown meat,
or in-vitro meat, cultured meat.
And it's created by, quote, painlessly harvesting
muscle cells from a living cow and then taking those cells
and culturing them in a bioreactor.
There's a study by Maastricht University
that talked all about it.
The cells begin to divide from one muscle cell
to more than a trillion.
Once they're cultured, they can take those natural cells,
and they will merge into myotubes
of about 0.03 millimeters.
And myotubes are then placed in a ring around a column of gel,
and the muscle contracts to cause them to grow.
And the muscle tissue turns into the same stuff
that you would find in an animal.
And with enough of these strands, we get meat--
with no slaughtering, no harm to the animal.
One tissue sample from a cow can yield enough muscle tissue
to make 80,000 quarter-pounders.
If you want to continue eating meat,
maybe this is a way that we could get sustainable meat
production.
In 2013, when I first reported this,
it was $300,000 per patty.
But it might be $5 in 2021.
Could we leave meat behind, or at least
the way we think of it now?
According to The Lancet, another study there,
if we switch to plant-based diets,
we're going to cut greenhouse gas emissions, also,
by 80% by 2050, remember?
80%.
Plant-based doesn't mean we can't eat burgers, because now
we have plant-based meat.
Essentially, it's plant-based proteins, fruit-
and vegetable-based colors and flavors
that are processed in such a way to get the texture of meat.
And a plant-based meat study by the University of Michigan
found that doing meat this way produces
90 percent less greenhouse gases,
46 percent less energy use, and 200 percent less water use.
It's not exactly healthier than meat,
but it's better for the planet.
Come on.
One challenge at a time, right?
It's still two to three times per pound
to make plant-based meat, in terms of cost.
Beyond Meat's chief growth officer Chuck Muth told Vox,
first you have to make a great product.
And then second, you have to make it nutritious.
And then third, you make it affordable.
But that's not all.
Because economically, land and water
are bigger issues when it comes to meat.
According to a study in PLoS ONE, 38 percent of our planet
is used for food production of some kind.
Of the habitable land, it's half.
Half-- just to make food for the people who
live on the other half.
Meat takes up more space to build to make than plants.
Plants don't roam around.
They're more compact.
They can be grown in cycles to keep the soil healthy.
And we don't have to grow a bunch of plants
to feed to the plants to make food.
You just grow them the first time.
A third option for protein might be insects.
I've done it.
It's totally normal.
You get far more yield.
They're super-efficient organisms.
It can be a bit off-putting.
Cricket legs can get stuck in your teeth.
But you can make them into protein powders.
You could put them in all sorts of stuff.
Now we're back to that pill food that I mentioned earlier.
But either way, food needs to be rethought.
And alternative meats might be a good option.
Either way, though, pill food just sounds terrible.
Can I just say this?
I love food shows.
I love documentaries and food television.
I love it all.
But pill food-- so unappetizing from a visual perspective.
If you like food, you should watch The History of Food.
This show explores the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
that created the evolution part of evolution
economics and classism that I mentioned earlier.
And it's in one of those big-budget, amazing
documentaries on CuriosityStream,
which is so good.
Use my link, curiositystream.com/trace,
right now during their holiday sale,
and you're going to get CS for $12 for the whole year.
That's $1 a month, the same price as a dollar cheeseburger.
If you find you're sort of full up on food stuff,
you can hop over to global warming, physics,
under-the-sea, space exploration.
They have got it all.
Plus, with my promo code here, you can get CS,
and you'll get Nebula for a year, too.
Maybe you've heard me talk about Nebula, even
in the previous episode.
It's so great, we got nominated for a Streamy.
And it's a streaming service that I helped start
with other thoughtful, curious creators.
And if you join CS, you get Nebula for free.
And by joining, you directly support creators
like Jordan Harrod and Rene Ritchie
and Patrick Willems and T1J--
all sorts of amazing creators.
It takes away algorithms and recommendation engines.
You just get to watch our videos.
And remember, we own the service,
so joining supports me and them directly.
It's a win-win.
Some creators even upload special Nebula-only episodes
just for you.
So again, $12 a year-- $1 a month,
thanks to their holiday sale.
You can get CuriosityStream's big-budget documentaries,
and you can watch us over on Nebula.
Only a Buckazoid.
And thanks.
So Harvard did this study-- how to feed 10 billion
by mid-century.
And they looked at all sorts of different ways.
It was like a big think tank.
It was a super-interesting panel.
And you can use technology to make farms more efficient.
We are doing that now, but not doing it in a sustainable way
all the time.
You can reduce food waste, which is a big deal.
40 percent of our food is lost from farm to table.
And then, of course, once it gets to the table,
we waste a significant portion of it in the West.
But the biggest way that we can affect the problem
with our food systems is that we need
to change our eating habits.
We need to eat more fish and more plants and less red meat.
But how many people could we feed, like, overall--
if we were to do everything right, what is the upper limit?
Our planet is one little speck.
We can't feed everyone forever.
More on that next time.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of Uno
Dos of Trace in this series all about where
we're going with food and what's going on with our food systems.
Make sure that you subscribe for all the episodes.
This was episode 3 of 5.
There's still two more.
Make sure that you check me out over on all the social medias.
I have a Patreon.
You can go and join, follow, like, subscribe.
Thank you so much.
Have a happy, happy holiday.
And 2020 is almost over, thank goodness.
I am Trace.
I'll see you in the future.