For many years, certain car manufacturers try to obstruct the transition to electric vehicles. It’s not hard to see why: when you’ve invested heavily in an existing technology, you want to extract every last drop before disinvesting. But sly innocent as in some cases these efforts have been, they seem almost innocent compared to the concerted program by a heritage industry and its pet politicians to suppress a far more important switch: the necessary transition away from livestock farming.
Animal farming ranks together with fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on earth. It’s not just the sprawling greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes Even more important is the quantity ground it requires Land use is an important environmental metric because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.
Wild ecosystems are of crucial importance for the survival of most species on earth, and of earth systems themselves: for example the rainforest and cerrado of South America help to regulate weather systems. The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed above all by livestock farmingwhose expansion is driven in part by the foodie craze for “grass-fed” beef. The cerrado becomes rubbish mainly through soy farming to produce feed for pigs and chickens.
Feeding ourselves animal products is a fantastically wasteful and inefficient way to use land, at least to swallow four times as much like all the other food we grow while providing only 17% of our calories. More than any other factor it drives the destruction of forestswetlands, savannas, rivers and other habitats. Weaning ourselves off these products is just as important as weaning ourselves off oil, gas and coal.
How can this be done? Moral suasion – convincing people to switch to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons – is going nowhere: worldwide, meat-eating continues to increase while the percentage of vegans remains in the low single digits. some countries. I have long been convinced that the only effective strategy is to produce alternative products that are in fact indistinguishable from meat, dairy and eggs, but are cheaper and healthier. Around the world, scientists and startups are working on it.
There is a wide range of developing technologies, often misleadingly reduced to “meat in the lab” or “cell-grown meat”. What these terms originally meant was to grow whole sections in a bioreactor on a collagen scaffold. After initial enthusiasm I have it as a dead end: it is simply too complicated and too expensive. Now the terms are often used to cover all new alternatives, including much simpler and cheaper technologies such as microbes brew.
Such new protein technologies are the biggest threat to the global livestock industry, as they can be used to replace animal sources for everything from cheese and ice cream to sausages, hamburgers, eggs, fish and steak, as well as to create a vast new variety of foods that we have yet to eat. can’t imagine. Because the protein content is so high and the variety of microbes is so great, some of these foods can be produced less processing than the animal-based products they compete with. Unhealthy components such as saturated fats can be excluded, and healthy ones, such as long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, can be bred in.
Last spring, Solar Foods, the company in whose lab I first ate a pancake made from bacterial proteins, announced its first factorynear Helsinki. The transition to such new protein sources can be as profound in its impact as the shift from hunter collection to agriculture. If done correctly, this can be significantly reduced demand for land and farm chemicals.
Unlike farming, it can ensure that neither inputs (such as fertilizers) nor outputs (such as manure) leak into ecosystems. This can significantly reduce the demand for fresh water: indeed, some microbes can be grown in salt water. This can allow food to be produced in places that can no longer feed their people, as there is insufficient fertile soil and rainfall. As long as governments prevent large corporations from monopolizing the new technology, it can greatly improve food security and food sovereignty.
If you doubt the potential of these technologies, you only have to look at the effort being deployed by meat corporations and their tame politicians to shut them down. At the behest of livestock lobby groups, lab-grown meat has been banned FloridaAlabama, Italy and Hungary. Politicians in FranceRomania and other US states try to follow suit.
Given the confusing terms used in these laws, lawmakers don’t seem to be quite sure what they forbid. But some officials are trying to ensure that the entire new protein sector is stopped in its tracks. An effort by the EU to green the food supply by encouraging alternative proteins was crushed by the agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski.
Governments seeking to ban alternatives to animal products have made little attempt to disguise their motivation: protectionism. Various politicians and officials have openly admit that they are trying to defend established industries – meat and dairy – against competition. In every other sector, they claim to favor “free markets”, and protectionism attracts huge penalties. In this sector it is enforced by legislation.
Now, according to Greenpeace’s investigative office, Excavateda new campaign funded by the livestock industry and driven by a former meat executive is calling for a EU-wide ban. Since the far-right Hungarian government holds the presidency of the European Council, the campaign could succeed. The UK government support for new proteins is a very rare benefit of Brexit.
None of the US and EU moves are subtle. They are the exercise of brute legacy power. They are bolstered by an outrageous allocation of public spending. Research published in the journal One Earth found that the US government spends 800 times more on subsidizing animal products than on subsidizing new proteins, and the EU spends 1,200 times.
A new investigation by Kenny Torrella for Vox magazine reports that some of the leading environmental groups in the US – WWF, the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund – far from fighting this anti-environmental market fraud, are participating in the meat industry’s greenwashing campaigns. Why? The answer appears to be pure cowardice: their justifications suggest that they are afraid of upsetting ranchers. Greenpeace UK is highly unusual in trying to defend the new technology against the old.
We must recognize self-serving corporate propaganda when we see it, confront protectionism and neophobia, and support the technology that may be our last, best hope to prevent environmental catastrophe.
