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According to numbers compiled by the Alternative Protein Show, an annual event in San Francisco, there are around 100 companies battling to build better plant, seed, insect, and lab-grown meat alternatives. Dozens of incubator spaces and venture capital firms in places like Silicon Valley are helping to fund this research, which promises to change how we eat. When Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic, announced in 2017 that he was investing in the alt-protein company Memphis Meats, he did so, he said, because he believes that “in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, and also be much healthier for everyone.”

This alt-meat movement is being made possible, in part, by what’s been called the fourth industrial revolution by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. This revolution “is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds,” according to the WEF, and it’s perhaps best summed up with the word du jour: disruption. As ride sharing upended the taxi industry, and online streaming put the screws to cable, companies like JUST hope to harness technology and computing to disrupt the feedlot-to-slaughterhouse pipeline and create foods that are more sustainable, healthy, and viable for a planet set to have 10 billion people to feed by the middle of this century.

“The alt-meat movement is the idea that we take the best of science, the best of engineering, and we can figure out alternatives to eating meat that will be healthy for us—or at least no worse—and that can be produced in sufficient quantities at a reasonable cost to be able to provide for the nutrition of today’s and tomorrow’s population,” says Ruth Faden, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. But will we eat it? And what unintended consequences might lurk amid the disruption? …

…continue reading ‘Protein of the future – Get ready for a menu of lab-grown steaks, “bleeding” plant burgers, and cricket smoothies’

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