The best-selling book, Drawdown, lists a total of 80 solutions to the threat of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. If these solutions were implemented in a timely way it would be possible to reverse the increases in greenhouse gases that have occurred during the past century or so. Drawdown is a wonderful book. I urge you to buy a copy and ponder which of the 80 solutions you might play a role in implementing. Interestingly, switching to a plant-rich diet ranks number 4 in importance among those solutions. It’s my favorite solution, not just because it would play a major role in abating the increase in greenhouse gases. A plant-based diet would improve human health and would be among the most readily adaptive to nations at all stages of development.
I recently became aware of a new technology that could replace our ecologically wasteful practices in the production of animal-based food, one that raises new possibilities and new questions: growing animal cells in cultures. In the final day of a recent USDA-FDA public gathering on cell-cultured food technology it came down to essentially one question: If it looks like meat and tastes like meat...can you call it meat?
Representatives of food technology companies that start with cells from animals and grow them into meat products like burgers, nuggets, fish or sausages, say the products are, effectively, meat and should be labeled accordingly. Brian Spears, CEO of New Age Meats, said he served cell-based pork samples to his friends and reporters and they didn't notice a difference from traditional products. "It was perfectly mistakable for meat because it is meat," he said. "When we go to market and label this, it would be simply dishonest to label it as anything other than meat."
You can guess who doesn’t like that idea. Traditional meat producers seem to think that they have a lock on words like “beef”, “pork” and even the word “meat”. We’re talking here about something quite different from products made to look, feel and taste as much as possible like meat; for example, the Impossible Burger, made from plants and consisting of simple ingredients, including wheat protein, coconut oil, and potato protein. Many other vegetarian substitutes for animal-based foods are formed largely from soy or mung beans. By contrast, the new cell-based products are formed from cells taken from animals and then colonized in some manner to multiply.
This is all new to me. I’m in the dark about the cellular compositions of the new –ahem—meat products. I have no idea about how the new materials will be prepared and presented to consumers in grocery stores, about their susceptibility to spoilage, contamination and all the rest. But when I reflect on the expenditures of energy, water and other resources required to make a typical animal-based food product such as an egg or chicken nugget, I so want this new technology to succeed!
Consider what it takes to produce a typical quarter-pound burger:
· About 460 gallons of fresh water
· About 13 to 15 pounds of feed, mainly corn and grain
· About 65 square feet of land
· A total of about 4 pounds of greenhouse gases, including methane
Add to that the environmental damages occasioned by animal wastes. All this for one measly quarter-pound piece of meat! As the per capita incomes in nations such as China climb, the citizens of these countries are avid to adopt American ways of life with respect to diet and many other niceties. If all of the earth’s humans were to enjoy an average American’s standard of living, the Earth could sustainably support only about 1.2 billion people.
 The agricultural enterprise that undergirds animal-based food industries produces enormous amounts of animal wastes that eventually pollute rivers, streams and ground waters. The big hurricanes that swept over the US during the 2018 season showed us once again how fragile our ecological framework actually is. An estimated 5500 pigs and 3.4 million chickens were killed in flooding following hurricane Florence. North Carolina, the second-largest pork producing state in the U.S., has more than 4000 open-air ponds filled with a mix of water and hog manure and urine—plus the remains of animal carcasses, blood, and chemicals from pesticides. Several of these hog ponds have leaked into surrounding areas during flooding, exposing communities to E.coli, salmonella, and antibiotic-resistant MRSA. People forced to live in the vicinities of these facilities suffer a diminished quality of life and continuing threats to their health.
It’s not all that hard to become a vegetarian. If you’ve never given it a try, why not start by setting aside one day of the week as a purely vegetarian food day? There are literally thousands of websites that offer great recipes: Forks over Knives, Dr. McDougall's recipes, just to cite a couple. With a bit of practice, you can even eat vegetarian or vegan in most restaurants - just ask. You too can help save the planet, while you live a longer and healthier life.
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