Veg for 20+ years, vegan for 10. Plant-based cuisine has grown in quality in leaps and bounds over that time. Better for animals, better for health, better for climate (+ land use, water use, pollution). We're not feeling the world on grass-fed beef. Ain't happenin.
Great episode, David. Your guest was excellent and your questions (as always) were thoughtful and smart. I appreciated your honesty about your own feelings of guilt and your unsuccessful attempts to change your habits to align with your concern for the environment. As a longtime vegan, I almost laughed at your perfect defense of veganism early in the show. Logical, irrefutable, and yet sheepishly swept under the rug by all non-vegans, hoping that no one will notice the hypocrisy. I've downloaded the book from Audible and look forward to listening. Our massive food industry and subsidies from the government that make meat cheaper than many plant foods make fundamental change seem almost impossible, but anyone who is serious about climate change or the treatment of animals has to come to terms with the damage that is being done by animal agriculture. Thank you for addressing it thoughtfully. I hope you will do so more often in spite of your discomfort.
This was an interesting talk! Ever since I tried my first proper plant-based meat burger (Impossible, at Blue Moon Burgers), I could see the vision: incrementally better meat alternatives at lower and lower cost.
It's a disappointment that the path has lost steam since then. I'd hoped that by now, a compelling beef alternative would be on just about every fast food menu, maybe even as the default/cheaper option.
I do hope your guest is right, that these efforts by Impossible and Beyond are a GM EV1 moment, and that with enough funding into R & D we can successfully crack the code of a truly compelling alternative in the future. The implications of getting this right are truly world-changing, in the most literal sense.
In Greg Nemet's "How Solar Became Cheap," he argues that there were boom and bust periods, and that we could have solved cheap solar far earlier if we'd stayed focus. In the book, I make the case that we should learn that lesson w/r/t alt meats. Sadly, we're in a trough of disillusionment right now; we need to pull out of it.
Excellent conversation. I think one huge incentive for the adoption of cultivated meat as opposed to raising and slaughtering animals is the deep dislike many people feel about the treatment of animals in an industrial setting. The proliferation of cage free and free range eggs points to this discomfort. There are few people who can witness an industrial animal confinement operation and not feel a bit queasy. Hence the laws against journalists covering these operations in many places.
Great presentation. It has rekindled my interested in plant-based meat. I continue to be surprised how much this technology seems to have reseeded from public acceptance. Hopefully better days are ahead.
This is wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Grass fed cows burp and fart just as much methane as feedlot cattle. They also require a lot more land, most of which was previously covered with forest which sequesters far more carbon than any farmland ever could.
I wish this were true, but I don't think there's a single environmental think tank that agrees; the only "evidence" in favor comes from self-interested actors, and the World Resources Institute has repeatedly dived into the analysis and found the opposite, including with their recent "Better Meat" report.
In the book, I argue that nevertheless, grass fed regenerative meat has a lot to recommend it (climate is not on that list, though); since it requires so much more land, alt meats can be a nice complement to grass fed beef. See chapters 2 and 11 of the book for more on this.
In chapter 2, I also do a shallow dive into the climate science.
It's crazy to me how many people who think they're environmentalists eat meat. If you're not convinced by the first sections of the podcast where they discuss the harms and how you can thrive on a vegan diet, as far as I'm concerned you just don't care that much about the environment. From the ratio of calories alone (at best 9 calories in to 1 calorie out), that means a vegan eating 15% of their food and just throwing away 85% of it is actually less wasteful than a meat eater eating every bite. All for what? Because you like the taste? If you're willing to cause this level of harm for something as trivial as a few seconds of sensory pleasure, I just can not by any stretch of the imagination consider you an environmentalist.
Very interesting but coming from a regenerative ag point of view I would want to see better real data around land use. The argument here seems to go first with the market and industrial tech lens first and a little mention of data that points to rewilding and regenerative ag when for this to work I am suggesting land use first then if necessary then engineer and tech solutions geo targeted for heath of the land and air we all need … it may or may not even need skyscrapers of grown meat . Savory who had us looking at the globe to see how fast our lands are turning to deserts …. That is a lot of land that once stewarded we may not need yet another energy demanding industry…. Try the land use lens first … I want to see more scalable regen ag….then we can use other tools … I don’t think he gets those lands that are regen are carbon sinks too not just forests where is that dats in the calculation of meat production?
data in chapter 2 of the book, though Mike Grunwald does a much deeper dive in his book, We Are Eating the Earth, which is also a delight to read (he's a professional writer!).
WRI has done a lot of work on this, too, and there are multiple meta-analysis. All of the evidence from disinterested parties indicates that while there's a lot to recommend regen ag done right, there's also 1) a lot of greenwashing; and 2) no legit evidence that regen ag is a net benefit for climate. See analysis from WRI and Project Drawdown as starting points - both show their work.
On Savory, I recommend the 2023 Monbiot v Savory debate: If there were any evidence that regen ag was a net benefit for climate, Savory would have made that case. In case, he started the debate by totally and completely conceding the point.
Again: I agree that regen ag has a lot to offer (esp re: farmer livelihoods, animal welfare, and soil health), but the point I make in the book is that right now, it's in a land competition for increased meat demand, and it continually loses. Alt meats can free up land that can be used for regen ag.
See the Green Alliance report, A New Land Dividend, for more on this.
How about we just shut down big fossil fuel and the corrupt kleptocrats who keep it going via their fascist propaganda mills? Leave meat alone ffs. Fake meat is shit.
I point out in chapter 2 that even if we did what you suggest, we'd still blow through climate targets and also that meat production causes lots of other environmental harms that are not solved by a shift away from fossil fuels. Plus global hunger, AMR, pandemic risk, and cruelty to animals.
I point out in chapter 6 that cultivated meat is real meat and that industrial animal meat is far more unnatural than cultivated meat. Not at all "fake meat."
If you read the book, please let me know what you think.
As a longtime listener of Volts, I wanted to subscribe and help them financially. I assumed David, who I thought was serious about the environment, would certainly be vegan, but just to confirm I specifically listened to this episode, so I could feel good about where my money is going.
Turns out, nope! I lost so much respect for David listening to this episode. It's one thing to not know how damaging animal ag is to the environment. It's quite another to know how bad it is and do it anyways just because you think meat is yummy, while trying to claim to care about the environment.
Hopefully he'll make the change in the near future
In the beginning, you were talking about the environmental costs of farming, which are all true, but then you say how there were no downsides to having a non-farming source of meat. I live in Maryland, and ~50% of the Eastern Shore economy is based upon poultry farming. The widespread adoption of non-farm meat would literally wipe out much of the Eastern Shore economy, and this is only one region of the country. I am sure many more areas are in a similar position. If your very livelihood is at stake, I would call that a real downside. Statements like this help Trump become president.
This is no different than pointing out that renewable energy puts coalminers out of business. Not a good reason to keep the industry around, even if some relatively small number people are hurt by it, it is vastly outweighed by many orders of magnitude by the benefits.
And since this transition will almost certainly be gradual, it's not like they're all going to be out of business tomorrow. They'll slowly transition out. Even just based on human lifespans, if we just let all the existing workers keep working until they die or switch careers, and simply not hire new ones, this would probably exceed the pace of alternative meat adoption, and not a single person would lose their job.
If I may play devil's advocate, from a climate perspective the problem is mostly cows (and to a much lesser extent sheep and goats).
So the fallback position if we can't make good fake meat is substituting beef for other meats. Kangaroo farms (which tastes pretty close to beef, though it's harder to cook well) across the world?
Beef and other ruminants are the worst for climate, yes, but that's a bit like giving Hummers a pass on climate b/c they're not as bad as flying first class; the Hummer is still horrible.
The land use and emissions attributable to chicken, pork, and farmed fish are still far greater than plant-based and cultivated meat (on land use, it's 3-6x for cultivated and plant-based chicken, respectively); that's huge for both the opportunity cost of land and sequestration potential.
As I discuss in the book, WRI says that on our current trajectory, there will be no wild spaces left in 2050.
Plus, chicken and farmed fish are far worse than beef for antibiotic use, pandemic risk, and cruelty to animals.
I also have a concern for allergens and whether we all actually won’t be allergic to proteins that our body may not recognize? Those old fillers were horrible on peoples systems… lab grown food can’t control how it behaves out there in the real world …
You honestly think we have less control over what goes into food produced in a lab setting than in a random animal's overbred body pumped full of hormones and antibiotics in some factory farm somewhere? I think the exact opposite is more likely to be true.
There's nonstop testing w/r/t precisely this concern, all over the world at this point.
It's a real concern for some of the brand new ingredients in plant-based meat (e.g., the synthetic heme in the Impossible burger), but it appears to be not a concern at all for cultivated meat (a tremendous amount of clear evidence on this point across dozens of companies and products).
And as we can see from both the extensive safety diligence that led to the approval of synthetic heme and 10 years of sales, it appears also to be a non-issue for Impossible's heme.
Important to stay diligent, of course, and ensure rigorous safety testing for all new ingredients.
Of course, more than 99% of new ingredients are used for all the other foods most people consume, including conventional meat - not for plant-based meat (and none at all for cultivated meat).
Veg for 20+ years, vegan for 10. Plant-based cuisine has grown in quality in leaps and bounds over that time. Better for animals, better for health, better for climate (+ land use, water use, pollution). We're not feeling the world on grass-fed beef. Ain't happenin.
Great episode, David. Your guest was excellent and your questions (as always) were thoughtful and smart. I appreciated your honesty about your own feelings of guilt and your unsuccessful attempts to change your habits to align with your concern for the environment. As a longtime vegan, I almost laughed at your perfect defense of veganism early in the show. Logical, irrefutable, and yet sheepishly swept under the rug by all non-vegans, hoping that no one will notice the hypocrisy. I've downloaded the book from Audible and look forward to listening. Our massive food industry and subsidies from the government that make meat cheaper than many plant foods make fundamental change seem almost impossible, but anyone who is serious about climate change or the treatment of animals has to come to terms with the damage that is being done by animal agriculture. Thank you for addressing it thoughtfully. I hope you will do so more often in spite of your discomfort.
This was an interesting talk! Ever since I tried my first proper plant-based meat burger (Impossible, at Blue Moon Burgers), I could see the vision: incrementally better meat alternatives at lower and lower cost.
It's a disappointment that the path has lost steam since then. I'd hoped that by now, a compelling beef alternative would be on just about every fast food menu, maybe even as the default/cheaper option.
I do hope your guest is right, that these efforts by Impossible and Beyond are a GM EV1 moment, and that with enough funding into R & D we can successfully crack the code of a truly compelling alternative in the future. The implications of getting this right are truly world-changing, in the most literal sense.
In Greg Nemet's "How Solar Became Cheap," he argues that there were boom and bust periods, and that we could have solved cheap solar far earlier if we'd stayed focus. In the book, I make the case that we should learn that lesson w/r/t alt meats. Sadly, we're in a trough of disillusionment right now; we need to pull out of it.
Excellent conversation. I think one huge incentive for the adoption of cultivated meat as opposed to raising and slaughtering animals is the deep dislike many people feel about the treatment of animals in an industrial setting. The proliferation of cage free and free range eggs points to this discomfort. There are few people who can witness an industrial animal confinement operation and not feel a bit queasy. Hence the laws against journalists covering these operations in many places.
Really loved this one!
Great presentation. It has rekindled my interested in plant-based meat. I continue to be surprised how much this technology seems to have reseeded from public acceptance. Hopefully better days are ahead.
if you check out the book, please let me know what you think. meatbook.org
I feel like there would be a market for extinct meats. T-rex steak, mammoth burger. /s
David, the problem is INDUSTRIAL meat production. Grass-fed meat produced regeneratively sequesters carbon. We should eat more meat, but produced in the right way. See the science from Carbon Cowboys: https://carboncowboys.org/about/all-our-films/roots-so-deep for the exquisite documentation on this, and https://www.climateandcapitalmedia.com/regenerative-agriculture-the-business-that-could-offset-all-human-emissions/ for the basic argument. Conversely, fake meat is toxic to humans, and likely never to pencil out economically. I can send you a piece I wrote on this if you want to dig into the numbers
This is wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Grass fed cows burp and fart just as much methane as feedlot cattle. They also require a lot more land, most of which was previously covered with forest which sequesters far more carbon than any farmland ever could.
I wish this were true, but I don't think there's a single environmental think tank that agrees; the only "evidence" in favor comes from self-interested actors, and the World Resources Institute has repeatedly dived into the analysis and found the opposite, including with their recent "Better Meat" report.
In the book, I argue that nevertheless, grass fed regenerative meat has a lot to recommend it (climate is not on that list, though); since it requires so much more land, alt meats can be a nice complement to grass fed beef. See chapters 2 and 11 of the book for more on this.
In chapter 2, I also do a shallow dive into the climate science.
(for the record, I do wish it were true.)
I love industrially produced corn fed steak
I’m more than happy to eat more pork or salmon instead
Why not more beans? They have less than 10% of the negative environmental impact of eating even the most "environmentally-friendly" animal meats
I don't like them.
It's crazy to me how many people who think they're environmentalists eat meat. If you're not convinced by the first sections of the podcast where they discuss the harms and how you can thrive on a vegan diet, as far as I'm concerned you just don't care that much about the environment. From the ratio of calories alone (at best 9 calories in to 1 calorie out), that means a vegan eating 15% of their food and just throwing away 85% of it is actually less wasteful than a meat eater eating every bite. All for what? Because you like the taste? If you're willing to cause this level of harm for something as trivial as a few seconds of sensory pleasure, I just can not by any stretch of the imagination consider you an environmentalist.
Very interesting but coming from a regenerative ag point of view I would want to see better real data around land use. The argument here seems to go first with the market and industrial tech lens first and a little mention of data that points to rewilding and regenerative ag when for this to work I am suggesting land use first then if necessary then engineer and tech solutions geo targeted for heath of the land and air we all need … it may or may not even need skyscrapers of grown meat . Savory who had us looking at the globe to see how fast our lands are turning to deserts …. That is a lot of land that once stewarded we may not need yet another energy demanding industry…. Try the land use lens first … I want to see more scalable regen ag….then we can use other tools … I don’t think he gets those lands that are regen are carbon sinks too not just forests where is that dats in the calculation of meat production?
data in chapter 2 of the book, though Mike Grunwald does a much deeper dive in his book, We Are Eating the Earth, which is also a delight to read (he's a professional writer!).
WRI has done a lot of work on this, too, and there are multiple meta-analysis. All of the evidence from disinterested parties indicates that while there's a lot to recommend regen ag done right, there's also 1) a lot of greenwashing; and 2) no legit evidence that regen ag is a net benefit for climate. See analysis from WRI and Project Drawdown as starting points - both show their work.
On Savory, I recommend the 2023 Monbiot v Savory debate: If there were any evidence that regen ag was a net benefit for climate, Savory would have made that case. In case, he started the debate by totally and completely conceding the point.
Again: I agree that regen ag has a lot to offer (esp re: farmer livelihoods, animal welfare, and soil health), but the point I make in the book is that right now, it's in a land competition for increased meat demand, and it continually loses. Alt meats can free up land that can be used for regen ag.
See the Green Alliance report, A New Land Dividend, for more on this.
How about we just shut down big fossil fuel and the corrupt kleptocrats who keep it going via their fascist propaganda mills? Leave meat alone ffs. Fake meat is shit.
I point out in chapter 2 that even if we did what you suggest, we'd still blow through climate targets and also that meat production causes lots of other environmental harms that are not solved by a shift away from fossil fuels. Plus global hunger, AMR, pandemic risk, and cruelty to animals.
I point out in chapter 6 that cultivated meat is real meat and that industrial animal meat is far more unnatural than cultivated meat. Not at all "fake meat."
If you read the book, please let me know what you think.
Okay, thank!
Even if we got completely off fossil fuels and fixed our Democracy, meat consumption would still be a massive environmental problem.
In the way that it is currently structured, yes.
As a longtime listener of Volts, I wanted to subscribe and help them financially. I assumed David, who I thought was serious about the environment, would certainly be vegan, but just to confirm I specifically listened to this episode, so I could feel good about where my money is going.
Turns out, nope! I lost so much respect for David listening to this episode. It's one thing to not know how damaging animal ag is to the environment. It's quite another to know how bad it is and do it anyways just because you think meat is yummy, while trying to claim to care about the environment.
Hopefully he'll make the change in the near future
In the beginning, you were talking about the environmental costs of farming, which are all true, but then you say how there were no downsides to having a non-farming source of meat. I live in Maryland, and ~50% of the Eastern Shore economy is based upon poultry farming. The widespread adoption of non-farm meat would literally wipe out much of the Eastern Shore economy, and this is only one region of the country. I am sure many more areas are in a similar position. If your very livelihood is at stake, I would call that a real downside. Statements like this help Trump become president.
This is no different than pointing out that renewable energy puts coalminers out of business. Not a good reason to keep the industry around, even if some relatively small number people are hurt by it, it is vastly outweighed by many orders of magnitude by the benefits.
And since this transition will almost certainly be gradual, it's not like they're all going to be out of business tomorrow. They'll slowly transition out. Even just based on human lifespans, if we just let all the existing workers keep working until they die or switch careers, and simply not hire new ones, this would probably exceed the pace of alternative meat adoption, and not a single person would lose their job.
David!
Someone is doing 50/50 beef/veggie burgers!
it's a start-up, but it's out there.
https://bothburger.com/
One of the co-founders is the son of an old friend of mine.
Great interview.
If I may play devil's advocate, from a climate perspective the problem is mostly cows (and to a much lesser extent sheep and goats).
So the fallback position if we can't make good fake meat is substituting beef for other meats. Kangaroo farms (which tastes pretty close to beef, though it's harder to cook well) across the world?
Beef and other ruminants are the worst for climate, yes, but that's a bit like giving Hummers a pass on climate b/c they're not as bad as flying first class; the Hummer is still horrible.
The land use and emissions attributable to chicken, pork, and farmed fish are still far greater than plant-based and cultivated meat (on land use, it's 3-6x for cultivated and plant-based chicken, respectively); that's huge for both the opportunity cost of land and sequestration potential.
As I discuss in the book, WRI says that on our current trajectory, there will be no wild spaces left in 2050.
Plus, chicken and farmed fish are far worse than beef for antibiotic use, pandemic risk, and cruelty to animals.
I also have a concern for allergens and whether we all actually won’t be allergic to proteins that our body may not recognize? Those old fillers were horrible on peoples systems… lab grown food can’t control how it behaves out there in the real world …
You honestly think we have less control over what goes into food produced in a lab setting than in a random animal's overbred body pumped full of hormones and antibiotics in some factory farm somewhere? I think the exact opposite is more likely to be true.
There's nonstop testing w/r/t precisely this concern, all over the world at this point.
It's a real concern for some of the brand new ingredients in plant-based meat (e.g., the synthetic heme in the Impossible burger), but it appears to be not a concern at all for cultivated meat (a tremendous amount of clear evidence on this point across dozens of companies and products).
And as we can see from both the extensive safety diligence that led to the approval of synthetic heme and 10 years of sales, it appears also to be a non-issue for Impossible's heme.
Important to stay diligent, of course, and ensure rigorous safety testing for all new ingredients.
Of course, more than 99% of new ingredients are used for all the other foods most people consume, including conventional meat - not for plant-based meat (and none at all for cultivated meat).