By Craig Shapiro
Raise your hand if you saw these recent headlines:
“U.S. greenhouse gas emissions bounced back sharply in 2021”
“2021 one of the seven warmest years on record”
“Major UN climate report shows world is on track for catastrophic levels of warming”
The takeaway? We’re digging our own graves.
But the good news is that we can do something about it.
Not long ago, the indie think tank RethinkX reported that a 90% reduction in world carbon emissions can be achieved in 15 years, but—, and there’s no gray area here—, we must change the way we eat because – animal agriculture is Public Enemy No. 1. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s the country’s primary emitter of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide— – the main drivers of the climate crisis.
That, of course, isn’t the industry’s only sin. It tortures and slaughters billions of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals every year, and the meat, dairy products, and eggs it peddles can be a recipe for heart disease, cancer, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
Startups around the world have taken note. With the potential to help resuscitate the environment, save animal and human lives, and give big agriculture a past-due kick in the pants, they’re working to put “clean” meat on our plates.
It’s also called “lab-grown,” “cell-based” or “cultured,” but the semantics don’t matter. What does is that it’s grown in a clean food-production facility from animal muscle tissue; billions of animals don’t have to be confined and butchered to produce it; it doesn’t suck up land, energy, or water; and it doesn’t produce tons of feces that end up in lakes, rivers, and our drinking water.
And there’s no need for antibiotics since clean meat is produced in a clean environment. Animals slaughtered for food are pumped full of antibiotics, which can lead to antibiotic resistance and outbreaks of E. coli, salmonella, and other superbugs. That can be very bad news for humans.
Late last year, the Bay Area’s Upside Foods lifted the curtain on a $50 million, 53,000-square-foot, one-of-a-kind processing plant outside Berkeley, California. It’s the largest ever dedicated to clean meat. The plant can produce almost any type of meat, but for now is growing chicken breasts, nuggets, and steaks from small clumps of animal cells, a process that takes about two weeks. The company, which has been working on clean meat for seven years, hopes to produce 50,000 pounds of food and have it in stores sometime in 2022.
And Upside is no outlier. More than 50 companies worldwide are developing clean meat.
While there’s no question that having clean meat in the pipeline is a game-changer, killing animals for food is killing the planet today. We can’t afford to sit back and wait until it’s in supermarkets. Sitting back and waiting is why we’re in dire straits. We have to go vegan now.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Researchers at New York University found that rejecting animal agriculture and switching to humane, healthy, environmentally- responsible plant-sourced foods could remove more than a decade’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
And researchers at Oxford Martin School in the U.K. determined that if we all went vegan, we could cut greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds and save more than 8 million human lives by 2050.
Additionally a study by scientists at Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley concluded that a global shift away from animal agriculture, coupled with a global turn toward vegan eating, would stop the surge of atmospheric greenhouse gases cold for 30 years— – 30 years— – giving us more time to replace fossil fuels.
So, what do you say? The clock is ticking.
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