Cultured meat would be a big help to the environment, but means big changes to agriculture

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cultured beef that actually comes with the shape and texture of traditional steak. (All the players can pass the taste test, because they are all working with real beef cells.) The process is designed for large-scale production, they’ve patented it six ways from Sunday, and they’ll do a pilot launch at the end of 2022.

This is going to happen. All the promising startups are attracting major investment from food giants like Cargill (Aleph’s godfather). We are at the start of a high-speed global transition, at least for the mass market, from born-fed-and-slaughtered beef, pork and chicken to ‘cultivated’ versions of the same meat.

How fast? Think 10-15 years, It needs to happen fast because meat and dairy production alone account for almost 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Vegetarianism and veganism alone will not solve the problem because they still depend on growing crops on the land, and also because people are very conservative about diet.

This is how to save the

Amazon, where the forest is being cut down to grow the soy that will feed the world’s cattle. In fact, this is how to take half the world’s cropland out of production.

Re-wild that land and we solve about six problems at once. We even give ourselves a chance of cutting emissions fast enough to avoid driving global average temperature above +2°C and unleashing hell on Earth.

All we have to do then is to figure out what a billion or so farm families will do for income instead. That’s tomorrow’s problem.