Isha Datar: How we could eat real meat without harming animals | TED

Diners in Singapore are eating chicken nuggets

made from a chicken who was never killed.

How is this possible?

Through the power of what I call "cellular agriculture."

For the past decade, I've been an advocate for growing meat in a lab.

To me, this chicken nugget, this hamburger, this sausage --

all made from cells instead of animals --

aren’t just fast-food products.

They're our ticket to a new food system.

Here's how it works.

Rather than raise a whole chicken with beaks, feathers, sentience,

we grow the meat directly from muscle cells.

We take a small biopsy from a living animal,

and then extract the cells of interest.

They're probably muscle cells,

but they could be fat or connective tissue as well.

Now, muscle cells in particular, love to attach onto surfaces.

It helps them grow and elongate into those long muscle fibers

that we're so familiar with.

So we might provide a scaffolding material

for those cells to adhere onto.

And then, of course, we have to feed the cells something.

So we put them in a liquid medium

that provides all the nutrients that these cells need to grow and divide:

carbohydrates, amino acids, growth factors and more.

Lastly, the cells on the scaffold in the medium

all grow within a bioreactor,

which is kind of like a large stainless steel tank --

looks a lot like brewing equipment and can be just as big as well.

And the bioreactor really just provides that constant stable environment

that those cells need to flourish in --

stable temperature, pressure, inflows, outflows, etc.

And after those cells get a chance to proliferate and differentiate,

mature into muscle fibers,

we might harvest the cells and the tissues and then turn them into a nugget,

a nugget that was boneless and skinless and all white meat to begin with.

Now, this wouldn't just be better for chickens and cows and pigs

and the people who have to farm them and slaughter them and process their meat.

This could be better for the whole world.

Think of this:

early estimates of cell-cultured meat's potential

show that cultured meat would require 99 percent less land,

96 percent less water

and produce 96 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, those are still speculative early estimates.

But think about the incredible potential that this technology holds.

I mean, if this all works, this would be a new subsistence strategy,

a new tool set for producing food.

It wouldn't just be a new product category.

And I think it's our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

to get a second chance at agriculture,

to do things better and to learn from our mistakes.

What do I mean by mistakes?

After all, this is a food system that keeps billions of people alive, yes.

But look at what has happened to chickens

in just 50 years.

By simply picking which two chickens to breed with one another,

chickens went from this on the left, a bird that's from 1957,

to this on the right, a broiler.

These chickens are the same age.

Broilers have been optimized so much for meat production

that they must be slaughtered at six to eight weeks,

because if they live beyond that,

their legs will not be able to hold up their bodies.

That is real suffering.

What about farms?

Today, animals are packed together so closely

that the risk of antibiotic resistance and epidemic viruses

are at all-time highs.

Did you know that 2018 was the beginning

of the largest farmed animal pandemic ever?

African swine fever has already killed an estimated one in four pigs on Earth.

One in four pigs,

that is hundreds of millions of pigs lost from our food supply.

Animal agriculture is simply too big to not fail.

What about our changing climate?

Did you know that our global herd of farmed animals

is one of the biggest drivers and victims of climate change?

On one hand,

cows alone produce nine percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

On the other hand,

climate chaos is seeing more and more incidences of thousands,

sometimes tens of thousands of cattle

being lost overnight in rogue storms, floods and fires.

Farming is always going to be at the mercy of Mother Nature,

but climate change is rewriting the rules of farming as we speak.

We need another way.

Lastly, our planet.

We dedicate more of this Earth to feeding cows, pigs and chickens

than we do to anything else.

About a third of this planet, 27 percent,

roughly equivalent to all of North and South America combined,

is dedicated to raising livestock.

Now, this could all change with cellular agriculture.

Remember how I said it would require 99 percent less land

to produce cultured meat versus beef?

Well, think about it: ranching can't go vertical, but cell culture can.

And if we can alleviate half, even a quarter, of this land

and meet the global demand for protein,

well, imagine what we can do with the rest.

Suddenly, it becomes possible to choose to do things

like restore the Amazon rainforest, which we continue to clear-cut for cattle,

or revive other ecosystems that have been colonized by cows, corn and soy.

Or return stolen lands to Indigenous peoples,

who can finally reclaim their ancestral foodways.

The United Nations says that we will have to restore nature

on land the size of China

if we are to achieve climate resilience.

Cellular agriculture actually puts this on the table.

Not only could we alleviate land for restoration,

we can also create the products we know and love at a fraction of the emissions.

By farming cells, we could actually proactively envision agriculture

for a climate-changed world.

And it’s not just meat.

Actually, by engineering biology,

we could theoretically grow anything that might come from plants or animals

from cells instead.

Vanilla doesn’t have to be rainforest farmed.

Egg whites don’t have to come with a yolk.

Foie gras can be completely cruelty-free,

and leather and silk don't have to come off the back of an animal

or the home of a silkworm.

In fact, we already consume cellular agriculture products

in our everyday lives,

just in supersmall quantities.

Several vitamins, flavors and enzymes are already made in cell cultures.

In fact, rennet, which is the set of enzymes used

to turn milk into curds and whey for cheese-making,

used to come from the stomach lining of the fourth stomach of calves,

baby cows.

And in 1990, a cell-cultured version hit the market.

A version of the key enzyme, chymosin.

And today, only 30-ish years later,

90 percent of rennet used for cheese-making

came from a bioreactor instead of a calf.

Now, imagine what might happen

if we expand beyond these small-volume, high-value products like rennet

into commodity-level products like milk.

Well, it's getting started.

Today, you can buy ice cream -- real dairy ice cream --

that was produced by cellular agriculture.

This is cows milk that never came from a cow.

It came from a computer.

The gene for whey protein was looked up in an open-source database, printed

and then inserted into the DNA of an organism called trichoderma.

Now, just like in brewing, where we feed sugar to yeast

to brew alcohol in a big stainless steel fermenter,

we feed sugar to this modified trichoderma

and out comes whey proteins that we can put in yogurt,

cream cheese and ice cream.

Now, I have to admit that maybe this is the easy stuff,

relatively speaking.

I mean, we have been modifying microorganisms to make proteins for us

for decades now.

And tissue engineering, which is what would be needed for meat production,

is a lot newer science.

I mean, animal cells are just a lot more finicky than microbes in cell culture,

and growing a lot of animal cells and achieving three dimensionality

is just no easy feat.

But we're getting there.

Back in 2013,

it cost 250,00 euros to produce this hamburger,

and today, I've seen estimates of cell-cultured meats

cost as low as $50 per pound.

That's one twenty-seven-thousandth of what it was less than a decade ago.

And I can really only see the price of cultured meat coming down,

and I can only see the price of meat from animals going up.

I mean, think about it -- we’re still in the early days of R and D.

As scientific breakthroughs are made,

like recycling growth medium, reducing the cost of growth factors

and achieving higher cell density in vitro,

this curve is still going to go down.

Meanwhile, the price of meat from animals is already artificially low

due to heavy subsidization.

It does not reflect the cost to the public health

or to the environment.

And, in a world changed by COVID, African swine fever

and a changing climate,

the price of meat from animals can only go up.

In fact, I think that price parity would be well within reach

if it were an even playing field.

On one hand, we have animal agriculture,

which is so heavily supported by public funding and government support.

On the other hand, we have this very promising technology,

which requires very intensive R and D

and needs a lot of infrastructure and training support

but is left entirely in the hands of the private sector and market forces.

In fact, I don't think any of the wonderful things

I just described about rewilding the Amazon and so on will happen

if we leave this technology solely in the hands

of technology and market forces.

There's a real chance that cellular agriculture could fail,

and it won't be because the science doesn't add up.

It'll be because we didn't think about what ownership should look like

or IP protection

or governance or policy --

you know, the business side of mission-driven businesses.

And we're going to have to be very careful and thoughtful

about what this technology needs around it

so we can maximize the positive impact that it will have on this world.

Look, I'm here today because animal products are just amazing,

and you would be hard-pressed to find proteins in the plant world

that can do what animal proteins can do:

long, stretchy cheeses, creamy custards, fluffy meringues,

the incredibly rich umami flavors that you can find in meat and seafood ...

But despite how amazing animal proteins are,

they just don't need to come from animals anymore.

And yes, we've got a long way to go

to realize the potential of this technology,

and it's going to take ingenuity both inside of the lab and outside of it, too.

But think about what we get in return.

We get a chance to usher in a transformation as big for humanity

as our transformation from hunting to agriculture some 12,000 years ago.

This could be a new era of abundance in so many different ways.

I'm personally most selfishly excited for the food products

that I can't even fathom today,

because this is really a new tool for culinary creativity as well.

I mean, we haven't really seen this

since our ancestors discovered fermentation a while back.

What I mean by that is,

we could have never looked at a glass of milk before we fermented foods

and wanted it to be hard and stinky and moldy.

You know, we could have never envisioned cheese

or the hundreds of varieties of cheese that we have today.

Similarly, meat is still defined by the body of an animal.

We still describe it as cuts of meat.

But if we can grow meat from cells,

suddenly the boundaries for what meat can be will totally change.

Meat could be thin and translucent.

It could be liquid.

It could be crunchy, it could be bubbly.

Burgers are the baseline and sausages are just a starting point,

and nuggets are nowhere near what's possible with cellular agriculture.

Let's dream up a bigger, bolder future of food.

Thank you.

(Applause)