As people aged over 50, we’ve become used to hearing about radical change that’s just around the corner and which promises to improve our lives, to solve some up-to-know insolvable problem, and all-together be a great thing.

Often these changes are new technologies. Sometimes they truly deliver, and sometimes not so much.

Isha Datar is here to talk about a technological revolution that even if it fulfills only half of its hype will utterly transform our planet for the better.

Bio meat! The process has several names, but the basic premise is the same – it’s meat grown in labs from the tissue of living animals.

Isha is a pioneer and passionate advocate for what she calls cellular agriculture. She is Executive Director at New Harvest, a non-profit research institute founded in 2004 to “ … fund and conduct open, public, collaborative research that reinvents the way we make animal products – without animals.”

For all who are unfamiliar with the bio meat story, they might be thinking why would anyone want to indulge in such a Frankenstein horror?

In this TED Countdown talk from October 2021, Isha talks about early estimates of the ecological benefits that bio meat might bring – land use cut by 99%, water use cut by 96%, greenhouse gas emissions cut by 96%.

Then there’s animal welfare to consider. Just look at what has happened to the humble chicken in the past 50 years. Talk about Frankenstein food, the modern battery hen has to be slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks because its legs are unable to carry their massively over-sized bodies. The situation is worse for pigs where worldwide 1 in 4 have died from African swine fever.

Just in case anyone needs more convincing, there’s always climate change. Isha calls the global herd of farmed animals both a cause and victim of global warming. Cattle produce 9% of all greenhouse gas emissions while 27% of the Earth’s surface is used to grow cattle, pigs and chickens feed (the equivalent of North and South America combined). At the same time, hundreds or even thousands of farmed animals can die in a single rogue storm event.

Cellular agriculture isn’t far-off into the ‘never never.’ Already, we have small-scale examples. Rennet used to be extracted from the stomachs of calves and now 90% is created in bio reactors. Some vitamins, flavours, and enzymes are also produced from cell cultures.  

Even better, cellular agriculture techniques can be applied to any living animal or plant life. As Isha says, that would mean vanilla that’s not produced at the cost of swaths of rain forests, cruelty-free foie gras, leather that hasn’t come from the back of an animal or silk that didn’t result in the death of silkworm.

However, Isha warns that the momentous promise of cellular agriculture could be unfulfilled if the technology is left unprotected to the private sector and market forces. That means sorting out the ownership of the technology, IP protection and governance of the industry.

As Isha says, we’re on the cusp of an animal protein revolution – “a second chance to do agriculture” – where humans will be able to enjoy all the benefits of animal protein, but not at the cost of the animals themselves.

But only if we’re Switched ON enough to make it happen.