So, how will future generations satisfy their craving for meat ?
The only reason animals don't get sick from being packed so tightly together is that they're fed antibiotics. But decades of news reports show that hasn't always worked. 
It can be hard for meat eaters to describe what makes meat taste so good. The indescribable sensation we get from eating meat goes way back.
This is a 3.4 million-year-old animal bone found in Ethiopia. At the time, Australopithecus afarensis roamed the plains of Eastern Africa. These early humans had large flat teeth adapted for a diet of fruits, seeds, and leaves.
Humans had started to eat meat. Meat is packed with calories, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins including vitamins B12, which is hard to find in nature outside of animals products. It also contain lot of iron (Fe), which is crucial to the health of our red blood cells. And while plants have iron, most of it is a different kind that doesn't absorb well into the body. The iron in meat is special, because it's bound with a compound called heme, and the only major source of heme iron is animal blood and muscle. This influx of protein and nutrients may be why our bodies changed. Smaller stomachs, shorter intestines, and bigger brains. Some believe that hunting meat is what led our ancestors to first develop tools, complex language, and social structures. Meat eating is arguably what made us human.
But 10,000 years ago, something major happened. We learn how to domesticate animal for food. We bred wild oxen into cows, wild boars into pigs, and red jungle fowls into chickens. It's one of the most important things in human history: the domestication of plants and animals. It changed the world. Farming led to human settlements. Our population started to climb, and through selective breeding, we kept transforming animals to fit our desire for more meat. And then, starting a century ago, modern science enabled us to transform these animals like never before.
To understand what that looks like, consider the chicken. You can see a chicken from 1957 compared a chicken from 2005. Huge chicken breasts, it's just this monster, and it's the exact same age as this chicken from 1957, which looks kind of like a pigeon. Chickens today grow four to five times bigger, thanks to growth-promoting antibiotics, vitamins, and selective breeding. When you look at that chicken, you understand that it must be slaughtered at five weeks of age because the legs can no longer hold up the mass of its body. We're also reaching the limit of how many farm animals can fit on Earth. If the whole world ate as much meat as these top meat-eating countries, every square foot of habitable land would have to be used to feed people. And it still wouldn't be enough space. And we're already packing most of those animals together as tightly as possible.
According to chicken industry lore, that's all thanks to the woman, Cecile Steele. In 1923, she placed an order for 50 hatching chickens. But because of an accidental extra zero on the order form, she wound up with 500. Steele decided to keep them. So she stuffed them into sheds and tried to raise them all at once. At the time, people didn't really eat chickens. They just used them for eggs. But because of that economy of scale, Steele was able to sell her chickens more cheaply. The following year, she expanded from 1,000 to 10,000. Factory farming exploded, and so did our appetite for chicken and every other kind of meat. And we invented new ways to eat it. The 1930s brought us Spam, meat in a can. And the 1980s saw the rise of the chicken nugget. Eating animals no longer involved seeing anything that looked like an animal.
Today, the majority of farm animals are grown out of sight in concentrated feeding lots like this one.
And antibiotics don't work on viruses. And sometimes, those viruses jump from factory farm animals to humans, like mad cow disease, and swine flu, bird flu, and the new one we are facing, COVID-19.
While meat consumption is now steady in the wealthiest countries, it's exploding in emerging economies. As countries get richer, and China and India are the most obvious examples, the middle classes tend to eat meals with meat. They want lots of protein. But meat is one of the least efficient ways to feed people. Every 100 grams of plant protein fed to a cow ends up as just 4 grams of protein in the resulting beef. For calories, it's even less. So you've giant swathes of land in the Midwest, in Brazil, in China that's just devoted to feeding animals.
The problem, of course, is that we like meat, and plants don't taste like meat.
But what if they could ?
This is the Impossible Burger. And this is the Beyond Burger. They're both plant-based patties trying to compete with meat. Since the 1980s, plant-based meat alternatives mostly used soybeans and wheat gluten to mimic meat. The psychological barrier is that most meat lovers expect any plant-based replacement for meat to suck as meat. And that's still the biggest challenge for these companies, making something that taste, smells, and feels like meat.
By far, the most important question right now: What makes meat delicious ?
It's a lot harder than you might think.
To figure out the recipe, food scientists heated up pieces of meat and collected air samples right above them as they cooked. What they're smelling are the components of what makes meat meaty. But one of the major things that gives red meat its distinct flavour?
It's that special compound found in animals: Heme iron.
And in 2015, Impossible Foods patented a way to synthesize heme iron in a lab. The result is a new generation of plant-based alternatives that taste, feel, and bleed like meat. But while their ingredients look wholesome and they have zero cholesterol, they have around the same number of calories as an unseasoned beef patty, similar levels of saturated fat, and more than five times as much sodium. These aren't health foods. They're burgers. And investors are betting big on them, from Bill Gates and Richard Branson to Jay-Z and Katy Perry.
So if this could be the meat the next generation is eating, do they like it ?
MAKING ANIMAL MEAT WITHOUT KILLING THE ANIMAL
Changing behaviour is hard. A lot of people just aren't going to give up meat that easily. So some companies are trying a different approach: making animal meat without killing the animal.
You're looking at chicken cells. But these cells aren't growing inside of a chicken. Cultured meat isn't any different than conventional meat that we've been eating for tens of thousands of years. Actually, the recipe's pretty hard. There are four main components involved.
THE CELL CULTURE
A tiny tissue sample taken from the body of a live animal. Then there's the scaffold. That's the surface that the replicating muscle cells stick to. To grow, the cells also need a growth medium, the soup that provides proteins, vitamins, sugars, and hormones to feed the cells as they grow and divide. And finally, a bioreactor, the temperature controlled environment that intakes fresh nutrients and outputs waste. You can think of it like an artificial body for the meat to grow in. In about nine weeks, this goes from a tiny group of cells to an edible chunk of meat.
Early research suggests that this process could use about half the energy of beef production, a tiny fraction of the land and water, and greatly reduce greenhouse-gas emission. But the key question: does it taste any good ?
In 2013, the world got to watch the first lab-grown meat taste test, televised on BBC. They said it kind of tasted like meat. And another big difference is that hamburger cost $330,000 to make, engineered by the guy, Mark Post (Pharmacologist).
Only six years later, Post's meat start-up, Mosameat, says it cut production costs by 99.997% to just $10 a burger. Right now, dozens of cell-based meat start-ups are racing to be the first ones to go to market. From the Netherlands to Israel to Singapore, but none of them have perfected the recipe yet. The first problem is sourcing the growth medium. Right now, the liquid is fetal bovine serum. And that's a nicer way of saying blood taken from the heart of an unborn cow, immediately killing it.
Cell-based meat companies are working toward a plant-based replacement, but experts aren't sure when or even if that could happen. Another problem is structure. That requires delivering nutrients to cells at the center of the meat like blood vessels do in an animal's body. Researchers are experimenting with different techniques to do that, like using the vein structure of a spinach leaf, but experts think were at least a decade away from pulling off something that resembles a big juicy steak.
And then there's the yuck factor.
In a 2016 survey, many Americans said they weren't interested in regularly eating meat grow in a lab. And some people won't even try it. A lot of people find the idea of cell-based meat disgusting, but lot of people find different meats disgusting too.
In many languages, the names used to describe different meats can make eating those animals easier. When we look at the language that we use around meat, for example, it's very interesting. So we don't say cow. We say we're eating beef. And we don't say we're eating pig. We're eating pork. And cell-based meat might just have a naming problem. Lab-grown, Test-tube, and In-vitro don't sound especially appetizing. That's why this companies have been fighting for name like culture, clean, or cell-based meat.
CAN WE EAT 100% NATURAL FOOD ?
Today, most of our food isn't going straight from the land to the table. In fact, much of what we eat started in a lab. Like anything, yogurt, cereal, gatorade, applesauce. All that stuff for commercial use started pff in a lab. But where something starts isn't where it ends. It's not gonna be made in a lab. It's gonna be made in a manufacturing facility. And the animals we eat have been engineered over millennia through Selective breeding, Artificial Insemination, Growth hormones, 24-hour climate controlled warehouses, fortified feed, and drugs.
In the US, more than 70% of all antibiotics sold each year now go to farm animals. Technology enabled us to eat animals the way we do today, and new technology might be the only thing that can help us satisfy our craving for meat in the future.
ZOONOTIC DISEASE
The reason why we're here today is because animal production are so awesome. But they change the surface of our Earth. It's creating epidemic viruses. It's threatening how useful our antibiotics are. For decades, we're dreamed of a future when we could have meat without animals.
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