T͢h͢e͢ ͢F͢u͢t͢u͢r͢e͢ ͢o͢f͢ ͢M͢e͢a͢t͢

A new podcast with Better Meat CEO Paul Shapiro, me, and others: tabledebates.org/meat/episode4

Opening lines:

Paul Shapiro:
We want to create a 21st century kind of meat industry, where we continue eating all of the meat that humanity wants, but without the need to cause so much harm to the planet and to animals.

Steve Jurvetson:
So the prediction I’m willing to make for 2050 is that it will no longer be a debatable proposition, anywhere on planet Earth, that our future will be entirely clean meat.

One of Better Meat Co’s supporters is Steve Jurvetson – an early stage venture capitalist whose investment portfolio includes SpaceX, Tesla, Skype and Upside foods.

Steve Jurvetson:
Look out 500 years, there’s no doubt that we won’t slaughter animals for meat, there’s no doubt that we will not burn gasoline for cars. And there’s no doubt that we’ll be colonizing other worlds. This is our inevitable future.

Matthew:
As we talked about in the efficient meat episode, we’ve made incredible advancements in animal agriculture over the last 50-60 years. But Steve Jurvetson sees the potential in building a new paradigm around the production and consumption of “meat”.

Steve:
Imagine you could somehow magically cause no suffering on the part of the animals, you still have the land use, the greenhouse gasses, all the other problems where you’re facing a 10x efficiency disadvantage versus cellular agriculture – why would you do that?

Matthew:
For Steve, this isn’t only an environmental fix. It’s also a wider moral question.

Steve:
It just seems so obvious to me that once we have an alternative to meat manufacturing that will actually cast an eye to how we do it today, in a way that we just psychologically can’t. The cognitive dissonance is too high, right? Meat eaters don’t want to visit slaughterhouses, even if we could. I can tell that I was blinded. My own psychology wouldn’t let me truly dwell on animal suffering, and that my future self would once I had a credible alternative.

Matthew:
Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist, wonders why we would continue to raise animals for slaughter when alternatives now exist.

Steve:
You could envision a future where meat is manufactured all over the planet, close to the point of consumption, that is not being trucked around on trains, it’s not going to major meat hubs, you’re not doing slaughterhouses. There’s all this element of complexity you don’t need, you can make and consume, all within a local area. In fact, a lot of the urban parking lots that are probably not going to be needed once we have fully autonomous cars, and you don’t need to park so much could be converted to meat manufacturing locations within city centers where the majority of people live.

Matthew:
He also sees a future where the company that can scale most efficiently can dominate the competition.
For Steve Jurveston, what will really launch the growth of these products is actually experiencing and tasting them.

Steve:
And isn’t it patently obvious that there’s a better way in front of us, and maybe as a venture capitalist I saw before others because I actually toured these places tasted their product. But once you’ve had a bite of the future, how can you deny its inevitability. And wouldn’t you want to say in your life that you helped make that happen.