Notes #1/2024

New Year's Resolutions: Phasing out eating animals and 'doing something' with cultured meat.

Notes are just that: Short, informal messages, or brief records of points or ideas written down. The views and opinions expressed in my notes do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of my employer or clients.

Happy New Year!

I do not make New Year’s resolutions, although I could benefit from a few changes in my lifestyle. I am not alone in this; most individuals and nearly all our societal systems could also benefit from some change—whether it be our economic system, political system, information system, energy system, or indeed, our food system.

It is in the food system where we find the one individual action that can truly make a difference: phasing out the consumption of animals. No, I am neither vegetarian nor vegan, and it is not my New Year’s resolution to become either one, although I would not mind if I can make it happen. However, I will invest some time in this new year to learn more about food systems and their role in sustainability transformation.

As usual, my interest lies in the transformative and governance aspects of the system. This note will focus on one potential transformative innovation: cultured meat. Additionally, I have an interest in the health aspects, particularly the relationship between diets and endurance. I will write more on that perspective in my other newsletter on ultrarunning.

Meat as we make it

A few years ago, during a long evening walk, I listened to the Rich Roll Podcast (#474) featuring Pat Brown, the founder, and CEO of Impossible Foods. That got me intrigued with the quest for an alternative to meat from animals, specifically the effort to replicate meat from plant-based ingredients. Later, I listened to earlier podcast episode (#402) with Bruce Friedrich, the executive director of The Good Food Institute, discussing the progress in research on producing meat without killing animals—meat from the lab. Ever since, I have had a bit of an obsession with the transformative potential of so-called cultured meat.

(For a comprehensive introduction to cultured meat, I recommend the Wikepedia page.)

My simple (though not scientific) analytical distinction of ‘meats’ is as follows:

• Meat as we know it - protein produced by killing animals.

• Meat as we replace it - protein produced from plant-based ingredients to replace the meat as we know it.

• Meat as we imitate it - protein produced from plant-based ingredients to imitate the meat as we know it.

• Meat as we make it - protein produced by the cultivation of animal cells to make meat as we do not yet know it.

From a sustainability perspective, all alternatives are better than meat as we know it. Even the animal cruelty that it involves should already, in itself, be more than enough reason to phase out animal meat. Replacing, complemented by imitating, might be the best strategy for a quick upscaling of alternatives. However, I am predominantly intrigued by the last category - making.

But what to make of it?

Quite a few times in life, I have had hunches about future developments in innovation, society, or politics but could not formulate an appropriate action to take part in them, or articulate the right words to be a thought leader on the subject. For example, developments in geoengineering, the politicization of sustainability science, the use of financial data and AI in monitoring emissions, or more recently, on energy poverty, and the potential of psychedelics in medical treatments. On that last one, I acted by investing tiny amounts in some start-ups (will write about that another time).

And now, once again, I have such a hunch, and this time it relates to cultured meat. But what should I do with that hunch? Well, at least this time, I have declared my interest in a clear and timely manner in this note.

Maybe I could benefit a bit by investing in some startups? In any case, I will have to and want to keep up and read up on this rapidly developing innovation. With Singapore already having approved cultured meat for consumption in 2020, large markets like the EU are set to follow—despite initial attempts to ban cultured meat by some US states and Italy (luddites are everywhere). Actually, the emerging regulatory wrestling will be intriguing in itself.

The most obvious course of action for me however, would be to utilize my professional experience as choreographer of sustainability to catalyze initiatives to explore and integrate cutting-edge technologies, increasing the pace of innovation in the pursuit of transformations. In other words: To find a client for which I could develop and implement a cultured meat public affairs strategy.

The Zaanstad-case / the case for Zaanstad

I did develop a bit of this in my previous role as a sustainability manager for the municipality of Zaanstad. This Dutch municipality is one of the oldest industrial areas in the world, and food processing industries are its dominant industrial base. These industries rely on resources vulnerable to climate change—coffee, cacao, and palm oil. However, these industries also employ excellent skilled process operators in food production, experienced technicians and researchers, and have literally centuries of knowledge (from when they started as windmills).

What better hedge against the risk of climate change than investing in the production of cultured meat as a contribution to mitigating climate change (and a plethora of other environmental and ethical issues)?

I am still convinced that this city, with access to the international harbor of Amsterdam, good railway connections, and a hard-working appropriately skilled population, would be a perfect candidate to host the first full-fledged production plant for cultured meat in the EU.

In conclusion

I will try to phase out eating animal meat in this new year; I will be an early adopter of cultured meat in the years to come; I will look for an assignment to lobby for and facilitate the scaling up of cultured meat; and I will bother the readers of these notes with more comments on this topic.

It seems that, by accident, I have just listed some New Year resolutions.

Reading recommendation

• Klimaatwetenschapper Joyeeta Gupta: ‘Wie stellen we aansprakelijk als ergens een stuk land opdroogt?’ NRC, 22.12.2023.

• “Historic” or “Historic Failure”? Fossil Fuels at COP28, by Harro van Asselt in Blog of the European Journal of International Law, 28 December 2023.

In other news: #SciCom going wrong

In December 2023, the International Science Council published a blog post titled "What's holding us back?": how economists and social scientists might hold the key to climate action. Perhaps they simply wanted to promote their panel discussion at COP28 or the concept of sensitive intervention points mentioned in the post. However, the resulting text is more than just annoying; it is ignorant of over a century of social science research. It raises questions that were relevant maybe 20 years ago, but we are well beyond the point of discovering the existence of social sciences and economics. There exists a vast body of literature with answers, solutions, and suggestions. It is not a lack of (social science) knowledge that hinders us from acting, as (oh, the irony) demonstrated by social sciences. I understand it is just a short blogpost with not much readership, but it still annoys me more than I expected. I really would like to write a reply entitled "What’s coming for us? How climate modelers might provide insights into the existence of climate change.”

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