A speaker argues that meat production is limited by using animals, which were never designed for it. Instead of raising cows, we should define meat by what consumers actually want: taste, nutrition, versatility, and price. Treating it as a blank-slate technology problem could slash environmental damage and create better products.
Chapters
The entire space of possibilities for doing transformative things in the food system is vastly under explored relative to its potential and its importance. And I think there's been very little real innovation in the traditional food food industry. And this the notion that. So we started with the idea that it should be possible to make meat. And by meat I mean I define it in the way that consumers define it. The flavor experience, the cooking experience, the whole sensory experience, nutritional value and affordability and so forth. To make meat better in all those measures than a cow can do it or than the existing technology can do it. That basically that the technology that we've been using up to now to make meat is fundamentally limited. And it's also completely unsustainable. But it's just a technology problem. We've kind of conflated the, the products with the way we make them. We use animals to make these products, but the value to consumers, and we actually have data on this, has nothing to do with the fact they're made from animals. You don't love meat because it's made from animals. You love it in spite of the fact that it's made from animals. And using animals as a technology is fundamentally limited. Cows did not evolve as a meat production technology. They were incidentally taken advantage of as a meat production technology. That if you approach the problem as saying we have to deliver a particular kind of sensory experience to consumers and nutritional value and versatility and affordability in a particular form factor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we want to do it with a blank slate basically, and with the goal of massively reducing the environmental footprint and we want to do a better job than the existing technology can do. Well, that's completely. What's that makes perfect sense to me anyway. And it's kind of like the same thing with transportation. 200 years ago, 200 years ago, people if you said, I'm going to make the cart move faster without using the horse, they'd think you were crazy. Because people conflated the particular way they made the cart move with the kind of universe of possibilities. But when you step away from that, you realize that actually you can avoid all the limitations of the existing technology or you can get rid of the limitations of the existing technology and there's vast possibilities for improving it.
