Would you notice if the cubed meat in your cup noodle wasn’t “real” meat? If you did, would you care? What if the future of our meat supply counted on it?
“Veganism is not for everyone,” says Yuki Hanyu, founder of IntegriCulture Inc. a Tokyo-based startup set to bring laboratory-grown foie gras to the country’s high-end restaurant market next year. This rings particularly true in Japan, where only 2.1 percent of the population is vegan, compared to 5 percent of the country’s 30 million visitors in 2018.
Internationally, veganism is on the rise, thanks in no small part to a growing awareness of meat’s negative environmental impact. Globally, livestock is responsible for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. At current levels of consumption, the Paris Agreement’s global emission reduction targets won’t be met, yet the sector is seeing unprecedented growth.