"Right now, growing cells as meat instead of animals is a very expensive process," said Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies. But it will get cheaper, and it probably will be needed.
Global population is heading for 10 billion by 2050. Average global incomes will triple by then, enabling more people to eat meat-rich diets. "We need a significant overhaul, changing the global food system on a scale not seen before," says professor Tim Lang of the University of London, one of the 37 scientific co-authors from 16 countries who wrote a report by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health that launched on Friday. But we've heard it all before.
It takes 7 kg of grain to grow 1 kg of beef. Seventy percent of the world's fresh water is used to irrigate crops. We have appropriated three-quarters of the world's fertile land for food production, and we'll need the rest by 2050. The world's stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050. It's all true, but we're sick of being nagged.