The meat sweats

A meaty memo on sustainable systems

People freak out when you talk about ‘sustainability’. It sounds like you’re about to get a lecture on recycling and turning the lights off.

But at its core, the word simply means building systems that won’t run dry.

A single loaf of bread, for example, is an unsustainable source of sustenance. Eventually, it’ll run out and I’ll need to buy another loaf. No matter how much I convince myself that one loaf will last for ages, it’ll still run out eventually. Even if I cut paper thin slices, it’ll still run out eventually. And no matter how optimistic I am, or no matter how much I ignore reality, a day will eventually come when I eat the last slice, and from then on I will go hungry.

Our world is full of unsustainable systems. As a species, we’re trying to feed ourselves for life with a single loaf of bread.

We’re using finite resources like coal and gas to power most of the world. They’ll eventually run out. Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not in my grandkids’ lifetime - but eventually.

We’re pumping new CO2 into the atmosphere faster than we can extract it. Some people argue that it’s harmless, but it’s still unsustainable. If you’re filling the bath faster than your plug is draining it, you’ll end up with wet ankles eventually.

And sustainability isn’t just about the environment. Parts of our economy are unsustainable. An increasing segment of the economy relies on extracting ever-more attention from its users, but attention is a finite, depleting resource.

Our healthcare systems are unsustainable: where the number of sick people outpaces the growth of qualified doctors and nurses.

These unsustainable systems will eventually hit an end-point: where they can either grow or go no further, or they collapse under the weight of themselves.

The food industry is one of them.

A whole lotta land

Making food requires lots of land.

In fact, it’s pretty extraordinary just how much land it takes to feed us.

Of the 107 million km² of habitable land on Earth, we live on 1 million km² : about 1%.

48 million km² is used for farming: nearly half! So it takes half of the world’s land to feed a population that lives on 1% of the world’s land.

And just think about that: every time someone on the local discussion page complains about trees being knocked down to build new houses. The land required to house them is relatively tiny compared to the land required to feed them: a football pitch worth of land per house!

And, of course, the global population is still growing (albeit more slowly). By 2050, it’s projected that we’ll need to find land twice the size of India to keep feeding us.

That is a perfect example of an unsustainable system: it takes too much land to feed one person. We’d see the absurdity of this if it was closer to home: imagine if you needed an entire cul-de-sac to park your car, or a football-pitch sized solar farm to power your house. You’d say: “Well, we need to find better ways to park cars/power homes, else we’re going to run out of space.”

Yet food production happens far away, and so the unsustainable system is far less visible.

Now here’s the kicker.

Nearly all of that crazy amount of land is used for the production of meat.

Of land used for food, 80% is used for meat.

One cow needs about 2 acres of land (that’s 16 tennis courts) for 2 years to produce enough meat to feed a crowd about the size of a lecture theatre… for just one day.

And a great irony, of course, is that the demand for organic and free range meat has made this problem even worse. Farming now requires even more land to produce even less food for even fewer people.

But meat, you may say, is an important source of protein. But even then, it’s no competition. Producing one gram of protein from animals requires 20 times as much land as producing one gram from crops.

In fact, crops account for 62% of the global supply of protein, and 83% of the global calorie supply: despite using the minority of the land.

We grow more than enough crops to feed the entire planet all of their daily macros (we grow so much, in fact, that almost half of the crop we grow is used to feed animals we go on to eat!).

So what, go vegan?

When faced with an unsustainable system, there are essentially three routes society can take:

1. Immediately transition to a sustainable alternative, even if it means huge, disruptive changes

2. Introduce slightly better alternatives, that slow the journey to D-Day, but don’t prevent it

3. Do nothing, and hope the science catches up

Take aviation fuel: a major contributor to global warming and CO2 emissions. For the most part, we’re taking option 3 - keeping our head in the sand and hoping science catches up and develops a greener source of fuel.

On cars, we’re bobbing around number 2: encouraging more electric and hybrid cars but accepting that, for the foreseeable future, the majority of cars on the road will be unsustainable.

And on food production, we’re below the chart. Not only is modern farming environmentally unsustainable, with its huge land use disproportionate to its useful production, it’s economically unsustainable: propped up only by generous government subsidies.

There is some exciting farming science in the field of ‘intensification’ - growing more crops using less land by using things like gene engineering and vertical farming (which is what it sounds like, literally the skyscrapers of the farmyard world). But these solutions address a fraction of a fraction of the problem.

But there is a saviour on the horizon: lab-grown meat.

Earlier this year, pet food supplier Meatly became the first company to sell lab-grown meat in the UK.

Its founder explained the miracle of its creation: "You take cells from a single chicken egg. From that we can create an infinite amount of meat for evermore.”

Lab-grown meat is completely indistinguishable from real meat: not just in taste and macros, but in its genetic composition. And it uses a fraction of the land that traditional farming needs. It is scalable: it will feed our population no matter if it grows or shrinks. It is not dependant on finite resources. And all of this, of course, ignores the also compelling arguments around ethics and animal cruelty.

The lab-grown meat industry is held back by its high costs and high energy consumption. But decades of post-industrial age tech evolution teach us that costs and energy consumption per unit almost always fall as tech evolves (compared to pre-industrial practices like farming, where they often rise).

It’s also held back by attitudes. Governments, for one, have been slow to make up their mind on lab-grown meat (though that’s changing).

Individuals, too, are unsure. Most people today are still slightly queasy at the thought of eating lab-grown meat (although one researcher’s surveys find that about half of people will be OK with it). But at one time in history, I’m sure people would’ve been queasy at the thought of drinking bright neon coloured energy drinks, but we quickly got over that.

Lab-grown meat is expected to receive approval from the UK’s food regulators within the next couple of years.

It’s the nuclear energy of food production: miraculous in its capacity for impact and transition to sustainability: but hugely contingent on a public getting past their preconceptions.

But something has to shift, else our diet will give us more than the meat sweats.