There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich, a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute. His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether plant based or built in the lab) and his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future. Please watch or listen above and share this post or the archived videos on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or YouTube. The mission statement of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization tightly meshes with my view of how to feed 9 billion or so people with the fewest regrets: Billions of people around the world love meat and want to keep eating more of it. Simply ramping up business-as-usual ways of producing that meat, however, is not a viable path if we want to achieve the world’s climate, biodiversity, public health, and food security goals within the next two critical decades. While multiple interventions will be needed, a transition toward alternative proteins—made from plants, cultivated from animal cells, or produced via fermentation—is the only one that can scale to address the demand for meat. Such a transition can dramatically reduce emissions, feed more people with fewer resources, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food system, and enable the conservation of lands and waters. His book masterfully untangles the issues and options - technical, financial and political - that could give people the protein they need without ravaging more forest, overheating climate, threatening health or adding to the nonstop, vast and growing slaughter of our animal kin. He describes his learning and work journeys, which started in the 1980s with reading books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and work focused on poverty alleviation and food sufficiency. He walks through the stutter-step start of the field in the last decade or so and the emerging reality that large-scale alternative-meat production is absolutely doable. It’s easy to get fooled by the slow start, he told me, adding: “Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University, said in 1906 that automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. because they were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly and they were really expensive. In 1908, Henry Ford solves those first two problems and puts us on the trajectory of solving the third. And 20 years later, the automobile industry was the largest industry in America. So the question is, how do we get to that 1908 moment? Listen for the answers. We also talked about my reporting journey on lab-grown meat, as well, which started in 2008 when I proposed that cultured foie gras would seem an ideal starting point. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned but Australian and French companies are there! Of course the holy grail isn’t exotica like fatty liver. It’s mass production. Watch our conversation to get the latest from Friedrich on what’s needed from science, investors and nations to boost protein security and cut environmental damage for the long haul. As in so many areas, China appears to be leading the way. Read Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins - a report by Zane Swanson, Caitlin Welsh, and Joseph Majkut for the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and Friedrich’s Foreign Policy article on how China is poised to do for alternative meats what it has already done for electric vehicles. To support my work, consider becoming a paying subscriber. Related Sustain What posts Other voices My vegan “solutionary” educator friend (and neighbor) Zoe Weil had Friedrich on her Solutionary Voices podcast: David Roberts did a great climate- and energy-focused Volts chat on the future of meat with Friedrich: Also watch Alex Crisp’s interview with Friedrich: These posts don’t magically appear. Consider helping out as a contributing subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe
