Cellular agriculture is the use of cell cultures to create new foods. This field of inquiry provides a unique opportunity for scientists from many backgrounds to contribute their skills to a common cause: reducing the impact of climate change and lowering the number of animals involved in the food system. Kate Krueger, the research director at New Harvest, describes modern cellular agriculture, its benefits, and how we can best promote its progress through research.

We’ve lightly edited a transcript of Kate’s talk for clarity. You can also watch it on YouTube and read it on effectivealtruism.org.

The Talk

Thanks so much for the kind introduction. It's wonderful to talk with you all today.

I've been the research director at New Harvest for about two years now. New Harvest is a nonprofit research institute that funds food innovation technologies in the cellular agriculture space.

I’ll get into what I mean by cellular agriculture. But first I'm going to talk about something amazing and unique that we interact with every day: animal proteins in food.

Whether we're just looking at them or enjoying them in one form or another, I think we can all agree that food proteins are really amazing. Milk, eggs, fish, and meat all have unique biochemical properties that set them apart and make them an interesting combination of bioavailable nutrients that we know and love.

One of the things that we think about a lot at New Harvest is what goes into these complex products and how we could enjoy them in ways that don't involve animals. Because as amazing as these products are, they do affect the environment. Here's an image of an algal bloom taken from an aerial overhead photo at a feedlot.

As you can see, these animals that we cultivate _en masse_ have some really negative effects on the environment. In some ways, we are literally shaping the surface of our planet in adverse ways when we do factory farming.

Beyond that, we also threaten human health. These products can be really unsafe. This is an image of a recent avian flu contamination in birds. In recent years, these infections frequently have jumped from birds to humans and other species. So it is not only unpleasant to think about these animals being packed in small areas together and confined, but really dangerous to human health.

At New Harvest, we like to think about other ways of creating f...

New Harvest

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