How To Save the World Without Going Vegan | Kimberly Liang | TEDxJamesLoganHS
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3o1etu21_g Video ID: D3o1etu21_g ============================================================ i want to show you two things that you've definitely experienced in your life one that you will love and one that you will probably hate but let's start with the one that you will love which is food no matter what diet you follow i think we can all agree that food is an essential part of our lives you know the pizza burgers fries sandwiches hot dogs salad strawberries the list goes on and on but food is both amazing and comforting for so many different people now there's something that you hate and these are the kind of people i like to call vacuum friends the kind that keep bugging you for pencils who lose all their stuff the kind to forget to bring food to a potluck dinner how annoying we all know that we don't like these kind of friends and i used to be asked all the time hey kim can i borrow a pencil oh and while i'm at it can i also use your eraser oh and your calculator too but then minutes later you come back only to find that they lost all of your stuff and out of the 100 pencils that i gave out every school year i probably only got three of them back and i remember being kind of ticked off and wondering where the heck are my 97 other pencils well this is the exact same situation that is happening to our food system specifically with meat cows are the vacuum friends of agriculture they are only three percent effective at converting nutrients and water into meat and the way we make food is extremely inefficient for every 100 pounds of stuff that we put into a cow it only gives us three percent of it back and in the world one in seven people don't have access to clean water and one in nine people don't have access to an adequate food source in the time that you spend listening to my talk 200 people will have died from hunger and this has been happening for years yet minimal progress has been made no one realizes how terrible our food system actually is and while countries are going day zero and people don't even have access to drinking water we are using precious resources on growing our food seventy percent of the world's fresh water is being used for agriculture and it takes more than two thousand four hundred gallons of water to produce one pound of beef and to put that into perspective that's 10 years worth of drinking water 1 900 toilet flushes 141 showers and one and a half olympic swimming pools just for one pound of beef so when you're throwing away or eating your hamburger you're basically dumping a whole swimming pool worth of water away and to make matters worse for that one pound of beef 64 square feet of habitable land is used up and methane a gas that is 20 times more potent than co2 is produced with the world population rising exponentially the effects of climate change will only get more detrimental but what if the way that we are looking at food is outdated this might sound like some outlandish solution but what if we didn't need the animal at all what if we could get the same exact meat down to the molecular level without having to kill an animal or damaging our environment how the answer is cellular agriculture which is the production of meat products from cell cultures cellular agriculture allows us to create products that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture but in a lab essentially making beef without the cow and getting eggs without the chicken and in order to replace our cow vacuum friends we need to make cellular products meaning we need to make tissues growing meat is the process of taking cells that make muscle cells from an animal and growing these cells in a cell culture media to become meat stem cells are the starting point for growing meat in a petri dish and a stem cell is an unspecialist type of cell that has a unique ability to self-renew and differentiate into different cell types going through this process they're like newly born babies that can be shaped into different types of people depending on what environment they grew up in and what behavior was endorsed but instead of people they differentiate into different muscle fat and skin cells to make meat and cultured means commonly starts from muscle stem cells which are then taken from an animal harmlessly through a biopsy they are different types of cells that can differentiate into muscle tissue it can meet through proliferation but only using the stem cells alone we encounter a challenge something called cellular senescence where the cells stop dividing after a certain number of divisions has been reached and to get over this the cells need to be bathed in a culture media which provides important nutrients and growth factors and i like to think of the growth meter kind of like our magic potion so we give a serum that nourishes the cells with the right ratios of sugars fats proteins and vitamins and we also give them different growth factors and hormones to encourage them to keep growing and proliferating and you can toss any type of cell into your petri dish with a growth factor and it will grow and there are different types of media that are being developed as we speak but no matter which one you use you just need something that encourages cell replication it is relatively low cost to produce but even if you have the cells and the growth media you'll still only get meat mush you need something to give the cells the structure that they need to grow into something that resembles meat texture and that's something it's a scaffold which acts as the glue that holds all the stem cells together in a certain shape we often use decellularized plant tissue chitten or collagen for this step to give the environmental cues to help the cells arrange themselves the cells are then transferred to a bioreactor which is a machine that provides the cells the necessary environmental triggers such as temperature and exercise which helps the cells proliferate and then reproduce and the concept itself is pretty simple you take the stem cells you give them the growth media you attach them to a scaffold and you put them in the right environment so that they become meat and just like how you can grow skin for burn victims or organs for patients with stem cells you can do the same things for meat now we can also get eggs and milk more sustainably with acellular agriculture we have another vacuum friend in agriculture which is the chicken it only converts a mere three percent of nutrients into protein or egg whites and chicken cells ferment nutrients ingested into the chicken to create eggs but we need more than 24 billion chickens in the world to produce enough eggs for us to eat but we can make the same exact proteins in a more efficient manner using yeast we genetically engineer yeast to contain the information necessary to create egg proteins and when the yeast contains the dna that chickens usually have to produce egg whites the yeast cells can produce the same exact proteins as chicken only in a more sustainable manner the yeast ferments the sugars that we feed it and it produces egg white proteins more efficiently because there is less sugars that are wasted and once we've made the egg white proteins we can make egg whites simply by adding water and we can also do the same thing with milk we insert cow dna into yeast so that it uses the blueprints in the dna to produce the same proteins as if it were in a cow the genetically modified yeast is fed sugar and converts it to casein and whey which is then used to produce your favorite dairy products and now that you have most of your love for food covered we just need to cut out the things that we hate and just like how we don't want to keep vacuum friends around in our daily lives we also don't want to continue having agriculture vacuums in our food system by exploring our curiosity and challenging the status quo we were able to figure out ways to reinvent the food industry so that we can still get the meat that we all love without slaughtering innocent animals and allowing us to save our planet the first lab grown meat was made by dr post in 2013 and since then more than two dozen companies have emerged in the space a handful of companies are eat just that recently got their chicken nuggets approved in singapore and finless foods which is working on growing the first lab grown fish products and beyond growing meat several companies are using a cellular agriculture to produce products that would otherwise be associated with livestock clara foods focuses on producing the first animal-free egg white product and perfect day foods revolves around making animal-free milk and milk derived dairy products there are tons of other companies in the field that are challenging the status quo but the point is big change is happening in agriculture and it is developing quickly all it takes is a bit of what if in situations that others would accept as the unchangeable norm all it takes is one person who is curious and courageous enough to not accept the problems in our systems economies and environment and if everyone were to ask what if more than complaining helplessly about our problems we would be living in a much better world and to you the consumer please give cellular agriculture a chance and take away the stigma of lab-grown meat the cultured meat companies that are doing good for the world rely on consumer interest from you to keep going and before being scared away from trying lab grown meat ask yourself what if this is the next big thing what if lab grown meat can be the same if not better than traditional meat and finally what if you could be the one to help stop climate change with cellular and acellular agriculture we will be able to produce healthier products without the use of antibiotics or hormones and with it we will be able to use 98 less water 99 less land and emit 97 less greenhouse gases in the future culture products will slowly be available on your grocery shelves and will change the world one style at a time thank you