Future Food—Can Cultivated Meat Save Our Planet?

Abstract

Think about what humans will eat in the future. Could you imagine eating meat produced without the extensive farming of animals? This scenario is not as unlikely as you might think. To protect our planet, we must reduce the irreversible damage we are doing to the environment. Eating less meat is a major part of this, because the way we produce most meat today has a tremendous impact on the environment. Plant-based meat alternatives are already available in stores, but it is hard to imitate the taste and texture of meat if no animals are involved. Therefore, scientists have been working on an alternative, called cultivated meat, that is made from real animal tissue but does not require the death of the animal. Cultivated meat shows great promise to become an environmentally and animal-friendly alternative to conventional meat. However, there are still limitations to cultivated meat products that prevent them from being sold in stores.