One innovation that we would love to see is cloned meat. The goodness of meat without the animal sacrifice. The primary drawback has been availability and cost. Meat is expensive in most of the world with the United States as a grand exception.
Meat the Future takes us into the world of cloned meat, mostly by following Memphis Meats over the last few years. The film specifically follows Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti, a cardiologist turned entrepreneur. We even go back to India, where Dr. Valeti is from. He tells a story about chickens being slaughtered at a child's birthday party when he was young.
“If I practice cardiology for another 30 years, I would probably save two or three thousand lives. But there is very little, in the form of any idea, that even comes close to the level of impact of what this could impact on billions of humans lives and trillions of animal lives,” Valeti said.
We spend part of the film looking at the company expanding to larger spaces. Nice but not relevant to the subject.
The film also covers the agency alphabet soup battle between the FDA vs. the USDA. We see the nuance of what to call the end product: clean meat as opposed to cultured meat or lab-grown meat.
The film feels like a business case study in general instead of a conversation about cloned meat.
At one point, they talked about growing corn and soy to feed the cells. "Why wouldn't you use grass?" was my logical question. Cloned meat isn't going to work well if the cells are eating cheap filler. Cloned meat should be glyphosate-free.
They did talk a bit about how the meat is grown in a sterile environment with a reduced chance of pathogens to sneak in. Mainstream meat production is sadly full of antibiotics.
The cost of the meat starts out at $17,000/lb. at the beginning of the film and falls to under $50/lb. at the end of the film. That does sound great. The final drop in price may be the most difficult step.
There are a couple of tastings in the film. You can taste through a film. The Beyond and Impossible non-meat products supposed taste like meat. Does the cloned meat taste like good meat or just meat? Did the taste improve between the first and second testing? We don't know.
BalanceofFood.com film coverage
Meat the Future is a good introduction to clean meat / cloned meat but doesn't cover the topic all that well. The person behind the meat is important but the meat is the future.
Meat the Future was scheduled to be a part of the 2020 Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. The film aired as part of Hot Docs at home on CBC television and the documentary Channel in Canada.
video and photos credit: Meat the Future film
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