La veille

Eat-Lancet report recommended shift to more plant-based, climate-friendly diet but was extensively attacked online [...] The report recommended that if global red meat eating was cut by 50%, the “planetary health diet” would provide nutritious food to all while tackling the harms caused by animal agriculture, which accounts for over 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. It suggested individuals – particularly in wealthy countries – should increase their consumption of nuts, pulses and other plant-based foods while cutting meat and sugar from their diets.

This report reveals the tactics of Big Meat and Dairy companies to delay, distract, and derail action on transforming the food system, mirroring strategies used by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. Food systems are responsible for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, with approximately 60% coming from animal agriculture, the largest source of man-made methane emissions.

Cultured meat is an emerging biotechnology that aims to produce meat from animal cell culture, rather than from the raising and slaughtering of livestock, on environmental and animal welfare grounds. The detailed understanding and accurate manipulation of cell biology are critical to the design of cultured meat bioprocesses. Recent years have seen significant interest in this field, with numerous scientific and commercial breakthroughs. Nevertheless, these technologies remain at a nascent stage, and myriad challenges remain, spanning the entire bioprocess. From a cell biological perspective, these include the identification of suitable starting cell types, tuning of proliferation and differentiation conditions, and optimization of cell–biomaterial interactions to create nutritious, enticing foods. Here, we discuss the key advances and outstanding challenges in cultured meat, with a particular focus on cell biology, and argue that solving the remaining bottlenecks in a cost-effective, scalable fashion will req

The case for cutting meat consumption is so compelling that you would think politicians would be less shy about making it. Yet while campaigners warn with increasing urgency that global livestock production is accelerating climate breakdown and causing devastating damage to nature and human health, governments remain reluctant to tackle meat-eating.

There is hardly any other food that pollutes our environment and the climate as badly as meat. However, no government in the world currently has a concept of how meat consumption and production can be significantly reduced. But if the sector continues to grow as it has up to now, almost 360 million tons of meat will be produced and consumed worldwide in 2030. With ecological effects that are hard to imagine.

Twenty livestock companies are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than either Germany, Britain or France – and are receiving billions of dollars in financial backing to do so, according to a new report by environmental campaigners. Raising livestock contributes significantly to carbon emissions, with animal agriculture accounting for 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Growing global meat consumption threatens to derail the Paris Agreement, but that hasn’t stopped the meat industry insisting it is part of the solution to climate change.

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