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Opinion | The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/opinion/eat-just-upside-foods-cultivated-meat.html

We are in the middle of a slow-motion global catastrophe. With every passing year, the destructive force of climate change gets more destabilizing, and the human harm to animals gets more extreme. But the societywide changes we’ll need to make to avert the worst outcomes are overwhelming, too. It’s so tempting to cling to recent memories of a less disordered past. Cultivated meat was an embodiment of the wish that we can change everything without changing anything. We wouldn’t need to rethink our relationship to Big Macs and bacon. We could go on believing that the world would always be the way we’ve known it. Cultivated meat was also a tantalizing spin on a deeply American fantasy: that we can buy our way to a better world. In a world where our favorite indulgences tend to come at someone else’s — or something else’s — expense, this was a product that reframed consumption as virtue. And for the investor class, it was confirmation that making money and doing good can really be the same thing. Last, it was a manifestation of our faith in technology and in dreamers with a fancy prototype, a pitch deck and a good amount of natural charm. With that framing, cultivated meat always seemed like a story about optimism. It was about the way people came together and solved big problems in the nick of time. It was about the infinite potential of human ingenuity, our ability to make the impossible possible. But the more time I’ve spent around this industry, the more I’ve felt that the whole project is fundamentally rooted in despair, an acknowledgment that real change, political change, was impossible, so we might as well offer people a sparkly new product to buy. To my surprise, Mr. Tetrick saw it similarly. “The reason we do cultivated meat has to do with a lot of, actually, pessimism I have about the ability for humans collectively to make that change,” he told me in a phone conversation. “I think the addiction to meat runs so deep in us.” Later, when we spoke in person, I asked him how he thinks about the $3 billion that investors put into cultivated meat. Could that money have made the world a better place if directed elsewhere? Mr. Tetrick perched his hands on his knees to represent two runners. The runner on the right, he said, represented grass-roots activism, political advocacy, nutritional education, farm policy, fair labor practices, animal conservation. The runner on the left was cultivated meat. If he had $3 billion, he mused, which would be the better bet to bring about the kind of world he says he wants first? He chose the first runner. Briefly, it was like he was emerging from a yearslong dream. But before I could ask him how, then, he could keep leading the company, he answered my question for me. The thing is, he said, you’re less likely to find people to give the first runner $3 billion. Even if it’s a better strategy, that’s not how the world works. “People are a lot more motivated to invest in something where they can get a return in something than they are to donate something,” he said. “I think that’s unfortunate, but I think that’s the reality of it.” Forget our diets for a minute. What will it take to change that attitude? We think of technology as fast, and bottom-up change as slow. But the irony is that sometimes new technologies can’t take off without plenty of unglamorous, collaborative effort. Without new regulations and bold political action. Without difficult cultural conversations. Without actual and sometimes uncomfortable change.

#venture capital #livestock #global warming #sustainable living #factory farming #food #cultivated meat #diet #change

over 2 years ago

The Evolution of Trust

https://lightspot21.github.io/trust/

#trust #game theory #educational game

over 5 years ago