Breaking the Divide: Depolarizing Food, Farming, and Innovation
Event description
Join GFI’s Elliot Swartz, Lead Scientist for Cultivated Meat, for an interactive discussion about how to move from division to dialogue. Organized by Generation Climate Europe’s Food Team, this online event will explore how polarization impacts sustainable food conversations and how we can foster more constructive, inclusive public discourse.
Elliot will join a diverse panel to share perspectives on navigating polarized food narratives, reducing misinformation, and creating space for shared values — especially when it comes to innovative solutions like cultivated meat. Together with other speakers, he’ll reflect on how alternative proteins can be positioned not as replacements, but as part of a broader toolkit alongside regenerative agriculture and other approaches to meet climate, nutrition, and food security goals.
The session will cover:
- How public perception, communication, and identity shape debates about food and farming
- The role of misinformation and how to counter it
- Bridging traditional and innovative solutions to build common ground
- How young people and emerging leaders can drive constructive, solutions-focused conversations
Whether you’re a student, farmer, activist, or simply curious about where food and farming are headed, this discussion will offer ideas and inspiration for creating a more open and connected dialogue about our shared food future.
GFI speaker
Elliot Swartz, Ph.D.
PRINCIPAL SCIENTIST, CULTIVATED MEAT
Elliot’s work at GFI focuses on analyzing the technical and economic bottlenecks facing the cultivated meat industry, identifying opportunities to accelerate the industry, and educating scientists, the public, and other industry stakeholders. For the past five years, Elliot has worked on projects ranging from food safety and environmental impact to in-depth analysis of the cultivated meat value chain. Elliot holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he worked with induced pluripotent stem cells to model neuromuscular disease.
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