From Bruce Friedrich, The Good Food Institute, Washington DC, US
Among the many steps we could take to lower the risk of the next pandemic, perhaps the most effective would be to stop farming animals for meat (20 June, p 30). By removing that viral vector, we would make humanity’s future much safer.
This isn’t another call for universal veganism. Rather, we need to work to modernise meat production and remove animals from the supply chain. By making “meat” from plants or cultivating it from cells, we will create a food system that is safe, secure and sustainable.
Yet just as we can’t depend on a private lab to come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus, we can’t count on a private company to shift global meat production on its own. As has been the case with just about every transformative advancement, public funding of fundamental research will be key.
We have seen this in communications, aviation, microprocessors, clean energy, the internet and many other fields. Shifting the agricultural research dollars of governments towards developing and deploying plant-based “meat” and cultivated meat will have countless pay offs, but the benefit of fewer devastating pandemics alone makes it a vital and compelling public investment.
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