Please Innovate Responsibly
Are today’s food innovations really advancing human progress, or merely fixing the problems created from yesterday’s food innovations?
The invention of agriculture was the original food technology that set the foundation for our modern society and enabled everything else created by humans by filling our bellies so we can think clearly about other things. Since that first crop was planted 12,000 years ago, the human population has skyrocketed from 5 million globally to 7 billion today, and likely to 10 billion by the year 2050. The food supply is the bottleneck for human existence and thousands of food innovations have progressively expanded that bottleneck over the last 12,000 years to enable us to flourish.
In the previous century alone, humans created the Green Revolution, GMOs, advanced food processing and preservation techniques, a massive food distribution system, and more. In this century, we are at the beginning of new, potentially game changing technologies like plant-based meats, cultured proteins, and many others. But with each invention that leads to more food access, human potential expands and so does our impact on the planet’s finite resources. Sheer human survival instincts (and profit!) motivated those innovators to create new food technologies and at the time, the long term effects of agriculture, GMOs, or food processing took a backseat to the allure of making more food in the short term.
Now that a significant portion of human civilization has become wealthy enough to have their basic food needs consistently met, there is plenty of extra mental bandwidth available on the planet to be more thoughtful about the impacts of new food technologies. The luxury of thinking about the effects of food production systems on future generations wasn’t one that the Founding Farmers had 12,000 years ago, nor do many in underdeveloped countries with insufficient food production today. Those people simply needed food by any means necessary and it’s hard to think about the future of the environment when you’re starving.
There still is real famine and malnutrition in the world today that needs to be solved, but those living in sufficiently fed, highly developed societies have the ability and responsibility to think more deeply about how new food innovations will affect planetary and social ecosystems.
Innovation Whac-A-Mole
The innovators working on things like creating plant burgers that bleed or meat that comes from a fermentation tank are not doing so to avoid famine or pull people out of extreme malnutrition, like the founders of the Green Revolution claimed to be doing. They are doing so under the auspices of trying to “save the planet” while laying the groundwork for feeding the 10 billion citizens of the year 2050.
And what are they saving the planet from? The previous innovations that brought us livestock living in confined animal farming operations (CAFOs) and fed with high yield Green Revolution era grains, all of which are contributors to climate change and biodiversity loss. We’ve been innovating food for long enough that new innovations are needed to clean up the mess from old ones. Yesterday’s breakthrough is today’s environmental crisis, like an infuriating game of environmental and public health Whac-A-Mole.
Lab-grown and plant-based meats are groundbreaking food inventions, but if they succeed at scale in the long term, we will be forced to address the energy consumption of the former and the reinforcement of plant monocultures in the latter. In a plant-based and cultured meat dominant world, we may make gains on reducing greenhouse gasses from animals, but we’ll also have new problems from those innovations to solve.
Founders of breakthrough technologies should invite spirited debate about what they’re creating, involving people outside of their inner circle or industry. Technology is a neutral vessel that reflects the biases of the inventors, and can be used for great benefit or harm, intentionally or unintentionally. No one is immune to having blind spots in their thinking, so the best hedge against that is to ensure you have as diverse and wide of a brain trust as possible.
The current mainstream debate about the future of generative AI, spurred by public releases of groundbreaking apps like ChatGPT, is a crucial conversation for everyone, especially to those creating the AI systems today. Because things like ChatGPT are not fully integrated into our lives yet, this is the right time to ask these hard questions because the trajectory of an emerging technology can still be adjusted or made safer if we focus a critical eye on the current state of AI. Generative AI will impact all nearly of our lives, so we all need to be involved in its gestation.
Food is the only product in the history of civilization to have 100% product adoption, so that means everyone on the planet is a stakeholder, not just people within the food and agriculture industry. And as a stakeholder, we all have a right and duty to educate ourselves, be aware of our role in the food system, and speak out on the direction that food innovation is going.
The Problem Is Me
For eaters, speaking out on food-tech innovations is not enough. Food startups don’t get funded without a big addressable market, which is us. Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Food are built on the assumption that it’s incredibly difficult to get consumers to drastically change their eating habits by eliminating some or all meat from their diets. So they apply their innovation smarts to fixing the problems stemming from prevailing consumer behaviors instead of trying get people to change those behaviors.
I don’t blame them at all for focusing on the science problem rather than the human problem. No one should be so naive to think that a meaningful chunk of the population who have eaten hamburgers all their lives will simply decide to eat a salad instead unless something drastic happens. It appears that it’s literally easier to raise $100s of millions in venture capital and perform food science magic than it is to convince a population to eat less meat. Corporations clearly bear a lot of responsibility for creating and running things like CAFOs but we must remind ourselves that they wouldn’t exist without us eaters constantly demanding more access to meat. The technology exists to enable human indulgence.
We need to expand our perception of what food innovation looks like. You probably had a certain image in your head when you read the headline of this essay and saw the word “innovate,” and that image probably had a futuristic, high-tech vibe to it, right? It’s an understandable reaction, as we’ve been trained our whole lives to think that innovation means doing something new and novel, like meat grown in a lab.
Webster’s defines the word innovation as meaning, "a new idea, method, or device; the introduction of something new,” which does not call for something to be technologically sophisticated to be innovative. The future is going to have high-tech things for sure, but it also needs low-tech, old-school, and behavioral innovations too.
The future of food conversation needs to be as closely associated with shifting consumer behaviors, regenerative agriculture, and more biodiverse farming systems as it is with lab meat and other high tech innovations. Only then can we make the future one that enables everyone to reap the benefits of human ingenuity and relieve future generations of the burden to innovate their way out of a mess we created.
The energy and monoculture consequences of new proteins are poorly understood. In addition the infrastucture that will be build to scale innovative foods will ensure that the environmental impact on the planet of new food technologies will be significant. In addition as major corporations embrace concepts such as regnerative farming they will continually look to standardise production methods to increase returns to shareholders. Whatever way we look at it under current models the quest for scale and profitability is one of the biggest challenges for creating a future future food market that delivers a net positive outcome for the overall balance of the planet.