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this is: When can I eat meat again?, published by clairey on the effective altruism forum.
By Claire Yip, co-founder of Cellular Agriculture UK. These views are my own.
Summary
Timeline: When we can expect highly similar cost-competitive alternatives to animal products
Timeline
There is a lot of uncertainty around when we will be able to eat meat grown from cells, and how we should divide our efforts between that, plant-based alternatives, and other forms of animal advocacy. This post seeks to give sensible, unbiased views on the future of alternative proteins.
However, these views are uncertain too: I have c.40-60% confidence. These estimates are not set in stone. Factors like investment and activity would quicken progress, but things will also probably take longer than we expect, for unexpected reasons, and we don’t know everything that we don’t know.
These are estimates for cost-competitive alternatives. We will be able to buy these products earlier than this.
In the next 5-10 years, expect to see plant-based versions of processed meats become more widespread and delicious. Yay, chicken nuggets! You’re also in luck if you want plant-based or animal-free scrambled eggs, omelettes, milk, cream, yoghurt, or whey protein powder.
These plant-based products will get even better in the next 10-20 years, especially as they’re blended e.g. with collagen (produced without animals), or real meat cultivated from cells. Decent animal-free butter, cheese, and whole egg products might become a reality! Pet food produced from animal and microorganism cells will also be more easily available.
If you want to eat unprocessed whole meat like bacon or sashimi without hurting too many animals or blowing your grocery budget, it looks like you’ll have to wait a few decades (30-50 years).
My time estimates are mostly based on private conversations with plant-based and cellular agriculture companies, at conferences and through writing a report on low-cost cell culture media for the Good Food Institute, as well as my understanding of the technical progress needed for each technology. However, my views do not represent those of GFI.
Actions you can take
Donors: If you want to donate to this space, promising recipients are the Good Food Institute and New Harvest (for open access research into cellular and acellular agriculture specifically).
Farmed Animal Funders has highly tentative suggestions on how philanthropists might allocate donations/funding to plant-based alternatives.
If you want to work in this space:
Most companies are hungry for scientific and engineering talent and will continue to hire.
Relevant disciplines/skills for plant-based meat include: biochemistry, food science, plant biology, chemical engineering.
Relevant disciplines/skills for a/cellular agriculture include: biochemistry, food science, plant biology, chemical engineering, tissue engineering, synthetic biology, bioreactor engineering, cell culture.
Software engineering will probably become more useful in automation and computational modelling.
Experience required varies: some ask for a few years of experience in a lab while others may only hire PhDs.
There are more job openings at plant-based companies, although public interest is peaking, so competition is also high (so replaceability might be a concern).
These are hugely varied, from working on production lines to operations, HR, data science, etc.
Non-scientific roles at acellular and cellular agriculture companies will be more widely available as they approach commercialisation, in 3-5 years.
CellAgri, GFI, and 80,000 Hours maintain lists of job opportunities.
Students: GFI has a guide for students which contains career profiles.
They also have quarterly career calls.
Researchers/scientists: Academic research seems valuable, partly because it is often open access while s...
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