This is the fourth installment of our Science at the Edge series, where we explore the benefits, tradeoffs, and risks associated with innovative solutions while unpacking questions about ethics, policy, or public perceptions.

Cell-cultivated meat has been making news headlines as a wave of startups create meat and seafood by cultivating animal cells, eliminating the need to raise, farm, and slaughter animals for food. The shift to cultivated meats and alternative proteins is predicted to grow significantly once production can be scaled. One reason for the interest is to mitigate the livestock industry’s environmental impact, which could reduce greenhouse gasses. In a roundtable conversation led by Institute Executive Director Kristan Uhlenbrock, we discuss the innovation, benefits, and tradeoffs surrounding cultivated meat from the scientific challenges and government regulations to the impacts on ranching communities, public perceptions, and more. 

Watch a video of this discussion on our YouTube channel.

Cell-Cultivated Meat

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: Today we are going to be talking about cultivated meat, also known as cell-cultured meat, or you may have heard the phrase lab-grown meat in the media. These are food products. Think seafood, pork, beef, but they are cultivated using animal cells directly. 

We’re joined by Dr. Jennifer Martin, a faculty member at Colorado State University (CSU), in the animal sciences department. And she also teaches with the Colorado School of Public Health. Her research interests lie in a systems-based approach to meet safety and quality.  

We also have Dr. Matt Hotze, the director of science and technology for the nonprofit Good Food Institute (GFI), which is a think tank working on bettering our global food systems. He leads a team that builds out the ever-expanding map that is alternative protein research and has a global perspective on this topic. 

JENNIFER MARTIN: I'm originally from Texas, an agricultural community. During high school, I recognized that there was a science that underpinned all of the things I was seeing around me, and so I chose to pursue a degree in animal science. I wanted to understand the science that goes into producing animals for meat consumption and then the meat itself. And my work here at CSU really focuses on strategies to enhance the quality and safety of meat that consumers see at grocery stores, restaurants, or wherever they purchase their products.

MATT HOTZE: I'm based in Houston, Texas. My background is more in environmental engineering than food science, but I switched over to work for GFI a couple of years ago. One of the reasons for that is because the food system underlies a lot of the environmental problems that we're seeing coming out today, and for the future of my kids, for the future of the planet. I'm excited about working on a food system that works for everybody, is more economically diverse, and can solve some of our current environmental problems, including climate, water use, land use, and biodiversity.

KRISTAN: To level set, what are we actually talking about when we say cultivated meat? What is this? What's the process?  

MATT: I think the best place for the audience to go in terms of lived experience is to think about breweries. A brewery uses three main products in its reactors: yeast, grains, and hops. And if you compare that with cultivated meat, you're really putting in three main products: animal cells, macronutrients like amino acids, and micronutrients. These are the same nutrients that any animal needs to be healthy. And then at some point, you're basically growing these cells in a reactor. When you have reached a certain mass inside of the reactor, then you harvest those cells. You can take them out of the reactor and either blend them with a product or you can actually put them on a scaffold and have them become full flesh like chicken breast or steak which takes a little bit longer. The ultimate aim of these companies is to either produce something like a mince product coming out of the reactor, which is the animal cells that are identical to the meat cells from an animal or these fully cut products like tuna steaks. There are about 150 companies globally that are researching and developing in this area, and they're covering all manner of different products across the board from seafood to terrestrial animals. 

Research and Development

KRISTAN: Can you give us some R&D background and history of where this came from to what the process looks like today? 

JENNIFER: From a scientific perspective, the innovation that we've seen in this space is really fascinating. We've taken technologies that have existed for a while, the ability to culture cells, into spaces where we can produce food. It has occurred in a concerted and intentional sense over the past couple of decades. The brewery example was great, but in the science space, we often relate this to tissue cultures and similar processes.  

Many folks may recall that several years ago scientists grew a human ear using human cells. They were able to form that tissue into an ear to replace the missing ear on a patient. So, the core technology itself has been around for some time. I think what we've really seen is the investment and the recognition that this technology might be able to be used in a space to generate foods in a new way. The research and development that’s occurred over the past several years really speaks to the investment in redirecting that technology towards food systems.  

MATT: I'll add here for perspective. A decade ago, there was a scientist named Mark Post. He made a burger patty, and it cost $330,000. Currently, we have two companies that are approved to sell cultivated meat in the United States. Those are chicken products, not beef products, but at the same time, they've reached the level where they can actually put this on the table at some reasonable cost. 

KRISTAN: It's remarkable and happening very quickly, right? Why are we seeing this surge potentially happening? Is it the markets that are in place, the regulatory framework, or all of the above? 

JENNIFER: I think one of the reasons is that it's an era of food innovation across the board. When you think about the similar spaces we see in plant-based meat proteins, there's been just as much. There's been a lot of innovation and improvements in that space. We see consumers who are interested in new products, new things that are available for them to purchase, or the ability to choose between traditional and something new. And that's really been a defining characteristic of the past decade - the innovation that's occurred in the food space.  

The other thing that I think has spoken to this particular topic is globalization. The development of these technologies isn’t just happening within the U. S. This is something that there's a lot of interest and investment in globally. So, learning from what's happening in other countries, and using what they're learning to apply within the U. S. is something that has defined the past decade in food innovation. Learning from across the globe is interesting because food production is local. It's not as if my family who's farming in Texas is asking folks in Eastern Europe about growing crops in central Texas. But that exchange of information has allowed things to move so much faster and then that culture transcends everything in innovation and food. 

Population Growth and Globalization

MATT: The global meat market, depending on the estimates that you look at, is around one trillion dollars. Also, depending on the estimate you look at, the global demand for meat will go up 50 percent by 2050. 

So, if you're looking at a market of 500 billion dollars, you start to see why there's been, at least in the US, a lot of venture capital investment in new meat products. People see this as a space that needs to be filled and the current technologies that we have are more than likely incapable of filling those spaces and certainly, even if we tried, we would face biodiversity losses and increasing climate impacts from these industries. So we need to start considering diverse sources of meat.  

JENNIFER: I think the challenge of feeding the growing population has been an underpinning priority, for both the traditional meat industry as well as cell-cultivated. We often hear, how are we going to produce enough food to feed the population that will be here in 2030, 2050, and beyond? If we use only the current infrastructure and processes, we know that it won't be enough. 

We also know that one of the things that developing countries tend to want to consume when they have a population that is affluent enough to purchase it is meat. So as the protein demand goes up, what can we do with the traditional protein production streams to meet that demand? And that's where the gap was acknowledged. 

The traditional meat processors and livestock producers are working to address that gap, but it has some real challenges. We don't have enough physical space. We don't have enough labor capacity to meet that demand if we were to only rely on traditional processes, so that innovation opportunity may have the capacity to fill that gap. It's amazing that when that necessity comes around, people step up with really good ideas. And then you have an influx of capital investment in those spaces and then lots of other things fall into place. 

It's been a cool time to be in the food sector to see that the impetus for this challenge was the recognition that we're going to have a population that demands animal proteins or meat proteins, and protein in general. So, what do we do? 

Climate Impacts and the Cattle Industry

KRISTAN: We have a massive global food system that has this growing demand from population projections. Food insecurity already exists in the world, and that is going to be exacerbated and expanded as the population grows. And it has this climate lens into it, this biodiversity lens, and loss because of the restrictions and the impacts on land use that we've been talking about. What are some of the climate impacts of this additive to the food system? 

MATT: Depending on the estimates you look at, greenhouse gas emissions as a total percentage across the globe from animal agriculture could be around 13-14% percent. If you look at the sectors that are the biggest emitters, of the things that have been invested in, in terms of decarbonization, food technology has had a relatively low investment. This is compared to something like transportation or fossil fuels, which has had hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars globally put into it (sometimes per year) for research and development solutions. So, the Good Foods Institute is asking: how do we increase the investment in this area? 

Not only in cultivated meat but other technologies to try to mitigate the climate impact from food. If you stopped all fossil fuel emissions today, and you just held the food emissions constant, we wouldn't hit our climate targets for the Paris Agreement.  

JENNIFER: From a livestock production perspective, that point is exactly right. There hasn't been as much investment in that space on how to reduce the environmental impact and improve the sustainability metrics of livestock production. I think that's one of the things that there's more recently been a concerted effort on here at CSU. 

We have a group called Ag Next that does research in the beef cattle industry. There are groups across campus in the research space that are trying to figure out how we can acknowledge that the environmental impact of livestock production is not zero and does need to be acknowledged and decreased. 

To do that, there has to be an investment in research. But one of the challenges that we see is translatable research. In the US, we have over 800,000 independent beef cattle producers. How can we take science that works in a laboratory here in CSU and translate that so that it's effective for all the different producers that are going into the meat supply chain? It's going to take some time for us to see meaningful reductions. It's not going to happen overnight and having both the research and translation happen in concert is really our only hope of finding a way to sustainably produce food for our future population, regardless of the metrics that we're trying to meet.  

MATT: One of the potential benefits of cultivated meat is a dramatic reduction in the amount of land used. If you're looking at beef and cattle, some estimate that as high as a 95% reduction in the amount of land used to cultivate that amount of beef. That makes this a simultaneous solution to regenerative agriculture because regenerative agriculture by nature requires more land. I've never been a rancher, but I do believe that a lot of ranchers want to keep their land in great shape and pass it down to the next generation as good or in better shape than it was when they received it. 

Maybe if we get some of our beef production over into a less land-intensive technology then we can allow these great practices of regenerative agriculture to have the space to be able to do their production sustainably.  

KRISTAN: We have a strong ranch-producing community here in Colorado and in the West, so I want Jennifer to just add on to that a little bit more. 

JENNIFER: When we think about sustainability (recognizing that sustainability isn't just greenhouse gases and emissions), there's societal and cultural sustainability that plays a role as well. This is often the space where I find myself, as a person who studies in the traditional meat science space and interacts regularly with livestock producers. When they hear the topic of cultivated meat, the question is, what does that mean for my livelihood? And what does that mean for my generational way of life? It's a weird space, where there is a recognition that the things that we're doing right now may not always work, and we need to improve, but does that mean we need to replace? 

We’re having the conversation about balance, and we can’t feed the growing population without every single person who is producing food playing a role, or every single entity that is producing food playing a role. There are going to be folks who still want to go to the farmer's market and see the farmer who raises the pig that they purchased pork from so there's still a need for that. 

There’s a need to balance technology and respect tradition with the acknowledgment that we're going to have to do something different in order for us to move forward as a society.  

When we think about most recently, for example, there were large wildfires in the panhandle of Texas that were devastating to cattle producers in the area, and how that's becoming more and more common. We see producers who are impacted by drought so much that they can no longer raise livestock. So we've seen a turnover and folks who have been generational livestock producers who say, “There's not enough water for me to do this.” Climate change is impacting our food systems and the ways in which we produce meat right now. We recognize that if we wait until climate change has had its impact, we won't have a food system. 

We must innovate while we're trying to balance and address our future needs, and maybe even in some spaces correct what we're doing in a traditional livestock sense so that those industries are sustainable in the future. They can recognize and use regenerative agricultural technologies so that they can have land that is available for their livestock herds for years to come. If we wait, it won't happen.  

Product Development

KRISTAN: Let’s pivot our conversation to talk about these products a little bit more. People are asking about mutations within the different types of cultures and the level of diversity needed for any source cell.  

MATT: Basically, what you need is to select cells that will survive in these reactors. So, this is not every cell that you take in a sample. Companies are really interested in cell lines that have an affinity for being in cultured meat reactors. What we've seen from studies of this is that genetic materials are not being altered. They're just being selected, but any sort of genetic material, according to the FAO and some of the international bodies, is not being transferred into your body. When you eat those, it just becomes like a normal cell.  

JENNIFER: At its root, it's not very different from the meat that we buy at the grocery store today. The same processes that happen inside of an animal are happening inside of a bioreactor. From a scientific perspective, one of the cool parts is that we can replicate what the body does outside of it. But those cells have the exact same properties that you would see within the animal itself. 

They're taken from the animal itself. So they're using animal cells to actually find ways to grow the tissue outside of the animal. As Matt mentioned, there are tremendous amounts of regulations and best practices on how to make sure that cells that are being used in those spaces are pure so we don't have contaminated cell cultures that are going into that. There are strategies that have been used in human medicine for decades that have informed what they're doing in this space. But once the product is formed and once it's cooked, then it's very similar and very difficult to distinguish at the cellular level from the cell that you would get from the steak you can buy at your local grocery store. 

MATT: The two companies that have approval for sale in the US went through an approval process with both the FDA and the USDA. As they were cultivating the cells, the FDA was approving that process in terms of purity, and once they started actually making the meat part of it, the USDA started taking over that process. And so both the FDA and USDA has certified both of these producers. So, there's been a lot of interaction with regulators to get this to the restaurant level, at least. 

KRISTAN: What's the labeling like?  

JENNIFER: Right now, labels have to be approved by USDA. That's the same requirement for our campus facility; if we're making bacon here on campus, we must get that label approved by the USDA. That was really a landmark shift that's happened in this space - finding out how we can regulate cell-cultivated meats so that consumers have confidence that wherever they find it, the meat has the same standards.  

USDA has a rigorous set of requirements. So if they call it beef, what does that actually mean? That's defined by USDA. If it's bacon, that's defined by USDA. I think that the comfort that consumers can feel is because the requirements from a regulatory perspective are the same.  

Investment and Cost

KRISTAN: What are we seeing on the market right now? We’ve talked about funding, so what is the price of this type of product now? 

MATT: What we're seeing is increased interest from an investment standpoint from the US government. 

The initial kickoff point was really from the private sector, but now there's a reason that the government is saying this needs to happen from a food security standpoint. If the demand for protein or meat is going to go up 50% by 2050, we need to start thinking about putting the infrastructure in the ground to make this happen. Unfortunately, venture capitalists are not really interested in spending a lot of money on infrastructure. They'd much rather get a quicker return on their money so they were in the space to see what would happen. Overall, 90% of startups fail, so that's just the risks that venture capitalists take.  

So now we’re at the scaling moment in time which aims to bring down the price, so the public entities such as the US government or philanthropists step in and start to invest in some of these larger, more capital-intensive projects that will be required to scale this up to the level where you would actually see this in the grocery store. 

KRISTAN: Is there a label to be expected that would say that it is cultivated or cultured?  

JENNIFER: We don't know yet what that will be because there isn't a retail-approved label for cell culture meats today. Those conversations are still going on right now. USDA has regulatory authority for meat and poultry products whereas FDA has regulatory authority for plant-based meats and things of that nature. So determining who will establish the retail labeling requirements is going to be a really important part of this conversation. As you would expect, there are lots of stakeholders who are involved in that. The traditional meat processors, the cell-cultivated producers, those who are somewhere in the middle, such as retailers, and restaurants. All of those folks are interested and curious, but that decision hasn't been articulated by the federal government yet. 

KRISTAN: Have either of you had some of these products?  

JENNIFER: I had some at a conference last year. I must frame my experience with it from a scientific perspective. I'm trained in how to pick apart meat products - I'm probably the worst person to go to dinner with. I noticed some quality attributes that I didn't prefer with the product, but I don't know if those same things would be experienced by the average person who's not a sensory scientist who eats meat samples all the time from a scientific perspective. 

From the scientist's perspective, we're really interested in how we can help understand consumer preferences around these products. So working with the producers who are making them and asking questions about whether a consumer can tell the difference between a chicken breast from a chicken and a chicken breast from a cell-cultivated process is some of the work my team and the group at CSU would love to do.  

MATT: I have not tried these cell-cultivated products, but I have several, several colleagues who have tried it. Based on their experience, they say the chicken tastes like chicken. If there were other issues, I didn't hear that articulated. I will say, though, there is a company in Israel that just got approval from the Israeli government to sell cultivated beef. And they were the first ones in the world, that's called Aleph Farms. 

Storage and Shipping

KRISTAN: Tell us about storage and shipping. Do those same properties still apply to cultivated and cell-cultured products? 

JENNIFER: They essentially have the same functional properties as meat and so it is a perishable item that would need to be refrigerated and cooked in the way that we do with meats currently. Packaging has just as much opportunity for innovation and to help reduce the impact of plastics, but today it would be packaged in the same way. At the retail level, it may look more like something that you would see at a Walmart, for example, where there's not a butcher case where a person can come up and get what you want weighed, cut, and wrapped. That's to be determined, but that would be my guess is that it's likely to have less of that storefront interface and maybe more likely already portioned and packaged.  

MATT: One thing I'll add about the cold chain is that this has not been studied, but because of the high purity that is needed to grow the cells for cultivated meat, there is some thought that the potential for bacterial contamination and growth might be lower for cell-cultivated products, and that might result in a shelf life that’s slightly longer in comparison. That will need to be studied and determined when we have enough product.  

JENNIFER: That's another study that a lot of folks in the research community are excited about - the opportunity to answer these questions because there's certainly a lot of curiosity. If we can reduce the cold chain requirements, that's not even really part of this greenhouse gas discussion as much. 

MATT: I'm not sure where people are drawing their boxes around these systems, but the cold chain is probably not part of that, but it’s a huge greenhouse gas producer. 

JENNIFER: Absolutely. And then you think about food waste. We know like any perishable food that it has a finite number of days. We see lots of meat products are discounted at retail levels because they're off-colored even though they're totally fine from a safety perspective, but they may just not be as visually attractive because of the cold chain deviations and non-harmful bacteria that leads to color and smell changes. The amount of food that we throw away because of cold chain challenges or shelf-life challenges could be an added benefit for these types of products.  

Cold-chain management means that there is a requirement that the product from the point of production to the point of consumption is kept cold. We don't leave fresh meat products in the back of your car and expect to come back the next day and have them be fine.

Regulations and Policies

KRISTAN: We’ve talked about the regulatory frameworks that exist, both with USDA and FDA and we are seeing quite a bit of interest in the policy world. Can you unpack a little bit of what we've been seeing happening across various states and internationally? 

JENNIFER: It's a question I've gotten quite a bit recently, and I think one of the reasons is it's a response and fear of not really knowing what the future looks like in this landscape and the fear that's being felt in the traditional agricultural community. In many of the states where these regulations are being considered, agriculture has a significant role in the state's GDP. There's concern that there are technologies or strategies, that are going to risk that without understanding the full impact. One of the reactions is, well, let's just stop that thing. That's going to risk something that's valuable to our state.  

In my opinion, most of the policies that I've seen being proposed are in that space of, “This is threatening to an existing part of our state's economy or history. We're concerned about what its impact will be, and we need time to figure out what that impact will be. So, to give ourselves more time, we're going to ban these sorts of products from entering our grocery stores or our restaurants.” Frankly, I think it’s a bit preemptive because we're not close to those products coming into the grocery store. It's also reactive to the reality that this is going to happen. If we have policies that prohibit it from happening, it's not helping those livestock producers acknowledge this reality and find strategies to sustain their businesses within this space of the future. I think it’s not going to be sustainable and will actually be harmful to traditional agriculture in the states where they've passed it because it's creating a false reality.  

MATT: I couldn't agree more. And these policies are a bit anti-competitive, right? These companies need to survive and stand on their own. They need to produce products that people will eventually buy.  

Also, we should be thinking about other opportunities that come to farmers from these technologies being developed. I mentioned earlier that cultivated meats need macronutrients and micronutrients. Right now there's a huge amount of soy being produced in this country and one of the primary routes for soy is to feed its animals. However, there are active research projects on taking the amino acids from soy and using them to supplement cultivated meat reactors in order to grow these cells more efficiently. So that gives those farmers and that economy another route by which to sell their product.  

I think we'll see this across the board with alternative proteins. It won't be a centralization of technologies, but rather a diversification of technologies that gives farmers and ranchers (some of the most creative people that I've met in this job so far) more options. We may be missing out on if we're just closing the door to certain technological options. 

KRISTAN: What is the reception of these technologies and the regulatory environment internationally?   

MATT: Internationally, companies that have more food security risks are interested in new technologies. Places like Singapore for example, who import a lot of food. They're looking at something that everyone else is going to face, but they're facing it first. Israel is another example. They're not the most food-secure country, so they're the leading edge of something that's going to happen to basically the whole global economy. So, those places have been more aggressive about supporting this research and development and the companies in that regulatory environment. That is extremely important, but it's also a matter of being patient with these companies and working with them because it's a brand-new technology. And it's not something that can just fit into the same box that they've used for other regulations in the past.  

The Israeli company that I mentioned, Aleph Farms, has applied to sell their beef in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Those regulators are working actively with that company to try to get those products approved. 

JENNIFER: We're also seeing, domestically, the same sort of conversation in the pet food space, which is a complete shift in the other direction. But I think it's an interesting parallel because we're seeing competition for human-grade animal proteins, whether it's in the global market space or countries that can't produce their own relying on import products from other countries great at producing traditional meat proteins. In the pet food industry, we're seeing a lot of interest as well in cultivated meats for the same reasons, and they're competing with human-grade meat products. That market is tending to be more profitable for most traditional meat protein producers, and so pet food manufacturers are looking at how can we meet the need for buffalo, recognizing we have a really finite number of those animals in the U.S. Can we use cell-cultivated meats to meet the pet owners demand for protein-based pet foods? So it's been something within the past couple of years that the pet food sector has recognized they're competing against humans for food for animals. This is an opportunity for them to lean into this technology now, especially since the landscape in a regulatory sense is becoming clearer.  

MATT: I know this isn't about cultivated meat, but there are some exciting companies out there that are looking at biomass fermentation, and not only for human consumption because it's actually a pretty complete protein with a lot of amino acids, but also looking at that for pet food applications as well. I think the big picture here is what will protein demand look like globally, and how are we going to be able to satisfy that. At the GFI, we talk about all these different pieces, because they all need to kind of come into play in the future.  

What's Next

KRISTAN: What is giving you excitement? What's in the future for this from your perspective?  

JENNIFER: There are still so many questions that have to be answered. So, in a research community, I think the excitement is that it's really rare in the food industry to have such a new technology where we can ask these questions for the first time and generate data that really is shaping the landscape of the future of the food industry and the food system as a large entity. 

I'm really excited about five years from now when we have enough scalable companies, where we can actually do research at the consumer level, and research on safety and shelf life. I'm excited about the opportunity to answer some of these long-standing questions that we just don't have the answer to today. 

The other part of me that focuses on my upbringing in agriculture and my respect for the traditional agricultural communities and those who produce livestock is the opportunity to realize a new future for our globe and the recognition that we've kind of been in this space for a long time. I'm excited about the opportunity to recognize that if we all are in this space of producing protein, it's going to take all of us to do that. It doesn't have to be competitive. We can acknowledge the strengths that each sector and each type of industry bring to the table and then move forward with that in the future. It's going to be a massive challenge, but it's something that I have a personal connection to and I'm excited about that challenge.  

MATT: These things are going to be regional because it's food. You need to be close when you're producing new food technology. For example, I mentioned the soy protein isolates earlier. If you had a factory that was dependent upon a cultivated meat facility, you would want to be placed close to those. 

And so those wouldn't necessarily be technologies that are concentrated in the cities, but they would be regionally distributed across the country. It makes me think of wind turbines across Texas. Sweetwater, Texas has a giant fan blade with the town name painted on it on the outside of town. It's wonderful and clear that that town is benefiting from this new renewable energy technology. So, a future that I see is these technologies distributed across the country so that we see an economic benefit that is more equitable in the food system and not just concentrated in population centers, for example. 

And then the second thing I'm excited about is the research side. Building on what Jennifer said, I think with the increasing investment from governments and philanthropists, you're going to see a different rate of learning. A lot of times when you're looking at R&D inside of a venture capitalist-driven company, they're not sharing a lot of that information. So the things that they learned that were successful, and the things that failed don't tend to be published as much as they should be. In academia, if you're getting your money from the government, they're going to ask you to publish those papers. And so learning rates for these technologies start to increase really fast when you see that type of situation. 

I'm excited about populating the food science sphere and biotechnology in general - populating that sphere with folks who have a higher level of knowledge who are not repeating mistakes of the past and who are learning from other people's successes.  

KRISTAN: Closing out this conversation, I’d like to give you the opportunity to rethink or reframe something that is a social acceptance challenge.  

JENNIFER: Thinking about my primary audience being those who are in the traditional livestock meat space, a misconception is that this is a replacement for their way of life. I don't think that's a reality that lives in the future. What I hear most whenever I talk about this topic is these companies are trying to take my livelihood, my way of living, or those sorts of things. I would like to address it and recognize it goes back to feeding people and allowing folks wherever they sit along the spectrum the opportunity to do so. So it doesn't have to be either or and that's a really big misconception. 

MATT: Surveys show that when people understand cultivated meat, most people want to try it. They say, “Well, this is a new technology. This is a technology that will allow me to have a lower impact with my food consumption. I'm very interested in trying it.” But I've realized that not everyone is that way. So, I think it's important that we continue to have open and honest conversations about what the technology is, and that we rely on facts to drive us forward together. The protein supply is the protein supply, and we're all drawing from that, so we better be working together across the board, rural, urban, and coast to coast about solving this problem from a food security standpoint.

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Read more of the series:

• Science at the Edge: The AI Revolution and Misinformation
• Science at the Edge: Carbon Capture
• Science at the Edge: Political Polarization