Intrigued by this video, I reached out to Shir Friedman, SuperMeat’s VP of marketing. “Certainly, there are also cultural reasons behind Israel’s interest in clean meat. Veganism for ethical reasons is a quite popular choice here,” she told me.

Also Shaked Regev agrees on this point. He’s working for The Modern Agriculture Foundation, an Israeli accelerator devoted to the research and promotion of cellular agriculture and he's also a PhD student in Computational and Mathematical Engineering at the University of Stanford.

“I started to be interested in clean meat around 2011, when I found out about Mark Post’ attempt to create the first burger in Maastricht,” Shaked Regev told me. “We were a tight-knit community of animal rights activists and we soon spotted the potential of clean meat, we realized that it could make intensive farming obsolete. For us, this was not just a side interest; in many cases – myself included – it influenced what we decided to study at university.”

As for other contributing factors, Shaked Regev points to the usual suspects: “the world-class know-how in the field of stem-cell and tissue-culture research and the right mix of governmental support of technology and innovation.”

The reference to the governmental support brought up in my mind that this wealth of innovation is happening within a highly controversial political backdrop.

I wasn’t sure whether I should have mentioned it here. Obviously, the work in the clean meat field of these scientists, entrepreneurs, and academics has nothing to do with governmental policies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, two considerations prevailed in my judgment.

On the one hand, technological innovation doesn’t spawn out of thin air; it’s always entrenched into the social and political fabric. Therefore, it’s relevant to keep the bigger picture in mind (i.e. the socio-economic context) every time we discuss it, not to wield it as a rhetorical weapon but just for the sake of a more complete story. On the other hand, it’s also somewhat hopeful to observe that the site of the “world’s most intractable conflict” is also one where a most pressing human challenge is being fruitfully tackled. If solved, the clean meat challenge could make the whole world a much better – clean, peaceful, livable – place.

Beyond clean meat

But what happens if clean meat turns out to be an impractical solution? Maybe the tech will never scale, the price tag will never drop substantially, and this high-tech food will remain at best a gastronomic extravaganza, a sort of new molecular cuisine.

All of this may well be true. History proliferates of examples of much-hyped technologies that never really took hold. After all, we’re still waiting to see the Virtual Reality boom happen.

Yet even the possible failure of clean meat is in itself a stride in the right direction, part of the greater debate to fix urgent problems of global hunger, animal welfare, and climate change. If clean meat is not the silver bullet that we’re hoping for, it just means that we’ll have to try different strategies. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” famously stated Deng Xiaoping.

Developments in the field of plant-based meat, for example, may render superfluous our quest to grow real muscle tissues in a lab. For the layman, plant-based meat consists of vegan products that mimic the flavor, shape, and structure of real meat. One of the best examples is the Impossible Burger, a vegan burger that “bleeds”. (Israel is also at the forefront of this field with larger corporations like Soglowek investing big money in the sector.)

Or maybe we could all just switch to a vegetarian lifestyle that doesn’t need meat, be it clean or plant-based. Maybe, the future of meat is that there is no future for meat.

Beyond this array of possible solutions, one thing is doubtless: we need to end intensive animal farming.

READ MORE

Meathooked by Marta Zaraska is an account of the "history and science of our 2.5-million-year obsession with meat"

Clean Meat by Paul Shapiro is a readable and complete overview of the history of clean meat

Our Kinder landscape of the future of meat in Europe features the biggest European players in the clean and plant-based meat spaces

This article was originally published on Forbes

Header image credit: Mosa Meat