The Good Food Institute photo CEO Council on Sustainability and Innovation and moderator Dan Glickman, former Secretary of Agriculture.

Antibiotic resistance. Falling lifespans. Global poverty. Climate change. Animal cruelty.

What do the food industry’s top leaders do in the face of these global challenges, each of which results from our inefficient and unsustainable method of producing protein? They form a council, of course. It’s called the CEO Council on Sustainability and Innovation—and it’s neither sustainable nor innovative.

At the Council’s inaugural event at the Bipartisan Policy Center, former secretary of agriculture Dan Glickman moderated a panel comprised of the CEOs of Big Agriculture giants Hormel, Land-O-Lakes, Elanco, Kellogg’s, and DuPont.

Unfortunately (if predictably considering the participants), the panel ignored the need to shift away from animal agriculture, a glaring omission for a discussion of agricultural sustainability and innovation.

Why is this omission so egregious? In short, funneling crops through animals to create meat is wholly unsustainable, and continuing to produce protein this way is archaic, not innovative. Indeed, the most efficient meat still requires nine calories of soy and other crops to produce just one calorie of edible meat.

Additionally, the least polluting meat causes 40 times more climate change per calorie of protein than legumes, including soy.

Moreover, there is nothing more innovative happening in the entire food sector than the creation of plant-based and "clean" (i.e., produced in a culture without animal slaughter) meat.

Recently, Fortune magazine declared that clean meat company Memphis Meats had, “the hottest tech in Silicon Valley.”

And the only agricultural innovation discussed by Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the shift from animal-based meat toward plant-based and clean meat.

Nevertheless, this new CEO Council completely ignored that elephant—or chicken—in the room, instead focusing on meager half-measures that won’t get us to sustainability and are not innovative.

For example, on the issue of feeding 9.7 billion people by 2050, their primary “solution” was improving animal efficiencies by ensuring greater output per animal. On the issue of climate change, their solution was improved energy use.

In other words—the exact same things we’ve been doing for decades. How’s that for innovation?

The foremost think tank in Europe, Chatham House, has declared unequivocally that reform of animal agriculture “cannot deliver the reductions needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius,” the level that scientists agree must be achieved to avert climate catastrophe.

After the panel, I spoke briefly with Kellogg CEO John Bryant and Hormel CEO Jeff Ettinger. I asked both men whether their corporations would consider diversifying their protein offerings by devoting more money and resources to plant-based and clean versions of animal-based meat, dairy, and eggs.

Ettinger claimed that Hormel was already committed to diversified proteins, pointing to its Muscle Milk brand (which contains dairy), range of Mexican products, and vegetarian chili (which is excellent, I must admit). He had not heard of the Chatham House report and seemed uninterested.

Kellogg’s CEO John Bryant was more engaged, telling me that Kellogg’s is committed to its plant-based Worthington and Gardenburger lines and that its research and development department continues experimenting with plant-based proteins.

I pointed out to Bryant that both Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates have declared plant-based proteins as ripe for innovation, and that Gates has noted that 92 percent of plant proteins have so far been unexplored as potential animal-based meat substitutes.

Plant-based meats are the most sustainable and innovative sector in agriculture—and they are also extremely profitable: venture capitalists like Bill Gates and Li Ka-shing (Asia’s wealthiest person) are putting their money into these alternatives both because they see them as a solution to some of the world’s biggest problems, and because they expect big capital gains from these investments.

Its lack of attention to these critical areas makes the Council seem, at best, toothless, and it reeks of greenwashing. Only if the CEO Council on Sustainability and Innovation focuses on a paradigm shift away from animal-based foods will it be worthy of its name.