“The great thing about animal agriculture,” says Isha Datar from her office in New York City, “is that it is offensive in so many different ways.”

Datar, of course, is being facetious. But with her company, New Harvest, a nonprofit focused on funding research for lab-grown animal products, Datar hopes to turn growing dissatisfaction with farming practices into a wave of funding for animal products—minus the animals.

Isha Datar Photo: David Gillespie

“A lot of nonprofits are built around a problem,” says Datar, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biochemistry and biotechnology. “We’re built around a solution, and all the problems that it solves are diverse and many.”

Since taking over as CEO of the 12-year-old organization in 2013, Datar has helped kickstart a small line of research endeavors and companies, including Muufri, a San Francisco-based startup currently developing cowless milk using yeast cultures (“I got to taste one of the early prototypes, and it tasted just like skim milk,” says Datar), and Clara Foods, which specializes in egg whites that come before the chicken. New Harvest is also invested in lab-grown meats and helped provide a part of the funding used to create scientist Mark Post’s $325,000 lab-grown burger, which garnered significant press attention for its astronomical price tag. (The price of the patty has since dropped to about $11/burger).

Muufri: Milk is usually made by mother cows kept in a lactating state in an industrial setting. Muurfi makes the same milk by brewing it, using a culture that consumes simple sugars to make milk proteins. Gif: via New Harvest

All these products are protein-for-protein the same as their naturally grown counterparts, but the environmental, economic, and ethical impact of creating them is significantly smaller. On the environmental and economic side of things, demand for meat, which is projected to grow by 10% to 100 pounds per person by 2030, is not remotely sustainable, not with livestock already consuming one-third of all grain worldwide, dominating agricultural land use, and, in the U.S., costing taxpayers $20 billion per year. And ethically speaking, the situation isn’t much better for the animals involved, who are all too often overfed, overworked, and overbred to the point of sickness or death. In other words, lab-grown animal products can offer an arresting alternative.

But an agreement that there is a problem doesn’t always translate to action. According to Datar, the primary driver behind her work at New Harvest is the lack of funding available for research into lab-grown animal products, which, since its advent, has been orphaned by the scientific community at large.

“You cannot apply for a grant to do cultured research today because so much of tissue engineering is focused on medicine,” says Datar, referring to the growing field of lab-grown human organs. “And neither food nor medical science has taken ownership of cultured meat as an area of work that needs to be done.”