Will lab-grown meat save the world, even with further human population growth? Let’s take stock.

We’ve reached eight billion. There are many people on Earth. A huge number if you compare it to 1950, not even a century ago when the world’s population stopped at just 2.5 billion people. And in thirty years or maybe less, we will get to ten billion. Will there be food for everyone? This is one of the first questions that demographic growth puts to us. In recent years, agriculture has been able to respond to the increased demand for food. Thanks also to technological innovations, the constant updating of cultivation and breeding methods.

Will the same result be possible in the future? Even now, what is produced in the world would be able to feed the inhabitants of the planet today and tomorrow, but we have to deal with the waste and the distribution of food globally. There are areas with vast resources and others where food security is a distant goal. There is, therefore, much to be done, and it will not be easy. These difficulties also have the complexity of the environmental impact that an increase in agricultural and livestock production could entail.

When we talk about the environment, it is clear how strong the positive link with the activities of fields is, being farmers and breeders are the first to be concerned about its protection. Their activity (and income) is intimately linked to respect for nature and the environment. Yet, there is an insistent narrative that would attribute agriculture and livestock to the greatest responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions rather than industries and transport. A lie, but by repeating it, many believe it. So much to greet with enthusiasm about the birth of laboratory products that try to replace meat and livestock.

Not the fake “plant-based” steak that winks at veganism, made by mixing legumes, flavours, thickeners and various additives. Which, however, hardly makes room for consumer preferences. But proteins are made by multiplying cells grown in bioreactors from which they obtain various additives and hyper-processed fake meat. It is no wonder this research is attracting billions of dollars in investment and has strong supporters, even among the institutions. In an increasingly populated world, the “power” of food could become even more palatable (to be on the subject) than weapons.

Following this logic, we would like to convert traditional agriculture into an unproductive garden, as suggested by some strategies from the European legislator and summarized in the Farm to Fork strategy. More realistically, these projects are the distorted result of a vision of agriculture imbued with a false environmentalist ideology and a bucolic, if not “romantic”, interpretation of agriculture itself.

But there are, fortunately, those who react and warn that the road is another, that of productive and sustainable agriculture and livestock when sustainability is environmental, social and economic. As is already realized in many countries, above all Italy, with precision agriculture and precision livestock farming, optimizing every resource and limiting waste.

To say that the right road for meat is not the laboratory but fields and stables is the whole production chain, from farmers’ organizations to institutions that have responsibilities and whose voices were raised to denounce the danger of lab-grown food in the hands of a few protagonists. The many researchers and scientists who deal with this matter support and give credibility to farmers and breeders. Their research shows, numbers in hand, the environmental invariance of formulas for sustainable livestock farming is more widespread than you think. Not to mention the protection of the environment resulting from the presence of humans in some marginal areas, where livestock farming is one of the few and only sources of livelihood.

Among these rumours, there is that one of Slow Food, which in a recent statement, denounced the risk that meat could become a commodity like many others, “devoid of any cultural significance, of the link with the territories and communities that live there, with their knowledge and traditions”, as stated by Barbara Nappini, president of Slow Food. It is impossible not to agree with that. Still, we should trust the intelligence of consumers, who have already shown not to be blinded by mirages of the “food of the future”, which is just a black hole where investors waste their money.