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In 2019, humanity received a warning:
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30 of the world's leading scientists
released the results
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of a massive three-year study
into global agriculture
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and declared that meat production
is destroying our planet
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and jeopardizing global health.
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One of the study's authors explained
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that "humanity now poses a threat
to the stability of the planet ...
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[This requires] nothing less than
a new global agricultural revolution."
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As somebody who's spent
the last two decades
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advocating a shift away
from industrial meat production,
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I wanted to believe that this clarion call
was going to make a difference.
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The thing is, I've seen this sort of thing
again and again and again for decades.
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Here's 2018 from the journal "Nature,"
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2017 from "Bioscience Journal,"
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2016 from the National
Academy of Sciences.
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The main point of these studies
tends to be climate change.
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But antibiotic resistance
represents just as big of a threat.
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We are feeding massive doses
of antibiotics to farm animals.
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These antibiotics are then
mutating into superbugs
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that threaten to render
antibiotics obsolete
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within all of our lifetimes.
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You want a scare?
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Google "the end of working antibiotics."
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I'm going to get one thing out of the way:
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I am not here to tell anybody what to eat.
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Individual action is great,
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but antibiotic resistance
and climate change --
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they require more.
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Besides, convincing the world
to eat less meat hasn't worked.
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For 50 years, environmentalists,
global health experts and animal activists
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have been begging the public
to eat less meat.
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And yet, per capita meat consumption
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is as high as it's been
in recorded history.
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The average North American last year
ate more than 200 pounds of meat.
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And I didn't eat any.
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(Laughter)
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Which means somebody out there
ate 400 pounds of meat.
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(Laughter)
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On our current trajectory,
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we're going to need to be producing
70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050.
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This requires a global solution.
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What we need to do is we need to produce
the meat that people love,
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but we need to produce it
in a whole new way.
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I've got a couple of ideas.
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Idea number one:
let's grow meat from plants.
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Instead of growing plants,
feeding them to animals,
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and all of that inefficiency,
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let's grow those plants,
let's biomimic meat with them,
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let's make plant-based meat.
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Idea number two: for actual animal meat,
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let's grow it directly from cells.
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Instead of growing live animals,
let's grow the cells directly.
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It takes six weeks to grow
a chicken to slaughter weight.
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Grow the cells directly,
you can get that same growth
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in six days.
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This is what that looks like at scale.
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It's your friendly
neighborhood meat brewery.
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(Laughter)
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I want to make two points about this.
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The first one is, we believe we can do it.
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In recent years, some companies
have been producing meat from plants
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that consumers cannot distinguish
from actual animal meat,
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and there are now dozens of companies
growing actual animal meat
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directly from cells.
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This plant-based and cell-based meat
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gives consumers everything
that they love about meat --
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the taste, the texture and so on --
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but with no need for antibiotics
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and with a fraction of the adverse
impact on the climate.
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And because these two technologies
are so much more efficient
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at production scale,
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these products will be cheaper.
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But one quick point about that --
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it's not going to be easy.
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These plant-based companies have spent
small fortunes on their burgers,
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and cell-based meat has not yet
been commercialized at all.
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So we're going to need all hands on deck
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to make these the global meat industry.
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For starters, we need
the present meat industry.
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We don't want to disrupt
the meat industry,
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we want to transform it.
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We need their economies of scale,
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their global supply chain,
their marketing expertise
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and their massive consumer base.
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We also need governments.
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Governments spend tens of billions
of dollars every single year
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on research and development
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focused on global health
and the environment.
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They should be putting some of that money
into optimizing and perfecting
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the production of plant-based
and cell-based meat.
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Look, tens of thousands of people
died from antibiotic-resistant superbugs
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in North America just last year.
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By 2050, that number is going to be
10 million per year globally,
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and climate change represents
an existential threat
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to huge portions of our global family,
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including some of the poorest people
on the face of the planet.
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Climate change, antibiotic resistance --
these are global emergencies.
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Meat production is exacerbating
these emergencies on a global scale.
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But we are not going
to decrease meat consumption
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unless we give consumers alternatives
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that cost the same or less
and that taste the same or better.
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We have the solution.
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Let's make meat from plants.
Let's grow it directly from cells.
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It's past time that we mobilize
the resources that are necessary
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to create the next global
agricultural revolution.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)