We've seen alternative protein take off with shocking speed. Just a few years ago I remember thinking it would take decades to be affordable, maybe never reach scale, and doubted people would accept it. It was another wildly exaggerated technology. A few years later, not only was it was available in burger chains and grocery stores but most people had tried it once. Now its rapidly becoming hardly noteworthy, like it was inevitable, obvious, and normal. I'm forgetting how weird and unlikely it sounded.
But what if I'm not thinking big enough? What if alternative proteins were just the start, and growing all our ingredients in vats is vastly more cost (and land) efficient than modern agriculture. Even with precision automated agriculture, we still grow the whole plant, raise it for years, and then harvest a tiny percentage of it. What if we just grew the part we needed, or better yet, just grew the nutrients we needed and then sold that. Wouldn't that make more sense and be cheaper once we have the technology? Don't we already have the technology? So isn't it the future we are heading toward? This is Precision Fermentation and what Reboot Food is about.
And it raises even more questions. What happens to the people who farmed? Who is in control of the food supply? How does this change our relationship with animals? Who will get there first? How will it spread to the rest of the world? Will it even happen?
There is enormous potential for good. It would be so easy to stop the factory farming hellscapes for animals. It would free up enormous tracts of the most fertile areas to transform into beautiful landscapes. It would make food enormously efficient and cheap and safe. There is enormous potential for harm too. Watch Precision Fermentation- Reboot Food to learn about historical food revolutions, technological ethics, how precision fermentation works, what is wrong with our societal structure now, and what our future might look like.
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