The next Democratic president must, among other things, enter the White House with a robust environmental agenda. This should include support for a significant investment in cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. Beyond the animal-welfare and public-health benefits, the new protein is expected to require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that slaughtered meat does.
Unfortunately, cultivated meat is, at the moment, too expensive to mass produce. We can rectify this with further scientific development. Let’s build facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture at schools across the country.
I have no doubt that, working together, researchers can overcome the remaining technological hurdles which impede the successful commercialization of cultivated meat. The next Democratic administration should back the effort.
Jon Hochschartner
Granby, CT