Lab Grown Meat, Vertical Farms

Painter of the burial chamber of Sennedjem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For me the number one concern is cost. It has to cost less than how they do it now, much less. Or why bother?

Feeding Tomorrow’s Billions: Lab-Grown Meat Products, Vertical Farms, AI-Designed Recipes, and More

Food and agriculture accounts for about 5.9% of the global GDP. Global food retail sales alone account for about $4 trillion/year, and food accounts for 15% of what American households spend each year. .... In 1790, farm jobs accounted for 90% of US jobs, compared to less than 2% today. ...... they won't be meats in the conventional sense, but something altogether new. ...... In 2012, it took 60 billion land animals to feed 7 billion humans. If successful, cultured animal products have huge advantages: 99% less land, 96% less water, 96% fewer greenhouse gases, and 45% less energy. ........ We will increasingly rely on genetically engineered crops. In 1996, there were 1.7 million hectares of biotech crops in the world; by 2010, the number had jumped to 148 million hectares. ..... More than a trillion GE meals have been served, and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up. ...... Vertical farms will be immune to weather, so crops can be grown year-round under optimal conditions. One acre of skyscraper floor produces the equivalent of 10 to 20 traditional soil-based acres....... Employing clean-room technologies means no pesticides or herbicides, so there's no agricultural runoff. The fossil fuels now used for plowing, fertilizing, seeding, weeding, harvesting, and delivery are gone as well. On top of all that, we could reforest the old farmland as parkland and slow the loss of biodiversity. ....... The average American foodstuff travels 1,500 miles before it's consumed. As 70% of food's final retail price is from transportation, storage, and handling, these miles add up quickly. With vertical farming and genetic engineering, production will become decentralized and distributed, allowing food to be produced nearer the location of consumption,

and food's price to plummet

....... companies turning plants into foods that look and taste just like meat and eggs.... data scientists are actively weeding out billions of proteins from hundreds of thousands of plants to learn what could form the equivalent of a chicken's egg. ....... IBM's Watson uses machine learning to construct new recipes and cocktails that no human chef would come up with....... As technology converges, the future will be a tasty, and abundant, one.

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US Ambassador To Nepal On Facebook

It started here. That took me to here. And to here.

This is the US ambassador to Nepal using Facebook to step right into a controversy. If all US ambassadors did this, Wikileaks might go irrelevant, like I said in a comment. By now I have left four comments. My latest comment is as follows.

(1) Biotechnology is like software, like nanotechnology, like green/clean energy. A country that wishes to go into the future can not be saying no to any of those. That is not me saying a big yes to Monsanto. Monsanto is just one company, although a big, influential one, and some might say a little notorious.

(2) Hybrid seeds are not news. Nepal has been using hybrid seeds for a long time now. But I must admit the kind of hybrids Monsanto seems to have in mind are leaps and bounds beyond what Nepal has been using so far.

(3) A new medicine sometimes is not what it was thought to be. But that is no argument against medical progress. Hybrid seeds can have and have had drastic eco consequences. That is an argument for a much more rigorous regimen to how the new hybrids get approved for the market in the first place.

(4) Biotech is going to play a key role in upping Nepal's agricultural production by a factor of something like 10, something dramatic. Again, that is not a vote for Monsanto. That is my positive vibe for biotech as an emerging field in applied science.

(5) Monsanto does seem to have some notoriety. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto A lot of it seems to come from its non biotech moves, in how it lobbies governments, how it influences decision making, how it enters countries. The solution to that is to have a full fledged intelligent discussion. It is for the Nepali people to decide if Monsanto is to be allowed. But at this point my stand is that a pilot project will not hurt. With a pilot project the Nepali people will have something concrete to talk about and debate.

(6) In this day and age of internet and globalization that pilot project local to Nepal can be coupled with global experiences with Monsanto. There's some good and some bad out there. Software programs have bugs. The early ones had even more of them. Windows crashed a lot in the early years. Some of what we blame Monsanto for is the fact that humanity is in its early stages of using biotechnology. And so there are "bugs." The effort has to be to fix the bugs. For that a corporation like Monsanto, a government like that in Nepal, and collectively a people all have to work hand in hand. I think cooperation is possible, and that starts with an open dialogue like this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotechnology