Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Turning meat-eaters into vegans

Rowan Jacobsen, author of "Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis" has an article about plant-based replacements for meat, from which I quote this encouraging paragraph:

“Livestock is an outdated technology,” says Patrick Brown.

Considering the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem, and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. It will be a textbook case of disruptive technology: overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast. Our grandchildren will look back on our practice of using caged animals to assemble proteins with the same incredulousness that we apply to our ancestors’ habit of slaughtering whales to light their homes.