Con

Last night I was lucky to be among the first group in New York to get to taste chicken grown from a droplet of muscle cells. It was.... DELICIOUS. Succulent, moist, the right texture. Chicken as it should be. Even though full commercialization is a way off, it made me excited for the future. It also made me even more frustrated with a tiredly cynical article in the NYT at the weekend "the revolution that died on the way to dinner". As if it were ever going to be easy to transform the way 8 billion humans feed themselves. This chicken came from Upside Foods, whose founder and CEO @UmaValeti is one of the most inspiring and impressive entrepreneurs I've met. The beautiful facilities he's building will allow this next-gen meat to start to become cost competitive. Let me tell you something about those facilities. They're housed in glass. Nothing to hide. Inside are large, clean metal containers for growing this meat, and growing it in half the time it takes for modern, artificially inflated chickens to grow. Those chickens, by contrast, are not grown behind glass. They're shielded inside closed-off massive meat factories. And for a reason. If we could see the hell-hole of cages, feathers, beaks, chickenshit, bird-flu, antibiotics and, worst of all, brains tortured with a short but horrifying life of suffering, we'd throw up before downing our next drumstick. To imply as the NYT did that next-gen meat will be slowed by some kind of ick factor is a woeful under-estimation of human adaptability. When the truth will out - and it will when there's actually an alternative available - the ick factor will run the other way. This technology really matters. It will probably be impossible to lure humans away from our meat addiction. I personally love meat. I want it to be part of my future. And last night I saw a glimpse of how that can happen in a way that will be both delicious and kind -- to our fellow creatures, and to the planet. I'm not an investor in Upside. But I wish I was. I certainly would not bet against them. When you peel back to the fundamentals, a system in which you're using your nutrients only to grow meat, instead of bone, brain, feathers, claws and beaks, and to do so in a shorter time horizon, has every chance to become cost competitive. I predict the New York Times will be proved embarrassingly wrong on this one. Just because a better future is hard to build, doesn't mean we should stop. For me, I'll throw my lot in with the determined, the visionary. Uma, an honor to meet you.