Despite recent government support for academic exploration of cellular agriculture, it remains unclear if traditional institutional support will keep up with the pace of private innovation to truly drive this field forward. How can we roadmap the global precompetitive infrastructure needed—from discovery to commercialization and including tools, facilities, resources, and training—to build a cellular agriculture ecosystem that can stand the test of time and the whims of the market.

Last month, an article in Canadian Business wrote, “​If every bioreactor in current use by the pharmaceutical industry were put toward manufacturing cell-cultured meat for a full year, it would only yield enough food to cover the meat Americans eat in a single day.” Few in the industry would dispute concerns about fermentation capacity for cellular agriculture. To produce cultured meat at scale, cellular agriculture will require materials and infrastructure that don’t currently exist. How can we solve for scale and price, from feeding cells at scale to modeling their growth and developing bioreactors?

In order to bring safe products to market we need to understand how to evaluate and demonstrate safety. What do we know about the safety of cultured meat, how can we go about evaluating potential hazards, what don't we know, and what can we do to ensure progress isn't threatened by a safety scare?

Open source software has a long history and successful track record, but how to incorporate open source principles into cellular agriculture remains an open question. After spending years advocating for a radically open and democratic way of doing science (abolishing the patent system, ending for-profit publishing, etc), Jake Wintermute now works at synthetic biology "unicorn" Ginkgo Bioworks. He shares how he puts his values into practice and works to democratize science from within industry.

Presentations by New Harvest fellows tackling precompetitive research questions and building out the scientific infrastructure for cellular agriculture. Grantees will share progress they’ve made in areas like food safety and scaffolds and discuss the importance of fellowship and community when doing unprecedented research in an unprecedented field.

To feed just 10 percent of the US meat market, Future Fields estimates cellular agriculture will require 13,000 tonnes of recombinant proteins per year. However, legacy models such as bioprocessing in an E. coli system can have a GHG impact that is untenable for meeting international goals to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In a field all about taking animals out of the equation, Matt has taken the unconventional route of building an insect-based biomanufacturing company. With a scalability mindset amidst a looming climate crisis, Matt asks "what is the environmental cost of animal-free growth media and how do insects change the equation?"

New York’s highest state court will soon decide if an elephant is entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, the first American high court to consider if a nonhuman animal can possess such a legal right. Meanwhile, cultured meat is getting closer to commercial reality. Both read like progress, but do we risk trying to do too much by forcing animals into legal structures designed for humans and seeking to mimic meat with clever engineering? Or, does durable social change require that we combine elements of the past with elements of the future?

If cellular agriculture gives us tools to create entirely new foods, then why are so many companies focused on recreating existing ones? It’s going to be hard to compete with and disrupt factory farming on factory farming’s terms. What if, instead, we play to our strengths and make the kind of products that only cellular agriculture can.

For cellular agriculture to truly build a more just food system, we need to look beyond the mechanics of the technology and think about how to responsibly usher it into the world. While we want to disrupt an extractive mode of agriculture, we don't want to wreak havoc on the lives of those who depend on animals. Using salmon as an example, we discuss the importance of transdisciplinary research, community engagement, and how to proactively reckon with cellular agriculture's potential cultural and social impacts.

Last year, an article in The Counter sent shock waves through the field with its deeply researched reporting of a deeply skeptical techno-econic analysis (TEA) of cultured meat. Isha Datar sits down with the author of the article as well as the author of the TEA to discuss the field's reaction to the infamous "Counter article" and where Joe and Dave stand on cultured meat today.

Drinks, dancing, and rooftop sunshine. Wristbands are required and food will be available for purchase.

Accessible via car or the B57 bus, which leaves every 15 minutes from Newlab and drops you off around the corner from Honey's.