 Our panel is called, Where's the Beef Your Hamburger in 2050? First I thought it was your hamburger at $20.50, but we'll get there sooner. We're going to talk about the future. We were just talking about plant agriculture. Now we're going to talk about some animal agriculture and the consumption of meat on a hotter planet and what it means for us and how it might change and how we might change it. We have with us some terrific people to talk about all the aspects of this. First of all, in no particular order, except the order on my sheet. In the middle here we have Gabor Furgach. Did I pronounce it correctly? Perfect. Gabor is the George Vineyard Distinguished Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. By the way, correct me if anything in the bio is wrong. That's happened before. He is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Modern Meadow, a biotech company that applies tissue engineering to the ethical production of animal products. Gabor's family comes from Hungary and today is Thursday, so we invited him to talk about food. That one didn't work at all. We have also at the far end here Graham Meriwether. Graham is the director, cinematographer, and producer of the documentary American Meat, which I hope he'll talk to us about today. He's the director of Leave It Better, a video-based social media network where people share ideas on how to green their neighborhoods. He's an independent film journalist whose work has been featured by Al Jazeera, current PBS, New York Times, and others. I actually got to talk to Graham a little bit at dinner last night. I was trying to do what I thought was the ethical thing. We had a choice between shrimp and asparagus. I thought I'll go with the vegetable. I had the asparagus. Then we had a choice of steak or cod. I really, really wanted the steak, but I thought I should eat the cod, so I got the cod. Then I was really regretting it because I really, really wanted that steak. I'm still regretting I didn't get the steak. Then I went over to Graham's table and talked to him, and he told me about all the bunnies that get killed by the tractors, much like what Dan and Barbara were saying, that you have blood on your hands. But in this case, the animal is actually being destroyed by the agriculture. I just wanted to say to Graham, thanks for making me feel guilty about eating the asparagus. To my immediate left is Dawn Monkreef. She is the founder and executive director of a well-fed world, a hunger relief and animal protection organization in Washington. She is the former executive director of the farm animal reform movement, and she speaks in the United States and internationally on the need for a diet change for health, hunger relief, and the environment. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I looked it up online. A well-fed world is an organization that talks a lot about small incremental steps that each of us can take to achieve a well-fed world. I was very much inspired by that because last night Stephen Izzelle was one of the folks who, Stephen here today, he was sitting next to me and he had to leave to get home by 8.30 and he had ordered his dessert and they brought it and it was just sitting there and I thought, this is going to go to waste and something had to be done about that. So, Stephen, I stepped up and ate your dessert. So, you know, I just want you to know, Dawn, that we are achieving a well-fed world thanks to you, one person at a time. Food waste is a terrible thing. So, I want to start off with Dawn because her organization works on these issues and talks a lot about the role of meat in the issues that we're talking about. Can you tell us about the role of meat in world hunger? Give us an idea of, numerically, of the effect of meat and meat production and also the role of meat production in climate change and then how climate change should make us think about the role of meat in what we eat in agriculture. Well, the top thing anybody can do for climate change, if you're concerned about that, which I hope we are, is reducing your meat consumption and other products. It's a no-brainer, it's common sense and it needs to be put higher on the agenda for social justice groups, for think tanks, for international institutions and thought leaders. So, that's one of the big things that we push for. Meat consumption is predicted to double over 50 years. That was back in 2000. If pre-first came out with it, the UN has then since also said, look, this is a real problem. The growth is stemming from the developing countries, the emerging economies. You've got a very large population base and very high growth rates and as they hire on the food chain, it's very resource-intensive. It's straining our limited resources and this is increasingly a problem. You're going to have more disparity between the haves and the have-nots. And unfortunately, they admit that there's a problem, but it's, what are we going to do? Are we going to have more efficient feed, more intensification, to clear up land and just looking for the symptoms. When the most common sense problem solution is to shift away from this massive overconsumption within the high consuming countries, high per capita countries, the U.S. and Europe. And so we need to downsize our overconsumption while promoting ways and solutions that are not meat centered to get the global increases to reverse. We can't sustain that. And so for climate change, there's so much out there. The UN livestock's a long shadow. You'll hear that quoted all over the place that it's 18% is contributed to livestock and that's current. They're current numbers. Actually, they're old numbers now, but that's not even including that livestock is predicted to double over 20, 50 years. And unfortunately, that is the trend. So the numbers first came out in 2000 and we had 50 billion animals being slaughtered every year for food meat consumption and that is up to 60 billion. We had 6 billion people. Now we're at 7 billion people. So it's a real issue as population increases, the demand for food increases, and our resources become more scarce. So I'm interested to see on the video that he's concerned about all the vegetarians. We're not the problem. And you're not just going to see everybody turning vegetarian. So we do work on mass reduction. So we do explain, hey, here's great ways that you can be vegetarian vegan. The more people are willing to do on an individual basis, we focus a lot on American consumption because it's so high. And that gives us a lot of power. That's a lot to decrease. We decreased by half. We've made a major difference. And we also want to focus a lot on kind of the growth. There's a lot of focus on the growth. And those countries over there, look at that. They're eating more. They're causing all these problems because now we've got meat consumption expected to double. What are we going to do? What are we going to do with China? What are we going to do with India? And I'd like to really explain that if you have China eating at two units and they increase to four units, there's all this upper war that, oh, my gosh, China has doubled their meat consumption. What are we going to do? And it's an important question. But if you look at U.S. consumption, it's at 10 units. And we've decreased to nine. And we're patting ourselves, oh, look, we're decreasing. We're doing our part. And we're still at nine units compared to therefore. You know, it's ridiculous. So you can't talk about growth without looking at the starting numbers and what that means. It's critical. We can't look overseas globally and say what are we going to do about this increase is without addressing our own consumption. And it's very convenient. And the other thing that a lot of them talk about is that it's demand-driven. And demand is not a given. It's not fixed. It's socially constructed. Subsidies affected. Public education affected. So it's not something that we're a victim to. This demand that's happening. We have to reduce it. And there's lots of ways we can do it. And it doesn't negate other solutions. So it's not just, you know, here, it's not a cure-all. And it doesn't negate other solutions. How far should we go to reduce our meat consumption towards no consumption? How far? We're so far... Our numbers are so high up. I mean, to talk about that, oh, are we going to try to get no consumption? Well, let that be a problem when we get anywhere near close to the smaller numbers. So whatever we can do, we're talking about climate change. The numbers that the UN report talks about, the 18%, which they said is more than all transportation combined, that was at a 100-year time frame. We don't have 100 years to deal with climate change. If you take those numbers and you do it over a 20-year time frame, all of a sudden the livestock contribution doubles and triples because of the methane, because of the nitrous oxide. We don't have 100 years. And again, you can still work on the carbon dioxide issues. You can still work on fossil fuels. You have to reduce the number of animals that are on the planet. And we're going to talk about different types of farming systems. It does make a difference. It makes a big difference what type of farming system. And I was glad to see him also, the video, talk about reduction. Have to reduce. Graham, reduce the number of animals on the planet. Is that a no-brainer? Yes, absolutely. I guess I think that Dan Barber was right, that there's absolutely no doubt that if we were to eliminate animal husbandry in this country, that would be a bad thing. But I completely agree with Don that we have to drastically reduce the amount of meat that we consume on a regular basis. The amount of resources that we have on our planet, and especially with the type of meat production that 99% of the meat is being produced with, is very resource-intensive. And we have to decrease the amount of meat that we're eating. And we also have to change the systems of animal husbandry that we have in place to ones that are more in line with ecological agriculture or organic agriculture. You've talked a lot to farmers and what farmers are doing now. Tell us a little bit from your reporting what's going on in agriculture right now and what can we do to promote it that's actually changing. Well, as regards to agriculture, I think it's an incredibly exciting time right now in agriculture. You have essentially an entire system that is changing. And you have a crisis point. The average age of the U.S. farmer is going to hit 60 in the next couple years. And we have less than 2% of our population that's farming. We have more people in jail than we do farming. So you need to have people to grow the food, grow the vegetables to raise the animals that we all eat. And so, of course, at the same time that we have this raise in the average age of the farmer, you also see this incredible optimism and this incredible movement that's happening in local-based, pasture-based, organic systems around our country. I've been going around the country and doing screenings of our documentary. The farmer's markets in Iowa City are so full that you can barely move. It's like you're at some kind of a rock concert. The farmer's markets across this country are absolutely filled. People want to get in touch with their food. People want to get in touch with the source of where things are coming from. I worked on a part of the reason I got into the production of this film is I started working on a friend of mine's farm, Balsam Farms, which is out on Amagansett, New York, out near East Hampton. And I grew up in the suburbs and Ian told me we were going out to harvest potatoes, and I took a pitchfork and lifted it up, and I shook out the potato plant and realized that I had no idea the potatoes grew underground. So I think there's this fundamental disconnect that has happened for a couple of generations. Our grandparents' generation, they understood agriculture. It was something, there was a connection to the farm, at least indirectly. My generation, it's just now starting to happen. So it's an incredibly exciting time to become a farmer. There's a lot of people getting into it, and there's a way that you can actually sell directly to your customers and make a living wage, which is incredibly exciting. Give us a clear idea of what specific technologies are changing the way that farmers do what they do and the role of generational change. I mean, are younger people who are going into farming bringing new ideas with them? Sure, and I can only speak to animal husbandry as far as the latest technologies. One thing that is often said, and it's a mistake when it's said, is that ecological agriculture is a return to our age-old agriculture thousands of years old, not the case. It's actually using very cutting-edge technologies and using the natural resources that we have in place. For instance, Joel Salaton, who's one of the main characters in our documentary, who's also in Food Inc. and is one of the main characters in the book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, he uses a model which they use electric fencing, and so they are intensely, rotationally grazing their cattle so that they get the most use from the land that they have. And it's really fascinating. He basically has taken natural models. So the fact that in the Serengeti's you have birds that follow the wildebeests. And so what happens naturally in nature is that you have these large herbivores and they create manure and then these birds will follow behind and eat the insects and the beetle grubs out of the manure and it's a great protein source. So Joel looked at that system and other farmers looked at that system and they said, well, how can we replicate that? And so they're using technology to basically put in electric fences, have these cows move, and then Joel decided to take the chickens out of the chicken coop, move the chicken coop up on the tractor, and then he calls it the eggmobile. He follows the eggmobile behind the cows one day after the cows and the chickens peck and eat the beetle grubs in the larva and spread the manure around. So it's incredibly ecologically friendly. The eggs have the most nutrition of any eggs in the country and the chefs in the Washington area and Northern Virginia, he can't sell all the eggs he's producing. So there's all this, it's very innovative, it's very exciting, there's a lot of technology and we're actually using ecological agriculture to make, his acres are more productive than any other acre in Augusta County where his farm is. Before I get to Gabor, who's got a great story to tell, I want to come back to Don on one question here. Electric fencing, I mean, are you cool with things that are going to be more ecologically sound and are going to increase production? But for animals, is that okay to do that to them? Well, it's certainly better than keeping them crammed in cages. One of the points again on the video, I'd love to just sit there and tag that little video apart, but oh, we won't have any cows if there are too many vegetarians. They're so sentimental. If you want cows, you can keep them in a sanctuary style. There's lots of ways to get their fertilizer. I love the chicken idea with the eggs. We'd be fine with it as an animal protection organization if you didn't slaughter the chickens afterwards, let them do their thing and take their eggs. But it's a slaughter industry just like the rest. So the animal protection side of what we do, we prefer animals not to be slaughtered. It's pretty much that simple. But that's not going to happen. We're not so idealistic. We don't have our heads in the cloud. We're very common sense oriented. So please have chickens following around and doing what they do, use animals for fertilizer. But again, you don't have to, hey, you don't need animals for fertilizer. You can compost. There's lots of other ways. I'm not going to get into it. We have information on our website, but they do provide a sense, a source of fertilizer. It'd be great if you had them and then slaughter them. But the economies, you know, they can't just keep them going. It sounds like there's a lot of agreement here on incremental steps that will take us in a common direction. And then can I just say also that if we get the massive reduction, it takes the pressure off the system. It'll allow these systems much more room. They don't have to compete with the factory farms. Most of the people who are eating meat are eating factory farmed meat. And if you're into getting the more humane, the local meat, other environmental, you know, get niches that we can talk about that are around that, but then do that. Do that in your home, but when you eat out at a restaurant, you're eating factory farmed meat. So go vegetarian, go vegan in those locations and keep the meat and animal products that you do have control over. And that helps these farmers. It helps us to get less meat, fewer animals, and it also helps get them out of the factory farmed system. So there is a lot of overlap where we can work together. Okay, now let me bring in Gabor, because Gabor, let me ask you this question, and it's a rhetorical question obviously. Is there a more ambitious alternative than the, I mean, I think there's agreement on the incremental steps. Is there a way that we can get meat without exhausting the earth's resources? Yes. Tell us about your role in that, what you've been doing. So what about getting to food or getting to meat, just having one cow in the whole universe, not using any land practically to grace them, not slaughtering even that one cow. Would that be acceptable? I love it, give it. Good. So I am a scientist, so I can come up with ideas that when others come out and say, yeah, you are cuckoo. We're all cuckoos and scientists, so I don't have bad conscience doing that. So I'm coming from the world of tissue engineering, and tissue engineering is a science that primarily was devised and set up to deal with regenerative medicine, to build tissues using doctors, physicists, engineers together, to remedy problems that we're facing, to replace injured tissues, dysfunctional tissues, and eventually creating new organs or replacement organs. So tissue engineering, if you go to Google and read anything about it, it's in the realm of tissue engineering, in the realm of regenerative medicine. And we founded a company three years ago, the name is Organovo, by now it's probably, it's using a proprietary tissue engineering technology, namely printing tissues that allows to construct three-dimensional functional tissues that eventually can be implanted into humans. So we started thinking, okay, so we can basically create any biological, viable biological structure. But we couldn't move out of the realm of regenerative medicine, because that's where tissue engineering was. And then one day the Eureka moment came and said, well, why don't we try to build food? After all, meats is made of mammalian cells, and we know how to package them, how to deposit them, how to make them interact in the right way to get functional tissues. And if we can do that at the level of regenerative medicine needs, well, why wouldn't we be able to do that at the level of agriculture? So to make the long story short, we started making meat products or animal products. So we're focusing on making leather and meat at this time, without killing anybody, without using the resources that you guys are all talking about. Just from a simple scientific point of view, it makes no sense to me. When I look at numbers like one kilogram to increase the weight of a chick by one kilogram of a pig, of a cow, respectively, you use two kilograms, four kilograms, and eight kilograms of feed. But that's nonsensical. If that's what needs, I have no idea because I'm new to this field, but if that's what is needed for me to eat meat, well, that's ridiculous. So there has to be a better way. We are printing meat. And when I say we're printing meat or leather, I have to make those statements a little bit more accurate. And we're talking about it with Will last night. The product that we're making should be considered as flour. Flour is something that you wouldn't need just the flour that you get in the supermarket, but it's yucky. So what do you make out of flour? You make bread, you make cookies, you make pancakes, you make bazillion things. And so this new biomaterial, you want to call it meat? Fine. I want to call it something that is a source of animal proteins which, whether you like it or not, whether you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you will need it. If you don't eat animal proteins, you're going to be in deep trouble. So this is a biomaterial, although when you say biomaterial that is consumable by eating it, I know that it doesn't sound right. We're still looking for a right word. It is something that contains all those nutrients that you would get when you eat your hamburger, actually less of those nutrients. And so that's where we're going. We would like to present this material as a new biomaterial that is the basis for any kind of meat products that you may want to build. So we go to chefs and they love it because a chef would like to work with some base material and then make fantastic things out of it. And so we provide that base material just the same way as the baker, the patisserie chef, takes flour and makes wonderful things out of it. So that's the way we should look at this product. But in every sense of meat, it is meat. Now I've been reading about what people used to call lab meat. I like biomaterial much better, although I don't think you can put it on the package. So I've been reading about this for a long time and it keeps not happening. Are we really anywhere close to this? I mean, how far off are we from being able to do this? Well, any transformative idea such as printing organs or printing meat is immediately a lot of hype around it. And the problem is there has been a lot of hype around it. Although I have to say that it was Churchill in 1933 who said, I'm looking at this chicken breast. And it's ridiculous. He says, I don't think that we need to kill animals for that. There has to be a better way of making it. And I can envisage that in 50 years it will be produced by researchers, in the labs. Well, you don't want to hear that. But the point is that he already thought of it. In 1959, a Dutch food expert, I'm not even sure if he was a food expert, but he started thinking about it. And in 1999 was the first year that a patent around culture meat was granted. And so since that time there's a big revival of this idea and it's the Dutch who started it. But the hype remains. And so even though I'm talking to you I am doing it with some trepidation. I don't really think that we are at the point where I would like to make a big fuss of it. And it's good if there are others who carry the hype. But the approach that we are trying to follow is a fundamentally different approach than everything that has been done before. And as you know, I ate piece of that meat that we produced and I'm still here, I'm still alive. So I think the hype eventually hopefully will disappear. And the best reassurance I think I can give at this point is that if we could make regenerative medicine great tissues that have been implanted into living organisms and healed the living organism, why wouldn't we be able to make this material for consumption? Let me ask you guys a little bit about to the extent that we can take animals out of the equation. It sounds like there's general agreement about a lot of good things, methane and so forth that will be changed as a result of that and being able to feed the world more easily. Let me ask you to come to Grant. What are some of the downstream consequences we need to think about that are going to complicate this? How it's going to affect agriculture? For example, Don brought up fertilizer that says she said, I believe that there's no need for animals for animal fertilizer in other ways. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean there's something called synthetic fertilizer which as Dan Barber mentioned in the video is made up of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus. The thing is that potassium basically the process of fixing that and making it into something usable, turning it into ammonia is one that uses entirely non-renewable resources. So the phosphorus and the potassium are mined often in mines like the Dead Sea and there's a finite amount of that resource. The nitrogen to get converted into ammonia is largely natural gas and coal, mostly natural gas that is used to do that. Now, if we were to remove animal manure from the equation you would suddenly massively ramp up the need for potassium, phosphorus and natural gas and coal. Seeing as how that production is actually a huge amount of the it's many percentages of the earth's what we convert to energy. So manure as it turns out is a renewable resource and so you're always going to need to have animals in agriculture so that you can grow vegetables and do so in a way that isn't dependent upon fossil fuels. Now, I agree that we need to massively reduce the amount of meat that we consume and we need to change our agriculture to be one that is more in balance with our ecological boundaries. One thing I'd like to add though is that as I hear about developing meat in a test tube something doesn't feel right and I guess what I would say is on that farm, on my friend Ian's farm, Balsam Farms out in Amagansett it was like I said you can imagine if you have the first time you realize potato comes from out of the ground whoa, there's a lot that happens there and another thing that happened there was I realized how much death is involved in agriculture. I mean they grow cantaloupes and the crows were going crazy on the cantaloupes that year and they had to kill a bunch of crows. The tractor that harvested those potato combines there's mice, there's birds that get caught up in that and I think as our culture has gotten more and more removed from the cities we've gotten so removed from the natural cycles of life and death that are necessary for our existence and so once you get into this idea well we can suddenly manufacture food the things that sustain us that becomes problematic there was something that happened with the cattle industry where they said scientifically we can take dead cows we can feed this ground up we can feed it back to cows because it'll be actually a really good revenue we'll save money and then they brought the Joel told me the story they brought him out to Ponderosa Steakhouse they're like this is the future and Joel was like no I'm not going to start feeding dead cows back to cows and the reason you don't do that is because cows are herbivores and over millennia, more than millennia they're supposed to eat grass so what happened as a result of feeding dead cows to cows as I'm sure many of you know is mad cow disease we had the development of pre-ond and so when you jump into things without understanding the ramifications of them morally because you want to see if you can do it suddenly you may enter very dangerous territory Gabor do you want to respond to that? Yeah Number one, it's not meat in a test tube I think that idea really should be taken off because it's... I don't want to give a scientific lecture on this but it is so far from reality what you just said that it's meat in a test tube sure we know that baby is in the test tube but that's just the very wrong approach Number one Number two and this is really the bad news I think we're talking about reducing the number of animals consuming less meat I think it's wishful thinking it's just not going to happen when there will be 90 billion people in about 30 years whatever we teach it's all very noble but it's not going to penetrate the masses in China where meat consumption is just exponentially growing even in India the Hindus don't eat beef but the reason they don't eat beef is not because they don't like it it's because of religious reasons when they go outside of India they do eat and there's nothing wrong with that so I think we have to approach the whole issue in my opinion differently it's very nice that we're talking about reducing the number of animals and teaching people to eat more vegetable and I'm sure that that resonates with many people but I don't think it's a winning proposition so what I advocate is that of course I'm mitigating my own art but that is going to respond to many of your wishes and also many of your wishes even though you don't like the smell of a test tube there's no testing what is the vessel? what is the vessel? it's a pot how about a pot? a petri dish? you can call it a petri dish I would call it a big pot that can handle cells when you cook your meat your meat is a bunch of cells so you use a pot you don't say it's a petri dish but what's the difference? there is a petri dish that develops some bad connotations because of the value added tax so let me I want to bring in some questions here I'm going to put one thing on the table and any of the panelists can address it if they wish to as we're going through the questions and that is the last panel we were talking a lot about genetic modification to adapt to climate change we were talking about genetically modifying plants what about genetic modification of animals to adapt to climate change but let's bring in some questions first, sorry, right back next to the camera yeah, Marcia Johnston Earth Stewart Associates actually can we just get three people to ask questions in a row, please do it quickly and then the panelists should choose what to answer question for Gabor was it good? that's the first question tasty, all that kind of stuff can you be a little more specific about what it looks like? do you make it in the shape of an animal? I don't know, just like what does it look like? let's put a couple more people in in the same vein what are the raw materials that you guys are using and what are the byproducts because the user seems to kind of stress much bigger efficiency rather than 8 pounds per 1 pound of meat, you get 1 to 1 but what's your raw material if you can tell us more about it and there's a gentleman, yeah, right there a constitutional law expert at Harvard recently said that he would eat his hat if the healthcare reform movement was actually reduced in the supreme court so I'm wondering if you could make hats that were edible if you're making leather secondly, if we have 9.2 billion human animals on the planet, why can't we use the fertilizer from the humans that are just now going into the environment anyone who wants, let's start with Dawn across, any questions you want to well, we could use human and other animal manure and some areas do and it's quite successful and again also composting of the other vegetables and plant based materials provide great fertilizer there is a whole agricultural sector that does this, it's called veganic so you can look that up or talk to me and that provides the science behind it well I have two specific questions first how did it taste neutral it was when I did it at the Ted Matt I put some salt and pepper just to make things a little bit more exciting but it was neutral it was that base material essentially that I was talking about it is something that I should give that a meat patisserie patisserie and let him do something but it has all the nutritional value of the meat so it was neutral, it was not bad I just said it's not bad and it really wasn't bad but it was not like your juicy hamburger now what is the room material so I said what about if we have just one cow so the mascot cow so I go into the cow I make a biopsy just the same thing that we do in the regenerative medicine space under very controlled conditions totally totally controlled conditions and when I have enough I well not I we shape it so there is a lot of biology going in there which I can tell you more about it if you sign the NDA but the point is that we can shape it and that back to your question if you like the round shape of a hamburger think about it we can do that too but we can do anything those are very very important questions cells produce waste whatever culture medium you use and there are cells you have to get rid of the waste there is no there is no panacea for that that is gotten rid of the same way as you do it when you do any kind of cell culture but the raw material are cells animal cells and not stem cells culture medium standard culture medium culture medium is basically water and today there are plant based culture media so it's again people ask oh culture medium so those people who know something about cell culture say oh you do you have FBS in it FBS is for fetal bovine serum for that of course you have to kill animals we don't use that we use plant based growth media so you're still feeding plants to animals animal cells I don't think there are any questions in there we have a few more questions we have a gentleman here back there the guy in the front thank you Hans Harren I think you know you can do anything maybe we can make bombs but should we do it if we just can do it so there's limits sometimes we know we can do a lot of things question is do we need to now on this meat issue first of all the statistics people think that it will grow forever it cannot because price will increase and people won't have the money so eventually if you true price the meat for example meat products they'll become more expensive so a few people again could afford them there is a feedback there which people and IFPRI and others actually do not factor in their models and long term calculation that's one so I think that's that's what I want to ask you so once we let's say we go and we print our sit on a computer we can print our dish right because we 3D printing so we have like 10 containers in the printer so there is flour there there's some vitamins there may be some other things they've been put on this plate there 3D put them in the oven actually the whole thing is the oven too now what is the landscape which produces this so we're going to have a world where there's only corn and oil palms which produce the base products for this is that then sustainable you know I mean one has to look at the consequences the long term much more when we start to do something so I wonder what you think about the consequences we have a question back here well one thing I think is clear from the discussion today is that there are not now ready substitutes for meat so it's hard to persuade people not to eat meat for industrial products that are even more of a threat to food industrial use of food is much more or considerably more of a threat than than animal you know consumption of meat and it'd be quite easy to there ready substitutes people prefer the substitutes quite easy to to persuade people to make that switch away from uses of food for industrial products so is this just my question is this a good strategy we had one more question over here yeah I was just wondering you know all the panelists agreed that we need to reduce our meat consumption and like the author of Eating Animals argues that it's much easier to be a vegan or a vegetarian than to be a selective omnivore since like around 99% of the meat in this country is a factory farmed and I just wanted to know for Graham do you agree that being a vegan or vegetarian is easier than being a selective omnivore and if not what kind of parameter should we put around eating meat okay and let's start with Graham and move across and we just have a couple of minutes to I don't agree that being a vegan or vegetarian is easier than being an omnivore who eats meat that you know the source of meat and that's over the course of the film my diet changed from being one that pretty much ate anything to somebody who I only eat meat if I know the farm that it came from because I did film on the conventional hog farms and chicken farms and that was also a transformative experience and so you know you know it's something that at first it seems like a bit of a pain because you go into a restaurant and like last night we had dinner at Nora and what I did was ask the guy that came around was so do you guys source your meat locally and they said yes we source locally it's grass finished and so I ordered the sirloin now you know if there are a lot of easy solutions there's websites where you can go local harvest real time farms where you can find out sources of grass fed meats there's also this incredible farmers market csa's there's movement that's happening and it's very easy to get access to these things but you do have to do a little bit of groundwork so I will now let other people talk to your question first of all if you go again the bakery store shop that stuff that you eat there beautiful croissant or something like that it has gone through so much chemistry already that it's mind-boggling and we still don't have any problem with that so I claim that it is going to be the same with our product now you raised the question which is a very delicate one you said should we make this type of leather or meat just because we can and in science this question has no brain response yes because if you can do it even if I say no no no I'm not going to do it somebody will so it's coming whether you like it or not and so to that question this is very simple answer there was a gentleman who I think you asked is our strategy the right one I cannot agree with you more I don't think and then I yeah I'm going to stop okay okay don you get the last word so these are all they work together we get caught up in the theory of well what about this and no animals no meat but it's not just going to happen we are working together this is in time right now it's happening but it's happening at a very small scale people are eating less meat vegetarian vegan especially within the higher income countries because we understand the diseases heart disease cancer stroke and what we can do about it the environmental consequences I have information on local versus less for environmental reasons we can talk about less meat no meat versus the mixed systems and in some areas we went in some areas not so much and I'm a huge fan of this technology it's going to take a while it's not going to be immediately available it's not going to be available at the lower income levels and that's country levels sectors within the US so there's a lot of politics around that and when you're talking about with the industrial uses when the meat crisis hit with the bio the biofuels nothing a drop in the bucket compared to the inefficiencies of what we are using to create meat it's a wildly inefficient and we are bidding the crops away from the poorest of the poor the Ethiopia during the famine exporting food for the higher income countries and this is common practice it's still happening today in the poorest of the poor countries so there are real benefits it's not some kind of idealistic oh if we eat less meat there'd be more for the poor it's we're bidding it away that their foods already over there we don't need to eat less here and transport it over there we need to stop taking their basic food supplies making feed to make the animals that we are eating so as Americans we have a great responsibility to to take that on and eat eat less meat cheese I've got stuff on cheese cheese very resource intensive see me I've got all kinds of research as well as online at awfw.org thank you so much can we have a round of applause for this wonderful panel thank you