Exploring Resistance to Meat Alternatives

This chapter explores the meat industry's resistance to adopting plant-based alternatives, comparing it to the fossil fuel industry's resistance to renewable energy. It discusses the efficiency and profitability of current meat production methods, but also highlights the increasing interest from major meat companies in exploring plant-based and cultivated meat options.

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Transcript

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Transcript

Episode notes

This week on O+O: UK Net Zero rollbacks, the rise of global populism and why we should all be hungry for (protein) alternatives. Pull up a chair to the table and tuck in to this week's episode.

With the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent announcement that he plans to ‘roll back’ Net Zero commitments, coupled with the disturbing rise of global populist politicians choosing to hack the climate crisis conversation, our hosts Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson, ask: why, and why now, are these leaders choosing to act against the scientific consensus and hit the brakes on progress? Tune in this week to hear the hosts’ lively and insightful analysis on this worrying trend in global politics.

Alternative proteins is the topic of this week’s guest interview. Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute is interviewed by the unflappable Andy Jarvis from theBezos Earth Fund, using his expertise in this area to dig into this incredibly important and hugely influential issue.

Bruce, Andy and the hosts unpacked the outsized positive impact that alternative proteins can have not only on tackling the climate crisis, but also our health, animal well-being and nature restoration. He also issued a stark warning with regards to the huge quantities of antibiotics we feed our animals and the current and future on human health:

“The UK government said the threat to the human race from antimicrobial resistance is more certain than the threat from climate change. It's already killing 1.3 million people per year. It's predicted to be killing 10 million people per year by 2050, according to an article in The Lancet last year. Seventy percent of medically relevant antibiotics are being fed to farm animals. Now, former head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, has said the end of working antibiotics is the end of modern medicine.” * Yikes.

Music this week comes from Colombian Psychedelic band ‘BALTHVS’ and their track ‘Eclipse Solar’.

NOTES AND RESOURCES

* Bruce quotes an article published in Jan 2022 by The Lancet: Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. This article in turn quotes the UK’s AMR review’s final paper:Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally: Final report and recommendations (2016) which is the original source of the figures Bruce uses in the quote above.

PLUM VILLAGE

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet course.

GUESTS

Bruce Friedrich, President and Founder of The Good Food Institute

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The Good Food Institute

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Andy Jarvis, Director of Future of Food at Bezos Earth Fund

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