I've been a

and

cultured meat

enthusiast for a couple of years now. If you've never heard of cultivated meat, my

illustrated notes

on the fantastic book Meat Planet will get you caught up.

The TLDR is we've found a way to grow meat without killing animals. You can see why this might be intriguing.

At fifteen I read

,

The Omnivore's Dilemma

, and

Stuffed and Starved

in quick succession. That was sadly the end of enjoying

hawker stall chicken rice

.

In the 14 years since, I've maintained various levels of Really Bad veganism. The highly flawed and non-judgemental variety. I have no interest in policing your personal plate. Which is the state of knowing all the facts, understanding their moral implications, and still only making the "right choice" about 82% of the time.

Because here's the thing.

, individuals voluntarily choosing to be vegan, and/or putting enourmous effort into convincing other people into veganism is a terrible game plan for addressing the complex, wide-ranging problems of animal agriculture:

A sad bar chart from

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Rather than judgementally guilt-tripping people into making hard sacrifices, exploring alternative ways of making meat (and meat-alternatives that aren't sad lumps of tofurkey) feels like a better use of everyone's time.

The thriving industry of cultured meat and cellular agriculture agrees. Research organisations like the

and

New Harvest

have been promoting, funding, and supporting new companies in this space over the last few years.

Keen to get involved, I talked my way into sketchnoting the 2019

at the MIT Media Lab.

A couple of illustrated notes from New Harvest 2019

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I'm now working on a new initiative with New Harvest, illustrating a series of podcast episodes around their impressive community of

.

Over the summer the

is interviewing each research fellow. For each episode I'm doing a one-shot illustrated summaries that explains their research focus.

Here's all the illustrations and episodes so far:

Natalie Rubio on Insect Cell Cultures

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Sam Peabody on Food Safety

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Jordan Jones on Decellularized Meat

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Janis Wollschlaeger on 3D Printing (in german)

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Andrew Stout on Nutritional Engineering

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