American manufacturing, meet clean meat
The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is on the hunt for ways to advance U.S. manufacturing and keep the nation competitive on the world stage.
Our recommendation? Launch a manufacturing institute focused on clean meat, which is meat grown directly from cells, not from animals on industrial farms.
GFI’s Science and Technology team submitted a comment to the federal Subcommittee on Advanced Manufacturing to provide guidance on how the NSTC can foster innovation, jumpstart R&D, and fix our food system in the process.
There is a global consensus that clean meat is an idea whose time has come, as evidenced by the emergence of more than a dozen start-up companies worldwide since 2015 aiming to commercialize this technology. If the U.S. wants to stake its claim as a protein pioneer and world leader in the emerging clean meat industry, it could hardly do better than to dedicate some fraction of the millions allocated annually for agricultural research to the healthy, humane, and sustainable future of meat production.
As Senior Scientist Dr. Liz Specht wrote within our comment, the benefits of a government-supported clean meat institute can hardly be overstated:
This type of support would enable the coordination of all key stakeholders, creation of industry standards, pioneering of engineering and scale-up technologies that are currently beyond the scope and means of the existing start-ups, and interaction with regulatory bodies and existing industries to streamline clean meat’s path towards commercialization.
If you were looking for a revival in American manufacturing, it lies in seizing future-facing opportunities. There is perhaps no greater opportunity than the production of a common commodity in a completely new way.
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