In a recent opinion piece for Food & Drink Business News, Dr James Ryall, Chief Scientific Officer for Australian cultured meat company Vow, contends that in seeking to model the environmental impact of a new technology into the future, a lack of hard data can lead to questionable assumptions that ‘quickly compound and can render the final data almost useless’. Such was the case, he argues, with a May 2023 University of California Davis pre-print study in which food scientist Derrick Risner conducted a life-cycle analysis (LCA) of cell-cultured meat production – in the process making assumptions that led Risner to conclude that the global warming potential of cultured meat was ‘four to 25 times greater than the median GWP of retail beef’.
Dr Ryall begs to differ. Read his counterargument here.
Source: The complementary process of cultured meat I Food & Drink Business News
Lead image: Rather than seeing cultured meat as ‘complementary protein’, view it as a ‘complementary process’ for producing identical animal proteins (minus livestock), says Vow CSO Dr James Ryall. Credit: Shutterstock