This is basically a press release for The Food Systems Economic Commission, a ghoulish think tank for greenwashed liberal policies. Its primary contributors draw from McKinsey, "green" capitalists, useless NGOs offering technocratic solutions that avoid challenging the key status quo, other liberal think tanks, and World Bank (bad things, not to be trusted). And various academics (they run the gamut). There's a reason they all have headshots like every other soulless C-suite exec.
An easy way to tell whether an article on this topic is full of it is to see whether it highlights food sovereignty. Major functions of World Bank and the IMF are to undermine food sovereignty as a condition of receiving loans countries are forced to take on due to the global economic (and military) system. To make imports (usually from the US) cheaper than domestic production for large categories of foods, as richer countries maintain their own food production subsidies while the loans are conditioned on destroying recipients' subsidies.
Neither this article nor its source have anything to say about food sovereignty or these international organs of capital that dictate agricultural policy across the global south, but they do talk about deforestation without describing its root causes and call for using more satellite data derived from African countries.
This is fundamentally a political question and not one that will be answered by a think tank such as this. To understand food sustainability, we have to materially ask how the food system works and why it is seemingly so strange. For example, why is slashing the Brazilian rainforest to grow soy for cattle to be killed and sold to Europeans and Americans (1) somehow cheaper than doing the same in America and Europe and (2) valued above indigenous land rights? What happened when policy changes are attempted (ex: what happened to Lula? To indigenous people?)?
All in all, the damages caused by the current system — how food is produced, marketed, and consumed — add up to $15 trillion in losses a year.
It’s time for a makeover, the authors of the report argue, which could garner up to $10 trillion in health and economic benefits (equivalent to roughly 8 percent of global GDP in 2020).
I think the cost-benefit analysis overall is clear,” Vera Songwe, co-chair of the FSEC and executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, said in a press call today.
Health costs alone related to failures in our food system add up to a bulk of current losses — $11 trillion a year, according to the FSEC report.
Continuing current trends would exacerbate undernutrition in other parts of the world, with food insecurity causing 640 million people to be underweight.
The report is the culmination of four years of investigation by the FSEC, including comprehensive literature reviews, case studies, and economic modeling.
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I actually bought two bags of the stuff when the podcast came out. Overall it's pretty a good pasta! It certainly had a bit more of a bite than something like penne, but I couldn't say that it really heald sauce any differently. It was a fun novelty pasta but not worth the small batch prices + shipping.
Here's a review from The Kitchn for the Trader Joe's officially approved version. I didn't know they had one, so I'm intrigued. I don't have a TJ near me, but they're close enough I could make a trip sometime, I had been wanting to taste it after listening to the shows about its creation.
I enjoyed listening to this series of podcasts as it came out. I find it very interesting to see how mundane products are produced and all the steps required to get something produced and finally to market.
How I Built This with Guy Raz is another one of my favs in the same vein.
I understand that reading articles like this while lacking all the requisite knowledge to understand it can make it seem scary, but this tech is not going to create cancerous cells. The "growth factor" they're describing is a signalling molecule. It binds to certain receptors on stem cells and allows them to differentiate into a particular type of cell, in this case skeletal muscle cells. It does a number of other things besides that help the cell grow, but it is just a signal. The cell itself is doing the work. FGF is an essential component of normal cell growth.
The problem with cultivating cells in vitro is that you aren't growing a full creature, just certain cells. These cells require a complicated set of signals to grow because they historically exist only as part of a full system. Because we're only interested in certain parts of that system (skeletal muscle, adipose tissue, connective tissue), we're the ones that have to signal the cells.
This has been an issue because growth media is hard to acquire and purify, and has historically been taken from cow fetuses (because stem cell differentiation is a large part of the task of growth factors, they are present in large quantities in fetuses). Because it's difficult to extract and refine, it is incredibly expensive. Additionally, the growth media of today is not terribly specialized - it will contain lots of different types of growth factors, not just fgf.
So the ability to create fgf in a lab is amazing. Not only will it significantly lower the cost, but it will also allow for the creation of tailored growth media, which could potentially speed up the process of growing muscle cells, for example.
I mean, it's great to suggest that cooking should be taught in schools, but if everyone in your house works I doubt anyone is going to have the motivation to cook on a regular basis, or retool their existing menu. It's not the physical act of cooking that saves you money, it's hitting a few targets:
Does it look good?
Does it taste good?
Is it nutritious?
Is it cost effective?
If, as the article states, people have four core recipes and aren't making cost saving substitutions... then households have probably come to a subconscious decision that it simply isn't worth the time cost of figuring out substitutions. Inflation has just made everyone that much poorer.
Any time I read an article title like this, I imagine the 'experts' to be 4 old retired farmers meeting for their morning coffee at McDonald's and jackjaw.
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