May 15, 2023

Did you know about the correlation between declining smoking rates and increasing hummus consumption? It’s true—a decade ago, as American smoking rates were falling, hummus consumption began ascending, leading numerous tobacco growers to convert their fields to chickpea production instead. 

Hummus is also a favorite...

May 1, 2023

There are several dozen startups, including one that I cofounded, laboring to scale mycelium fermentation to a point where it can start making a dent in demand for animal meat. One company though, has been doing this for decades: Quorn Foods. 

While most alt-meat is made from pea, soy, or wheat, Quorn dominates the...

Apr 15, 2023

Twenty years ago, Jason Matheny was a public health student who in his spare time was crusading to create a meat industry that would be less reliant on animals. 

In 2004, after he founded New Harvest to popularize cultured meat, his fame grew. The New York Times profiled him in its annual “Ideas of the Year” feature...

Apr 1, 2023

You probably already know that using animals to make materials like leather has a lot of downsides. But using petro-chemicals and intensive crops like cotton, while better than animal products, is still pretty suboptimal for the planet.

Keel Labs thinks it has a better idea. Rather than relying on animals or terrestrial...

Mar 15, 2023

In 2021, a lengthy analysis was published by a now-defunct online news outlet concluding that cultivating animal cells at commercial meat industry scale was simply a pipedream. Josh March didn’t really disagree. But he thought if you could bioengineer the animal cells to get more comfortable at production scale, and...