Why I Don't Want Lab-Grown Coffee
But I still want cultured meat (yes, it's the cow)
There’s something new in the alt protein world: lab-grown coffee, coffee cells cultured in a petri dish and brewed into something that tastes kind of like coffee-flavored tea. Yum? You’d think I’d be all over it. I do love my future foods. And according to the news coverage I’ve read, we need sustainable, lab-grown coffee because regular coffee is “the fifth most polluting crop in the food value chain.”
The cite for that source is Our World in Data. But as I wrote elsewhere, that statistic is a little misleading without further context. It’s the fifth highest in emissions based on kgs, but you can get around 120-140 cups of coffee per kg of beans.
The main problem with coffee is the environmental and human impacts that make production difficult for the people growing and harvesting it — crop disease, climate change impacts, poor wages. We don’t need to replace coffee farming, at least not yet. We need to improve it.
But wait, don’t we need to improve cattle ranching too? Well, yes, actually. Or at least that’s what many climate researchers say. Cut back on consumption but improve production too. Yes, there are environmental and animal rights advocates who would prefer to put an end to animal agriculture altogether. But there’s also plenty of research-backed support for improving efficiency at the same time that we reduce consumption.
The deeper problem here has to do with media coverage. We’re at a point where future foods can’t be covered from a purely techno-optomist lens. What we need instead is more rigorous scrutiny of every solution along with the bigger climate context, which continues to be this:
Most of agriculture’s emissions comes from beef. Beef is a problem because (1) cows are ruminants that belch lots of methane and (2) cows need a lot of land. The more beef we need, the more land we need, and we don’t have that much usable land left. What’s always worked in the past — expanding farmland — won’t be an option in the future. It’s not even a great option now, because expansion causes deforestation in places where we can’t afford to keep losing carbon-storing forests and grasslands, like Brazil and Indonesia.
Yet we’re still getting a lot of food coverage that doesn’t give the reader this important context. Take the above headline from the Washington Post for a story on Kernza.
Kernza is super cool and this is a beautifully written story, but the headline stinks. Will Kernza really fight climate change and feed the world? I don’t think so:
Worse, in the New York Times, this story ran with a quote from an analyst who says Beyond Meat might be just as bad as JBS because we don’t really know what Beyond’s full supply chain or processing methods look like.
What? There is no secret processing method that could ever make pea protein as bad for climate as beef. Again, because of the methane and the land use problems discussed above.
Every article that gets food systems emissions wrong right now is a missed opportunity. That’s it. And there’s just no reason for it anymore.