The IPCC climate panel is sounding the alarm: we must reduce CO much sooner than 20502– be neutral. That requires strong measures, also for our food. Maybe that’s where the cover goes very smoothly.
I have been writing a weblog about sustainable energy for twelve years now. The past few days I realized that I’ve been suffering from a big blind spot all this time. I wrote about green energy from the sun and wind, batteries, electric cars and much more. But I overlooked one form of energy: the energy we take in through food and convert it into muscle and brain power.
E-bike vs muscle
My electric bicycle shows that this form of energy is quite comparable to electricity. I regularly make trips of 20 kilometers. If I do that on my old bike, I use 450 kilocalories (kcal). If I make the same ride on my electric bicycle with an average support, then I only consume 200 kcal, 250 kcal less.
You can convert kcal to Watt-hour (Wh): 250 kcal is 290 Wh (0.29 kWh). But my bike needs power for that: 155 Wh. So if I drive electrically I save 290-155 or 135 Wh. And since the electricity for my bicycle is largely clean, because my solar panels and the energy from my muscles do have a lot of CO2 it is best for the climate to cycle electrically. (For a healthy body you can make a different assessment, I do that regularly…)
With our food, a significant amount of CO2emissions are involved, and these must therefore also be reduced. You can do that simply by not eating meat anymore. I myself have been a vegetarian for about 50 years and I can tell you from practice that you survive that. In fact, I think I’m quite a fit retiree. All these years I have never forced others to also leave meat and fish. And now I don’t want to do that.
Holy cow
That’s not necessary either. And for two reasons. Firstly, the vegetarian menu has become much more attractive since about 2000. For the first 25 years as a vegetarian, I had the choice of omelette, omelette or omelette in restaurants, nowadays all restaurants have delicious and varied vegetarian dishes. And in the supermarkets, the choice of meat substitutes is almost unlimited.
But meat has turned out to be more and more a sacred cow in recent years; according to politicians in The Hague, you are not allowed to rob the Dutch of their meatball and barbecue. That will soon no longer be necessary. Because cultured meat is on its way.
Faster and cheaper
Cultured meat? Isn’t that at most something for goat wool socks with too much money? And above all, something for the distant future? Well, that future is not that far away. Lately I often have to think back to the start of my weblog, in 2010, when I wrote about battery-electric cars. Those were very expensive ‘toys for the elite’.
Back then, batteries cost $1,000 per kWh of storage, and a $35,000 battery would get you just 200 kilometers away in the summer. And then you had to buy the rest of the car. Fast-forward the movie ten years and you’ll see batteries costing less than $100 per kWh and e-cars displacing fossil cars from the showroom floor.
Is a similar development conceivable for cultured meat? Yes I think. In fact, you can already see it happening. Cultured meat factories have become a popular investment. Israel, the country with one of the highest meat consumptions per capita, already has three.
And the meat is still expensive, but another Israeli start-up has developed techniques to make production three times faster and cheaper. And just as China was the first to stimulate e-cars, it also turned to cultured meat last year. Cultured meat is quickly becoming a kilo banger.
Kodak, Nokia and livestock farmers
Cultured meat needs a lot of electricity. If that stream is green, cultured meat is much, much better for the climate. And for cultured meat we no longer have to cut down jungles to grow animal feed on that land. In short: given this week’s cry for help from the IPCC to limit global warming, we have every reason to soon see meat from cows and pigs as petrol cars: something that is no longer of this time.
If cultured meat is also cheaper than cattle meat, the argument in the supermarket is quickly decided. And the same applies to dairy, because there are already alternatives for milk and cheese that no longer use animals.
Over the past 50 years, I’ve seen several global market leaders disappear because they didn’t understand their time: Kodak missed the digital camera, Nokia missed the smartphone, and now Toyota seems to have missed the boat on battery electric cars. If I were a cattle farmer in the Netherlands, I knew it: retraining before I become the next Kodak, Nokia or Toyota.
In his weblog ‘Vincent wants sun’, Vincent Dekker highlights innovations and developments in the field of green energy, close to and far from home. More episodes at Trouw.nl/vincentwilzon. Vincent now also has a podcast, including about heat pumps – listen to it via this link or look it up via the well-known channels.
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Less meat, the Dutch really want it now
Meat on the table every day is not necessary, many Dutch people think. The Netherlands Nutrition Center has had the impression for some time that people are consciously trying to eat less meat and it has now been investigated. Four out of ten Dutch people say they have been eating less meat for a year.