HUMAN PRACTICES
BUCT-China
2022
The 2020s so far have been plagued with food shortages of different kinds. A lot of factors have obviously played into that: a global pandemic, climate change, supply chain hiccups, worker shortages, and the list goes on. According to Eurasia Group, people facing food insecurity will rise by about 142 million-243 million by the end of 2022.
Did you know that our global herd of farmed animals is one of the biggest drivers and victims of climate change? Livestock produce 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and 30 percent of the earth's land area. On the other hand, the extreme weather conditions such as floods and droughts brought about by changing climate could kill many livestock overnight.
What if we could eat chicken nuggets without harming a chicken or eat hamburgers made from a cow who was never killed?
Through the power of the “cultured meat”, meat would all be made from cells instead of animals. This power is our ticket to a new food production system.
This system would not just be better for the animal we eat like chickens and cows and pigs, this would be better for the whole world. Early estimates of cell-cultured meat potential show that cultured meat would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and require 99 percent less land and 96 percent less water, respectively.
Just think about the incredible potential that this technology hold, this would be a new subsistence strategy and a new way to produce food! It is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change and do better from our food system that keeps billions of people alive. Meanwhile, the food system that has an all-time high risk of epidemic viruses.
Farming is always going to be at the mercy of Mother Nature, but climate change is rewriting the rules of farming. We need another way! We need the power of “cultured meat”!
Our project intends to research cultured meat, to provide a new technology for the development of food safety, food hygiene, and standardized food production. Therefore, our design includes producing scaffold materials and cultivating muscle cells. We will achieve efficient production of polymeric materials by improving the pathway of non-natural biosynthetic PHFA. Besides, to meet up with the challenge of the high-cost 3D-print scaffold, the method of cell culture by microspheres is proposed, which greatly promotes the process of industrial large-scale production. As a result, our project will solve the problem of high cost and difficult technology in industrial production, which improves the nutritional diet, reduces global carbon emissions, and also be a firm source of intergalactic colonialization.
