Podcast: The Guardian, How to feed the world without destroying it.

You first.

Eating fertiliser.

He dismisses animal farming on perennial pastures. But gets wet about perennial rice production which if practical would already be a thing already. Doesn't mention that rice production is hugely damaging to the planet with soil methane production and water hungry.

Soil carbon under perennial pasture you'd be talking up to 5 times as much more than arable farming. Purely down to the perennial plant and grazing and manure production and not tilling that soil.

He's blinkered. And biased against. But if anyone wants to eat fertiliser that's their perogative.

We were told in the not too distant past that plant fats were good and animal fats bad.. Marathons were even sponsored by such.

I wouldnt worry much about moonbat he's made a career preaching half truths to the masses that want to believe him. There's alot of land not suited to crops and even less suited to veg. One example is a grower sending Marris piper to O'sheas in Piltown getting back 1/4+ of the crop as its going out through a 75mm web before it see's a pick off table and isn't big enough for the designer market people have come expect and is sold for cattle feed at E50 a ton.

As in most issues with sustainability it aint farming that's doing the damage but the modern current western lifestyle and over population in other parts of the world.

I struggle to see how lab grown food is

1. Going to feed any number of people, consider the amount of land used for food production. Even if labs were hypothetically10 times as efficient you'd need 10% of the area currently used.

2. What's the long term implications of this lab grown food. Will we find its carcinogenic or some other long term side effects.

3. If inflation is bad now wait until you're paying lab's to produce food. I can guarantee yoh costs will be higher.

Whatever about milk the culturing of animal cells (meat) along with the inevitable regulatory requirements will keep costs high.

Now the likes of quorn or insect protein could be viable.

The concern I'd still have is the health impact long term. What needs to go in to factory milk.

The problem is that the average person is very gullible.

Just needs Hydrogen? seems like hydrogen could be the solution to all of our problems, its a pity 95% is produced from fossil fuels and the other 5% requires lots of electricity which is a long way off being carbon neutral yet.

As for lab grown meat, hard to see how it will be scaled up without using large amounts of antibiotics, well beyond animal agriculture not to mention copious use of growth promoters similar to what is already banned in animal agriculture in the EU. Greenhouse emissions are likely to be far higher due to massive energy requirements unlikely to be met by renewable power any time soon and claims of lower water requirements are total BS when they try to attribute every drop of rain that falls on a green field as part of the water requirement of raising livestock.

Currently yes, and where is the extra energy required coming from to derive hydrogen using electricity? It seems we are a very long way from producing our current electricity from clean renewable sources yet the solution to farming emissions is to use even more? And on mega scale? Eventually is a long way off.

As for antibiotics? Common sense, it's one thing to produce lab grown meat antibiotic free, it will be an entirely different story to do the same on large factory scale. Bacterial contamination will be a problem.

https://medium.com/swlh/clean-meat-still-a-work-in-progress-f2006799acfd .

Claimed reasons why lab grown meat is will might could be better:

• It takes 15,000L of water to produce 1KG of Beef! (What they forget to mention is 98% is the water used to grow the feed, ie the rain that will still fall on the same land regardless of meat production. In contrast the cultured meat will have a much bigger requirement for treated water, https://www.nfuonline.com/updates-and-information/water-use-and-beef-what-we-know/)
• It "will" have a lower carbon foot print (Seems very unlikely anytime soon given the current energy crisis and the massive energy requirement of this type of production.)
• Cattle are routinely fed antibiotics and growth promoters (Certainly not true in the EU and much more likely to be a true of the lab grown meat)

Doubt the factory workers in such a meat factory would be highly skilled or compensated which will in itself lead to higher risk of contamination. (except "maybe" in some pilot show factory built purely as a vanity exercise of some billionaire backer)