What Do Quill Pens Have to Do with Meat? See My New TEDx Talk
I’ve often told the story about the switch from whale oil to kerosene, including one time even using an actual harpoon in a TEDx talk about the cultivated meat movement. (Recommendation: Don’t try to bring a harpoon on a plane.) I’ve also written about the switch from horses to cars, fireflies to synbio, calf intestines to synbio, and other types of animal exploitation that were displaced not by humane campaigns, but by new technologies.
Probably nowhere is that clearer than the switch from quill pens, used for thousands of years, to fountain pens, as I’ve also written.
So it was with pleasure that I recently had the chance to discuss that same topic on the TEDx stage again, this time to highlight the advantages that fungi fermentation offers compared to raising animals for food.
As I discuss in the 12-minute talk, it wasn’t humane sentiment nor sustainability concerns that spared geese from live-plucking so we could write. Rather, the invention of the metal fountain pen was indeed both good for the goose and good for the gander. With the newfound ability to write sentences uninterrupted by the need to dip a quill in an inkwell, and no need for sharpening the quill tip, fountain pens didn’t just mimic quills; they were so superior that they quickly rendered quill pens a relic of an archaic past.
Just in the same way that metal fountain pens allowed us to write, but in a far more efficient way than how we’d written for millennia prior, the task before humanity today must be to find ways to continue to enjoy the experience of meat, but in a far more efficient way, meaning without having to raise and kill so many animals.
Well, good news. Just as there are many ways to create energy without fossil fuels — wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and more — there are many ways to create meat experiences without animals. Most people already know about plant-based meat and meat cultivated from animal cells. These are both greatly needed technologies.
But there is a third way, and yes, I’m talking about the F-word…
Fungi, of course. Not any kind of fungi, though. I’m talking here about microscopic fungi, often referred to as mycelium, or the root-like filaments of fungi that essentially blanket the earth. Fungi of the kind that we grow at The Better Meat Co.
By harnessing the power of microbial fungi fermentation like we do, we can rapidly and cost-effectively mass-produce such alt-meat in stainless steel tanks that resemble craft breweries, except instead of brewing alcohol, we are brewing protein. And unlike a cow, who takes more than a year of feeding before you get a steak, our microscopic fungi can be harvested in less than one single day, making them among the most efficient ways to produce protein on a planet that’s getting more crowded by the day.
In other words, fungi fermentation can allow us to keep enjoying the experience of meat consumption, but by using less land, less water, fewer greenhouse gases, and more. It’s also, of course, much more humane to animals.
Fungi fermentation is just one way to help liberate humanity from our reliance on animal slaughter, but it’s a critically important and scalable solution to this vexing issue of how we’ll sustainably feed ourselves into the 21st century. We only have one planet and we shouldn’t deforest the rest of it just so we can eat more and more animals.
Instead, just as we must end our dependence on fossil fuels, so too must we end our dependence on factory farms. Today, the place you’re most likely to encounter a goose quill pen is in a museum. Similarly, it’s time for us to leave the factory farming of animals where it too belongs: in our past.
