I’ve been a cellular agriculture and cultured meat enthusiast for a couple of years now. If you’ve never heard of cultivated meat, my illustrated notes on the fantastic book Meat Planet will get you caught up.

The TLDR is we’ve found a way to grow meat without killing animals. You can see why this might be intriguing.

At fifteen I read Fast Food Nation , The Omnivore’s Dilemma , and Stuffed and Starved in quick succession. That was sadly the end of enjoying hawker stall chicken rice .

In the 14 years since, I’ve maintained various levels of Really Bad veganism. The highly flawed and non-judgemental variety. I have no interest in policing your personal plate. Which is the state of knowing all the facts, understanding their moral implications, and still only making the “right choice” about 82% of the time.

Because here’s the thing; given the statistics , individuals voluntarily choosing to be vegan, and/or putting enourmous effort into convincing other people into veganism is a terrible game plan for addressing the complex, wide-ranging problems of animal agriculture:

Rather than judgementally guilt-tripping people into making hard sacrifices, exploring alternative ways of making meat (and meat-alternatives that aren’t sad lumps of tofurkey) feels like a better use of everyone’s time.

The thriving industry of cultured meat and cellular agriculture agrees. Research organisations like the Good Food Institute and New Harvest have been promoting, funding, and supporting new companies in this space over the last few years.

Keen to get involved, I talked my way into sketchnoting the 2019 New Harvest conference at the MIT Media Lab.

Illustrated notes from the New Harvest 2019 Conference

The conference work led to a new initiative with New Harvest; illustrating a series of podcast episodes around their impressive community of research fellows .

The Cultured Meat and Future Foods Show interviewed each research fellow. For each episode I made a one-shot illustrated summary that explains their research focus.

Cultured Meat and Future Foods Show illustrations and episodes

Natalie Rubio on Insect Cell Cultures

Sam Peabody on Food Safety

Jordan Jones on Decellularized Meat

Janis Wollschlaeger on 3D Printing

Andrew Stout on Nutritional Engineering