In order to feed such a large number of people, we are, in all likelihood, going to need to change the way we eat. What I mean by that specifically is, it’s very intensive, both agriculturally and economically, as well as in terms of amount of food produced per land mass, for us to be eating meat like beef, for instance. That is a great food. I love steak. It’s one of my-

One of the, what I find to be a very interesting approach, and there’s many approaches to solving this, but one of them is called cultured meat. What’s meant by that is that it’s meat that is essentially grown in a laboratory environment. The big question is, can this cultured meat be a viable replacement for animal meat obtained in the usual way.

Before we start jumping into this and thinking, “Hey, that seems a little bit insane,” we should keep in mind that we’ve cultured animal product for a very long time, including things like insulin, which would really be considered the first cellular agriculture product ever. So, 1922, the first diabetic patient was treated with an insulin injection using animal insulin.

One term for this method for producing meat is cellular agriculture. They’re taking the cells and then growing them out, rather than having the animal grow them for us. There’s all kinds of startups in this area. Some are focused on chicken, some are focused on beef.

Dirk, when you think of this problem set, are you willing to forgo your filet mignon for, say, a cultured meat product of maybe similar composition, but grown in a lab?

That little joking aside, the gap is not that far from where I am today to largely, if not completely, not eating let’s just say beef. That’s a trip that I can take. I don’t want to take it. I do enjoy, like you, beef, but it’s complicated. I know it’s not super healthy for me. I don’t eat a ton of it, but when I do I know it’s not the best choice. I was, for a year as a grad student, a vegetarian actually. That was because I really was struggling philosophically with beings being slaughtered for the gluttony of my taste buds, let’s say.

What stopped me, at that time, from being vegetarian was I had two young children, and it was just completely impractical. That was a tough, tough year of trying to make it all work. I still have some of those proclivities inside of me, and if the rest of the world were turned a little bit more in that direction, where it was easier to get delicious, affordable, convenient things, as opposed to the beef, I could do that. For me, speaking as the user group of one, it’s not that far to go, to go from eating beef to not eating beef.

The harder part, to me, is getting a beef replacement that I want to eat. Looking at other food products that are on the market for a long time, there’s almost no product that’s light or fat-free that I enjoy.

For something like cultured meats, which when you first said the phrase I thought was a cattle that liked Miles Davis.

Yeah, you can get me off beef. But I think it’s going to be a hell of a lot longer time before you get me on cultured meat.

There’s other kinds of protein as well, and I wanted to raise this next item, because it is extremely viable, but maybe kind of icky from the Western point of view, which is grasshopper protein. Grasshoppers are like 72% protein. They have all your essential amino acids. They have no saturated fats. In other cultures, it’s perfectly acceptable to munch on insects, no problem. Here in Western nations, I think we’d be a little bit hesitant, maybe, to try these out. Whereas in Asia and Africa, it’s a little bit more embedded into the food culture.

The third and final trend that I wanted to touch on today is just talking a little bit about managing food waste, especially in the United States. There are a number of startups who are looking at this problem. It’s really interesting. It’s essentially a logistical and enterprise resource planning problem.

So you and I are pretty familiar with both of those problem sets. You’re talking about enterprise level management of multiple sources of food, where you have these time limitations, and at a certain point, food that was once sellable, whether it’s produce or packaged goods or what have you, they’re reached the point that by certain regulations they need to be removed from consumer sale. There’s this point at which the food gets marked down at your typical grocery store, and you can buy food that’s not as fresh.

There’s another area where digital technology is helping to shorten or reduce the amounts of waste, and shorten that cycle. In terms of food technology, I think all of these areas where they’re looking at alternatives to the foods we eat, or you’re looking at better ways for managing the food we produce now, I think all of that’s really going to need to come together, because we’re only at the very beginnings of this population growth problem, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. I think we really need to address this in a significant way.

There’s such an opportunity to say, these tomatoes are the prime, beautiful tomatoes, and they are double the price of normal tomatoes. Then, your average, run-of-the-mill tomatoes are the typical price that people are used to, and then the ones that people aren’t buying, over some period of time nobody’s taking, they’re going down to dirt cheap, rock bottom, get your crummy, cheap tomatoes here, right?

Even if you didn’t have the waste reduction … Even if assume at the end of the day there’s going to be the same amount of waste, it’s that kind of price stratification. It’s been proven again and again in really every product, service, experience category, you’re going to make a lot more money for it.

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You can find The Digital Life on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Player FM, and Google Play. If you want to follow us outside of the show, you can follow me on Twitter @jonfollett, that’s J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T. Of course, the whole show is brought to you by Involution Studios, which you can check out goinvo.com. That’s G-O-I-N-V-O.com. Dirk?