Bruce Friedrich
About
Co-founder overseeing global strategy at the Good Food Institute
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Claims by Bruce Friedrich (13)
Vegetarian self-identification overstated
Roughly 6% of the US public self-identifies as vegetarian, but when the Vegetarian Resource Group asks what people actually ate in the last month, a significant portion report eating fish or chicken, so the arithmetic does not work and GFI focuses on the ~98% of Americans who continue to eat meat.
Animal agriculture is 14.5% of climate change
The United Nations calculated that animal agriculture is responsible for about 14.5% of all human-caused climate change globally, and on a per-calorie basis chicken—the least climate-intensive meat—causes about 40 times as much climate change per calorie of protein as legumes like soy and peas.
Chicken converts nine calories to one
Chicken is the most efficient farmed animal at converting crops into meat, yet it still takes about nine calories of feed (soy, oats) to get one calorie of meat back, making animal agriculture extraordinarily inefficient in land, water, pesticides, and herbicides, with pork and beef being even worse.
Plant-based and cultivated meat can beat meat on price and taste
Because plant-based meat is far more efficient than animal meat and cultivated meat is roughly three times as efficient as chicken on input/output, as production scales up and moves to food-grade ingredients these products can eventually taste the same or better and cost the same or less than conventional meat, making the transition a market-driven inevitability rather than a sacrifice.
China dominates EV gigafactories
China holds about 93% of the world's gigafactories for lithium-ion batteries and is expected to have 140 by 2030, versus the US's four (expected 10 by 2030); the same dynamic could play out in protein—whichever country goes all-in on reconstructing meat from plants and cells becomes the global supplier of meat.
Education fails to change diets
Dietary change through ethical education has fundamentally failed because food is governed by Kahneman's System 1 (fast, intuitive) thinking; even in countries where awareness of meat's external costs is high, most people don't change their diets, so solutions must work everywhere regardless of education levels.
Meat is the most likely cause of next pandemic
Industrial meat production is the most likely cause of the next pandemic, followed by intensification of agriculture, according to the UN Environment Program, making shifts to plant-based and cultivated meat a direct way to reduce pandemic risk to zero.
Burning Amazon to grow feed soy
The inefficiency of animal agriculture has global consequences: the Amazon rainforest is being burned down to grow soy that is shipped to Europe to feed farm animals, and the developing economies who contributed least to climate change will be hit worst, with cities displaced and least able to cope.
Antibiotics in farm animals drive resistance
About 70% of all antibiotics produced globally are fed to farm animals for their entire lives at subtherapeutic levels, which drives antibiotic resistance that experts warn could mean the end of modern medicine; shifting to plant-based or cultivated meat eliminates the need for these drugs.
Big meat companies are partners not resisters
The world's largest meat and food companies (JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, Nestlé, ADM) have responded with enthusiasm rather than resistance, launching their own plant-based brands and investing in cultivated meat startups, because their supply chains, consumer knowledge, and trusted brands position them to benefit from the transition.
Israel and Singapore most advanced
Israel and Singapore are the two countries most advanced on both plant-based and cultivated meat because they are highly technologically advanced and motivated by food security, meaning science discovered there can change how meat is made everywhere.
GFI budget and structure
The Good Food Institute's 2021 budget is $18 million, with roughly $8 million for US operations, $5 million for international operations, and $5 million for an open-access scientific granting program, employing about 65 staff in the US and 45 across international affiliates in India, Israel, Brazil, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.
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