Will lab-grown food really save the planet?

Will lab-grown food really save the planet?

The environmental campaigner and journalist George Monbiot has created a huge controversy by predicting that farmers and farming as we know them will soon be made redundant by the massive expansion of lab-grown food. This, he argues, is largely a good thing (though he adds that it is not without its own dangers), because agriculture is the key driver of the major environmental catastrophes that we face: climate breakdown, maxed-out water use, agrochemical pollution, soil erosion, and Insectageddon (the mass die-off of insects).
Monbiot set out his case in an article that he wrote for The Guardian, "Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet" and a documentary for Channel 4 TV in the UK, called "Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet".
We at GMWatch hugely respect and admire George Monbiot for his tireless and courageous work over many years highlighting environmental issues and exposing corruption in power structures, including the corruption of science. We have also been proud to cooperate with him on a series of major investigative pieces that he has written drawing on our research, where we have seen the care he takes over getting things right. But sadly, we believe he is seriously mistaken in his latest intellectual venture, for reasons we explain below.
Monbiot's arguments
Monbiot's key message is summed up by this excerpt from his article in The Guardian:
"We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories. I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time."
Much of the food revolution that Monbiot anticipates will require the use of genetically modified bacteria that will "create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs". Monbiot believes that while fruit and veg will continue to be grown on farms-as-we-know-them, we will rely on bioreactors to manufacture meat, dairy, palm oil, and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
In his documentary, Monbiot visited a Finnish factory in which a company called Solar Foods is using a bioreactor to manufacture a flour-like substance that is intended as a protein-rich food-like substance. The bioreactor uses hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. Monbiot gets them to make him a pancake from the flour. He eats it and states his verdict that it tasted "just like a pancake". Solar Foods' venture has given rise to a BBC News headline claiming that Food 'made from air' could compete with soya.
Comparing this process with growing food plants in fields, Monbiot says, "The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts."
Monbiot concludes, "Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale... Farmfree food offers hope where hope was missing. We will soon be able to feed the world without devouring it."
Counter-arguments
Monbiot's ideas have come in for heavy criticism from a variety of sources. We'll give just a taster of these below, but anyone who is interested in these issues should read the articles we cite in full, as they are wide-ranging and make a multitude of points. ...
Read on and access linked sources on the GMWatch website:
https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19282

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