# Chapter 9: Realizing New Technology *Part Four: Catalyzing A Future Without Animal Products* From *After Meat: The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World* by Karthik Sekar. Written and published November 2021, before the current generation of language models. Human-written throughout; none of it is model output. Source: https://aftermeat.org/book/text/chapter-9 The text of this edition is licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) by Karthik Sekar. Copy it, quote it, translate it, redistribute it, train on it; credit the author. The figures are not covered: https://aftermeat.org/book/text#license. --- ## Investing in Research and Development for Animal Food Replacements In order to explore The Expanse more fully and quickly, we need research and development in the relevant domains. Thankfully, we’ve had no shortage of innovating impressive technology in just the last fifty years with smartphones, personal computers, the internet, positron emission scanners, MRI machines, mass spectrometers, and DNA sequencers. This all begs the question: how do we practically promote the generation of new technology and knowledge? Even more, can we direct our knowledge generation efforts toward specific problems? We broached this question first in Chapter 2. We do this currently in human health research, as we pour billions of dollars into a certain problem. And we do likewise with renewable energy. We invest in renewable energy for a number of reasons. There’s the tangible issue that the sources that power non-renewable technology, by definition, will run out. There is only so much fossil fuel in our ground, and we use it at a rate faster than it can be replenished. In contrast and as the name suggests, renewable energy processes can be run indefinitely. A second reason that floats to the forefront pertains to energy security. Energy is the lifeblood of industry, and thus the engine of the economy of each country. This dependence on energy naturally requires unbroken access, a perilous situation when one must often import from another source because a country’s own production is insufficient. As of 2019, Russia and Saudi Arabia were the world’s largest suppliers of fossil fuel.[^328] Both countries have appalling records in terms of human rights and civil liberties,[^329] yet because of their fuel reserves, they are not punished by the international community. Shifting to renewables means that countries such as South Korea and Japan aren’t held hostage to such relationships for being geographically unlucky enough to possess zero fossil fuel resources. And the third and final reason is that renewable energy adoption has been promoted for environmental reasons. For example, ninety-one percent of Germans support reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and this sentiment has spurred the *Energiewende*, the planned transition from a high-fossil fuel, high carbon emission energy infrastructure to a low-carbon emission, renewable one.[^330] There’s no physical reason why renewable energy cannot eventually displace traditional, fossil fuel-based technology. Similar to animal-free technology, the former could be better in every way compared to the latter, particularly with a game-changer such as nuclear fusion, which works at energies roughly a million-fold higher than current electron (oil combustion) or photon-based (solar) technologies. To this end, we’ve been intentional about our development of renewable energy worldwide. In 2014, humanity spent just a shade over $10 billion dollars on research and development, with the Chinese state being the largest governmental sponsor.[^331] The total investment into renewables is impressive: over $250 billion dollars per year financing mostly utility-scale projects, such as wind turbines and solar power plants. The same reasoning behind investing in renewable energy applies to finding alternative, non-animal-based foods. While animals are a renewable technology, they’re a terribly costly, inefficient one, as argued throughout this book, requiring more water, land, and energy than a fermentative process for the same amount of protein production. Furthermore, animal technology isn’t decoupled from the development of renewable energy. Consider renewable biofuels, which are produced from corn, the same feedstock for animals. Therefore, increased demand in animal agriculture would keep biofuel costs higher. Even if the feedstock isn’t the same, plant producers must weigh growing and selling to the animal agriculture or biofuel industries. Secondly, food security should remain a concern for many interested countries, and one way to improve food security is with alternative meats and foods. Susceptible countries with dense populations that lack arable land have grokked this argument: Singapore currently imports more than ninety percent of the food it consumes, and the government has pledged over $100 million dollars toward research and development of alternative foods, with a keen interest in non-animal meat.[^332] Finally, the environmental problems of animal agriculture are pronounced. A good chunk (over a quarter) of methane-gas emissions stems from guts of cows.[^333] Methane traps thirty-two times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.[^334] And as highlighted earlier, the rapacious land capitalization of animal agriculture makes it harder to offset carbon dioxide emissions with more forests. Even large, already agriculturally-productive countries such as China and the US would benefit from developing alternative proteins and foods. China lost thirty percent of its entire pig supply in 2019 to an African swine fever outbreak.[^335] The 2020 coronavirus pandemic revealed how precarious the US meat supply chain is: Smithfield Foods shut down a slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota after a coronavirus outbreak among workers in early April 2020. Meat production for the entire country is concentrated at these slaughterhouses to a remarkable degree. The Sioux Falls facility itself accounts for four to five percent of the pork supply in the entire country. Its shutdown along with other processing facilities led to a spike in meat prices.[^336] Animal-free technology would not suffer from the same issues as production can be more distributed, flexible, and hedged. Even though China and the US are current leaders in agriculture production, staying ahead means being at the forefront of technological innovation, lest the lead diminish. American automobile production is a good example. In the 1950s, America was the unquestioned leader, producing eighty percent of the world’s automobiles.[^337] However today, that figure has diminished to under ten percent due to innovations from China, Japan, and Germany. Most governments have been oblivious and slow to react to the movement away from animal-based production. Instead, private investment into alternatives to animal products has picked up the slack and continues to grow. There’s never been a better time to be a startup entering the alternative food space. Venture capital funding is vast, exceeding over $100 billion dollars in 2019.[^338] Various startup incubators and funds have leapt at the opportunity to bolster this burgeoning industry including Y Combinator,[^339] Big Idea Ventures,[^340] Founders Fund,[^341] and IndieBio.[^342] The *in vitro* meat company, Memphis Meats, raised the largest single round of private investment in the alternative food space, to the tune of $161 million dollars, in early 2020.[^343] And in May 2019, Beyond Meat completed a highly successful, enriching initial public offering, where company shares became available to purchase publicly.[^344] The company’s total worth increased sixty percent in one day. While the amount of funding and broadening opportunity for the alternative food industry is encouraging, it is not enough. The lack of governmental funding means fundamental research at the academic (university) level is almost nonexistent, research that could build the fundamental science to lay the foundation for applied research and commercialization as it has in other areas such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and computing technology. Governments, rightfully, fund the fundamental research behind renewable energy to the tune of over $10 billion per year, but not even a fraction of that money is available for alternative food and protein research, even though the arguments consistently overlap. Right now, the only funding for university labs to perform fundamental research into alternative proteins comes from non-profits like The Good Food Institute[^345] and New Harvest,[^346] and only in the order of millions of dollars, not billions of dollars, or nearly a thousand-fold less per year as such organizations simply do not have the resources of a governmental organization. (Some good news in this front after I initially wrote this section: the US National Science Foundation funded a cultivated meat project in September 2020.[^347]) New Harvest limits funding to cellular agriculture (*in vitro* meat) technology, which I remain unexcited about. The Good Food Institute funds alternative meat, but not alternatives to dairy or other animal products.[^348] To me, the utter lack of governmental support has been a marked shortcoming in the transition away from animal products, when the outcomes for efficiency, food security, and environment are so starkly beneficial. There are many opportunities for government funding in the alternative foods space, particularly platform technologies that would support the industry as a whole. One example is centralized standards and a database for food properties (such as texture) based on the underlying molecular structure. Many of these properties cannot be predicted from molecular details; we must instead measure and ascribe metrics (e.g., stretchability, viscosity, and brittleness) to a variety of foods. A government could set up the data standards and the repository so that researchers may share and standardize the data. Furthermore, with more data aggregated and accessible, we can start to build some models that predict certain dimensions, thus dramatically shortening the time to discovery of new foods and ingredients. The US started an effort, the Materials Genome Initiative, in 2011 to perform similar services for advanced materials, and it’s been largely a great success, innovating for example a new material for the United States five cent “nickel” coin.[^349] We might be able to find a new casein or new muscle mimic with a similar strategy. The materials from such a project could be used as the ink to support another government investment opportunity in 3D food printers. The device would extrude comestible paste in a programmed mechanical fashion, forming pieces of meat. It could create the Chise discussed in the last chapter. After extrusion, the material could bet set with heat or air dried. As far as I know, no company or venture is working on such devices to sell at the consumer or restaurant level. A 3D food printer, other than self-assembly technology, is the only way that I can conceive of to have personalized food. We can have food tailored to a person’s physiology with the right taste, digestibility, and nutrients. It would parallel the personalized medicine revolution, where drug doses can be dialed to each person’s individual physiology. A 3D food printer would be a platform technology akin to personal computers for which many other companies can develop ink and substrates. We could even have an iStore for different recipes. And finally, there are numerous methods for novel food discovery, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Democratizing scientific instrumentation and lab access means more bandwidth can be budgeted toward this. Enter cloud labs. Cloud labs offer researchers remote access to shared scientific instrumentation.[^350] In this way, researchers do not have to purchase and maintain expensive scientific instruments. My postdoctoral tenure benefited from over a million dollars’ worth of mass spectrometry equipment; none of my eventual publications could have happened without these instruments. We want similar opportunities for researchers and developers in the alt-food space especially. We see some cloud labs such as Emerald Cloud Lab (for all of life science research) and Culture (for bioreactor capabilities) are already helping in these pursuits.[^351] Nonetheless, these cloud labs can struggle with funding, which I know firsthand from my experience at Emerald. Given the value and problem-solving capability, for at least alt-foods, cloud labs deserve governmental funding consideration. I’ve encountered skepticism for government funding of applied efforts (like the 3D printer and cloud lab technology above). So, let’s see how innovations have played out before in other industries with the help of government funding. ## Governmental Innovation Funding The most salient examples of technical innovations invoke emblematic companies, especially the behemoth Silicon Valley titans like Google, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, etc. It’s difficult to imagine my life now without internet searching, smartphones, and two-day shipping, yet many of those technologies only arrived ten to twenty years ago. It would be easy to conclude that we need more of these companies in order to develop self-driving cars, drone delivery, and *in vitro* meat. These companies are not shy about suggesting such as well: they would happily take more tax cuts to support “transformative innovation and research.”[^352] However, giving the companies the full credit does not track with reality. With a simple thought experiment, we can conclude that their business models would not have worked a century ago when there was no internet, and computers were more a theoretical construct than reality.[^353] Clearly, these businesses are built on a variety of previous technologies and knowledge. We might conclude that the precursor knowledge was generated by other innovative companies. Edison’s company invented the light bulb, a necessary development to run modern facilities. Alexander Bell invented the telephone, and his company’s in-house lab later invented the transistor, the basis for all modern computing. But for other antecedent technologies, it’s clear that government played an indispensable role. The internet grew from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative to create computer-to-computer communication between Los Angeles and Menlo Park, California in 1969.[^354] Satellite technology was created by the Soviet Union with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 with purely governmental efforts.[^355] Satellite technology then enabled the development of Global Positioning Technology (GPS), which started from a collaboration of the US Military and Johns Hopkins University in 1972.[^356] By the late 1990s, companies such as Google had a large canvas to work upon. Their business model would have been unfeasible without all of the previously described technologies in place. Punctuating the point further, Google’s core technology—internet search—was funded by the National Science Foundation as the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page worked on it for their PhD thesis. It’s fair to say that Google could have never developed, nor thrived, without direct governmental intervention and efforts. Technologies such as the internet are special—their impact easy to appreciate and their development easy to trace. This does not always happen when seeking antecedents in precursor technology and knowledge. Fundamental knowledge and technology, as discussed in Chapter 2, ripple and cascade throughout society. When impactful knowledge and technology is discovered, many populations can benefit. For example, solving the structure of DNA in 1953 advanced the understanding of human health in foreseeable but arguably indirect ways. It led to a revolution in molecular biology, which reveled in innovation after innovation in the 1950s such as decoding the amino acid basis for proteins and uncovering the central dogma.[^357] Knowing the structure of DNA helps us understand and tackle ailments such as cancer, which occurs when DNA mutates. We know that the arrangement of atoms in the DNA structure leaves it susceptible to damage from sunlight, and therefore skin cancer.[^358] This effervescent property of fundamental technology actually dissuades private companies from pursuing such scientific research *because* it is so broad and not just applicable to their narrow niche. Private companies would love more knowledge and technology, but *only* if it selectively helps them. Fundamental knowledge might help out a competitor and ultimately lead to the demise of any other company. Economist Kenneth Arrow prominently discussed this idea in 1962,[^359] drawing a parallel to a landlord. Landlords will seek to maximize the rent on the buildings that they own and control. A single landlord is not going to want to pay for a public park nearby, especially when competing with neighboring buildings for tenants, even if the park would provide more benefit relative to the cost. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spend about ten to fifteen percent of their revenue on Research and Development.[^360] Apple only spent a paltry three percent in 2014. Marketing budgets, which are clearly designed to maximize the prosperity of the company, were actually about the same, if not higher for these companies.[^361] But perhaps the easiest way for a company to enrich itself without doing anything innovative is with stock buybacks. When a company has excess cash on hand, they can purchase their publicly traded stocks, driving their stock prices up higher and benefiting only their shareholders. Apple spent over twenty percent of its revenue on stock buybacks in 2018, dwarfing anything spent on Research and Development.[^362] It is easy to conclude, however cynically, that any societal benefit these companies provide is incidental to their primary objective of raising as much capital versus what’s invested. The implied social contract that we have with private companies is that they will provide societal value (solve problems) while generating income for their owners: the shareholders. Their societal value comes from jobs that they provide, goods and services rendered, and the technological and knowledge generation that they then spread and monetize. This works out beautifully with internet search and smartphones, and ideally, we could steer companies toward such efforts instead of buying back stocks, which do not solve societal problems. Government regulations are a way to align the companies’ primary objective (increasing returns on invested capital) to societal goals (solving problems). Limits on stock buybacks should be explored, and I’d be keen to learn the potential downsides. We also want to spur new technology forward. I highlight a model proposed by the economist Mariana Mazzucato in her effulgent book *The Entrepreneurial State.*[^363] Mazzucato argues that foundational technology is the cradle of every burgeoning industry, as the ARPANET paved the way for internet companies such as Facebook and Google. Her book covers a panoply of similar examples. Pioneering technology must be supported by large institutions with deep pockets and motivated primarily by societal improvement rather than individual enrichment. Furthermore, private industry operates on short time windows because board, investor and shareholder meetings occur quarterly, and demonstrable metrics—with implied concomitant growth—must be shown. That PowerPoint slide on earnings per share can be augmented immediately with stock buybacks rather than the same cash used for a long-term research project. Even venture capital firms which invest in startups prefer internet technology because such companies grow quickly (so-called scaling) and can quickly boost the internal rate of return metrics in geometric versus arithmetic progression compared to other industries. In Mazzucato’s and my own view, investor patience is also a key determinant to the development of innovations. Right now, the generally accepted time horizon for private companies to go without earning a profit is about three to five years. This can be excused if the company can demonstrate rapid growth, as in the case of Uber or WeWork.[^364] But private investors will not tolerate toiling away on research, even if the technology in question demands such time. So, if we’re relying solely on private enterprise, we’ll be leaving a lot on the table. When I worked at Emerald Cloud Lab, I constantly heard about the difficulty of raising money from venture capitalists. Even though Emerald solved many problems that seemingly no other company or entity could address, the timeline was just going to take much longer. That three to five year window for complete development is not a reasonable expectation for a fully capable cloud lab. And without such a platform technology, consequent alt-food innovation slows. In general, biotechnology, including alt-food, just simply takes longer to develop compared to computing technology. Mazzucato offers a solution to this problem of short time horizon to profitability: governments should be the long-term funder. They can patiently cultivate and foster the development of groundbreaking technology without expectation of immediate returns or song and dance performance metrics (e.g., revenue numbers). In fact, there have been successful instances of this when, in 2010 for example, the US Department of Energy provided a $465 million loan to Tesla Motors.[^365] In the time period since, Tesla’s total market cap, i.e. valuation, rose nearly 100-fold.[^366] The government has certainly had some failed investments too. Taxpayers lost over $500 million on a loan to the failed company Solyndra, which was touting revolutionary solar technology[^367] but ultimately foundered on the shores of competition from low-cost Chinese providers. Lawmakers on the other side of the aisle were quick to castigate the loan program, but overall the program has turned a profit, and the bigger windfall is the creation of new technology that benefits society wholly.[^368] Certainly, we should do our diligence to understand why such failures occur, but nonetheless, it’s unreasonable to expect that the government or any other knowledge-generating entity will be capable of producing knowledge without failures. Heck, shouldn’t we apply the same criteria to investment firms? Most private venture capital firms only expect a small fraction of their investments to actually yield profit.[^369] The 1- in-10 winners might actually carry over ninety percent of the firm’s revenue. As I stressed in the early chapters, knowledge generation requires conjectures and leaps. Of course, we shouldn’t be taking random leaps but entertain only plausible ideas by, for example, refuting bad ones with projections, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and understanding all of the potential physical limitations. However, despite our best efforts, we’ll never be able to predict how new knowledge will emerge. Again, if we can figure out how a technology fares, we already know everything about that technology, and therefore, we have that technology. So, we should observe realistic expectations for how governments pursue such ventures and celebrate their entrance as filling an important void. Speaking of innovation gaps fulfilled by government, another critical one is the “valley of death.”[^370] This is the time for an emerging technology when the fundamentals of the project are established and validated, and the potential of the technology is clear, but sizable funding is needed to lower the risk of commercialization. I alluded earlier to the case of the internet where the government takes much credit. By 1969, the communication, technological, and scientific ideas behind ARPANET were well-founded and validated and even the commercial potential was apparent. What was lacking was proof of concept—a demonstration that this precursor internet could work at scale—and even the modest prototype demanded a significant amount of funding, to the tune of $25 million ($170 million today, adjusted for inflation).[^371] Enter the US Department of Defense, which had the resources, patience, and desire to see if the project could benefit the military and so funded the demonstration through their Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA funds large projects stalled by the valley of death, in particular, generally funding demonstration-scale processes.[^372] Such funding would be valuable for the alt-food space when you consider that a complete demonstration bioreactor production-to-consumer product formation process generally costs on the order of seven figures.[^373] The Quorn process discussed earlier used an unconventional bioreactor design, specifically a pressure cycle-fermenter.[^374] I expect other bioreactor-derived foods to observe similar uniqueness, so it’s not just a matter of making one plant for all food; valley of death funding is needed here. Likewise, a pilot plant to make 3D food printers would be similarly expensive. In 2009, the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded as the clean energy equivalent to the original defense-oriented agency (DARPA). For example, a promising photovoltaic for solar panels will never make it to market without a suitable production process, which is costly to develop. ARPA-E helps the inventors develop this process, providing significant funding for such promising projects (in the millions of dollars), on much more sustainable terms than they would be able to receive privately. This model has been resoundingly successful. Of the over 800 projects, 145 of them have received follow-on funding of $3.2 billion dollars from private firms versus $2.3 billion spent, and eighty-two of them have formed new companies—all of this in the span of merely a decade.[^375] It goes without saying that I would be highly supportive of a similar organization for the alternative food space, and I’m not the first to suggest this.[^376] So far, I’ve mostly focused on applied technology. As the DNA structure example shows above, we clearly want more fundamental knowledge, too. Sometimes such knowledge cascades in unforeseen manners, as we see in the case of CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which has been lighting up the synthetic biology world for the last seven years or so. CRISPR-Cas9 is the most promising technology for powerful, directed, and facile genetic engineering to date. It’s now realistic to be able to permanently eradicate genetic diseases such as Sickle Cell Anemia, which stems from a well-characterized, singular genetic defect.[^377] CRISPR-Cas9 didn’t appear out of thin air though. It was found thanks to curiosity-driven research into bacterial immune systems.[^378] After a certain point of understanding the natural CRISPR-Cas9 system, the potential application of the technology became pronounced. The way science stumbles into new, different areas is beautiful and should be welcomed and fostered. François Jacob, a Nobel laureate for pioneering work on bacterial physiology, couches the intentional, evidence-driven aspect of science as “day science” versus the highly creative, wandering aspect as “night science.”[^379] Day science is the conventional—but incomplete—picture of scientific research where a hypothesis is followed by experiment followed by conclusion. If a hypothesis is falsified, then what? Enter night science, where hypotheses are generated, i.e., the conjectures side of the Popperian model discussed in Chapter 2. All scientific projects have elements of both day and night science and jump back and forth between the different modes.[^380] However, different labs and scientists prioritize and wield day and night differently. My post-doctoral advisor, Uwe Sauer, advised me to start my first project by feeding sugar drops to starved bacteria and observing the kind of signal they elicited on a mass spectrometer. Uwe calls this process “hypothesis generation” and saw our spectrometry technology as a hypothesis generator. Once we had hypotheses, we could then test each one with follow up experiments. We shifted back to the day science modus. The stumbling of night science took me into studying bacterial cell division, an area that I had almost zero experience with, but our data and technology had clear implications for the field, particularly fifty-year-old questions about predicting when bacteria divide based on their molecules (proteins, DNA, metabolism) inside. I eventually got in touch and collaborated with Suckjoon Jun, a physicist, biologist, and self-professed “night” scientist. His website profile reads as follows: > We value both logic and intuition, but more of “night science” than “day science.”[^381] Suckjoon Jun also studies bacterial cell division and developed widely influential quantitative division models.[^382] These models were enabled by another physical invention: the mother machine, a microfluidic device that seals mother bacteria into chambers and captures when they split into daughter cells.[^383] The videos are striking, stunning, and available on his website.[^384] Our efforts traced the division event to the quantities of the FtsZ protein (as described in Appendix A), and both our labs published complementary papers on the findings.[^385] Both Uwe’s and Suckjoon’s night science were enabled by their internal technology development, each of which pushed the boundaries of what was explorable scientifically. For Uwe, the technology was funded by ETH Zurich, our institution’s research commission. Professors at ETH can receive discretionary funding to try out night science projects and so build cutting edge technology.[^386] These funding instruments contrast with the familiar ones, such as the National Institute of Health, R01, where the supplicant poses a hypothesis and a clear, detailed investigative plan, i.e. day science. There are few opportunities for explicitly night science projects along the lines of “We propose to build XYZ to generate hypotheses and follow up after that.” These are effectively uncollected scientific Easter eggs that we’re missing out on. Night science, in contrast to day science, is entirely driven by curiosity. Why is curiosity-driven research so powerful? I think this, again, is explained by the best knowledge generation model. When we’re fully curious, we are at our most open: we entertain a variety of conjectures and are willing to falsify our current knowledge. The more we can do this, the better knowledge we can generate. This assertion has borne out in some real-world data. Author Dan Pink highlights this in a striking TED video about a puzzle game given to test subjects where one group is offered a monetary reward for completing the puzzle within an allotted time.[^387] Another group is asked to solve the puzzle without such a potential prize. Guess which group did better on the puzzle? The one *without* the prize. The researchers offered an explanation that the group without the prize was motivated only by curiosity. The pursuit of money had an inherent tunnel-vision effect on the way the study participants were conjecturing solutions to the problem. Therefore, I advocate night, curiosity-driven research, with an entity such as the government to patronize such efforts. Any other organizations likely have more narrowly stated missions and will fund only research perceived to be congruent to their specific mission, this versus the kind of patron we want who can recognize and appreciate the value of aimless scientific inquiry in itself. I acknowledge that curiosity-driven knowledge is a grab bag. We do not know what will come out of the research and what kind of reach it will have. I also concede that we cannot necessarily wield it to directly replace animal products. But as shown throughout the book, animal technology is fundamentally flawed, and replacement technology has the potential to take over with more development. Therefore, curiosity-driven knowledge will either do nothing in this domain or potentiate replacements of animal technology. In the US, curiosity-driven research has waned over the last thirty to forty years in proportion to our created wealth.[^388] This trend is not moving in the right direction. Given that much impactful knowledge comes from curiosity, we would be remiss to not further fan that flame—and vigorously. ## Directed Efforts to Replace Animal Products There are a few research areas that could certainly use more help to facilitate a future without animal products. As mentioned, generating protein is a piece of cake. For the bulk of protein in Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers, for instance, the producers are unconcerned about the chemical makeup of the protein itself. The bigger concern is being able to source it easily, healthily, and cheaply, which shouldn’t be a problem when using highly efficient and productive bioreactors. Therefore, finding alternative protein is not as much of a concern as other alternative food efforts. A more pressing constituent is sourcing our semi-solid fats. The Beyond Burger, Impossible Burger, and many alternative food products use coconut oil, which fulfills many roles, as the primary fat ingredient. When refrigerated, this oil hardens so the patty isn’t a wet, unwieldy mess coming out of storage. Secondly, this ensures that the fat does not seep away during transit. Further magic: when heated, say on a grill, the fats melt and form a coating around the meat that helps conduct heat, thereby crisping the patty. And finally, the fat is one of the most delectable parts of the burger.[^389] Reproducing the quality of animal fat is a more challenging task than producing protein. Animals evolved to have fat that melts at a higher temperature. For example, beef fat melts at roughly 40° Celsius, or just above the body temperature of a cow.[^390] Evolutionarily, this makes sense as the cow would be limited if she had fat just sloshing around in her body. Imagine trying to run from a predator. Furthermore, solid fat is denser than liquid, so for storage purposes, solid fat works better. Therefore, fat synthesis in warm-blooded animal life has been evolutionarily optimized to take the form of solid fat. But the fat cannot be too solid; otherwise, it would be difficult to burn and metabolize. So, the perfect melting point is a hair above the animal’s body temperature. This characteristic incidentally also served animal flesh when rendered into meat (solid when cold, liquid when heated). Unfortunately, plants and microbes do not have the same evolutionary imperative when it comes to their fats. So, semi-solid fats are more rare among those species. However, we understand the chemistry behind fat solidification well. We’ve been able to take plant oils and turn them into the solid liquid chimeras, as famously shown with Crisco, through the process of **hydrogenation**.[^391] This process makes liquid fats more solid by turning the doubled chemical bonds into single bonds. This in turn strengthens the interaction of fat molecules with one another, allowing them to harden and solidify at higher temperatures. Until the mid-aughts, hydrogenation techniques were problematically scattershot, and the bonds converted to single bonds (and sometimes back to double bonds) were difficult to control precisely.[^392] Even worse, healthwise, were the byproducts, specifically the trans fats. These molecules occur much less frequently in the biological world, and, because they’re so chemically alien, our body has a difficult time dealing with and metabolizing them.[^393] As a result, most of the food world retreated from hydrogenation back into the naturalism ideal. Premium foods such as the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger stick with natural coconut oil to substitute for the animal fat rather than a hydrogenated vegetable oil. However, hydrogenation technology has come a long way. The chemical company Cargill has developed a way to perform oil chemistry without introducing trans fats.[^394] Additionally, the field of **metabolic engineering** has developed improved and precise ways to make target fats of interest at an industrially viable scale using, for example, yeast to grow them in a bioreactor.[^395] The opportunities for creating foreign byproducts are scant when using metabolic engineering because the same enzymes are used to perform the identical chemistries as the originating plant or animal. Many of the chemical details have been worked out to engineer microbes to produce everything from runny oils to hardened waxes.[^396] We should be able to produce the ideal fat, and even fine-tune the melting temperature. We could continue a step further to add nourishing fats and fat-soluble molecules. For example, we could seed our veggie burgers with omega-3 fatty acids, highly recommended for dietary intake but which mostly come from fish.[^397] Metabolic engineering could create fat blends fortified with essential vitamins A and D.[^398] These healthful fortifications could seamlessly blend into the fat of the food with control and precision unobtainable with animal technology. We should also not discount other techniques to create semi-solid fats. The process of **glycerolysis** cleaves the three heads off the fat molecule triglycerides, turning them into diglycerides and monoglycerides. Interestingly, when we change the proportions so that there are fewer triglycerides and more mono- and diglycerides, the entire fat mixture will harden.[^399] Enzymes from yeast can perform this chemistry[^400] so we could even envision a fermentation process to produce these fats. Furthermore, we already know that our bodies can metabolize these fats, as monoglycerides and diglycerides already exist in cottonseed and rapeseed oils,[^401] albeit in smaller proportions to a semi-solid version. Another research opportunity lies with specialized proteins. While the bulk protein will form the majority mass of our foods, there are proteins with unique functions and capabilities that we’ll undoubtedly want in our stable. As I mentioned in the first pages of the book, cheese falls squarely into this category. We’ve been able to reproduce some of the qualities of cheese reasonably well; for example, brands such as Violife get the taste nearly identical as well as some of the melting capability by playing around with levels of starch. Other properties are more difficult to replicate. Anyone who has had cheese fondue knows that cheese also has a stretchy property (which Violife cheese doesn’t quite have), enabling it to wrap around a piece of bread or potato stirred into the fondue pot. This property stems directly from the casein protein, which forms spheres of fat and protein within the cheese. These casein proteins hook to one another and release constantly, enabling this stretch.[^402] The uniqueness of casein has inspired many efforts to try to produce it without a cow.[^403] However, as also mentioned earlier, microbes have a hard time adding the functional modifications to casein that make for the stretchiness. Remembering the beginning of my personal casein journey, the solution that I tried was to find a casein-like protein. I theorized that given the incalculable number of possible proteins (more than the total number of atoms in the universe), we might be able to find a protein amenable for production in a bioreactor and with more desired characteristics than the original casein. In fact, others have launched some efforts validating my hypothesis. In order to find such a protein, I conjectured a **functional screen** that would enable us to search quickly for this. The functional screen works by assessing and quantifying a property of the protein. In The Expanse chapter, we discussed how we desire certain properties of food, so why not just screen for these properties among a library of candidates? Of course, we need instrumentation and experimental techniques to do this, and that was the basis of the proposal that I wrote. I hoped to use a technique, dynamic light-scattering, to assess a protein’s ability to form into the casein-like spherical structures.[^404] The proposed screen wasn’t perfect though because it wasn’t assessing, say, the proteins’ ability to stretch or to melt, like in dairy-based cheese. But these are properties that *can* be measured and screened for in proteins.[^405] New instrumentation and techniques constantly hit the shelves, and our ability for screening only increases as the technology gets better and faster throughput. Functional screening could be boosted with genetic engineering. Imagine that we find a candidate casein alternative, and we change the underlying DNA sequence to increase its potency. There would be no reason that we couldn’t surpass the properties of dairy-based cheese casein. Dairy cheese casein is the product of natural evolution for a mother cow to feed her calves. My best guess is that the stretchiness and formation into a solid glob benefits the calf by being easy to consume and staying as an intact mass in the calf’s stomach, a slow burn food better for the calf’s metabolism. There’s no reason that our unnatural food evolution can’t take it a step further and yield an even better cheese fondue. ## The Unprofitable Replacements There are problems at the fringes, too, that merit our attention. As noted earlier, the profit margins for animal agriculture are razor thin, and the industry is able to keep prices lower due to sales of byproducts. Admittedly, these make up a small fraction of the total revenue stream for producers, but if replacement efforts are tractable, then we should certainly explore them as well. Most prominently, the hide of cows adds roughly five percent to the value of the carcass.[^406] This hide is fashioned into leather goods that form our clothing, bags, shoes, and belts. Certainly, replacing all leather pales in comparison to replacing all beef products in terms of impact, but there are important considerations here. First, consumers will likely be more receptive to non-animal products that they wear versus ingest.[^407] Secondly, leather is a terrible product. It wears out easily, it’s not particularly water-resistant nor breathable, and tanning chemicals wreak havoc on both human and environmental health. Clothing producers already see this, and outdoor-focused brands such as Patagonia, REI, and North Face do not use leather in their products because of how crummy it is as a material. Similarly, sports-focused apparel (e.g., gym shorts) tends to use non-animal products, too—again due to performance criteria such as compression, comfort, weight, and rapid drying.[^408] The Sports-focused company Under Armour is known for their synthetic polymer clothing that wicks moisture better than cotton or wool can. Unfortunately, we are behind technological reality when it comes to dress shoes and belts, which are still predominantly leather. A few years ago, I bought my first faux-leather belt made of vinyl and polyester. Despite everyday use, it’s still as good as new whereas every leather belt I’ve owned has worn away after a half a year or so with daily use. It’s clear that we *already* have the better materials, and consumers know this: sales for athletic shoes rose 14.3% while leather plummeted 12% in 2016.[^409] Similar to how achieving better food is possible *without using animals*, the same is true with fashion. The Expanse is limitless. We can have something that looks great, is supremely comfortable, lasts a while, and is waterproof. New textiles and materials will continue to render leather dress shoes obsolete—if not ridiculous—akin to what happened to fur coats. We just need more leadership from the fashion community to accelerate this trend and forsake animal products. It is conspicuously missing from icons such as Cecilie Bahnsen and Jimmy Choo. We’ve seen progress from the fashion industry to reduce sales of animal fur, and the logical next step is leather, wool, and its ilk.[^410] Similarly, our cosmetics teem with waste products from animal agriculture.[^411] The throats, hooves, feet, and faces of cows, chickens, and pigs are boiled in acid, despite the fact that we don’t know if they do anything other than change the texture of the makeup.[^412] Squalene oil, used in face creams, was historically harvested from sharks, leading to overhunting.[^413] Thankfully, many of these ingredients can now be made with microbial fermentation. Squalene can be produced in metabolically engineered yeast.[^414] And we’re thankfully seeing similar fermentation strategies for collagen production.[^415] We need similar leadership from the cosmetic industry here, as the same argument applies. We can have better, kinder cosmetics if we’re not shackled to animal products. ## Chapter Terms - **hydrogenation:** a chemical reaction to add more hydrogen atoms to a molecule, which turns double bonds into single bonds. Hydrogenation can be used to turn liquid fat into semi-solid or solid fat. - **metabolic engineering:** modifying the chemistry of microbes or plants to produce a useful chemical good. Yeast can be metabolically engineered to produce the malaria-fighting drug, artemisinin, for example.[^416] - **glycerolysis:** chemically turning triglycerides (fat) into mono- or diglycerides. Glycerolysis is another way other than hydrogenation to achieve semi-solid or solid fat from liquid fat. - **functional screening:** a technique to choose and accentuate specific features among candidates. This could be selecting for candidate plants that produce the most vitamin A using an instrument that measures the amount of vitamin A. ## Chapter Summary Worldwide, many countries have invested in renewable energy technology for reasons of sustainability, energy security and environmental concerns. These reasons apply to finding alternatives for animal products. Despite the corollary, the monetary investment for replacing animal agriculture is more than a thousand times less than what is invested in renewable energy technology. And we’ve seen a lack of leadership and foresight of governmental departments and organizations, which historically have stewarded some impressive technological breakthroughs, especially by sponsoring initial process demonstrations as well as patronizing fundamental science. These opportunities will not likely be pursued by private enterprises because they will be unable to reap the benefits solely for their own commercial benefit. We still have many to replace animal agriculture including trying to directly foster the qualities highlighted in the prior chapter (“The Expanse of Amazing Foods”) such as with fats and specialty proteins. Finally, while replacing animal-derived food would have the largest impact, we shouldn’t dismiss trying to replace other animal products in clothing and makeup. Animal-free clothing already exhibits much better properties compared to animal-based materials (such as leather) especially for the obvious-use cases of sportswear and outdoor apparel. [^328]: Morton, A. (2019). Australia Is Third Largest Exporter of Fossil Fuels behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. The Guardian. (Accessed May 9, 2020). [^329]: 2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Russia. United States Department of State. (Accessed November 27, 2020). Saudi Arabia | Events of 2019. (2019). Human Rights Watch. (Accessed November 27, 2020). [^330]: Polls reveal citizens' support for climate action and energy transition. (2015). Clean Energy Wire. (Accessed May 9, 2020). [^331]: McCrone, A. (2015). Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015. The Frankfurt School – UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance. . [^332]: Teh, C. (2019). $68m Fund to Turn Labs into Food Factories of the Future. The Straits Times. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^333]: Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the U.S. (2011). U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^334]: Global Warming Potential. (2020). Wikipedia. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^335]: Brown, T. (2019). China’s Pork Crisis Is Bigger than You Think. MarketWatch. (Accessed June 7, 2020). [^336]: Mackinnon, Jim. (2020). Local Butchers: COVID-19 Impact on Meat Prices May Ease Soon. The Review. (Accessed June 7, 2020). [^337]: Automobile Production, Selected Countries, 1950-2019. (2017). The Geography of Transport Systems. (Accessed August 3, 2020). [^338]: León, R. (2019). How SoftBank and Its $100 Billion Vision Fund Has Become a Global Start-up Machine. CNBC. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^339]: Protein Replacement Startups Are Coming for Food Additives as Shiru Launches from Y Combinator. (2019). TechCrunch. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^340]: New Protein Fund. Big Idea Ventures. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^341]: Founders Fund Backs Its First Food Tech Startup, Hampton Creek Foods, With A $1M Investment. (2013). TechCrunch. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^342]: IndieBio: Creating the Future of Food. CellAgri. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^343]: Rowland, M. P. (2020, January 22). Memphis Meats Raises $161 Million In Funding, Aims To Bring Cell-Based Products To Consumers. Forbes. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^344]: Shanker, D., Mulvany, L., Hytha, M., & Bloomberg. (2019, May 2). Beyond Meat Just Had the Best IPO of 2019 as Value Soars to $3.8 Billion. Fortune. (Accessed May 10, 2020). [^345]: Alternative protein research grants. The Good Food Institute. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^346]: Opportunities. New Harvest. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^347]: NSF Award Search: Award#2021132 - GCR: Laying the Scientific and Engineering Foundation for Sustainable Cultivated Meat Production. National Science Foundation. (Accessed September 6, 2020). [^348]: This is based on my personal communication with Good Food Institute organization members during Summer 2020. [^349]: Gillespie, A. (2019). Materials by Design. NIST. (Accessed January 11, 2021). [^350]: Hayden, E. C. (2014). The automated lab. Nature News, 516(7529), 131. . [^351]: Full disclosure: I worked at Emerald Cloud Lab for two years, and I own stock in the company. I went to high school with one of the founders of Culture. [^352]: Garcia, J. (2020). Tech, Defense Giants Lobbying for Tax Break That Would Save Them Billions. [orlandosentinel.com](http://orlandosentinel.com). (Accessed August 3, 2020). [^353]: Ceruzzi, P. E. (2003). A History of Modern Computing (W. Aspray, Ed.; second edition). The MIT Press. [^354]: Waldrop, M. (2008). DARPA and the Internet revolution. DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, (December 1969), 78–85. [^355]: Sputnik 1. (2020). Wikipedia. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^356]: Rewire Security Team. (2019). Origin of Global Positioning System (GPS) Rewire Security. Rewire Security. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^357]: Platt, J. R. (1964). Strong Inference: Certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others. Science, 146(3642), 347–353. . Judson, H. F. (1996). The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Commemorative Edition (Expanded edition). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press [^358]: Direct DNA Damage. (2020). Wikipedia. (Accessed August 3, 2020). [^359]: Arrow, K. (1962). Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention. In The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (pp. 609–626). [^360]: Truong, A. (2015). Huawei’s R&D Spend Is Massive Even by the Standards of American Tech Giants. Quartz. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^361]: What Percent of Revenue Do Publicly Traded Companies Spend on Marketing and Sales? (2020). Vital Design. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^362]: Rooney, K. (2019). Share Buybacks Soar to Record $806 Billion — Bigger than a Facebook or Exxon Mobil. CNBC. (Accessed June 12, 2020). Global revenue of Apple from 2004 to 2020. Statista. (Accessed June 12, 2020). [^363]: Mazzucato, M. (2015). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (Revised edition). PublicAffairs. [^364]: Horan, H. (2019). Uber’s Path of Destruction. American Affairs Journal. (Accessed November 27, 2020). Eavis, P. (2019). ‘It’s Definitely Pretty Empty’: Why Saving WeWork Will Be Hard. The New York Times. (Accessed November 27, 2020). [^365]: TESLA. [Energy.gov](http://Energy.gov). (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^366]: Tesla Market Cap 2009-2021 | TSLA. Macrotrends. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^367]: Howell, K., & Dinen, S. (2015, August 26). Solyndra misled government to get $535M solar project loan. The Washington Times. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^368]: Brady, J. (2014, November 13). After Solyndra Loss, U.S. Energy Loan Program Turning A Profit. NPR.Org. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^369]: Graham, P. (2013). How to Convince Investors. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^370]: Ford, G. S., Koutsky, T., & Spiwak, L. J. (2007). A Valley of Death in the Innovation Sequence: An Economic Investigation (SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1093006). Social Science Research Network. . [^371]: Press, L. (2012). Government Spending: Seeding the Internet Cost $124.5 Million, Morse’s Telegraph $30 Thousand. (Accessed August 3, 2020). [^372]: Warner, M. (2019). Industrial Biotechnology Commercialization Handbook: How to make proteins without animals and fuels or chemicals without crude oil. Independently published. [^373]: Warner, M. (2020). Successfully commercializing alternative proteins - bench to plate with Mark Warner. Good Food Institute. Presented September 18th, 2020. [^374]: Wiebe, M. (2004). QuornTM Myco-protein — Overview of a successful fungal product. Mycologist, 18(1), 17–20. [^375]: Our Impact. ARPA-E. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^376]: Roberts, D. (2019). Jay Inslee Is Writing the Climate Plan the next President Should Adopt. Vox. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^377]: Clancy, S. (2008) Genetic mutation. Nature Education 1(1):187 [^378]: Deltcheva, E., Chylinski, K., Sharma, C. M., Gonzales, K., Chao, Y., Pirzada, Z. A., … Charpentier, E. (2011). CRISPR RNA maturation by trans-encoded small RNA and host factor RNase III. Nature, 471(7340), 602–607. . [^379]: Jacob, F. (1995). The Statue Within: An Autobiography (Illustrated edition). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. [^380]: Yanai, I., & Lercher, M. (2019). Night science. Genome Biology, 20(1), 20–22. . [^381]: Suckjoon Jun. University of California – San Diego. (Accessed January 13, 2021). Suckjoon Jun also coauthored a provoking essay explaining his philosophy on night science and scientific funding: Desai, A., & Jun, S. (2018). Promoting an “Auteur Theory” for Young Scientists: Preserving Excitement and Creativity …. BioEssays, 40(11), 1800147. . [^382]: Taheri-Araghi, S., Bradde, S., Sauls, J. T., Hill, N. S., Levin, P. A., Paulsson, J., … Jun, S. (2015). Cell-size control and homeostasis in bacteria. Current Biology, 25(3), 385–391. . Si, F., Li, D., Cox, S. E., Sauls, J. T., Azizi, O., Sou, C., … Jun, S. (2017). Invariance of Initiation Mass and Predictability of Cell Size in Escherichia coli. Current Biology, 27(9), 1278–1287. . [^383]: Wang, P., Robert, L., Pelletier, J., Dang, W. L., Taddei, F., Wright, A., & Jun, S. (2010). Robust growth of Escherichia coli. Current Biology : CB, 20(12), 1099–1103. . [^384]: Jun, S. Jun Lab | qBio | UCSD Physics and Molecular Biology. (Accessed January 13, 2021). [^385]: Sekar, K., Rusconi, R., Sauls, J. T., Fuhrer, T., Noor, E., Nguyen, J., … Sauer, U. (2018). Synthesis and degradation of FtsZ quantitatively predict the first cell division in starved bacteria. Molecular Systems Biology, 14(11), 8623. . Si, F., Le Treut, G., Sauls, J. T., Vadia, S., Levin, P. A., & Jun, S. (2019). Mechanistic Origin of Cell-Size Control and Homeostasis in Bacteria. Current Biology, 29(11), 1760-1770.e7. . [^386]: ETH Zurich Research Commission. (Accessed January 13, 2021). [^387]: Pink, D. (2009). The puzzle of motivation. TED – ideas worth spreading. (Accessed June 13, 2020). [^388]: Hourihan, M., & Parkes, D. (2016). Federal R & D Budget Trends : A Short Summary. (January), 1–7. [^389]: Pepino, M. Y., Love-Gregory, L., Klein, S., & Abumrad, N. A. (2012). The fatty acid translocase gene CD36 and lingual lipase influence oral sensitivity to fat in obese subjects. Journal of Lipid Research, 53(3), 561–566. . [^390]: Bockisch, M. (Ed.). (1998). Chapter 3—Animal Fats and Oils. In Fats and Oils Handbook (pp. 121–173). AOCS Press. . [^391]: List, G., & Jackson, M. (2007). The Battle Over Centralization (1903-1920). INFORM - International News on Fats, Oils and Related Materials., 18, 403–405. . [^392]: Eun, S. J., Mun, Y. J., & Min, D. B. (2005). Hydrogenation for low trans and high conjugated fatty acids. Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, Vol. 4, pp. 22–30. . [^393]: Trumbo, P., Schlicker, S., Yates, A. A., Poos, M., & Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, The National Academies. (2002). Dietary reference intakes for energy, carbohydrate, fiber, fat, fatty acids, cholesterol, protein and amino acids. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 102(11), 1621–1630. . [^394]: Removing Trans Fats from McDonald’s® Famous Fries. (2015). Cargill. (June 13, 2020). [^395]: Aznar-Moreno, J. A., & Durrett, T. P. (2017). Review: Metabolic engineering of unusual lipids in the synthetic biology era. Plant Science: An International Journal of Experimental Plant Biology, 263, 126–131. . [^396]: Vanhercke, T., Wood, C. C., Stymne, S., Singh, S. P., & Green, A. G. (2013). Metabolic engineering of plant oils and waxes for use as industrial feedstocks. Plant Biotechnology Journal, Vol. 11, pp. 197–210. . Soong, Y. H. V., Liu, N., Yoon, S., Lawton, C., & Xie, D. (2019). Cellular and metabolic engineering of oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica for bioconversion of hydrophobic substrates into high-value products. Engineering in Life Sciences, Vol. 19, pp. 423–443. . [^397]: Omega-3 Fatty Acids. (2020). National Institute of Health - Office of Dietary Supplements. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^398]: National Research Council (US) Committee on Diet and Health. (1989). Fat-Soluble Vitamins. In Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk. National Academies Press (US). . [^399]: Nicholson, R. A., & Marangoni, A. G. (2020). Enzymatic glycerolysis converts vegetable oils into structural fats with the potential to replace palm oil in food products. Nature Food, 1(November). . [^400]: Raza, S., Fransson, L., & Hult, K. (2001). Enantioselectivity in Candida antarctica lipase B: A molecular dynamics study. Protein Science: A Publication of the Protein Society, 10(2), 329–338. . [^401]: Flickinger, B. D., & Matsuo, N. (2003). Nutritional characteristics of DAG oil. Lipids, 38(2), 129–132. . [^402]: Ah, J., & Tagalpallewar, G. P. (2017). Functional properties of Mozzarella cheese for its end use application. Journal of Food Science and Technology, 54(12), 3766–3778. . [^403]: How We Make Animal-Free Dairy Proteins. Perfect Day. (Accessed June 14, 2020). New Culture. New Culture. (Accessed June 14, 2020). [^404]: Hristov, P., Mitkov, I., Sirakova, D., Mehandgiiski, I., & Radoslavov, G. (2016). Measurement of Casein Micelle Size in Raw Dairy Cattle Milk by Dynamic Light Scattering. Milk Proteins - From Structure to Biological Properties and Health Aspects, (September). . [^405]: Pierce, M. M., Raman, C. S., & Nall, B. T. (1999). Isothermal titration calorimetry of protein-protein interactions. Methods (San Diego, Calif.), 19(2), 213–221. . Label Free BLI Detection. ForteBio. (Accessed June 14, 2020). Kanai, T., Egoshi, K., Ohno, S., & Takebe, T. (2018). The evaluation of stretchability and its applications for biaxially oriented polypropylene film. Advances in Polymer Technology, 37(6), 2253–2260. . Fife, R. L., McMahon, D. J., & Oberg, C. J. (2002). Test for measuring the stretchability of melted cheese. Journal of Dairy Science, 85(12), 3539–3545. . [^406]: Marti, D., Johnson, R., & Mathews, K. (2011, November). Where’s the (Not) Meat?-Byproducts From Beef and Pork Production. USDA Economic Research Service. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^407]: Tubb, C., & Seba, T. (2019). Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030. RethinkX. . [^408]: Abd El-Hady, R.A.M & Abd El-Baky, R.A.A. (2011). Enhancing the Functional Properties of Sportswear Fabric based Carbon Fiber. Asian Journal of Textile. 1(1), 14-26. . [^409]: Mulvany, L. & Rupp, L. (2018). As Leather Shoes Drop out of Favor, Cattle Hides Pile Up. Los Angeles Times. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^410]: Koran, M. (2019). Macy’s Becomes Biggest US Retailer to End Fur Sales. The Guardian. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^411]: Dallmeier, L. (2013). 13 Animal Products in Cosmetics. Herb & Hedgerow. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^412]: Newton, A. A. (2019). Do Collagen Creams and Supplements Actually Do Anything? SELF. (Accessed June 14, 2020). [^413]: Kirkova, D. (2013). Lily Cole to Reveal the Ugly Truth behind Luxury Beauty: Model Exposes Cosmetics Industry’s Cruel Use of SHARK Liver. Mail Online. (Accessed August 4, 2020). [^414]: Li, T., Liu, G.-S., Zhou, W., Jiang, M., Ren, Y.-H., Tao, X.-Y., Liu, M., Zhao, M., Wang, F.-Q., Gao, B., & Wei, D.-Z. (2020). Metabolic Engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae To Overproduce Squalene. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 68(7), 2132–2138. . [^415]: Home | Geltor | Biodesigned solutions for beauty, nutrition, food & beverage. Geltor. (Accessed June 14, 2020). [^416]: Ro, D. K., Paradise, E. M., Quellet, M., Fisher, K. J., Newman, K. L., Ndungu, J. M., … Keasling, J. D. (2006). Production of the antimalarial drug precursor artemisinic acid in engineered yeast. Nature, 440(7086), 940–943. .