#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption

80,000 Hours Podcast

"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with alternative proteins and there's so much white space, it's actually just really exciting to know that we can keep on innovating and being far more efficient than this existing technology — which, fundamentally, is just quite inefficient. You're feeding animals a bunch of food to then extract a small fraction of their biomass to then eat that.

Animal agriculture takes up 83% of farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories. So the current system just is so wasteful. And the limiting factor is that you're just growing a bunch of food to then feed a third of the world's crops directly to animals, where the vast majority of those calories going in are lost to animals existing." — Seren Kell

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Seren Kell — Senior Science and Technology Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe — about making alternative proteins as tasty, cheap, and convenient as traditional meat, dairy, and egg products.

They cover:

• The basic case for alternative proteins, and why they’re so hard to make
• Why fermentation is a surprisingly promising technology for creating delicious alternative proteins
• The main scientific challenges that need to be solved to make fermentation even more useful
• The progress that’s been made on the cultivated meat front, and what it will take to make cultivated meat affordable
• How GFI Europe is helping with some of these challenges
• How people can use their careers to contribute to replacing factory farming with alternative proteins
• The best part of Seren’s job
• Plenty more

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa’s intro (00:01:08)
• The interview begins (00:02:22)
• Why alternative proteins? (00:02:36)
• What makes alternative proteins so hard to make? (00:11:30)
• Why fermentation is so exciting (00:24:23)
• The technical challenges involved in scaling fermentation (00:44:38)
• Progress in cultivated meat (01:06:04)
• GFI Europe’s work (01:32:47)
• Careers (01:45:10)
• The best part of Seren’s job (01:50:07)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy Moore
Transcriptions: Katy Moore