Everybody’s gotta eat. The keynote presentation at the 2023 Vermont Tech Jam, a career and tech expo organized by Seven Days, focused on a new way to feed people — by growing meat in a lab instead of raising and slaughtering animals.
Proponents of “cellular agriculture” point out that the world’s population is rising fast, and meat consumption is growing right along with it. Today the world slaughters 80 billion animals a year. More and more land and water are required to raise them. The result is increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
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Hundreds of researchers across the globe are working to make the production of cell-cultured meat more affordable and sustainable — including two based at the University of Vermont: Dr. Rachael Floreani, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and PhD candidate Irfan Tahir. Floreani’s startup, Burlington Bio, was one of the exhibitors at the 2023 Tech Jam.
Seven Days deputy publisher Cathy Resmer interviewed Floreani and Tahir at the Jam on Saturday, October 21, 2023. Their wide-ranging conversation covered how cell-cultured meat is made, what challenges remain to be solved before cell-cultured meat is available at the grocery store — spoiler alert, there are a lot of them — what these two scientists are hoping to contribute to the field and why they believe it’s worth exploring in Vermont. The session concluded with an audience question-and-answer session, which included queries from Vermont farmers.
