Microsoft co-founder and Big Tech poster boy Bill Gates recently said during an interview that all wealthy countries should fully transition to synthetic beef. Gates also said the U.S. must switch to synthetic plant-based meats to save the planet.
“I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” Gates said.
He went on to say that “middle-income and above” countries need to make the switch to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere.
Gates added that the politics of the idea are challenging, saying “There are all these bills that say it’s got to be called, basically, lab garbage to be sold. They don’t want us to use the beef label.”
Bill Gates is currently the chair of the investment fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which currently has four different investments in the synthetic meat space to make the ingredients more efficiently.
Although the synthetic meat industry is continuing to grow, the current production cost of eco-friendly lab-grown meats is much more expensive to produce than normal meat. For this reason, synthetic meat cannot be grown or produced affordably at the type of scale required for mass consumption.
