From fried chicken to foie gras, meat inevitably comes with cruelty and catastrophic environmental cost. Many of us know this. Most of us condemn it. Yet, the vast majority of us refuse to forgo the flavours we love. While plant-based alternatives are converting a good following across the world, reaching unrepentant carnivores is a tough design challenge to tackle.

This month, we meet pioneer in cellular agriculture Didier Toubia, CEO and Founder of Aleph Farms. We hear how his team are designing with cells and explore why, in the not so distant future, our meat will be 'reared' in vats rather than factory farms. He explains that with just a few non-GMO cells, taken from any desired animal, we can produce the very same meat only without the slaughter.

"We're not an alternative meat company; we're an alternative to the production process," says Toubia. "We domesticate the edible part of the animal instead of domesticating the whole animal."

Toubia views the biomimicry-inspired approach as a natural progression for humans; he likens it to how we initially observed naturally occurring electricity and then learned how to harness it and replicate it in a controlled environment.

"This approach of reproducing a natural phenomenon is very much in line with the human progress of our time... Being inspired by nature [and] developing better solutions to promote human progress, has always been the cornerstone of human development."

"This approach of reproducing a natural phenomenon is very much in line with the human progress of our time."

Aleph Farms are industry leaders in the booming cellular agriculture industry. They launched their proof-of-concept product, a thin steak grown from cow cells, in 2018 and are working to have their meat on the market by 2022.

"Design is, by some means, a connection between functionality and emotions," says Toubia. "The social, historical and even religious connections to meat, what we do when we design our meat is very much similar to other fields of design—we're crafters of emotions."

The Podcast Series
'Can design save us?' is a series exploring design as a pioneering force for good. We dive into the most pressing problems of our time and meet inspiring people using design to solve them. We explore the good, bad, complex and controversial. Listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Podimo.

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