Dn our quest for breaks in the long history of life on Earth, what the British naturalist and prehistorian John Lubbock (1834-1913) called in 1865 the “Neolithic” could well become a parenthesis that is bound to close. Clearly, humanity has known, for a decade, how to make food without agriculture.
Humans had never achieved this before 2013. At most, the American science fiction author Harry Harrison (1925-2012) had imagined, in the scenario of the film Green Sun (1973), the New York of 2022 where synthetic foods would have replaced plants and animals.
These foods were supposed to be made by the multinational Soylent Industries from ocean plankton or bean sprouts. The reality was much more sinister, but the idea was to produce food without agriculture on a planet Earth fried by the greenhouse effect, with the consequences of the depletion of natural resources, poverty, overpopulation and the voluntary euthanasia.
Let’s go back to the history of the food of hominids, first frugivores, then carnivores and who diversified their diet 10,000 years ago with cereals, legumes, tubers. The first written traces of contestation of a meat diet date from the 8the century before our era when Parshvanatha, Jainist master, teaches non-violence towards all living beings. In Greece, Egypt, Rome, where Ovid denounces animal husbandry as a crime, or during the Arab Middle Ages, the detestation of meat products is shared by elites as far away as Europe.
Yet meat products have remained the backbone from which a meal is constructed until modern times. But, with a better knowledge of plants, exchanges between the Americas and the three other continents, the Enlightenment with authors like Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau who condemned the meat diet, the return of raw food and the first vegetarian restaurant which opened in 1898 , everything is going in the direction of a diversification of food production: there are 80 million vegans in the world in 2022.
High-end positioning
Is a new model being born with the use of stem cells? Exceptional fundraising in 2022 for foodtech are a track to be able to affirm it. The GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), but also Unilever, Nestlé, Cargill, Tyson, JBS, or even pharmaceutical giants, not to mention a few antispeciesist showbiz celebrities, are very present in the manufacture of products food of cellular origin. But the industrial secrecy surrounding culture media with synthetic hormones – although prohibited for breeding in Europe – does not facilitate the assessment of their harmlessness.
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