NICHOLAS NISHIMURA
Cellular Agriculture and Photobioreaction Initial Learnings
In 2023, I wrote an article regarding my initial learnings on cellular agriculture (cultivated/lab grown meat), the amounts of energy it takes, and how that energy can be produced sustainably using photobioreactors to cultivate algae for biofuel.
2020, in a community pandemic lunch line, 6th-grade me witnessed community food insecurity for the first time. Despite sitting in that line of cars every day, my 6th-grade self didn’t realize that my community and home state had people in it who were struggling with food insecurity, due to preconditioned economic struggles exacerbated by the slowing and stopping of food shipments from the mainland U.S. due to COVID. My 6th-grade self did realize what my friends and family were going through. For the first time, it seemed that the meals on our tables that we never had to worry about were now in jeopardy due to the scariness of food insecurity around us.
COVID-19 changed everyone's lives- but it changed mine most by opening my eyes to the unstable conditions of food security in not only my home state of Hawaii, but many other densly populated low-food producing areas such as Singapore. My state and other population hotspots like it live in a world where there is a growing number of mouths to feed (86% of whom consume meat on a daily basis). With a finite and already large amounts of land, water, and feed to grow livestock; our scary conditions of food security become scarier as we move towards a future in which the world will need to produce 56% more food over the course of the next 3 decades. Conventional agriculturalists and food distributors are trying to do the almost impossible: continue to produce more food for a growing population with depleting resources and finite land.
A solution called cellular agriculture offers a beacon of hope. Cellular agriculture works by extracting stem cells from livestock (cows, chickens, etc.), putting those cells into an controlled environment allowing for efficient cell growth and mitosis, and letting those cells grow into real meat- grown in less time, with less water, much less land, and no feed. However, this process consumes much more energy, and could have the potential to be more harmful to the environment if fossil fuels are used than conventional livestock production already is.
Through researching photobioreaction technology, there is a potential intersection between both industries. Photobioreactors cultivate algae using light, carbon dioxide, oxygen, water, and other growth mixtures to cultivate different species of algae more efficiently to extract oils out of to create sustainable biofuel.
Photobioreactors and cellular agriculture have an intersection which would allow for a more sustainable future of food, ran using organic energy. View my full article below.
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