MetaMeat

Through telling the story of Metameat, a fictional agriculture corporation, we set out changes in policy, technology and culture that could radically reduce the environmental impacts of meat production, helping Americans transition to a more sustainable bug-based diet by 2050.

MetaMeat takes a systems level approach to addressing these needs. We focused on six key elements to implementing a change, sustainability:

1. Sustainability - The current trajectory of meat production is unsustainable. Tomorrow, what we eat and how we produce it needs to be re-evaluated. Inefficiencies need to be rectified and food waste reduced. Put simply: we need to find new ways of feeding the world that are environmentally sustainable while also providing the protein and other nutrients required to support a healthy population. To tackle this, the UN and others have called for a shift towards eating insects as a way to reduce pollution. Edible insects need significantly less land, water and feed to farm them and emit much less GHG emissions.

2. Diet - Two billion people in the world already regularly eat insects. There are also associated health benefits, including a high protein content. For example, insect-based protein can contain all eight essential amino acids so are more nutritional and have organic tastes.

3. Economics - Metameat’s interventions create huge economic potential due to a number of advantages farming insects has over meat production, which have otherwise not been tapped into due to the systematic blockades in place. Compared to conventional meat proteins, Insects have a faster reproduction and growth rate, more efficient feed conversion, greater percentage of edible material, and there are fewer ethical concerns.

4. Culture - While there are currently significant barriers to overcoming taboos associated with eating insects in the USA, a number of Metameat’s interventions are targeted specifically at changing cultural norms. A variety of foods have gone through this necessary transformation, even rising to be labeled as luxury items, such as lobster.

5. Technology - To tackle head on the taboos associated with eating insects, we predicted that Metameat would use augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to help change psychological behaviors. We created an AR app that mitigates the visual cues that create visceral reactions standing in the way of entomophagy.

6. Policy - With little or no specific regulations for edible insects, there is legal grey area with their production falling under cumbersome and unclear general regulations for farming under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. This will continue to hamper the supply of insect products and and investment in physical infrastructure until new policies for entomophagy pave the way for farming edible insects on an industrial scale. We have also redesigned the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food pyramid, reflecting the move towards a more bug-based diet.