Alt is the new mainstream
Alt food for the good?
This year, the UK became the only country in Europe to approve the use of lab-grown meat in pet food.
According to estimates from the European Environment Agency, lab-based meat cultivation uses 45% less energy than traditional beef farming; if powered by renewable energy, research suggests a 92% reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions, plus water and land use reductions of 78% and 95% respectively.
And a couple of infographic pics showing energy, land and water savings, as well as emission reductions that’ll result from switching to alt-meat:
And yeah - the industry is not only ineffective itself; the majority of e.g. soy production goes to supporting the farming industry:
All this marks the importance:
switching to alt-food → not only for alleviating suffering, but the bare pragmatic reasons
considering second-order effects → e.g. how soy production is skewed, or how transportation/biotech/VC industry have to cater to all that
- another concern is accelerated pace of panresistant bacteria emerging
The cute kitten they’ve saved in a TikTok video 🥹
Fock, again Goodhart’s law and unintended consequences: a lot of animal rescue videos are actually fake.
More than 1000 links showing fake rescue content were collected over six weeks from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter/X.
Almost 52% of links were found on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok each feature around a quarter of the content.
The links located by SMACC had been watched 572,013,959 times.
The most common Fake Rescue themes identified were:
“Found to be abandoned” (30.6%)
“Rescued from being trapped/stuck” 28.1%
“Rescued from being attacked by animal/s” 15.7%
Cats were the most numerous animal featured (42%), followed by primates, dogs, snakes and turtle species.
21% of fake rescue creators asked viewers for donations under the disguise of helping animals, usually by Paypal links.
Links
Top 15 foodtech deals in 2024
Is it even foodtech? O-okay, it is:
- The definition of foodtech applied above includes the AgFunder categories Innovative Food (which includes novel ingredients and alt proteins); eGrocery (online stores and marketplaces); Instore Retail & Restaurant Tech; Online Restaurants & Marketplaces (meal kits etc); Cloud Retail Infrastructure (ghost kitchens, last-mile delivery robots and services; and Home & Cooking Tech (smart kitchen appliances etc).
eGrocery startups
Nutrition recommender systems
Restaurant tech (menu optimization etc)
Mostly interested in the deals tackling alt-food space, so:
🇺🇸 Perfect Day’s $90M (dairy proteins identical to cow’s milk)
🇩🇪 Formo’s $61M Series B (precision fermentation → expressing microbes that make dairy proteins → dairy products like cheese)
Even 🇫🇮 Solar Food’s EUR 8M deserves attention (yeah I’m biased as I love the idea of knallgas and other chemotrophs; Aerbio/Deep Branch’s Proton is another example)
Random links
Worldwide old-time photos
A treasure trove! Something similar - criticalpast.com, an archive of old videos (one can find both wartime footage and LSD monkey experiments there).
5 free rotating proxies
from one of the leaders in the space, OxyLabs.
Welcome to Teleogenic❣️
Other places I cross-post (not always) to:
