Bruce Friedrich

"We need to change the meat, because we aren’t going to change human nature."

"To remake meat is how we solve climate change. Remaking meat is how we prevent the next pandemic. Remaking meat is how we take antibiotics out of the food system."

"We don't want to disrupt the meat industry, we want to transform it. We need their economies of scale, their global supply chain, their marketing expertise and their massive consumer base."

"Individual action is great, but antibiotic resistance and climate change—they require more. Besides, convincing the world to eat less meat hasn't worked. For 50 years, environmentalists, global health experts and animal activists have been begging the public to eat less meat. And yet, per capita meat consumption is as high as it's been in recorded history."

"What we need to do is...to produce the meat that people love, but we need to produce it in a whole new way. I've got a couple of ideas. Idea number one: let's grow meat from plants. Instead of growing plants, feeding them to animals, and all of that inefficiency, let's grow those plants, let's biomimic meat with them, let's make plant-based meat. Idea number two: for actual animal meat, let's grow it directly from cells. Instead of growing live animals, let's grow the cells directly. It takes six weeks to grow a chicken to slaughter weight. Grow the cells directly, you can get that same growth in six days."

"What is happening to [animals] on modern farms and in modern slaughterhouses is beyond most of the worst moments of our lives...that's their entire existence."

"It is a crime against humanity, while people are starving, to funnel massive amounts of crops through animals so we can eat animals when those crops should be feeding human beings."

"30 years ago, about 2% of the population was either vegetarian or vegan. Twenty years ago, about 2% of the population was vegetarian or vegan. Ten years ago, about 2% of the population was vegetarian or vegan. Are you catching a theme? It hasn’t changed in 30 years. So a lot more people claim to be vegetarian or vegan now than claimed to be vegetarian or vegan 20 and 30 years ago. But if you look at the actual numbers, if you look at when you do the polling in the most accurate way and you say, “In the last month, which of these products have you not consumed,” it turns out that about 2% of the population is vegetarian or vegan."

"lab grown [meat] is just a misnomer. Lab grown is what the media often times likes to call it. It’s somewhat sensationalist. But lab grown is just wrong. At scale, once this stuff is commercialized, it’s not going to be grown in a lab—it’s going to be grown in essentially a meat brewery. That’s what it’s going to look like. So every processed food starts in a food lab but we don’t say lab grown Cheerios, or lab grown whatever else. It isn’t anymore. It started in a food lab, now it’s in a factory. And the factories for clean meat are going to look like breweries, so we’re calling it clean meat and we’re talking about meat breweries."

"Jesus' message is about love and compassion, but there is nothing loving or compassionate at factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals endure miserable lives and die violent deaths. Jesus mandates kindness and mercy for all God's creatures. He'd be appalled by the suffering that we inflict on animals today to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh. Catholics, and all Christians, have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the violence, misery and death in the world, or we can respect God's creatures with a vegetarian diet. I believe we're obligated to make choices that are as merciful as possible, and we can all do that at the dinner table with a vegetarian diet. There won't be any factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven."

"Behind the scenes of this surge [in demand for meat alternatives]—everywhere you turn, from advising new companies and funding scientific research to sparking our cultural obsession with meat alternatives—is Bruce Friedrich."

"Bruce Friedrich...realized at a certain point that his activism wasn’t achieving his goal — getting fewer people to kill, eat and wear animals...These days, he is hoping capitalism might work where activism and persuasion fell short."