Vegan TED Talk Exceeds 500,000 Views in 24 Hours

The video of a TED talk that focuses on eliminating traditional animal meat production as a solution to impending climate and health crises received more than 500,000 views within 24 hours of its debut online this week. The five-minute clip was taped during a TED talk given in Vancouver, Canada by Bruce Fredrich, Executive Director of nonprofit Good Food Institute. In his speech, Fredrich references the harrowing study published earlier this year by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which reveals that human activity, particularly animal agriculture, will drive one million of the earth’s eight million plant and animal species to extinction, most within decades. Fredrich explained that this latest study is one of many that has advocated for reducing global meat consumption for many years but to no avail. As a solution, Fredrich advocated for a “global agricultural revolution” in the form of transforming meat production to solely focus on plants and cellular agriculture. “Governments spend tens of billions of dollars every single year on research and development focused on global health and the environment. They should be putting some of that money into optimizing and perfecting the production of plant-based and cell-based meat,” Fredrich said. “We need all hands on deck. We need the present meat industry. We need their economies of scale, their global supply chains, their marketing expertise, and their massive consumer base. We don’t want to disrupt the meat industry; we want to transform it.” In recent years, that transformation has begun, as evidenced by the sizeable investments made by meat companies such as PHW Group, Cargill Foods, Tyson Foods, and JBS into both proprietary plant-based products and companies making alternatives to conventional animal meat.