Sustain What?

There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich, a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute.
His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether plant based or built in the lab) and his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future.
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The mission statement of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization tightly meshes with my view of how to feed 9 billion or so people with the fewest regrets:
Billions of people around the world love meat and want to keep eating more of it. Simply ramping up business-as-usual ways of producing that meat, however, is not a viable path if we want to achieve the world’s climate, biodiversity, public health, and food security goals within the next two critical decades.
While multiple interventions will be needed, a transition toward alternative proteins—made from plants, cultivated from animal cells, or produced via fermentation—is the only one that can scale to address the demand for meat. Such a transition can dramatically reduce emissions, feed more people with fewer resources, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food system, and enable the conservation of lands and waters.
His book masterfully untangles the issues and options - technical, financial and political - that could give people the protein they need without ravaging more forest, overheating climate, threatening health or adding to the nonstop, vast and growing slaughter of our animal kin.
He describes his learning and work journeys, which started in the 1980s with reading books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and work focused on poverty alleviation and food sufficiency.
He walks through the stutter-step start of the field in the last decade or so and the emerging reality that large-scale alternative-meat production is absolutely doable. It’s easy to get fooled by the slow start, he told me, adding:
“Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University, said in 1906 that automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. because they were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly and they were really expensive. In 1908, Henry Ford solves those first two problems and puts us on the trajectory of solving the third. And 20 years later, the automobile industry was the largest industry in America. So the question is, how do we get to that 1908 moment?
Listen for the answers.
We also talked about my reporting journey on lab-grown meat, as well, which started in 2008 when I proposed that cultured foie gras would seem an ideal starting point. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned but Australian and French companies are there!
Of course the holy grail isn’t exotica like fatty liver. It’s mass production. Watch our conversation to get the latest from Friedrich on what’s needed from science, investors and nations to boost protein security and cut environmental damage for the long haul. As in so many areas, China appears to be leading the way.
Read Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins - a report by Zane Swanson, Caitlin Welsh, and Joseph Majkut for the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and Friedrich’s Foreign Policy article on how China is poised to do for alternative meats what it has already done for electric vehicles.
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Related Sustain What posts
Other voices
My vegan “solutionary” educator friend (and neighbor) Zoe Weil had Friedrich on her Solutionary Voices podcast:
David Roberts did a great climate- and energy-focused Volts chat on the future of meat with Friedrich:
Also watch Alex Crisp’s interview with Friedrich:
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On a road trip from Maine to Nashville and back, visiting our sons and other kin, my wife and I spent a couple of days back in the Hudson Valley, where I popped into the studios of Radio Kingston to speak with my old environmental-media compadre Jon Bowermaster for his Green Radio Hour show.
Bowermaster, a couple of years older than I am, has amassed an extraordinary globe-spanning body of great journalism — most of that in documentary films. His latest, “The Keeper,” is an intimate portrait of Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb’s quarter-century effort to curtail pollution and revive the ecosystem along “the river that flows both ways.” (Lipscomb retired in 2024.) See a clip and more on Bowermaster’s other films below.
Radio Kingston has grown substantially since my last visit and now includes 2/47 Spanish language programming for the large immigrant community in the region.
I’d been on Bowermaster’s show many times, but this was the first time in more than a decade that I’d gotten to sit face to face with my old friend in the studio — and also the first time I was there with my guitar and bouzouki and a new album of original songs. My album, Wake Me up Martha, is launching April 30th and this was my first radio interview supporting the record. Let your favorite stations know about the album! Here’s a promotional flyer you can share.
We ranged widely in the hour, talking about how some environmental challenges (climate, ecological degradation) seem immune to even the best efforts of journalists, about the importance of truly engaging audiences, about his fine films. And we talked about my growing focus on my music.
I’m pasting some highlights below, but I hope you’ll listen to, and share, the full conversation! I’m grateful to Bowermaster and the station for allowing me to post the segment on Sustain What.
How I fell in love with blogging at The New York Times — as a way to build a conversation on complex questions; how the name of Sustain What derives from the main tool of journalists — the quetion mark — and why asking questions isn’t always a delay-seeking form of “whataboutism”:
How my journalistic and musical journeys intersected off and on — here when I wrote “Liberated Carbon” to describe the long human love affair with fossil fuels:
Why sustaining democracy has become a vital focus of my sustainability quest, and why the plasticity of the Constitution is its greatest strength, and now greatest weakness — one being exploited almost hourly by President Trump:
Bowermaster asked me for my thoughts on what Lee Zeldin has been doing at the Environmental Protection Agency. I responded with the point I made in a meme and column here awhile back:
Watch the conversation for some of my songs. And please SHARE this post. That’s really the only way we can grow the Sustain What community.
Here’s more on Bowermaster’s films, starting with “The Keeper”:
I loved “Sink or Swim - Learning to Crawl in the Maldives” because it gets at a critical issue for safety and sustainability I’ve explored before: making sure people in coastal communities can appreciate the ocean environment that surrounds them.
I love his short intimate film about The Wonder of the Bobolink, a threatened field-nesting bird with an intercontinental migratory cycle that we’ve come to love in our part of downeast Maine because they nest in hayfields near us (and are beginning to return as conservationists work with farmers to time mowing safely).
There’s so much more from Bowermaster and his team.
Thanks, Jon, for helping elevate my music side!
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This is the post-webcast post of my invigorating and unnerving conversation with Andrew Maynard and Jeffrey Abbott, the authors of a “practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process.”
The curtain raiser post is here with more background:
The more I dive into the free downloadable (and AI-uploadable) version of AI and the Art of Being Human, the more I appreciate what they’re trying to do.
But the more we talked, the more, also, I became convinced that the ungovernability of the technology, and the norms of those shaping it, poses the most existential challenge of all. Here’s a key point from Maynard:
I think there’s another challenge here as well. And that is that so much of what we’re seeing is being driven by ideology. So it’s not just making money. If you look at the big tech companies, they’re driven by people who have a very, very specific vision of the future.
And I would say in many cases, it’s a very naive vision, a very flawed vision. But it’s this vision that drives them. This is what they’re trying to build. You look at someone like Dario Amodei or Elon Musk or others; it’s not the money. It’s creating the future that somehow has got locked in their heads.
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It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will take many years, so oil and gas are still vital.)
Without functioning democracies, forget about climate policy
That’s why I focus periodically here on the vital need to maintain the kind of political systems and norms that are vital for any progress on deeper themes. In February, 2025, I hosted a conversation with scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden who, for a decade, have been charting nations’ vital signs in ways that reveal drift either toward or away from autocracy.
Their 2025 report was gloomy but focused on analysis showing that, in recent decades, countries that had moved to control by a single individual or cabal could experience u-turns back toward democracy. My first Sustain What conversation with them is here: Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century, Here’s How U-Turns Toward Democracy Can Happen.
No bright spots this time in Trump’s America
In our discussion of the V-Dem Project’s 2026 report, I kept pressing Staffan Lindberg and Marina Nord for good signals, but we came up empty. The section on the United States — no surprise — is very grim. Read these nuggets, but don’t weep; get busy! Sustained civil resistance across society is an essential precursor for restoration of good governance.
Their new report, like last year’s, noted that the autocratization trend remains strong around the world and is measurably worse than in the 1930s. We discussed a range of situations, from efforts to influence the upcoming election in Hungary to questions around what comes next after the youth-driven uprising in Nepal.
I hope you’ll take time to listen, and SHARE, and let me know what you’re doing to defend humane democratic government from the local to global scale.
Here’s Lindberg describing the evidence that the current global situation is worse than the 1930s:
Thanks to those who tuned in live.
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Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more.
Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What community.
Here are a couple of highlights if you’re in a hurry. We started out talking about threats from space given the dramatic meteor explosion over the U.S. Midwest. Frank pointed to his recent Everyman’s Universe post positing that if dinosaurs, way back when, had had the planetary defense technology we are developing now, we wouldn’t be here now:
Here Frank described the vital challenge of reintegrating the human journey within the biosphere’s constraints.
Here Frank describes how he tries to use practices he learned in Buddhism and meditation to pull back from the zone-flooding dread around us: “You’re only given so many hours on this planet. So spending every moment of it in terror, you’re not helping anybody. You’re not helping the future by being freaked out 99.9 percent of the time.”
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