保罗·夏皮罗（Paul Shapiro）lives in California and is the author of "清洁肉：没有动物的肉如何革新晚餐和世界。”他发推文@PaulHShapiro。
Imagine train car after train car, all en route to a medical factory, filled with nothing but pig and cattle pancreases.
As tough as it is to imagine today, just four decades ago, that’s how we made insulin for diabetics. At the time, it took some23,500 farm animal pancreasessimply to produce a single pound of insulin, meaning that pharma giant Eli Lilly purchased the pancreases of53 million animalseach year.
值得庆幸的是，糖尿病患者不再需要给自己注入猪胰腺。Instead, they have access to a safer and more reliable therapy: actual human insulin. No, they’re not relying on cadavers。Instead, they can thank the scientists at a then-start-up called Genetech, which figured out how to engineer bacteria to make human insulin on their own.
Today, a group of promising start-ups is further refining this process and taking it out of the medical space, using it to produce everything from egg whites and牛奶至leatherandgelatin，全部没有动物。In fact, this technology isn’t really new: the same microbial fermentation process has been used for decades to produce the rennet that makes cheese curdle. In the past, cheesemakers relied on huge numbers of calf intestinal linings for the substance.
Known as acellular agriculture, companies like the Bay Area’sClara Foods已经弄清楚了如何获得酵母微生物产生实际的卵子蛋白。而且您可能没有意识到它，但是您已经对它的工作方式有所了解。当您将糖喂入贝克的酵母菌时，酵母会产生二氧化碳以使面包升起。当您将糖喂入酿酒酵母时，它会产生酒精。好吧，这些企业家已经设计了一种酵母，在这种情况下，实际产生了实际的卵子蛋白。从其产生的蛋白质中取出酵母后，剩下的不是鸡蛋替代品。它是实际的蛋清蛋白，但没有鸡肉。其他公司，例如Geltorand完美的一天, are doing the same with gelatin and cow’s milk,两者都在做animal-free.
“最重要的是，我们希望为想要食用其价值观，环境良心以及最终是没有所有行李的良好蛋白质来源的产品提供替代品，”Clara Foods CEO Arturo Elizondo告诉我。
Just what type of baggage? Think about what it takes to produce an egg. You need a chick, and the whole system in place to produce those chicks. Then you need to feed and house her for four months before she even starts laying eggs. You need照明，气候控制，饲料，水，补品，药物，人工等。即使她开始铺设，她平均每天只躺一个鸡蛋。
发酵，仍然有需要资源,但这种precision agricultural techniques could pump out a constant flow of liquid egg whites for consumers with a small fraction of in the inputs its competitors in the egg industry need.
随着人类在地球上的占地面积越来越大，我们需要找到更可持续的蛋白质，因此许多人想要吃的蛋白质。我们今天生产动物蛋白的典型方法是对环境征税，对动物残酷，并构成严重的公共卫生风险。细胞农业似乎是未来派的，但是在医疗和食品空间中有数十年的安全使用记录，其新应用程序可以使我们能够拥有鸡蛋并食用它们。
我们很容易在想到载有数百万只猪胰腺的火车来供应胰岛素的糖尿病患者来摇头。我们有一天会很快对工厂农场的思想感到惊讶，而工厂农场仅仅为我们提供蛋白质而将数百万只鸡限制在鸡上？随着Acellular AG初创企业的进步，这一天似乎并不难设想。
