In the US's food-obsessed landscape, the quickest route to a new idea is to look for something already being done - and then make it vegan. Wild Earth, a start-up based in Berkeley, California, is doing that to pet food with laboratory-created proteins. Translated, that means fake meat for Fido. The stakes are far from small potatoes. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own four-legged friends - a paw-dropping 184million dogs and cats. To feed this mass of tail-wagging companions, they spend almost $30-billion (about R358-billion) annually. Pet food - predominantly animal-meat products - represents as much as 30% of all meat consumption in the US. According to a first-of-its-kind study on how that sweet black lab on the kitchen floor affects the environment, Gregory Okin, a professor in the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes that if American pets were to establish a sovereign nation, it would rank fifth in global meat consumption. That nation of d...
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