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 dogs and cats consumes about 19% as many calories as humans, but because their diets are higher in protein, their total animal-derived calorie intake amounts to about 33% that of humans.
"If you're feeding your large dog the same as you, your dog is eating more meat than you are," said Dr Cailin Heinze, a Tufts University faculty member and board-certified veterinary nutritionist.
Food consumption by dogs and cats is responsible for releasing up to 64million tons of greenhouse gases every year. Developing fake meat for pets may help put a dent in that, as well as the use of water and land needed to breed all that livestock. In doing so, the industry might pave the way towards replacing the real meat in your fridge too.
As the global human population approaches eight billion, said Ron Shigeta, one of the founders of Wild Earth, "the opportunity here is to create something that is safe and sustainable".
First, they're starting with pets. With $4-million in seed money, Wild Earth hopes to be the first pet-food brand based on cellular agriculture. In 2013, Shigeta and co-founder Ryan Bethencourt started Berkeley Biolabs, followed by Indie Bio - a synthetic biology accelerator - before getting into pet food, which, like products for human consumption, has tilted ever more towards higher nutritional value...