My 5 Key Takeaways From the Future of Food at COP27

Earlier this month, the United Nations climate summit, COP27, gathered over 35,000 leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Though 2022 marked nearly three decades of COP, this year’s gathering was the first to focus on food as an issue of climate. Despite adding this focus, however, critics lambasted the summit for serving meat to participants. In today’s piece, I dig into this issue, plus some of my most interesting takeaways on the future of food at COP27.

First things first, let’s talk about the origin of COP. COP (Conference of Parties) was created in Berlin in 1995 as a climate change-focused meeting of UN members. In 2015, the meeting resulted in a monumental international agreement, known as the Paris Climate Accord, which the United States pulled out of during the Trump administration in 2020, only to re-enter again during the Biden administration in 2021. In recent years, the UN has heavily focused on the extreme climate effects being faced by the Global South, resulting in COP27 being held in Egypt and next year’s COP28 set for the United Arab Emirates. 

As an attendee at the first “food COP,” I was shocked to see a lack of focus on meat and dairy as key drivers of the climate crisis, considering 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to animal agriculture. I was even more surprised, however, to learn that the IPCC, the UN’s research body for climate change, recently published a landmark report that directly attributes meat overconsumption in the Global North to starvation in the Global South — yet it was missing from the agenda.

As I heard during a discussion from 50by40, more land is being used for animal feed, with nearly half of all crops in the world grown to feed animals rather than people. This has resulted in undernutrition and starvation of those living in the Global South. Now, human rights organizations are becoming involved in the issue, as the conversation of meat overconsumption shifts to a human rights issue. 

Moving to the conversation of agriculture, it was certainly a year for heated debates around the newest craze in U.S. farming: regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is a set of farming practices that are intended to recapture carbon into the soil through grazing and other techniques. Though the concept has gained mass attention in recent months and years, I was fascinated to learn that there is no legally defined standard or process for “regenerative agriculture” and comprehensive data around the effectiveness of carbon soil capture remains spotty.

Instead, much of the programming at the summit pointed to agroecology, a globally defined food system process involving agricultural, environmental and cultural factors, which was recently studied by a UN panel of experts. Though I am not new to regenerative agriculture in the U.S., it was interesting to hear global organizations favor agroecology. 

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On the technology side of things, this COP was certainly the debut of the future of food, as a cultivated meat tasting was held by GOOD Meat (Eat Just). Currently only sold to consumers in Singapore, this tasting marked a historic first for the product being sampled elsewhere, as leaders from around the world were able to sample the creation. Cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown meat, is real meat, grown from the cells of an animal without slaughter. As someone who has consumed cultivated products from half a dozen companies around the world but has not eaten conventional meat in nearly a decade, I was enheartened to see such a positive response from attendees during the tasting. (The jury is still out on whether cultivated meat is considered “vegan” or not.) 

Unsurprisingly, alternative protein was also on full display from various country pavilions, jockeying to become the world’s leader in the new industry. While the United States, which currently leads the world in alternative protein companies with 80 companies in California alone, did not participate in food technology programming, other countries, such as Israel and Singapore, put it front and center. It seems that the race to reinvent meat could become the new “space race” — it’s just not quite clear if the United States has figured it out or not.

While Israel hosted multiple talks featuring alternative protein companies, Singapore debuted various products, including a new precision fermentation-enabled drink from TurtleTree Labs. Other key players in the industry, including Impossible Foods, Oatly and Upfield, also participated in programming. This healthy bit of international competition may just be what the industry needs to heat up. 

Finally, the last takeaway from this year’s COP, and the most important one, is how many new financiers, such as foundations and private groups, have come into investing in the future of food. The FAIRR network, a group of ESG-focused investors, featured prominently in programming, as they focused on leveraging their portfolio assets to transition animal agriculture. By focusing on ESG, FAIRR and others such as The Rockefeller Foundation are driving trillions of dollars into shifting the food system. While government and innovation can drive us forward, at the end of the day, the real change could come when trillions of private dollars come pouring into the space. 

COP27 was an experience in itself — and I’m still not quite done digesting it all. Nonetheless, I believe this summit proved that the future of food is moving in the right direction, whether through the NGOs on the ground, the innovators in the lab or the private leaders pushing dollars into the right places. I left feeling stunned by the decision to ignore the perils of animal agriculture but overjoyed by the countless attendees working to make the change.