Ronen Bar (vegan): Bringing Animal Suffering to Light, Part 3 of 3

Today, we hear Ronen speak about kosher foods as well as cultured meat. Kosher means that the product has been certified to meet Jewish dietary laws. Both animal products and animal-free foods can be kosher. “Unfortunately, kosher doesn't mean that there was no animal cruelty. [It’s] the other way around. All the kosher meat sold in Israel is entangled, is connected to animal cruelty.” “The only kosher from a moral perspective is, of course, plant-based food.” “And when I look at all of this effort, endeavor, to help animals, I see two main aspects. The first one is raising consciousness, which will make people give up some of their comfort in order not to hurt animals. So raising consciousness is very important. The other one is technology. Technology will make it much easier for people not to hurt animals. So you don't have to give up so much or change so much in order for you not to hurt animals. And these two efforts, are coming and helping each other and feeding each other.” “I'm the chairperson of the board at the Modern Agriculture Foundation. It's a nonprofit focused on promoting alternative proteins, which means that we don't do the R&D (research and development), the scientific work ourselves. Our job is to make sure others will do it. So we reach out to scientists, to entrepreneurs, to companies, to big food companies and to investors, everybody in the space that can enlarge the effort to make cell-based meat and make plant-based meats commercially viable and cheap and tasty as fast as possible.” “I have to say that from an ethical standpoint, the best thing is just to eat the plain soy and legumes and cereals. The effort to make the cell-based meats, the mimicking of the animal protein meats consumes more resources from the environment. Nevertheless, they're still very good compared to animal-based products.” “I think all of them are really in a totally different category than meat, of course, because they're more environmentally-friendly, or you can say less contributing to animal genocide, and because they don't hurt animals directly, like factory farming is doing.”