Isha Datar

Humans have always harvested food from animals by domesticating, raising and slaughtering them. But while the human population has grown immensely, the Earth's resources that sustain our food supply have not. In 2015, Isha Datar coined the phrase "cellular agriculture" to describe the emerging science of developing agricultural products from cells rather than whole plants or animals. As the field's foremost spokesperson, she maps what that shift means for farmers, producers, grocery stores and the financial backers of new food technology.

Datar came to the field early, publishing a 2010 review paper that was among the first academic articles to discuss cultured meat. Her 2021 TED Talk, "How We Could Eat Real Meat Without Harming Animals," lays out the stakes: a meat industry spending ever more money and resources raising billions of animals while coping with unpredictable losses from climate, disease and antibiotic resistance. Cellular agriculture, she argues, can secure the food supply without further straining global resources, and it opens new markets and culinary experiences that were previously unimagined.