New Harvest
| Formation | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jason Matheny |
| Legal status | 501c3 |
| Purpose | Research Institute |
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
|
CEO
|
Isha Datar |
| Website | www.new-harvest.org |
New Harvest is a 501(c)(3) non-profit promoting innovative technologies that address global food insecurity, and the growing environmental and ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock production. It is most known for its advocacy for cultured meat.
New Harvest currently funds university-based research to develop new culture media, bioreactors, and methods of tissue assembly for the production of cultured meat. The group is also backing an environmental assessment of the relative efficiency in land, water and energy use of cultured meat compared to conventional meat.
New Harvest is currently one of Animal Charity Evaluators' Standout Charities.
In 2004, New Harvest was founded by Jason Matheny to fund academic research into the use of cell cultures, instead of live animals, to grow meat. Matheny became interested in cultured meat after researching infectious diseases in India for a Master’s degree in public health. In the course of his research, he toured a poultry farm outside Delhi where he saw “tens of thousands of chickens in a metal warehouse, doped with drugs, living in their own manure and being bred for production traits that caused them to be immune-compromised.” He said the experience made him recognize the need for a new way to meet a global demand for meat that is “exponentially growing” in even a traditionally vegetarian country like India.
When Matheny returned to the States, he read about a NASA-funded project that “grew” goldfish meat to explore food possibilities for astronauts on long-range space missions. He contacted all 60 of the cited authors and teamed up with three—a tissue engineer, cell biologist and animal scientist—to consider the viability of producing cultured meat on a large scale. In 2005, their research was published in the journal Tissue Engineering which generated considerable public and scientific interest in New Harvest.
When a new Executive Director, Isha Datar, was appointed in 2013, New Harvest’s focus grew to include other animal commodities like milk and eggs, that could be produced by biotechnology rather than livestock. Since 2014, New Harvest has helped found two start-up companies, Muufri and Clara Foods.
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