Relying on cell cultivation, the biotechnology company Believer Meats targets industrial supply chains to fight scarcity, while POWERLENS combines low-tech processes into a mobile plant that is designed to produce a product that does not fail where markets fail: duckweed.

POWERLENS is trying to decouple food from industrial requirements. Image: ynet

In recent years, Israel has become an important actor in the global debate on food security. In the process, very different approaches have emerged under the shared objective of combating hunger — approaches that define this objective in fundamentally different ways.

Two examples illustrate this range: Believer Meats, a biotechnology company aiming to produce cultivated meat on an industrial scale, and POWERLENS, a solar-powered mini system developed by three schoolgirls for the local production of nutrient-rich food in regions without stable infrastructure.

Believer Meats relies on cell cultivation: animal muscle cells are multiplied in bioreactors to produce meat without conventional livestock farming. The product is designed for global markets, state food policy, and industrial supply chains. POWERLENS, by contrast, combines well-known low-tech methods — solar energy, hydroponics, modular design — into a mobile unit intended to produce protein and micronutrients where markets, grids, and supply systems fail.

Both approaches respond to the same problem. But they do so from opposite directions.

Hunger as a Systemic Question

Believer Meats follows a systemic interpretation of hunger. Scarcity is understood as the result of inefficient or environmentally harmful production methods. The solution therefore lies in substituting entire industries: reduced land use, fewer emissions, controlled production, high scalability. Hunger appears here as a problem of quantity, efficiency, and manageability within food systems.

Believer Meats wants to achieve food security through industrial revolution. Image: calcalist

This approach aligns with state industrial policy and global markets. However, it presupposes stable conditions: capital, regulation, technological expertise, and consumer acceptance. Its impact unfolds where systems function — not where they are absent.

Hunger as a Contextual Problem

POWERLENS begins elsewhere. Hunger is not primarily understood as a production deficit, but as the outcome of fragile contexts: lack of energy supply, insecure logistics, political instability, insufficient purchasing power. Accordingly, the project does not aim at efficiency gains but at resilience.

The system is deliberately simple. It avoids complex technology, artificial lighting, or digital control. Plant selection is guided by nutrient density rather than market value. Success here does not mean scaling up, but durability under adverse conditions.

While Believer Meats seeks to reindustrialize food, POWERLENS attempts to decouple it from industrial prerequisites.

Market Logic versus Use Value

The central difference between the two approaches lies in the role of the market. Believer Meats is inconceivable without markets. Investment, production costs, regulatory approval, and price acceptance are integral to the concept. Hunger is addressed indirectly, through altered global supply structures.

POWERLENS, by contrast, is explicitly not market-oriented. The project follows humanitarian rather than economic logic. It is designed to be replicable rather than proprietary, and it is aimed at actors such as NGOs, aid organizations, or local communities. Its value emerges where purchasing power is no longer a reliable category.

Two Models of Innovation

Both projects exemplify different innovation models that coexist in Israel. One is export-oriented, capital-driven, and technologically complex. The other is context-specific, resource-efficient, and deliberately limited. One seeks global impact through markets; the other seeks local impact despite market failure.

This coexistence is not a contradiction but an expression of different political and moral assumptions about what hunger is — and how it should be addressed.

Limits of Both Approaches

Neither cultivated meat nor modular mini systems will solve global hunger on their own. Believer Meats faces unresolved questions of scalability, cost, and acceptance. POWERLENS remains limited in reach and cannot replace the structural causes of poverty.

The comparison shows that “innovation against hunger” is not a unified project. It can mean restructuring markets — or deliberately bypassing them.

Believer Meats seeks food security through industrial transformation.
POWERLENS focuses on provision where transformation is not an option.

Both are responses to hunger. But they follow different definitions of what the problem actually is.

POWERLENS and Believer Meats do not operate in the same league — and do not intend to. Their “potential” is therefore not comparable on the same scale, but only within the same field of meaning. One addresses world nutrition as an industrial question; the other treats hunger as a moral–practical challenge.

Believer Meats wants to feed the world by changing the market.
POWERLENS wants to feed where the market no longer plays a role.

What both approaches share is that they no longer understand food primarily as a cultural or market commodity, but as ethically grounded infrastructure. Both Believer Meats and POWERLENS address the negative externalities of existing food systems and implicitly raise the question under what conditions food production remains legitimate. In the case of Believer Meats, this critique targets industrial animal farming, land use, and emissions; in the case of POWERLENS, it targets dependencies on energy, transport, and market structures in vulnerable regions. In both cases, protein is detached from its traditional prerequisites: the animal body, fertile soil, stable supply chains, and state provision. Food thus appears less as a product of origin than as the result of a normative calculus in which suffering, resource consumption, and accessibility are weighed against one another. Both projects also follow a logic of prevention: they do not merely respond to acute hunger crises, but to structural risks — climate change, geopolitical instability, demographic pressure — that render existing systems unreliable. Despite their different scales, they share a common understanding of “ethical food” as something that must not only nourish, but also be responsibly produced, distributed, and justified.

A Light — or a Beginning

Whether one sees in the work of the three schoolgirls Lihi Azulay, Yasmin Millman, and Hodaya Kamari, or in Professor Yaakov Nahmias’ endeavor, a divine gift or a national mission of a people proclaimed by the same God as a “Light among the nations”: the products show, on the one hand, how early, and on the other, how effectively global responsibility can be made concrete. They also show that it is the same God Who gives and takes —and Who sent the great hope Believer Meats sliding into ruin. Would humanity today deserve such a blessing: a literal rain not of manna, but of quail?

For what?

By Okay Altinisik | 6-2-2026, 16:01:45