Bill Gates (yes, that Bill Gates!), co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is very excited about the potential of plant-based meats… and you should too!

His reasoning is quite simple. As the world population grows to 9 billion by 2050, meat consumption is expected to double! It’s pretty clear we’re going to run out of arable land for raising livestock. So how are people across the world (especially the developing world) going to get enough protein?

Plant-based meats, of course!

On his site, The Gates Notes, where he posts updated information and videos about the future of food, Gates points out that there’s plenty of protein and necessary amino acids in plants, including the world’s four major commodity crops — rice, maize, wheat and soy. Hell yes, we have been saying this for a while now. Read this and this.

Gates goes on to add “The problem is that instead of feeding these crops to people, we’re feeding most of them to livestock. And so we’re caught in an inefficient protein-delivery system. For every 10 kilograms of grain we feed cattle, we get 1 kilogram of beef in return. The calorie kick-back is just too low to feed a growing world population.”

In a guest post on Mashable, Gates applauds companies like Beyond Meat, Hampton Creek Foods and Lyrical for creating some amazing plant-based alternatives to animal products like “chicken meat” and “eggs.” He thinks this innovation could be great news for people concerned about health problems related to overconsumption of fat, salt and cholesterol. He also points out that it’s important too in light of the environmental impacts of large-scale meat and dairy production, with livestock estimated to produce nearly 51% of the world’s greenhouse gases.

Yes, It’s great for people, animals AND the planet!

Not convinced? Watch the simple, yet effective video below: