An important milestone went largely unnoticed at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow this fall. President Isaac Herzog of Israel became the world’s first head of state to try “cultivated meat”—made from actual chicken cells, but without slaughtering animals. After sampling it, Herzog declared it to be delicious and said the technology was critical not just to Israel’s security, but to the entire world.

I had heard that message before. As a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama administration, I met with a head of state from a country in the Middle East for highly classified war planning. It was 2013, when the Iran nuclear deal was in the works. He surprised me by saying that his worst fears were not about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, he said, they were about how his country would feed itself if it runs […]