Hi I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Vs from Gimlet. Today we're fitting facts against fleshy food. 

So when you did you fall in love with food? Are you in love with food? I am! I always loved cooking with my mum,

This is Chase Purdy, he's a journalist… who reports on inner workings of our food system…  like how meat gets from the farm to our plates...

Which made me start questioning meat…When you learn how our meat is made you have a lot more opinions about it…

WZ You know literally know how the sausage is made?

CP Yes…exactly. 

And when Chase started writing about this he quickly saw…what a mess our meat system is^[1][2],^[3]Like, just looking at what it does to the environment… It's estimated 15% of ALL human made greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock^[4] 15%! It also uses up a lot of land… and when all these animals poo… it can get into our water ways^[5]  And then there’s just the fact that we're killing a lot of animals. Billions of land animals every year... ^[6]

CP Fish is harder to track - but 1 and 2 trillion fish^[7], hell of a lot of animals slaughtered, to feed our appetite to food. This is a broken food system

A lot of us have heard of this broken food system… and it feels like every year Silicon Valley is giving us new solutions…  One year it was Soylent, getting all your nutrients from a bottle^[8].. Next it was fake burgers made from plants...like the Beyond Burger or the Impossible burger^[9]…  And now there's a new solution on the Horizon… …. it’s one of these wild ideas that - just might work- a little while ago - brought Chase to the headquarters of a tech startup in Berkeley, CA.

UV You ok with the sun? 

CP: For a bit I have more to be worried about more than you

hahah

CP: Which is trouble for me, because I'm bald and so haha

Chase is with Uma Valeti, the CEO of Memphis Meats and he’s about to taste meat - from the future.

CP: So we're like sitting on the bench chatting, someone walks out of the company, comes over with a plate -

MM Guy: So this is the Memphis Meat duck, grown right here -The meat is just seasoned with salt and pepper -the meat is the star of the show-01

WZ What did it look like?

CP: It looked like a chicken tender, McDonald’s Arby's that's what it looked like… it was a duck tender

A juicy hunk of duck… real meat. And yet, no duck died for Chase's lunch -- and the idea is that by making it - we wouldn't be killing the planet either.

We took a little bite,

CP - This is wild-01

It did taste like duck

CP - That's tasty that's really cool

And the reason it's really cool is because this meat -- was cooked up in a laboratory… grown in a vat cell by cell… so it really took Chase by surprise…that it didn't just taste like meat… it looked like meat…

I expected to pull it apart and for it to be mealy, and process, like a chicken nugget when you pull it apart, but the mind blowing thing about it was that -it had all the elements of the texture and feel "real thing would have"

CP - That's wild and cool

I just though in my brain at the time - they did it

Chase has been following the lab grown meat industry for years, he just wrote a book about it called Billion Dollar Burger…. And he says that after years of flopping about, lab grown meat -- is final making it into the big time.^{[10][11][12][13] [14]}

There are about 50 start ups all around the world… trying to hit the market first. He calls it the edible space race.

CP Like there's one in Singapore making Shrimp, you have chicken nuggets, duck foie gras, I mean you name it - there is a cell cultured meat company making mouse meat for for cats^[15], 

WZ whaaaat?

CP That does exist - that's real

These companies are saying that they are the answer to our broken meat system. That their meat is better for the planet than what we have now… and it's going to save us from climate change. So today, we're going to sink our teeth into the weird world of lab grown meat. We'll find out -- where did this crazy idea come from? How exactly do you grow a duck tender in a lab, without carving off a piece from an actual duck?  And finally -- could this mad science really give us a cleaner and greener food system?

When it comes to lab grown meat there's a lot of..

This is wild!

But then there's science..

AHHH

It's all coming up… after our lunch. break.

BREAK

Welcome back! Today we’re diving into the world of growing meat in a lab… And this technology is so new that the nerds who make it are still arguing over what to call it. I talked about this with food writer Chase Purdy

CP Yeah the names are super weird, you have motherless meat, which is just strange

WZ Motherless Meat?

CP Yea that really evokes what you want to have on your plate. You know, the industry for a while tried to get clean meat to be a thing, to like give this idea of clean energy  

WZ Don Draper approved that one-- clean meat

CP Right exactly. But the issue with that was that several Dutch scientists spoke up and were like, in our language this sounds like it's been run through detergent. So… So I like to call is what it is on a very scientific level which is just cell cultured meat^[16]

Cell cultured meat, so that's what we'll call it.  And the first question we had about this technology… was just, where on Earth did this idea come from? And it turns out that while cell cultured meat… now it has millions of dollars of investment, fancy offices, CEOS from Silicon Valley… where this idea started… it couldn't be further away from all that

IvE I'm in front of a porthole, there's a huge thunderstorm going on, so I'm floating on a boat in Amsterdam

The person who lives on a houseboat in Amsterdam is Ira van Eelan and we called her up because her dad, Willem is known as the godfather of cell cultured meat. 

IvE He's the guy that started this // he was a dreamer, He was extremely charming he was bright

He died a few years ago… but Ira grew up hearing him tell the tale of how it all began…  

IvE There are real heroes in there

It all started during WWII.

Willem was a young soldier and he was captured by the Japanese and taken to a POW camp,

IvE Which was horrible…

He was basically left to starve. And years later - that memory of being so hungry- it stayed with him even after the war ended and he moved to the Netherlands. Ira remembers her Dad telling this story - of a time where he was just gazing at cans of food in a store window.

IvE So not at jewelry shop with an expensive watch, that wasn't a big treasure, the big treasure was a piece of canned food

The day Willem started thinking about growing meat in a lab… started off pretty normally. Soon after the war, he’d enrolled in Medical School. And was touring the labs. And there he saw something that lit a fuse in his mind.

IvE He described it as if he saw a fish tank, a small fish tank, with a piece of tissue in it,

Scientists had put a chunk of animal tissue in liquid in a glass tank. They were trying to keep it alive -- hoping that one day they could grow organs - like livers and kidneys - from scratch^[17].

But Ira says that because of her dad’s experience in the war -  he was always looking at things and thinking…

IvE Hey I can eat that…

So when he saw this piece of tissue - floating in the glass tank, he wasn't thinking about the future of human organs.

IvE Everyone was like, woah this is great science. And he was looking like, hey, I can put it in a frying pan and eat this.

Willem started thinking more about this… What if instead of taking a cell and trying to grow a new heart -  we took a chicken cell and tried to grow chicken fillets? Like 1000s of them!  Or Steaks? If they could do it… Maybe it would be easier to get more food to more people…?

For decades, he tried to convince scientists to join him^[18] [19] … without much luck.  But he kept calm and carried on…

IvE if you can recover from Japanese war camps, this is just a minor glitch in your life

So Willem started tinkering with this idea basically on his own. In 1997, he was the first to file a patent^[20] detailing how you might do this… cook up meat in a lab^[21]. And several years later^[22][23].... other people started taking notice… By the mid-2000s… Willem and others convinced the Dutch government to pour some money into cell cultured meat… .^[24] And that ultimately led to the moment in August 2013 when Willem's big idea burst onto the spotlight..

Now the first lab grown cultured beef burger has been cooked and eaten in an event in London^[25]

The raw ingredients may sound unappetizing, half-millimeter thick strips of pinkish yellow lab grown tissue^[26]

Which were then combined and made into a patty^[27] 

In a room full of journalists….  food critics tried the burger…

There is quite some intense taste, it's close to meat, it's not that juicy.

Chase Purdy -- who was watching this all happen - said - this taste test was basically a publicity stunt to show people that you could actually eat meat that was cooked up in a lab^[28] … because Chase says that these burgers, they were still far away from getting in our supermarkets… .

CP it was painstakingly created, like literally 4 or 5 scientists growing tiny bits of ground beef little bits at a time

WZ It's like they were sewing it by hand, like a delicate quilt or something like that?

CP Kind of, they were growing it bit by bit, which took a while

They also used this kinda gross and very expensive ingredient called fetal calf serum^[29] - it literally comes from the blood of a cow fetus - and it helps to get the cells to grow…All in all, it was estimated that one of these burgers would cost more than $300,000 USD.

So, bottom line -  if this technology was gonna work at all -- these companies were going to have to find a whole new way to make cell cultured meat. But that was 2013, since then the tech has come a long way…we've got dozens of startups beavering away trying to perfect -- not just mincemeat in a burger.. but they want to make thick slabs of steak…. cocktails of bouncy shrimp…They want to make Sunday roast! And they're trying to make it way cheaper - without using the blood of cow fetuses. So how are scientists working it all out - right now? To find out we caught up with the guy who shared a meal with Chase at the start of the show.

UV My name is Uma Valeti I'm a cardiologist, and I founded Memphis Meats.

Uma walked us through, step by step - the kinda bizarre ways they’re cooking all this up. So if you're trying to make chicken fillets. Here's how it starts.

Using, say a needle, Uma and his team can suck up cells from a real living chicken^[30].  And not just any cells.

UV Yeah, These are stem or stem-like cells^[31]. Which means these cells can continue to multiply and grow and can become muscle tissue or fat or bone^[32] and that's what we're talking about

Once you take the cells out of the chicken, they're all naked! And alone! No longer in the warm natural cell factory of a chicken's body. Since these cells don't have a body to grow in, Uma has to MAKE a body. And to do that he uses a big cauldron called a bioreactor - and inside it?

UV It includes amino acids, fats, and vitamins and minerals.

He adds proteins^[33], sugars^[34].  and iron. Hormones, like insulin^[35]. Chicken cells also need oxygen -- which in a real bird would flow through their body via their blood. Uma's bioreactor doesn't have that -- so instead, he passes oxygen through this witches brew^[36].

Ultimately, you end up with a kind of watery goo… which Uma says, it kinda tastes like blood

UV Many of us remember if we had a cut, putting our finger in our mouth, and it tastes a little salty, a little metallic, that's what it reminds me of.

So that's the basic idea… you take some cells… grow, or culture them in a lab. That's why it's called cell cultured meat… But Uma has been toiling away at this for 5 years... and he says it's just really hard to mimic the innards of a chicken. Seriously try it! Gurgle gurgle… I mean, chemically it’s hard too. So… for example Uma told us sometimes his cells just don't play ball.. He'll give them their salty slop. Hoping that they'll grow into nice big chicken tenders!! Leave them for weeks to do they're thing… And then come back to the lab and be like..

UV Hey where is the tissue it didn't grow at all? We didn't know why it was not growing… after spending a week, two weeks trying to feed the cells. And they'll just sit there, and sit there, and just keep eating, they just won't grow. they just refuse to grow.

WZ How many times did it not work - like you came back to the reactor all the cells were dead?

UV Yeah i mean it happens even now. There's a number of time we're like, this is never going to work, I'd say we stared into that absolute despair of “will this ever work?” - more times than i can count

But little by little… Uma's  been learning how to work through this... by playing around with the secret recipe. These days, they’re also trying to work with only the most cooperative cells...the ones that will do really well in his watery slop. He saves those for the next batches...and tosses the duds in the bin. Essentially...breeding cells… you can think about it like taking wild jungle fowl^[37] and breeding them generation by generation… until you get the plumper, fatter chickens.

And meanwhile as Uma is working through that puzzle… there's another one to deal with.  If Uma just shoved cells in a vat to grow any which way. He would get a meat milkshake.^[38] 

So, some companies build little scaffoldings - which are like a jungle gym for cells to grow on. Memphis meats has managed to find the right mix of ingredients in their goo to help coax the cells to grow in little layers ...^[39][40][41] 

UV In the early stages the tissue are very very thin, you can only see them under a microscope, but as they start growing you'll see like a naked eye there's a like tissues like meat has this very light pinkish hue. As it starts growing, and as we harvest it, you starts growing like little chunks of meat, like cubed chicken, except we don't have bones so it's cubed boneless chicken is how I would describe it.

Mmmm… Cubed boneless chicken.. gahhhhh… but seriously… this been a real struggle - and now Uma can almost taste victory….  And the moment he thought - we will do this - was when his team cooked up beef in his lab -- and made fajitas. ^[42] 

And I still can't forget the moment in which I put that fajita in my mouth and was eating i, the intense flavor came out, the meaty flavour, I’m like this is MEAT.

Memphis Meats says it takes several weeks to go from a bunch of cells to chicken, duck or beef that you can eat…  So we are getting really close here…  But the billion dollar question is… will this meat live up to the hype? Right now it's basically all happening in small, photogenic laboratories…  but if this is really going to work -- it's going to need to be scaled up in a massive way. And that means we're going to need HUGE vats -- filled with thousands of litres of that weird salty goo… bubbling away… if all that happens… will this really be that environmentally friendly?

That's coming up after the break.

BREAK

Welcome back. Now we know how to cook up our cell cultured meat. Our next question is --is it worth the trouble? The big promise here - is that it's the great new hope for meat eaters ... all the burgers you want… and you don't have to hurt the planet while you're at it^{[43] [44] [45]} But, is that true?

Hello! Hello??

Hi Can you hear me?

Hey!! I can!

This is Dr Carolyn Mattick, an environmental engineer at the University of West Florida.^[46] She has analysed every step of making cell cultured meat^[47]..  To see if it’s really Captain Planet approved - and better for the environment than the meat we're making now. ^[48] 

And to help us see how this fancy new tech might use up energy… Carolyn painted a picture for us of a cell cultured meat facility…

CM That facility is going to look like a high tech brewery, So people involved in cell based meat have coined the word carnery

WZ Oh! Instead of a brewery like a carne… carnivorous?

CM Yes! Isn't that clever?

So these carneries basically are gonna be full of big metal vats - with piping all over.  And these vats are going to need power to run them.^[49] 

CM To circulate the water, to circulate the nutrients, to circulate the oxygen, maintaining the temperature… And some of this just isn't necessary - when we're growing say a cow or a chicken, because a cow and the chicken do all of those things internally

WZ: Oh right because a cow is naturally 37 degree celsius^[50]

CM Exactly, yes

WZ But we will need to do that with electricity, or what not, when we do this in the lab

CM Yes, exactly, we will have to do all those functions for them.

And while with this new kind of meat we don't need to grow all the grains to feed the cow to then feed us. We'll still need to feed the cells, with stuff like sugar. And that doesn't come for free^[51]. So, in the US, a bunch of our sugar comes from corn …

We mill it and dry it and that becomes sugar.^[52] So that in itself is an energy intensive process.

But the big question Carolyn was ruminating on was: is this all gonna be more energy intensive - say pump out more greenhouse gases -  than making meat the old fashioned way?^[53]. Because what we’ve got now is pretty bad. And a big reason for that is that we currently have millions of cows burping out this really potent greenhouse gas - methane.^[54]  

So put it all together --who's better? Cell cultured meat - or bad old agriculture?  Carolyn estimated that  … cell cultured meat would probably be better than beef -- because much less pesky methane to deal with^[55]. But this new technology? it could end up spitting out more greenhouse gases than pork and poultry.^{[56] [57][58]} 

Potentially yes. A lot of the messaging around the environmental messaging, is that it is good, it's better than conventional meat, and I think about it as not inherently better or worse, but it's different^[59]

There are a couple of things where cell-cultured meat looked like a clear winner. That was with water pollution and land use^[60]. Carolyn estimated that without so many animals crapping all over the countryside -- we'd have less of that poo running off into our waterways^[61]. We'd probably need less land partly because we wouldn’t need to grow acres of grains to feed the animals. ^[62][63][64] Other work has found similar stuff.^[65]

CM It is very likely that producing meat in a factory will require less land, it is very likely ^[66]-03

Now Carolyn's study - was published a few years ago.. it’s based on what she knew then. And by the time this meat makes its way to your barbie - a lot could change. but Carolyn's broader point is that this technology isn't necessarily going to be great for the environment. Like, if these companies don't properly treat their waste when it runs out of their bioreactors... or uses ingredients in its witches brew that are really bad for the planet - then it's gonna be bad. From where we're sitting now though, Carolyn optimistic….

I do think it has the potential to be environmentally beneficial, it's not automatically an environmental win across the board, but I think it has a lot of potential

And then - just a quick gut check - is this stuff going to be safe to eat? Well…as with any new food that’s hitting the grocery aisles . - whether it's Pop Tarts or Flaming Hot Cheetos or cell cultured meat - we're not going to have any randomized control trials to show that this is safe in the long run. But curiously - there is one way that this new meat… has the potential to be safer than the meat we're eating now

So, raw meat that you buy in the supermarket at the moment - often has nasty bacteria in it^[67],^[68] like E-Coli and Salmonella^[69] - it gets in there because this bacteria is hanging out in the guts of cows^[70] and chickens^[71]. And when the carcasses are carved up in the slaughterhouse the bacteria can move onto the meat. In a lab grown meat -- no guts, no slaughterhouse. Here's Chase

CP You know one of the scientists told me, in one of the labs, I was looking at raw meat coming out of a bioreactor - I just sort of said - what would happen if you ate this right now? And he said, I wouldn't want to do to this, cos it wouldn't be taste great without it being cooked, but it's totally safe, you could spoon it right into your mouth,

If everything goes to plan though -- and this beef cooked up in “carnary”, is exactly like beef from the ranch….  it's still not going to be the healthiest thing around^[72]… we know eating too much meat can be bad for us^[73][74]… which takes us to the giant pumpkin in the room -

If we're worried about the environment and your health - we don’t need to scoop your breaky out of vats in Silicon Valley.  We can just eat more plants. Work comparing cell cultured meat to beans or nuts - found that this snazzy new tech could not compete with these simple foods. The lab stuff is worse for the environment than plants.^[75] And this is probably true for a lot of the sparkling start ups pumping out complicated processed foods like Impossible Burgers^[76]… Chase has spent a lot of time thinking about all this - so I took this meaty issue to him …  

I just can't help think we should be eating less meat^[77], and that's the singular message, we should be eating less meat - I should be eating less meat -we don't need to invest millions into this brand spanking new thing…

Right, we shouldn't need to but I don't think we can make a good bet that people are suddenly going to go vegetarian, because the planet, because we've been asking them to for a long time, certainly you and I haven't made that switch yet. And we know this science pretty well.  And the fact of the matter is that people aren't eating less meat^{[78][79][80][81]}, even though they have this information at their fingertips. So, in lieu of waiting for a miracle to happen, or a light switch to go off in literally billions of people's heads, cell cultured meat offers another possibility.

These companies are ultimately banking on the fact that we’re so obsessed with meat that we'll shovel it out of bioreactors -- rather than quit it. Cold tofurkey… and, y'know, maybe they're right.

That's Science Vs

CITATIONS

If you want to know more about the race to get Cell cultured meat onto your plate - you've got to check out Chase's book. It's a great read and it's called: Billion Dollar Burger.

And if you want to read more about what Ira van Eelen is doing in this space - head over to https://www.kindearth.tech/ 

This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zukerman and Chase Purdy, with help from Rose Rimler, Nicholas DelRose, Michelle Dang, and Hannah Harris Green. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Hanna Tuomisto, Dr. Marco Springmann and Dr. Lini Wollenberg. And special thanks to Livia Padilha, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.

I'm Wendy Zukerman, fact you next time.

I do have something fun to show you-01

Basically it's a futuristic cookbook on what you can make with cell cultured meat

Ok so when we we flip through what we have?

Whiskey glazed celebrity cubes!

What??  The idea you would have cells from Kanye grow them in a lab and eat them…

if you're feeling super promotional yes, that is the idea

You see on the page there are cubes of meats with little toothpicks sticking in them… other page it says forget autographs or posters - prove you're the ultimate the fan of a celebrity, by eating him or her, takes you to whole new level

Whaaaat the future is nigh?!