January 30, 2023 • 35 mins
Jacob Goldstein co-hosts today's show with Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful. Jacob and Dan eat their way through the history of fake meat -- from Gardenburger hockey pucks, to meatier Impossible burgers. And they get a report from the fake-meat frontier, where scientists are trying to make lab-grown chicken breasts.
This is the third episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Dan Pashman, host of the Sportful podcast, Jacob Goldstein,
host of the podcast What's Your Problem. I am here
in your kitchen in the Sportful test kitchen. Welcome. So
we're old friends. We've collaborated back when you were a
planet money and you're more like business tech economics reporter
(00:35):
guy and I'm more nerdy food guy. Yes, and we
found a story that is the crossover podcast event of
twenty twenty three, right, and the story is this, so
we'll go with that short. Come on, yeah, this is
the Sportful. It's not for food ease, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsessed
(00:56):
about food to learn more about people. And I'm coming
to you from my kitchen with my friend Jacob Goldstein,
host of the podcast What's Your Problem? The show where
entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're gonna say change
the world. The show where entrepreneurs talking about how they're
gonna change the word about say solve if your problems,
you gotta work. I'm memorizing your own tagline, kind of
anti tagline. At this point, like people know what the
show is. They pushed play yes, Yes, Today, Jacob, we're
(01:22):
gonna talk about the past, present, and future of alternatives
to meet Meat from animals is clearly a problem in
the world right now right. It's a huge driver of
climate change, a huge driver of land loss, of biodiversity decline.
And so this is a real high stakes problem in
the world, and people are spending billions of dollars to
try and come up with new technologies to give us
(01:43):
meat without animals. And I know a lot has been
said about this, but I really feel like we have interesting, new,
big stuff to say here. That's right, things have changed
in the past year. Some of the things that looked
very promising are struggling. Some of the things that felt
like pipe dreams are becoming more real. So we're gonna
get into all of that. The moment that sort of
sets the stage for our story. Really, hippie is essentially right,
(02:07):
Hippie vegetarian is right. And there is this chef who
is who is kind of hippie adjacent. His name's Paul Winner,
and in the seventies, he has this restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
It's called the Garden House, and he wants to figure
out what to do with his leftover food at the
end of the day, and you know, he's got rice
peel off. He's got to sort of random veggies, and
(02:29):
he tries a few things, and he comes up with
basically making it into a patty and cooking it and
putting it between two buns, and he calls it the
garden Burger. This garden burger that he invents in his
restaurant becomes the garden burger. That was the go to
veggie burger in the eighties and definitely in the nineties.
But it wasn't a high end thing. It was almost
the kind of thing where like when a bowling alley
(02:50):
wanted to offer something vegetarian, they would have the garden Burger,
or a chain restaurant or like a one level above
a diner type place. Yeah, and you could also buy
to the store. And you can't get the garden burger anymore.
That just last year. Actually it got phased out. But
I think you got sort of the closest thing, right.
That's right. Let me step over here to my freezer
(03:12):
and I have Morning Star Farms garden veggie burgers frozen.
What's cooking up while we're talking about it. Yeah, let's
do it. So let's just say before we even put
it in, the veggie burger starts out brown. It looks
(03:32):
to me, actually, it looks kind of like a like
a hash brown. It's gotta that's got a brownish, almost
like Cure Aid potato type vibe. Unlike meat, right, Like,
it's not. It's not really supposed to be like meat. Right.
It's supposed to be a thing you can eat between
a bun when your friends are eating meat. So, so
now we're gonna put the veggie burger into the pan.
Let's see what kind of sound it makes. Oh, there's
(03:57):
a little bit of sizzle, but not much. Yeah, I
think I think the sizzle is just like because it's
maybe a little icy from the freezer. So what happens
to Paul Winner and his restaurant in Portland in the eighties.
He winds up closing the restaurant, but the gardenburger turns
into this product. He turns the gardenburger into this thing
(04:19):
you can buy at the grocery store that restaurants buy
to have a sort of token option for vegetarians. You know,
it fills a need in the nineties if you want
to get something for vegetarians at the barbecue. You pick
up a pack of Gardenburgers. It's the go to veggie
burger of the era. Right, It's functional. That's a great
word for it. And that's why Gardenburger gets so big.
(04:40):
It's doing a job in society. And this company blew up.
It did great in the nineties. The Gardenburgers a big deal.
The company actually has an IPO, it goes public, they
sell stock. This chef who ran a vegetarian restaurant in
Portland is like a multi millionaire from it. And maybe
peak Gardenburger comes in the late nineties. It's huge. The
(05:01):
stock is doing well. They advertise on the Seinfeld Finale Wow,
which is like, you don't get more nineties than that.
That's like Super Bowl ad level. Yeah, oh no, I
want something and yo, Gardenburger the burger and the squeals
would be like, so they were big time and Samuel L.
(05:22):
Jackson generating their kind of strange Seinfeld ad. Yeah. So
the instructions say that we should heat burgers over medium
for seven to eight minutes, turning burgers over frequently throughout
heating time. So I got my spachelor ready, I'm going
to turn the burgers periodically, and while we hang out
here and cook, Jacob, why don't you continue your story?
So now it's the two thousands, and the Gardenburger isn't
(05:46):
the only mediocre veggie burger game in town anymore. There's
enough competition that you can't just get by on being
the one anymore. And Gardenburger eventually goes bankrupt in two
thousand and five, and if I remember correctly, Kelloggs purchased
garden Burger and they kept selling these patties forty years,
like they just discontinued them last year. But Kelloggs also
(06:07):
owns morning Star, which is the company that makes this
Garden Burger adjacent patty that we have in the skillet
right now. And it looks like it's done, actually should
we Yeah? Yeah, we have ketchup, we have mustard, and
then I have my burger sauce, which is basically shake
shack sauce. I'm in your hands, all right, let's do
the shack sauce. Then no, they don't. They don't give
(06:28):
out the recipe for the shack sauce. But I don't
know if you know the recipe developed with Kenjie Lobo
salt you will not take for hamburg No, and just
kind of likes that. Being said, eating this does take
(06:49):
me back. It's had a little more of a more
of a pepper taste than I remember, but just that
sort of that texture, that kind of crispy edges and
mushy interior. It still scratches a nostalgia itch for me.
I gotta say not for me. I'd rather like eat
Cheetos or something if I want nostalgia food. Garden Burger
(07:21):
and the similar burgers. They are veggie Burger one point zero,
the sort of basic puck you can eat like a
burger if you don't eat meat. And so around twenty
ten we get the start of this really different new
era in veggie burgers. You know, the old one was hippies, vegetarians, natural.
(07:42):
The new one is Silicon Valley high tech like engineered
in a lab. And there are two companies in particular
that get founded in Silicon Valley. You know what they are.
Say the names I'm gonna go with Beyond Meat and
Impossible Foods very good. And I have to say I
have been a big customer of these companies. My wife
doesn't eat meat, my daughter doesn't eat meat, and our
(08:04):
definite preference in our house is for Impossible, And I
can say I haven't tried both. I agree that I
like the impossible better. So partly because of that, I
talked with Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible. He does
not come from a food background. He was not a chef.
He was a Stanford biochemist who spend his career studying
(08:25):
the genome. And then one day, as one does, Pat
Brown thinks to himself, let me think about what are
the biggest problems in the world that I might work on,
And he decides not to start a podcast, but rather
it decides that the biggest problems in the world are
climate change and the decline in biodiversity, and he decides
(08:47):
that the way to fight those for him personally, is
to start a company that can make fake meat that's
as good as real meat without using animals. And so
his goal in starting this company and starting Impossible is
to entirely replace real meat with fake meat. This industry
is supported by people who love meat, okay, and for
(09:09):
us to compete them out of existence, we have to
give them exactly what they want and do it better
than the animal I love vegetarians and vegans as much
as the next guy. But we don't accomplish anything by
making better meat for vegans, and that's a completely different
project and it requires technology and science. Right, So he's
(09:31):
thinking about meat as a scientist, and in particular, he
thinks about all the amazing things that happen when you
cook meat. One of the striking characteristics of meat in
general is that it behaves like an active chemical system.
It starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively
(09:52):
not very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you
cook it, in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms,
and in the process it produces this explosion of aromas
that weren't there at the beginning. That's why a barbecue
smells so good, exactly exactly, and you will notice that
you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you
(10:13):
barbecue broccoli. You also don't get similar behavior when you
cook a garden burger, right right, It doesn't transform. It
looks at the end basically like it looks at the beginning.
And so Pat Brown knows that he needs to capture
that magic transformation that happens when you cook meat. And Patchman,
I know you bought a couple of impossible burgers also
for us. Maybe we should start cooking those here. Yeah,
(10:35):
let's do it, right, you want to crack these open, Jacob, Yeah,
we've got two impossible burgers here. And just to compare
them to the garden burger, right, like the garden burger
look brown like a piece of bread. These look red
(10:56):
with little flecks of white, like ground beef. And it
was also interesting to me, you know, these are all
the little details the garden veggie burger. You keep it
in the freezer. The instructions say keep frozen until cooking.
The Impossible Burger label says, treat this just like meat.
If you're gonna cook it, defrost at first. In practice,
if the end result is good. In theory, it shouldn't
really make a difference how it starts. But it made
(11:18):
me feel like, oh, treat it like meat. It made
it feel that much more like meat to me. That's
a real sizzle. And you can see that the bottom
(11:38):
of the burger, the part touching the pan is browning
and change in color as it would for any normal burger. Right,
so so it goes in red burger color. And yeah,
it looks not exactly like a burger, but a lot
like a burger. So, just to go back to the
(11:59):
story of Pat Brown, he wants to capture that that
incredible smell and color and texture change that you get
when you cook meat. And he thinks about this molecule
called right. Hem is a naturally occurring molecule. There's a
ton of it in meat. We also have it. Right,
You may have heard of hemoglobin in our blood. That's
hematologist is a blood doctor, very good, and hem is
(12:21):
in all animals. It's a big part of what makes
meat taste like meat. So Pat Brown's going to find
a way to get hem into his burgers without animals.
There's a version of hem in soy, right, soy leg hemoglobin.
It's a version of hem that occurs naturally in the
roots of soybeans. It's very molecularly similar to the way
(12:43):
heme occurs in meat. They decide to genetically engineer yeat
cells to produce soy leg hemoglobin. So this genetically engineered
version of soy leg hemoglobin works and it becomes essentially
the secret sauce in impossible meat. Should I prep these up? Yeah,
(13:05):
let's each buns, so you cut it in half. For
us to split and it is what you call this
medium rare medium is a little line of pink in
the middle. That's right, Okay, let's see it. The fact
that this thing reacts like meat from the second you
take it out of the fridge, and that you can
(13:27):
cook it medium rare, and that it's even reminiscent of
a burger is pretty amazing. That being said, you still
wouldn't fool me in a taste test. And can you,
as a professional describer of food, like talk about why
you still like the burger better. So the things that
this does have. It has a little bit of a
(13:47):
crispy edge like you get in a good burger. It
has it has the texture down very well. It has
a meatingness, but it's still a tenderness like you would
get with a good burger. It's still missing that hardcore
beef note. It's it's it's like a band without a
bass player. I like it, so not bad, but the
bet you kind of miss something. You miss something that's
(14:09):
there's like a deep guttural that isn't quite there. So
let's go back to the story sort of on that note.
So Pat Brown is making the impossible burger that people
at Beyond are making the Beyond Burger, and they come
out in the teens, in the two thousand teens, and
then their big moment, the real sort of rocket ship
blast off, turns out to be the pandemic. It turns
(14:30):
out to be twenty twenty. I talked about this with
Laura Riley, she covers the business of food for the
Washington Post. A lot of us, you know, let's say
March of twenty twenty through the end of that year,
a lot of us had a lot of time on
our hands. We were panic eating frequently, and we were
looking for new things to do, so a lot of
us at least dabbled in the whole kind of alt
(14:52):
meat space. Also, the Impossible Whopper. The Impossible Burger comes
out at Burger King just before the pandemic in twenty nineteen,
and during the pandemic that wound up being big for
my family. Obviously we weren't going out to restaurants, but
drive throughs were still open. Not everybody in my family
each meet, and I have to say that is my
favorite version of the Impossible Burger is the Impossible Whopper.
(15:15):
It was pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't a smash.
But what every fast food restaurant wants to do, and
they've tried all different things over the year's salads, etc.
They want to remove veto power. So you have a
family of four and mom says, I don't feel like
a burger. So you know, that's what you're always trying
to do. You want to have enough menu items that
(15:36):
you can appeal, you can find something for that person
who would veto it. You know what's interesting about that
is that's actually the same motivation as the garden burger.
We have one person who we can't please with the
regular menu, so we're going to have this thing in
the freezer. And it is also not the dream of
Pat Brownet impossible foods, not the dream of beyond right again,
(15:57):
not quite there yet, but it's good enough right that
in twenty twenty it's new. That is like the big
boom for fake meat both you know, the impossible whopper
people are buying at grocery store. Everything's great. It feels
like we're in this new era of fake meat until
we get to twenty twenty two, which is when everything changes.
This last year is when really the kind of air
(16:20):
starts coming out of the fake meat bubble, and you
see this in a lot of different ways. One place
you see it is the most important fast food restaurant, McDonald's,
which in early twenty twenty two comes out with its
mcplant burger, which is a collaboration with Beyond. They were
massively late to the game, and they debuted it in
(16:40):
the San Francisco Bay area, the Mcplant, and also in
Dallas Fort Worth. So they roll out the mcplant in
early twenty twenty two, and what happens. It bombs and
they basically they cancel the mcplant. So okay, So the
failure of the mcplant, that's like piece of bad news
number one in twenty twenty two for this new era
(17:03):
of fake meat. But there's more bad news. One thing
that happens is just the growth really stop. Right. This
sector had been growing, growing, growing at the beginning of
the pandemic, and now it's not growing anymore. Essentially, one
theory of why that happened is that people tried it.
It was a novelty and like kind of like you,
(17:23):
It sounds like they were like, yeah, it's pretty good,
I would eat it, but I don't like it enough
to keep buying it. But I actually think the most
important thing that hurt fake meat last year was inflation.
Food inflation was particularly high, and fake meat crucially being
problem they haven't solved yet. Not only is it not
(17:44):
quite as good as real meat, it's way more expensive,
and people are feeling acutely higher prices at the grocery store.
It's like, no, I'm not going to pay more for
this thing that's not quite as good. Laura Riley the
Washington Post reporter. She says, we do need another sort
of technological leap forward, and the same way that there
was a leap from the garden burger to the impossible burger,
(18:04):
we need the next one of those. We need the
next technological leap. What it's been launched so far is
mostly patties or nuggets. What we need next in order
to kind of grow the category is we need things
that are really thought of more as ingredients, you know
what I mean? Like that I'm making I'm having friends
over tonight and two of them are vegged. So I'm
(18:25):
going to make a stir fry with this plant based
sliced chicken. The bowlless, skinless chicken breast is beloved by
home cooks. We need to get to whole pieces of meat. Yeah, exactly,
we need meat. We're coming up, Jacob. We're gonna hear
about people growing meat right now, and we'll hear from
my friend Sean Rama's farm who went out to California
(18:46):
and tasted lab grown meat. Culture. You love to go
to California. He's still got that edge, the no kid's edge.
(19:10):
And now a delicious word from our sponsors. Welcome back
to the sport Full. I'm Dan Pashman, and if you
missed last week's show, you missed a big one. I
announce that I've teamed up with Spollini once again and
we have produced two new pasta shapes that are on
(19:31):
sale right now. For these two shapes, I went deep
into the pasta shape archives looking for obscure shapes that
I wanted to share with the world. But before I
could do that, I had to convince some of my
toughest critics my family. All right, first ever tasted this
new pasta shape, Quatratini. It's perfect in all three categories,
like no offense to Cascatelly. I love it. I had
(19:55):
a hope it didn't take away from Cascatelli sales, because
I mean, do you think it has. It has all
three right precability, sausability to think ability. There's think that's
room in the world's fro more than one great pasta shape.
Listen to last week's episode. Here the story of these
shapes and buy them now only through Sfolini's website. That's
also where you'll see a link to buy these new
(20:16):
casketelly clutch purses limited edition by a designer named Julie Malow.
They're really cool and they're just for Valentine's Day. There's
only a couple of hundred of them. You can get
all these things at s Folini dot com. That's sfogli
Ni dot com. All right, I'm back in my kitchen
with my friend and collaborator for this episode, Jacob Goldstein,
(20:36):
host of the podcast What's Your Problem, and we're talking
about the past, present, and future of alternatives. To meet
now for the next and final stop on our journey, Jacob,
I've been looking into cultured meat. Okay. This is where
you take cells from a real animal, you take them
into a lab, and you grow meat using those cells.
So in theory, if it works, it will be real meat,
(20:57):
but you won't have raised or killed an animal to
get it. Now, The underlying technology here is not so new, okay.
The idea of growing cells in a lab has been
around for many decades. I mean, this is how they
made the polio vaccine. What's new is using this technology
to create something you might eat. Okay. Now, the first
success with this was when a Dutch professor made a
(21:17):
lab grown burger. That was in twenty thirteen, ten years ago, okay,
ten years out in this new kind of era. Now,
just in the last few months, it's got a lot
more real, especially here in the US, because in November,
the FDA declared cultured chicken from one company, Upside Foods,
to be safe for human consumption. That's a major milestone. Now,
it's still not going to be in stores quite yet.
It's got to get past the USDA, and even when
(21:39):
that happens, it's going to be you know, expensive, and
in just a few places. So it's still early days.
But I mean, we talked about this in the Sportfull
a few years ago, and my impression then was like,
this is space age stuff. So the fact that it
could be coming to any kind of stores soon seems
like a major development to me. I mean, I know,
sort of On the business tech side, there has been
(22:01):
a ton of a venture capital investment into fake me
not just beyond and impossible, but to these kind of
next generation sell culture fake meat, although I would say Jacob,
I would not call it fake meat. It might not
be a whole animal, but I think it's meat. And
one company working on making cultured chicken and beef is
called eat Just. They aren't have a product in grocery
(22:22):
stories you may have seen called just egg. It's a
plant based egg, and now they're getting in to grow
in their own meat. To be clear, this is not
the company that got the FDA approval, but they are
one of the big players in this space. Their headquarters
are in Alameda, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco.
I wasn't able to visit, but my old friend Sean
Ramas Farm, host of the excellent Daily News podcast Today,
explained he went there and saw it himself. Here's how
(22:44):
he describes the setup at each just there's all these tubes.
There's very serious scientists hard at work. There's like big
chambers and fridges and steel this and that, and rows
and rows of lab equipment. It looks like, you know,
there's like a billion COVID tests going on at once,
with like little droplets of this going into little droplets
(23:06):
of that. I don't know that COVID test is the
metaphor I want for my cultured meat. I think he's saying.
You know, there's that generic newsreel footage that we've seen
on TV ten thousand times now anytime they talk about
COVID and tests. You see those people in the coats
with the droplets, and that's what it looks science. So
after all these droplets that Sean described, the cells go
into a bioreactor that speeds up their growth. And the bioreactors,
(23:28):
as they're described to me, there like giant steel cylinders.
They look like a brewery. You've ever been all those
restaurants is also a brewery. You see the big steel tanks.
It's like that. So to find out what happens next
in those bioreactors, I talk to a scientist who works there.
So my name is Vitor Sento. I am the senior
director of cello Agriculture at Good Meat, which is a
(23:48):
subcb area of heat just so Vitoor Santo trained as
a tissue engineer. In past jobs, he worked on using
cell cultures to regenerate human bone and cartilage. So he
was in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Now he's growing meat. So
once the cells are in the bioreactor, we feed them
a solution, so it's in a liquid farm and it's
(24:09):
a combination of different nutrients. So think of proteins, I
you know, acids, vitamins, fats like miracle grow. But for meat,
pretty much think of what you would what you would
feed the chicken, like the soliditade of a chicken, but
you just turn that into a into a cultural broth.
When the sales come out of that bioreactor, they're not
(24:30):
done yet. A lot of times people expect you to
see a full steak or a chicken breast coming out
of the bioreactor, but that's not really what happens. What
do you see is more like think of a slurry
or a concentrator which doesn't have yet a lot of structure.
So not that they ask, but my tip to them
(24:50):
would be stop using the words slurry to describe any
part of your process. Slurry, we don't want to bioreactor. Basically,
don't let a scientist talk to it. Just show me
the chicken. Yeah, like, I don't want to eat meat
that at any point was a slurry. But so so
they get the slurry and they need to make it
into a chicken breast, and to do that they need
to add what they call scaffolding. All right, This is
(25:12):
plant protein extract that is formed into a three D
model of a piece of meat that the cells can
then attach themselves to in order to get the shape
and texture of a chicken breast. Now, I know it
sounds very sci fi, but Beator says, it's not as
far out as you may think. And what we're doing
that by our reactors, to be honest, is just mimicking
the natural process. We're just feeding. Instead, let's say, of
(25:33):
having cells growing in tissues and organs and having blood
circulating through them in the animal body, we're mimicking them,
but inside of a stainless steel by a reactor with
this mixture of nutrients. Now, as we've been saying, Jacob,
the goal is to get whole cuts of meat like
a chicken breast, right, But they had to start with
a simpler project, the chicken nugget, and Viator still remembers
(25:55):
the first time they made a chicken nugget that actually
had the taste and texture of a chicken nugget. It
was a turning point, I would say at eat Just,
it was a little like touching the moon almost. In
December of twenty twenty, Single Poor became the first country
in the world to approve lab grown chicken for sale,
and eat Just began selling their chicken nuggets in one
(26:16):
fancy club in Singapore and since then now there's another
restaurant in places in Singapore. Now eat Just is moving
on to whole cuts of meat, like chicken breasts, which
seems like profoundly harder than a chicken nugget, right, Yeah,
I mean you can kind of throw anything into ground
meat or a chicken nugget and to mimic the quote unquote.
I mean, like, like like what's real in an original chicken nugget,
(26:36):
Who knows. But when you're talking about an actual chicken breast,
there's so much about the eating experience that you might
not even consciously know, but you're gonna know if it's missing.
I mean, that feels like a bigger leap. If we
think of the leap from the garden burger to the
impossible burger, like that's big. But going from a faked
chicken nugget to a fake chicken breast that feels like
an even bigger leap. It's huge. Do you think about it?
(26:58):
Like a chicken breast has those kind of you pull
up hearted chicken breasts has those sort of striations. Yeah,
the sinews right, you had to chop across them when
you're exactly right, and like the idea of creating that
in a out of a flurry. Our friend Sean Rama's farm,
he when he went there, he got to taste their
chicken skin and their chicken breast. We started with an
(27:18):
appetizer that looked something like like a pork rind. It
was like chicken skin on top of a sort of
mix of vegetables, and you know, because it was crispy,
it was sort of hard to tell like like what
the difference was, and so it was hard to be like, wait,
(27:40):
is this chicken or is this is this not chicken?
If it tasted just like the real thing, what do
they served to you? Next? Next up was the piece
de resi stalls. I suppose it was another mix of
vegetables over like a muscular, fatty piece of chicken that
felt like a kin to a piece of chicken breast,
(28:02):
but again with with skin on it, And as much
as I wanted to doubt, I was very impressed. It
was you know, it had the texture, it had the taste,
and it had the flavor of the genuine article. It
was legit. So it sounds like you went in skeptical
(28:23):
totally and you were impressed. I was impressed with the product.
Now I remained skeptical that this is going to happen
anytime soon, Jacob, What what Sean's alluding to is like, Yeah,
they made tremendous advances on the taste and the texture.
What they're struggling with is the cost. Yeah, okay, right now, vetours,
(28:44):
does it cost them about fifty dollars to make one
chicken nugget? Amazing? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's so they
got a little ways to go here before this is
gonna be a big product. In fairness, that's way cheaper
than it was a few years ago. They're doing better,
but they still have obviously a long way to go.
They got to scale up, They gotta get cost down.
(29:05):
They need to find a way to grow more cells
per batch, faster and without spending so much to feed
the cells. But it's a constant struggle, Viator tells me,
because if they push too much in that direction, the
quality of the product can suffer. That as an impact
on the flavor of the cells. Maybe they don't taste
as much as chicken anymore, or they are the flavor
(29:26):
maybe is a little less powerful. Yeah, I mean this
is a really interesting, profound question, right, Like making things
get cheaper and better or at least equally good, is
like a core technological problem in history, right, And maybe
the most important thing in the world economy for the
(29:46):
last fifty six years has been the way computing power
has gotten better and cheaper. Right. There's this famous thing
More's law that every two years computers basically get twice
as good, and that has been this huge driver of
like everything in Silicon Valley. Right, And this is very
much a Silicon Valley universe. You have venture capitalists. This
company is in the Bay Area. They're pouring money, and
(30:06):
what they want is a computer like outcome. Right. They
want it to get twice as good at half the
price constantly. And it's not obvious that just because it
worked with computer chips, it'll work with cultured meat. It
doesn't work in every domain. But I have to hope
that it will, right. I have to hope that all
this money will pay very clever people who are motivated,
(30:27):
who will make cultured meat, meat without animals, that is
at least as good as meat from animals and at
least as cheap. I think it's cool that they're trying,
and it's exciting to hear Sean say that as close
as they are, and I'm excited for the day that
we can really take this technology to the next level
of Jacob okay, because Vitor says that once they get
the template, they can make almost anything. As long as
(30:50):
you have the equipment, infrastructure, and the means, like the
culture composition to feed those cells, you can essentially grow
any type of meat, any type of meat. Jacob okay,
are you thinking what I'm thinking, Human beings? No, No, Jacob,
(31:15):
Jurassic Park. This is like almost the same technology from
that movie. Okay, they got the dinosaur DNA, they made dinosaurs,
And in fact, there's a company in Belgium right now
that says they're developing wooly mammoth burgers. You know, in
foody circles, there's all this talk about your burger blend like, oh,
we do like you know, twenty percent short rib, twenty
(31:35):
percent brisket or whatever, and every chef thinks they have
the best blend or whatever. I cannot wait to go
out to a restaurant and be like, I'll have the
like half Dodo bird, half Stegosaurus burger. Please, I'm in.
If it costs the same as a hamburger, it'll work.
Oh come on, Jacob, you wouldn't pay an extra dollar
for a stegosaurus burger. I'd pay an extra dog. How
does it come with fries? Sure, I'll throw in the
(31:58):
fries for free in I think the big question here
with the cultured meat is even if it does taste
the same, will people eat it? It still feels weird.
I hear what you're saying. But a couple of things.
First of all, think about all the stuff in the
whatever freeze or aisle of the grocery store. Like, look
(32:21):
at the ingredient list on any whatever frozen pizza. It's insane.
Nobody looks at it. I think basically most people don't care, right,
And if you think about today the way some people
care a lot, you can imagine those kind of meat eaters,
some you know, small percentage of people who will always
want their meat. But I think if you have something
(32:42):
that is indistinguishable from meat and the same price or
even a little cheaper, let's dream big. I think people
will get the cheaper thing that's basically the same. I
also think that these things may be somewhat generational, you know,
so like if you are have you been eating cultured
meat from the time that you were five, then it
doesn't feel weird to you. I think that I would
(33:02):
probably I'm more excited about cultured meat than about the
plant based I think they have a better chance of
getting to the truth. What I would call it taste parody.
It sounds like from what Sean said that they're already
there in some respects. We agree with the impossible Burgher.
As impressed as we were, it's not quite there. And
to me, like I feel like I'm in the target
(33:24):
audience for this because I'm not a vegetarian, but I
care about the environment and animals. I try my best
to buy meat that's been raised ethically. I don't always succeed,
but I try so. If you said to me, hey,
here's the thing that would check all those boxes and
it tastes the same and it's the same price. I
would go for that. I think we agree. Fake meat,
cultured meat, whatever you want to call it, meat without
the animals. It's not there yet, but it really sounds
(33:48):
like it's getting there. And if they can get the
price down, I think that'll do it and I hope
it happens. Cashman, this is great man. Thank you for
having me in the Sportful Test Kitchen. Is my pleasure anytime.
Let's tell folks real quick. So your podcast, Jacob Goldstein
(34:10):
is called What's Your Problem? And actually we've been doing
a few food shows now. We did a whole interview
with Pat Brown, the impossible food guy, who you heard
a little bit from in this show. We have a
whole interview with him. We did another show recently about
this app Slice that's trying to help mom and pop
pizza shops compete with Dominoes. So well, lots of food
content as well as other kind of business and tech stuff. Jacob,
(34:31):
thanks for coming to the Sportfel Test Kitchen aka My kitchen.
Thanks for having me. This show is produced by me
along with senior producer and producer Andreas O'Hara, with help
this week from What's Your Problem host Jacob Goldstein and
producer It's Our editor is Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is
Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sportfell
(34:52):
is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Colin
Anderson Nora Richie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pash and
I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more,
eat better, and eat more better that
Pushkin. Dan Pashman, host of the Sportful podcast, Jacob Goldstein,
host of the podcast What's Your Problem. I am here
in your kitchen in the Sportful test kitchen. Welcome. So
we're old friends. We've collaborated back when you were a
planet money and you're more like business tech economics reporter
(00:35):
guy and I'm more nerdy food guy. Yes, and we
found a story that is the crossover podcast event of
twenty twenty three, right, and the story is this, so
we'll go with that short. Come on, yeah, this is
the Sportful. It's not for food ease, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsessed
(00:56):
about food to learn more about people. And I'm coming
to you from my kitchen with my friend Jacob Goldstein,
host of the podcast What's Your Problem? The show where
entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're gonna say change
the world. The show where entrepreneurs talking about how they're
gonna change the word about say solve if your problems,
you gotta work. I'm memorizing your own tagline, kind of
anti tagline. At this point, like people know what the
show is. They pushed play yes, Yes, Today, Jacob, we're
(01:22):
gonna talk about the past, present, and future of alternatives
to meet Meat from animals is clearly a problem in
the world right now right. It's a huge driver of
climate change, a huge driver of land loss, of biodiversity decline.
And so this is a real high stakes problem in
the world, and people are spending billions of dollars to
try and come up with new technologies to give us
(01:43):
meat without animals. And I know a lot has been
said about this, but I really feel like we have interesting, new,
big stuff to say here. That's right, things have changed
in the past year. Some of the things that looked
very promising are struggling. Some of the things that felt
like pipe dreams are becoming more real. So we're gonna
get into all of that. The moment that sort of
sets the stage for our story. Really, hippie is essentially right,
(02:07):
Hippie vegetarian is right. And there is this chef who
is who is kind of hippie adjacent. His name's Paul Winner,
and in the seventies, he has this restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
It's called the Garden House, and he wants to figure
out what to do with his leftover food at the
end of the day, and you know, he's got rice
peel off. He's got to sort of random veggies, and
(02:29):
he tries a few things, and he comes up with
basically making it into a patty and cooking it and
putting it between two buns, and he calls it the
garden Burger. This garden burger that he invents in his
restaurant becomes the garden burger. That was the go to
veggie burger in the eighties and definitely in the nineties.
But it wasn't a high end thing. It was almost
the kind of thing where like when a bowling alley
(02:50):
wanted to offer something vegetarian, they would have the garden Burger,
or a chain restaurant or like a one level above
a diner type place. Yeah, and you could also buy
to the store. And you can't get the garden burger anymore.
That just last year. Actually it got phased out. But
I think you got sort of the closest thing, right.
That's right. Let me step over here to my freezer
(03:12):
and I have Morning Star Farms garden veggie burgers frozen.
What's cooking up while we're talking about it. Yeah, let's
do it. So let's just say before we even put
it in, the veggie burger starts out brown. It looks
(03:32):
to me, actually, it looks kind of like a like
a hash brown. It's gotta that's got a brownish, almost
like Cure Aid potato type vibe. Unlike meat, right, Like,
it's not. It's not really supposed to be like meat. Right.
It's supposed to be a thing you can eat between
a bun when your friends are eating meat. So, so
now we're gonna put the veggie burger into the pan.
Let's see what kind of sound it makes. Oh, there's
(03:57):
a little bit of sizzle, but not much. Yeah, I
think I think the sizzle is just like because it's
maybe a little icy from the freezer. So what happens
to Paul Winner and his restaurant in Portland in the eighties.
He winds up closing the restaurant, but the gardenburger turns
into this product. He turns the gardenburger into this thing
(04:19):
you can buy at the grocery store that restaurants buy
to have a sort of token option for vegetarians. You know,
it fills a need in the nineties if you want
to get something for vegetarians at the barbecue. You pick
up a pack of Gardenburgers. It's the go to veggie
burger of the era. Right, It's functional. That's a great
word for it. And that's why Gardenburger gets so big.
(04:40):
It's doing a job in society. And this company blew up.
It did great in the nineties. The Gardenburgers a big deal.
The company actually has an IPO, it goes public, they
sell stock. This chef who ran a vegetarian restaurant in
Portland is like a multi millionaire from it. And maybe
peak Gardenburger comes in the late nineties. It's huge. The
(05:01):
stock is doing well. They advertise on the Seinfeld Finale Wow,
which is like, you don't get more nineties than that.
That's like Super Bowl ad level. Yeah, oh no, I
want something and yo, Gardenburger the burger and the squeals
would be like, so they were big time and Samuel L.
(05:22):
Jackson generating their kind of strange Seinfeld ad. Yeah. So
the instructions say that we should heat burgers over medium
for seven to eight minutes, turning burgers over frequently throughout
heating time. So I got my spachelor ready, I'm going
to turn the burgers periodically, and while we hang out
here and cook, Jacob, why don't you continue your story?
So now it's the two thousands, and the Gardenburger isn't
(05:46):
the only mediocre veggie burger game in town anymore. There's
enough competition that you can't just get by on being
the one anymore. And Gardenburger eventually goes bankrupt in two
thousand and five, and if I remember correctly, Kelloggs purchased
garden Burger and they kept selling these patties forty years,
like they just discontinued them last year. But Kelloggs also
(06:07):
owns morning Star, which is the company that makes this
Garden Burger adjacent patty that we have in the skillet
right now. And it looks like it's done, actually should
we Yeah? Yeah, we have ketchup, we have mustard, and
then I have my burger sauce, which is basically shake
shack sauce. I'm in your hands, all right, let's do
the shack sauce. Then no, they don't. They don't give
(06:28):
out the recipe for the shack sauce. But I don't
know if you know the recipe developed with Kenjie Lobo
salt you will not take for hamburg No, and just
kind of likes that. Being said, eating this does take
(06:49):
me back. It's had a little more of a more
of a pepper taste than I remember, but just that
sort of that texture, that kind of crispy edges and
mushy interior. It still scratches a nostalgia itch for me.
I gotta say not for me. I'd rather like eat
Cheetos or something if I want nostalgia food. Garden Burger
(07:21):
and the similar burgers. They are veggie Burger one point zero,
the sort of basic puck you can eat like a
burger if you don't eat meat. And so around twenty
ten we get the start of this really different new
era in veggie burgers. You know, the old one was hippies, vegetarians, natural.
(07:42):
The new one is Silicon Valley high tech like engineered
in a lab. And there are two companies in particular
that get founded in Silicon Valley. You know what they are.
Say the names I'm gonna go with Beyond Meat and
Impossible Foods very good. And I have to say I
have been a big customer of these companies. My wife
doesn't eat meat, my daughter doesn't eat meat, and our
(08:04):
definite preference in our house is for Impossible, And I
can say I haven't tried both. I agree that I
like the impossible better. So partly because of that, I
talked with Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible. He does
not come from a food background. He was not a chef.
He was a Stanford biochemist who spend his career studying
(08:25):
the genome. And then one day, as one does, Pat
Brown thinks to himself, let me think about what are
the biggest problems in the world that I might work on,
And he decides not to start a podcast, but rather
it decides that the biggest problems in the world are
climate change and the decline in biodiversity, and he decides
(08:47):
that the way to fight those for him personally, is
to start a company that can make fake meat that's
as good as real meat without using animals. And so
his goal in starting this company and starting Impossible is
to entirely replace real meat with fake meat. This industry
is supported by people who love meat, okay, and for
(09:09):
us to compete them out of existence, we have to
give them exactly what they want and do it better
than the animal I love vegetarians and vegans as much
as the next guy. But we don't accomplish anything by
making better meat for vegans, and that's a completely different
project and it requires technology and science. Right, So he's
(09:31):
thinking about meat as a scientist, and in particular, he
thinks about all the amazing things that happen when you
cook meat. One of the striking characteristics of meat in
general is that it behaves like an active chemical system.
It starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively
(09:52):
not very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you
cook it, in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms,
and in the process it produces this explosion of aromas
that weren't there at the beginning. That's why a barbecue
smells so good, exactly exactly, and you will notice that
you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you
(10:13):
barbecue broccoli. You also don't get similar behavior when you
cook a garden burger, right right, It doesn't transform. It
looks at the end basically like it looks at the beginning.
And so Pat Brown knows that he needs to capture
that magic transformation that happens when you cook meat. And Patchman,
I know you bought a couple of impossible burgers also
for us. Maybe we should start cooking those here. Yeah,
(10:35):
let's do it, right, you want to crack these open, Jacob, Yeah,
we've got two impossible burgers here. And just to compare
them to the garden burger, right, like the garden burger
look brown like a piece of bread. These look red
(10:56):
with little flecks of white, like ground beef. And it
was also interesting to me, you know, these are all
the little details the garden veggie burger. You keep it
in the freezer. The instructions say keep frozen until cooking.
The Impossible Burger label says, treat this just like meat.
If you're gonna cook it, defrost at first. In practice,
if the end result is good. In theory, it shouldn't
really make a difference how it starts. But it made
(11:18):
me feel like, oh, treat it like meat. It made
it feel that much more like meat to me. That's
a real sizzle. And you can see that the bottom
(11:38):
of the burger, the part touching the pan is browning
and change in color as it would for any normal burger. Right,
so so it goes in red burger color. And yeah,
it looks not exactly like a burger, but a lot
like a burger. So, just to go back to the
(11:59):
story of Pat Brown, he wants to capture that that
incredible smell and color and texture change that you get
when you cook meat. And he thinks about this molecule
called right. Hem is a naturally occurring molecule. There's a
ton of it in meat. We also have it. Right,
You may have heard of hemoglobin in our blood. That's
hematologist is a blood doctor, very good, and hem is
(12:21):
in all animals. It's a big part of what makes
meat taste like meat. So Pat Brown's going to find
a way to get hem into his burgers without animals.
There's a version of hem in soy, right, soy leg hemoglobin.
It's a version of hem that occurs naturally in the
roots of soybeans. It's very molecularly similar to the way
(12:43):
heme occurs in meat. They decide to genetically engineer yeat
cells to produce soy leg hemoglobin. So this genetically engineered
version of soy leg hemoglobin works and it becomes essentially
the secret sauce in impossible meat. Should I prep these up? Yeah,
(13:05):
let's each buns, so you cut it in half. For
us to split and it is what you call this
medium rare medium is a little line of pink in
the middle. That's right, Okay, let's see it. The fact
that this thing reacts like meat from the second you
take it out of the fridge, and that you can
(13:27):
cook it medium rare, and that it's even reminiscent of
a burger is pretty amazing. That being said, you still
wouldn't fool me in a taste test. And can you,
as a professional describer of food, like talk about why
you still like the burger better. So the things that
this does have. It has a little bit of a
(13:47):
crispy edge like you get in a good burger. It
has it has the texture down very well. It has
a meatingness, but it's still a tenderness like you would
get with a good burger. It's still missing that hardcore
beef note. It's it's it's like a band without a
bass player. I like it, so not bad, but the
bet you kind of miss something. You miss something that's
(14:09):
there's like a deep guttural that isn't quite there. So
let's go back to the story sort of on that note.
So Pat Brown is making the impossible burger that people
at Beyond are making the Beyond Burger, and they come
out in the teens, in the two thousand teens, and
then their big moment, the real sort of rocket ship
blast off, turns out to be the pandemic. It turns
(14:30):
out to be twenty twenty. I talked about this with
Laura Riley, she covers the business of food for the
Washington Post. A lot of us, you know, let's say
March of twenty twenty through the end of that year,
a lot of us had a lot of time on
our hands. We were panic eating frequently, and we were
looking for new things to do, so a lot of
us at least dabbled in the whole kind of alt
(14:52):
meat space. Also, the Impossible Whopper. The Impossible Burger comes
out at Burger King just before the pandemic in twenty nineteen,
and during the pandemic that wound up being big for
my family. Obviously we weren't going out to restaurants, but
drive throughs were still open. Not everybody in my family
each meet, and I have to say that is my
favorite version of the Impossible Burger is the Impossible Whopper.
(15:15):
It was pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't a smash.
But what every fast food restaurant wants to do, and
they've tried all different things over the year's salads, etc.
They want to remove veto power. So you have a
family of four and mom says, I don't feel like
a burger. So you know, that's what you're always trying
to do. You want to have enough menu items that
(15:36):
you can appeal, you can find something for that person
who would veto it. You know what's interesting about that
is that's actually the same motivation as the garden burger.
We have one person who we can't please with the
regular menu, so we're going to have this thing in
the freezer. And it is also not the dream of
Pat Brownet impossible foods, not the dream of beyond right again,
(15:57):
not quite there yet, but it's good enough right that
in twenty twenty it's new. That is like the big
boom for fake meat both you know, the impossible whopper
people are buying at grocery store. Everything's great. It feels
like we're in this new era of fake meat until
we get to twenty twenty two, which is when everything changes.
This last year is when really the kind of air
(16:20):
starts coming out of the fake meat bubble, and you
see this in a lot of different ways. One place
you see it is the most important fast food restaurant, McDonald's,
which in early twenty twenty two comes out with its
mcplant burger, which is a collaboration with Beyond. They were
massively late to the game, and they debuted it in
(16:40):
the San Francisco Bay area, the Mcplant, and also in
Dallas Fort Worth. So they roll out the mcplant in
early twenty twenty two, and what happens. It bombs and
they basically they cancel the mcplant. So okay, So the
failure of the mcplant, that's like piece of bad news
number one in twenty twenty two for this new era
(17:03):
of fake meat. But there's more bad news. One thing
that happens is just the growth really stop. Right. This
sector had been growing, growing, growing at the beginning of
the pandemic, and now it's not growing anymore. Essentially, one
theory of why that happened is that people tried it.
It was a novelty and like kind of like you,
(17:23):
It sounds like they were like, yeah, it's pretty good,
I would eat it, but I don't like it enough
to keep buying it. But I actually think the most
important thing that hurt fake meat last year was inflation.
Food inflation was particularly high, and fake meat crucially being
problem they haven't solved yet. Not only is it not
(17:44):
quite as good as real meat, it's way more expensive,
and people are feeling acutely higher prices at the grocery store.
It's like, no, I'm not going to pay more for
this thing that's not quite as good. Laura Riley the
Washington Post reporter. She says, we do need another sort
of technological leap forward, and the same way that there
was a leap from the garden burger to the impossible burger,
(18:04):
we need the next one of those. We need the
next technological leap. What it's been launched so far is
mostly patties or nuggets. What we need next in order
to kind of grow the category is we need things
that are really thought of more as ingredients, you know
what I mean? Like that I'm making I'm having friends
over tonight and two of them are vegged. So I'm
(18:25):
going to make a stir fry with this plant based
sliced chicken. The bowlless, skinless chicken breast is beloved by
home cooks. We need to get to whole pieces of meat. Yeah, exactly,
we need meat. We're coming up, Jacob. We're gonna hear
about people growing meat right now, and we'll hear from
my friend Sean Rama's farm who went out to California
(18:46):
and tasted lab grown meat. Culture. You love to go
to California. He's still got that edge, the no kid's edge.
(19:10):
And now a delicious word from our sponsors. Welcome back
to the sport Full. I'm Dan Pashman, and if you
missed last week's show, you missed a big one. I
announce that I've teamed up with Spollini once again and
we have produced two new pasta shapes that are on
(19:31):
sale right now. For these two shapes, I went deep
into the pasta shape archives looking for obscure shapes that
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like no offense to Cascatelly. I love it. I had
(19:55):
a hope it didn't take away from Cascatelli sales, because
I mean, do you think it has. It has all
three right precability, sausability to think ability. There's think that's
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Listen to last week's episode. Here the story of these
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(20:16):
casketelly clutch purses limited edition by a designer named Julie Malow.
They're really cool and they're just for Valentine's Day. There's
only a couple of hundred of them. You can get
all these things at s Folini dot com. That's sfogli
Ni dot com. All right, I'm back in my kitchen
with my friend and collaborator for this episode, Jacob Goldstein,
(20:36):
host of the podcast What's Your Problem, and we're talking
about the past, present, and future of alternatives. To meet
now for the next and final stop on our journey, Jacob,
I've been looking into cultured meat. Okay. This is where
you take cells from a real animal, you take them
into a lab, and you grow meat using those cells.
So in theory, if it works, it will be real meat,
(20:57):
but you won't have raised or killed an animal to
get it. Now, The underlying technology here is not so new, okay.
The idea of growing cells in a lab has been
around for many decades. I mean, this is how they
made the polio vaccine. What's new is using this technology
to create something you might eat. Okay. Now, the first
success with this was when a Dutch professor made a
(21:17):
lab grown burger. That was in twenty thirteen, ten years ago, okay,
ten years out in this new kind of era. Now,
just in the last few months, it's got a lot
more real, especially here in the US, because in November,
the FDA declared cultured chicken from one company, Upside Foods,
to be safe for human consumption. That's a major milestone. Now,
it's still not going to be in stores quite yet.
It's got to get past the USDA, and even when
(21:39):
that happens, it's going to be you know, expensive, and
in just a few places. So it's still early days.
But I mean, we talked about this in the Sportfull
a few years ago, and my impression then was like,
this is space age stuff. So the fact that it
could be coming to any kind of stores soon seems
like a major development to me. I mean, I know,
sort of On the business tech side, there has been
(22:01):
a ton of a venture capital investment into fake me
not just beyond and impossible, but to these kind of
next generation sell culture fake meat, although I would say Jacob,
I would not call it fake meat. It might not
be a whole animal, but I think it's meat. And
one company working on making cultured chicken and beef is
called eat Just. They aren't have a product in grocery
(22:22):
stories you may have seen called just egg. It's a
plant based egg, and now they're getting in to grow
in their own meat. To be clear, this is not
the company that got the FDA approval, but they are
one of the big players in this space. Their headquarters
are in Alameda, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco.
I wasn't able to visit, but my old friend Sean
Ramas Farm, host of the excellent Daily News podcast Today,
explained he went there and saw it himself. Here's how
(22:44):
he describes the setup at each just there's all these tubes.
There's very serious scientists hard at work. There's like big
chambers and fridges and steel this and that, and rows
and rows of lab equipment. It looks like, you know,
there's like a billion COVID tests going on at once,
with like little droplets of this going into little droplets
(23:06):
of that. I don't know that COVID test is the
metaphor I want for my cultured meat. I think he's saying.
You know, there's that generic newsreel footage that we've seen
on TV ten thousand times now anytime they talk about
COVID and tests. You see those people in the coats
with the droplets, and that's what it looks science. So
after all these droplets that Sean described, the cells go
into a bioreactor that speeds up their growth. And the bioreactors,
(23:28):
as they're described to me, there like giant steel cylinders.
They look like a brewery. You've ever been all those
restaurants is also a brewery. You see the big steel tanks.
It's like that. So to find out what happens next
in those bioreactors, I talk to a scientist who works there.
So my name is Vitor Sento. I am the senior
director of cello Agriculture at Good Meat, which is a
(23:48):
subcb area of heat just so Vitoor Santo trained as
a tissue engineer. In past jobs, he worked on using
cell cultures to regenerate human bone and cartilage. So he
was in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Now he's growing meat. So
once the cells are in the bioreactor, we feed them
a solution, so it's in a liquid farm and it's
(24:09):
a combination of different nutrients. So think of proteins, I
you know, acids, vitamins, fats like miracle grow. But for meat,
pretty much think of what you would what you would
feed the chicken, like the soliditade of a chicken, but
you just turn that into a into a cultural broth.
When the sales come out of that bioreactor, they're not
(24:30):
done yet. A lot of times people expect you to
see a full steak or a chicken breast coming out
of the bioreactor, but that's not really what happens. What
do you see is more like think of a slurry
or a concentrator which doesn't have yet a lot of structure.
So not that they ask, but my tip to them
(24:50):
would be stop using the words slurry to describe any
part of your process. Slurry, we don't want to bioreactor. Basically,
don't let a scientist talk to it. Just show me
the chicken. Yeah, like, I don't want to eat meat
that at any point was a slurry. But so so
they get the slurry and they need to make it
into a chicken breast, and to do that they need
to add what they call scaffolding. All right, This is
(25:12):
plant protein extract that is formed into a three D
model of a piece of meat that the cells can
then attach themselves to in order to get the shape
and texture of a chicken breast. Now, I know it
sounds very sci fi, but Beator says, it's not as
far out as you may think. And what we're doing
that by our reactors, to be honest, is just mimicking
the natural process. We're just feeding. Instead, let's say, of
(25:33):
having cells growing in tissues and organs and having blood
circulating through them in the animal body, we're mimicking them,
but inside of a stainless steel by a reactor with
this mixture of nutrients. Now, as we've been saying, Jacob,
the goal is to get whole cuts of meat like
a chicken breast, right, But they had to start with
a simpler project, the chicken nugget, and Viator still remembers
(25:55):
the first time they made a chicken nugget that actually
had the taste and texture of a chicken nugget. It
was a turning point, I would say at eat Just,
it was a little like touching the moon almost. In
December of twenty twenty, Single Poor became the first country
in the world to approve lab grown chicken for sale,
and eat Just began selling their chicken nuggets in one
(26:16):
fancy club in Singapore and since then now there's another
restaurant in places in Singapore. Now eat Just is moving
on to whole cuts of meat, like chicken breasts, which
seems like profoundly harder than a chicken nugget, right, Yeah,
I mean you can kind of throw anything into ground
meat or a chicken nugget and to mimic the quote unquote.
I mean, like, like like what's real in an original chicken nugget,
(26:36):
Who knows. But when you're talking about an actual chicken breast,
there's so much about the eating experience that you might
not even consciously know, but you're gonna know if it's missing.
I mean, that feels like a bigger leap. If we
think of the leap from the garden burger to the
impossible burger, like that's big. But going from a faked
chicken nugget to a fake chicken breast that feels like
an even bigger leap. It's huge. Do you think about it?
(26:58):
Like a chicken breast has those kind of you pull
up hearted chicken breasts has those sort of striations. Yeah,
the sinews right, you had to chop across them when
you're exactly right, and like the idea of creating that
in a out of a flurry. Our friend Sean Rama's farm,
he when he went there, he got to taste their
chicken skin and their chicken breast. We started with an
(27:18):
appetizer that looked something like like a pork rind. It
was like chicken skin on top of a sort of
mix of vegetables, and you know, because it was crispy,
it was sort of hard to tell like like what
the difference was, and so it was hard to be like, wait,
(27:40):
is this chicken or is this is this not chicken?
If it tasted just like the real thing, what do
they served to you? Next? Next up was the piece
de resi stalls. I suppose it was another mix of
vegetables over like a muscular, fatty piece of chicken that
felt like a kin to a piece of chicken breast,
(28:02):
but again with with skin on it, And as much
as I wanted to doubt, I was very impressed. It
was you know, it had the texture, it had the taste,
and it had the flavor of the genuine article. It
was legit. So it sounds like you went in skeptical
(28:23):
totally and you were impressed. I was impressed with the product.
Now I remained skeptical that this is going to happen
anytime soon, Jacob, What what Sean's alluding to is like, Yeah,
they made tremendous advances on the taste and the texture.
What they're struggling with is the cost. Yeah, okay, right now, vetours,
(28:44):
does it cost them about fifty dollars to make one
chicken nugget? Amazing? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's so they
got a little ways to go here before this is
gonna be a big product. In fairness, that's way cheaper
than it was a few years ago. They're doing better,
but they still have obviously a long way to go.
They got to scale up, They gotta get cost down.
(29:05):
They need to find a way to grow more cells
per batch, faster and without spending so much to feed
the cells. But it's a constant struggle, Viator tells me,
because if they push too much in that direction, the
quality of the product can suffer. That as an impact
on the flavor of the cells. Maybe they don't taste
as much as chicken anymore, or they are the flavor
(29:26):
maybe is a little less powerful. Yeah, I mean this
is a really interesting, profound question, right, Like making things
get cheaper and better or at least equally good, is
like a core technological problem in history, right, And maybe
the most important thing in the world economy for the
(29:46):
last fifty six years has been the way computing power
has gotten better and cheaper. Right. There's this famous thing
More's law that every two years computers basically get twice
as good, and that has been this huge driver of
like everything in Silicon Valley. Right, And this is very
much a Silicon Valley universe. You have venture capitalists. This
company is in the Bay Area. They're pouring money, and
(30:06):
what they want is a computer like outcome. Right. They
want it to get twice as good at half the
price constantly. And it's not obvious that just because it
worked with computer chips, it'll work with cultured meat. It
doesn't work in every domain. But I have to hope
that it will, right. I have to hope that all
this money will pay very clever people who are motivated,
(30:27):
who will make cultured meat, meat without animals, that is
at least as good as meat from animals and at
least as cheap. I think it's cool that they're trying,
and it's exciting to hear Sean say that as close
as they are, and I'm excited for the day that
we can really take this technology to the next level
of Jacob okay, because Vitor says that once they get
the template, they can make almost anything. As long as
(30:50):
you have the equipment, infrastructure, and the means, like the
culture composition to feed those cells, you can essentially grow
any type of meat, any type of meat. Jacob okay,
are you thinking what I'm thinking, Human beings? No, No, Jacob,
(31:15):
Jurassic Park. This is like almost the same technology from
that movie. Okay, they got the dinosaur DNA, they made dinosaurs,
And in fact, there's a company in Belgium right now
that says they're developing wooly mammoth burgers. You know, in
foody circles, there's all this talk about your burger blend like, oh,
we do like you know, twenty percent short rib, twenty
(31:35):
percent brisket or whatever, and every chef thinks they have
the best blend or whatever. I cannot wait to go
out to a restaurant and be like, I'll have the
like half Dodo bird, half Stegosaurus burger. Please, I'm in.
If it costs the same as a hamburger, it'll work.
Oh come on, Jacob, you wouldn't pay an extra dollar
for a stegosaurus burger. I'd pay an extra dog. How
does it come with fries? Sure, I'll throw in the
(31:58):
fries for free in I think the big question here
with the cultured meat is even if it does taste
the same, will people eat it? It still feels weird.
I hear what you're saying. But a couple of things.
First of all, think about all the stuff in the
whatever freeze or aisle of the grocery store. Like, look
(32:21):
at the ingredient list on any whatever frozen pizza. It's insane.
Nobody looks at it. I think basically most people don't care, right,
And if you think about today the way some people
care a lot, you can imagine those kind of meat eaters,
some you know, small percentage of people who will always
want their meat. But I think if you have something
(32:42):
that is indistinguishable from meat and the same price or
even a little cheaper, let's dream big. I think people
will get the cheaper thing that's basically the same. I
also think that these things may be somewhat generational, you know,
so like if you are have you been eating cultured
meat from the time that you were five, then it
doesn't feel weird to you. I think that I would
(33:02):
probably I'm more excited about cultured meat than about the
plant based I think they have a better chance of
getting to the truth. What I would call it taste parody.
It sounds like from what Sean said that they're already
there in some respects. We agree with the impossible Burgher.
As impressed as we were, it's not quite there. And
to me, like I feel like I'm in the target
(33:24):
audience for this because I'm not a vegetarian, but I
care about the environment and animals. I try my best
to buy meat that's been raised ethically. I don't always succeed,
but I try so. If you said to me, hey,
here's the thing that would check all those boxes and
it tastes the same and it's the same price. I
would go for that. I think we agree. Fake meat,
cultured meat, whatever you want to call it, meat without
the animals. It's not there yet, but it really sounds
(33:48):
like it's getting there. And if they can get the
price down, I think that'll do it and I hope
it happens. Cashman, this is great man. Thank you for
having me in the Sportful Test Kitchen. Is my pleasure anytime.
Let's tell folks real quick. So your podcast, Jacob Goldstein
(34:10):
is called What's Your Problem? And actually we've been doing
a few food shows now. We did a whole interview
with Pat Brown, the impossible food guy, who you heard
a little bit from in this show. We have a
whole interview with him. We did another show recently about
this app Slice that's trying to help mom and pop
pizza shops compete with Dominoes. So well, lots of food
content as well as other kind of business and tech stuff. Jacob,
(34:31):
thanks for coming to the Sportfel Test Kitchen aka My kitchen.
Thanks for having me. This show is produced by me
along with senior producer and producer Andreas O'Hara, with help
this week from What's Your Problem host Jacob Goldstein and
producer It's Our editor is Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is
Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sportfell
(34:52):
is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Colin
Anderson Nora Richie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pash and
I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more,
eat better, and eat more better that
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