Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Flightless Bird: Burgers

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

This week on Flightless Bird, David sets out to discover why Americans love burgers so much, eating 50 million of them a year. Joined by Monica, he tries to figure out why in America it’s always beef for dinner and how that fact has drastically altered the biology of the humble cow. David talks to Ben Wurgaft, author of “Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food” about the triumphs and problems of creating artificial meat. David also talks to Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, about the realities of feeding 8 billion people on earth each year using meat grown in giant vats - and asks whether it’s all just hype. We also discover what Dax Shepard and Kim Kardashian have in common - and yes, it’s related to meat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm David Farrier, a New Zealander who ended up accidentally marooned in America, and I want to grasp what makes this country tick. Now it's always fun finding out about the national dish of any country you're in. In New Zealand, it's fish and chips, or the humble meat pie, found in the pie warmer at any good corner store. In Italy, it's bolognese, and Canada has poutine. As for America, well, from what I can tell, I'm not sure it has a specific food. But if you did, I'm pretty confident it would be the burger. The burger

represents everything about America. It's big, it's satisfying, and it's quick, available almost everywhere all the time. I mean, you can be in some fancy restaurant, and chances are you'll be able to order a burger as easily as you can at McDonald's. You go on a road trip, and every diner along the way has a burger. Americans eat about 50 million burgers every year. Because America loves beef. Beef. It's what's for dinner. loves beef. Beef, it's what's for dinner. But why is it beef for dinner? The United States eats more beef than any other country in the world, 12 million metric tons a year. That's wild, and I need to find out why. So grab some buns and figure out what animal or animal substitute you're going

to shove in the middle before you shove it down your throat. This is the burger episode. So full disclosure, I get teased for this a lot, but I love the McDonald's cheeseburger so much. It would be my last meal. There's no other burger that's better than the McDonald's cheeseburger. We're going to fight, but yeah. And my happy place is a double cheeseburger combo, Coke and fries. You're loving it. I'm genuinely loving it.

Our road trip, he got it probably six times. You got it so many times on your trip? Yeah, Rob was disgusted. He would sneak away. I'd go to the bathroom for Starbucks. Oh my God. And he'd be at the McDonald's across the street. Shameless.

Yeah, so that's my thing. That's awesome. I mean, I love burgers. I did not picture you as a burger person at all. Oh my God. When did it start? Were you raised with burgers? Not really. My parents, the longer they've been in America, the more red meat they've started consuming. All right. Cause it is so American. It's so

American, but it's not like when I was younger, we ate that much of it. But now it's in the routine. When I'm there, my mom will make spaghetti with beef and we'll have steaks at Christmas now. That's new. Yeah. So that's like a celebration. So we've got something to celebrate. Out comes the meat. Now it's time for meat, which is not usual for them. Because for me, my McDonald's obsession started because when I was eight or nine, I did gymnastics with my brother. We're going to learn so much about you in this show. Imagine that. Imagine this lanky body vaulting over some rings, whatever you do in gymnastics. It's all left me now.

I've got no skills left. But after Saturday morning gymnastics, we would go to McDonald's. And so that was associated with reward in my brain. We're so basic, aren't we, as humans? We really are. So I think I always go back to McDonald's. It's my little reward for doing a good job. with reward in my brain. We're so basic, aren't we, as humans? We really are. So I think I always go back to McDonald's. It's my little reward for doing a good job.

I actually think McDonald's in particular hits the reward system for most people who live here. Yeah, right. It's very common of, yeah, like, just finished a practice and on your way home, you pick a McDonald's. Or, I mean, Dax and I have a thing where, like, if you're sick, we allow ourselves to eat a whole bunch of fries. Like it actually makes zero sense. Like you probably shouldn't be stuffing your face.

Not at all. But that's, yeah, that's this like shared language you'll come up with to reward yourself. I'm not very good at cooking. And if I'm ever going to like a dinner where you're invited around to bring stuff, my gag is always like, I go through McDonald's drive-thru on the way to any function and buy 20 cheeseburgers and I turn up and everyone's like, Oh, ha ha ha. That's so funny. And there'll be a beautiful table and it's got like beautiful,

like salads that people have made. And yeah, like people have really gone all in. I'll just make a pyramid of cheeseburgers in the middle and people laugh, but the first things to go are those cheeseburgers. And I and people laugh but the first things to go that's right are those cheeseburgers and i see some people getting a little bit angry at that as well because i've done like the cheap trick my last meal definitely includes emily burger which is well known to this umbrella emily burger is in new york it's actually called emily's restaurant

okay and there's pizza and salads. It's a very good restaurant. But the burger is what really stands out. It's a soup. It has a paste. Sounds sort of awful. No, no, no. I don't associate paste and burger as being a good combination. What about soup?

Why are you sort of dipping it in there? What are you doing? Yeah, like we had to eat it kind of with a spoon the first time. Sort of falling apart. That's so strange because to me, the joy of a burger is that it's this thing you can grab and it's tidy and it's neat and you can almost like travel with it. But this is burger 2.9. It's just wet. Like because there's so much.

Like the meat is just good quality. So it's like really wet and then it has a paste and it has really cheesy cheese. And oh my God, is it good. Quite high, quite pricey, I'm guessing, this wet burger? Yes, yes. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's not a cheap burger. And when we first saw the price, we were like, what the hell?

We're absolutely not doing that. Who do they think they are? Yeah. And then we took one bite with a spoon and it was over. Like, oh my God, we got to get this again tomorrow. We got to get this every day for the, are we, if we get a jet, we're going to use it to go to Emily Burger. It has become such a staple. But I love burgers in general. I always have a running list of my top five burgers in the world. Mineta Burger also in New York is one of my favorites. There's something both nostalgic

and now feels elevated. Best Burger is like a thing to weigh in on. Yeah, absolutely. It's also a club. It's funny because in New Zealand, we have a similar thing, but it's not with burgers. It's with meat pies. Ew.

So we have, yeah, we used to have like a chain Georgie Pie. They actually got bought by McDonald's, but that was like the pie shop. And so you'd go to McDonald's for your burgers and you'd go to Georgie Pie for your meat pies. My family would trek from, because we didn't have a Georgie Pie. So we would sometimes travel two hours to Georgie Pie for your meat pies. My family would trek from, because we didn't have a Georgie Pie,

so we would sometimes travel two hours to Georgie Pie and order like 50 hot pies, and then we'd freeze them in the freezer, and so we'd have Georgie Pies to bring out and eat. So what I'm saying is, anyway, but my point is that in New Zealand we have the Pie Awards, and so that is like the elevated pie, because originally people thought pies are so simple. It's pastry with like mince in the middle. Right. But then people started going and inventing these really beautiful elevated pies that had like some mushroom in there or special steak or some other like vegetable.

And it suddenly made it like elevated and special, which is just what I thought about when you're talking about your like elevated burger. Interesting. So the pie is kind of when you're talking about your elevated burger. Interesting. So the pie is kind of the New Zealand equivalent of the American burger. And I actually freaked out the other day because I was driving past the Beverly Center and I saw a pie shop with the name of a New Zealand pie shop. And I didn't realize, but there's a New Zealand pie shop here in LA. And I went in there the other day and had my first pie since I've been stuck here and it was so glorious and I want to take you guys there. Yeah I want to go there. But yeah as far as burgers go obviously there are a lot of different opinions. I went out and talked to a bunch of people and this is what they had to say. Okay

back to like the 1970s when McDonald's was first getting started. It was synonymous with kind of this new age of cuisine, and I don't think that's really left, and I think the cheeseburger has actually evolved. If you're a fan or not, it is like a very symbolic piece of food. The foundation of American economy is agriculture, and beef is like the biggest part of agriculture. I'm a farmer and agriculturalist. I study this stuff. So they have to figure out ways to be able to sell more beef

and that's ground beef. That's the leftovers. And so, of course, you're going to position that to people. The same with cheese. Cheese is like leftovers, leftover butter, right? So like, of course, we got leftover butter. We got leftover meat. We're going to make more money off of dairy

and off of the agriculture industry. So boom, let's push this as a cool thing so we can keep this thing going. Burgers. Now we got cheeseburgers. Cheeseburger, what does it mean to me? I think it evokes right away, like, cookouts, Fourth of July.

Even people who can't cook can throw a burger on a grill and put a slice of cheese on it. So being a summertime thing, a gathering thing, so it makes it almost a social food. When I was living in Cameroon for a while, I just craved so much just a cheeseburger from McDonald's. In-N-Out isn't in Florida, and that's where we're from. If you're in California,

In-N-Out is the best cheeseburger in the game. If you're in Texas, it's probably Whataburger. If you're in New York, it's... Shake Shack. Shake Shack, yeah, yeah. What do you think that does mean to you as an American? What do you mean? Like it's just a piece of meat with some buns.

And that sums up America. There it is. The guy that I put that question to that was just like, it's buns and a bit of meat. That is what a New Zealander would answer. Yeah. Part of the joy of talking to people in America is that everyone here is so well-spoken and they've thought about things.

In New Zealand, we hate being talked to and we haven't thought things through. So that guy reminded me of a Kiwi. And you don't like hugs. So much. And we don't like hugs. Maybe he was Canadian, that guy, because I agree. People have opinions here. People have opinions and they're proud to have opinions and they're not worried about putting them forward which I think is like a

really remarkable thing yeah but most people apart from that one person I met most people do clearly love burgers it's like a positive thing and I also I didn't realize it was associated with holidays as well like fourth of July have a burger a few people said that to me one of the people said even for people who can't cook i can relate to that because when i was younger it was like right after college i have a friend she doesn't check any of the stereotypical female boxes as far as like be nurturing be a good cook all those things, which are bullshit anyway. She's an incredibly competent, awesome, smart person. But yeah, she just like didn't pick up those skills. She didn't feel like she needed them.

And one time she had everyone over for dinner and I was like, what is going to happen? And she served burgers. Right. Because that is all she could do. And also she just like threw some buns out and just had these patties and we just were joking that it was like meat on bun.

That's like all she could provide for us. But it was great. It's like, yes, even she can cook. Oh, I identify with that. I'm a terrible cook, but I can do a burger. I can like fry some mints and like throw

some buns and a bit of lettuce on the table, you know, maybe some tomatoes if you're lucky, you know, a bit of cheese, but it's doable and it's achievable. And this is a conjecture because I'm not in one, but when you're in a relationship, there's this breakdown of like the guy will grill, the wife will make the sides and the salad.'s a family event it's all interesting yeah it's very gendered in that way and i think burgers can be gendered to a point you think of burgers as being like a male thing just because it's like this big thing you grip you sort of like have to bite into it it's like a bit awkward yeah it's not like a pretty no experience it's not a pretty experience at all unless you eat it with a spoon that. That's true. But it's so funny, like,

New Zealand and America really combine at times and that whole grilling thing, the male grilling thing, that is such a New Zealand thing, like a stereotype where summertime, just be a bunch of dudes staring at the barbecue. Like, one of them will be, like, flipping something over. The rest just have a beer in their hand drinking. Yes!

And, like, it's actually the women there that are actually, like, doing all the stuff that actually, like, really matters. But guys have to deliver the their hand drinking and like it's actually the women there that are actually like doing like all the stuff that actually like really matters but guys have to deliver the meat it's like caveman times it's like we will bring in the meat like this is our domain yeah and the women will forage and the men will like go get the meat which in yeah 2022 just looks kind of comical at times and you've got a bunch of dudes around a barbecue but i think new zealand took that from america oh we we take everything from America. Yeah, we love American things. Just so people can really understand the scope of how dear burgers are to me.

Yeah. I was just at a bachelorette party and we did wine and watercolor. It was a beautiful experience in Sedona. Wine and watercolor. I don't actually know what that is. What does that look like? It's a class where you drink wine and Wine and watercolor. I don't actually know what that is. What does that look like? It's a class where you drink wine and he teaches you. And you paint.

Yes. Oh, I love that. So you get a bit booze and confident and silly. That's right. Okay. But there's a qualified instructor. He was a professor of art. Amazing.

And he taught us all these techniques and, you know, we surrounded him. He was telling these beautiful stories about painting and painting from your heart and getting inspiration. And everyone was like, yeah like yeah yeah some people were crying and then i went back and i painted a cheeseburger oh my oh so you know this is your thing you love a burger love it i love it and it's a gorgeous painting i didn't even know i had it in me was it a soggy burger or more of a firm it was actually a burger from the place we were at we were at enchantment resort shout out and they have an

incredible burger and it was a representation of enchantment were you painting from still life like did you have the burger there and you were from memory yeah i'm still confused about the paste oh you don't understand okay no i just all i know is mcdonald's i know the cheeseburger mcdonald's can have a paste like are you talking about sauce like sauce no no no no it's a mixture of like okay i feel like i'm on mars it's when like grease mixes with some of the ingredients white castle and crystals are the North Star of paste. Okay. Because it's so greasy.

It like soaks into the bun and creates this layer of, almost like if you caramelized onions and then removed the onions and what's left in the pan is like some goo. But it still has the solid bit of the bun on top and at the bottom so you can still hold the thing. Yes, it's like a- Sort of transmutes into something different wow oh that sounds magical actually it sounds like an accidental discovery that someone discovered one day and then they're like oh my god this

tastes like the shit yeah dax and i discovered it so where can i go to can i get that the paste in and out or like where can i get it in california okay so dax will make you one of his burgers which is smash burgers proprietary to him okay and he does a great job making paste it's important to get the balance right like you don't want too much or too little that's i would love that okay so we're gonna revisit i'm gonna tell him to make you some smash burgers and paste burgers there are so many things to figure out in amer, like just day-to-day simple things. You're walking through your life knowing all this. It's a huge mystery to me.

You don't even know about paste. A lot of the time I have to bluff my way through it by just sort of nodding. I understand. I do that a lot too, actually. Okay. Because no one wants to look like an idiot, being like, what's paste?

Oh yeah, paste. But aren't you happier knowing about paste? I'm so happy and I absolutely want to try it. Stay tuned for more Flightless Bird. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Flightless Bird is brought to you by Indeed. No one has a business like yours with all its strengths and challenges. To succeed, you need a hiring partner that adapts to your needs. You need Indeed. Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place.

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Symptoms can include lack of motivation, irritability, fatigue and other awful stuff like that. I love BetterHelp. I love that it's bringing therapy to the masses because it can be really hard to find someone that's good for you, that's affordable, that's quick. It's just hard. I love, love, love that BetterHelp makes it easy. Yeah, in New Zealand, finding a therapist is just incredibly difficult. So I like that these systems exist because it just makes it way easier. BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers a video, phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy therapy and you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours our listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com slash bird that's better h-e-l-p.com slash bird so i wanted to find out how we got to this point where burgers are so important. And I tracked an academic down because I love academics, but he's quirky and fun. The discussion kind of started with meat because without meat, you don't really have a burger. Although even that's becoming different now.

But this is what I learned. When it comes to talking about meat, people are incredibly passionate. Everyone has skin in the game, whether it's the fact they love eating meat or they hate eating meat. I mean, if you talk to a farmer in Texas, they'll tell you how vital meat is to your diet. A vegan will talk to you endlessly about how terrible it is. I wanted to learn about America's relationship with meat from somebody who's at least slightly objective. So I found myself a writer and historian, a big old nerd. The purely functional hamburger as delivered across the counter of, say, the gypsy wagon on the UCLA campus, the surf border at Hermosa Beach, or any McDonald's or Jack in the Box outlet anywhere is a pretty well

balanced meal that he who runs, surfs, drives, studies, can eat with one hand. Not only the ground beef, but all the sauce, cheese, shredded lettuce, and other garnishes are firmly gripped between the two halves of the bun. Ben Wargaft is reading a quote from one of his favorite books by British writer Rainer Bannam, a man who loved the hamburger maybe more than I do. Bannam wants you to get this picture of the burger as the perfect accompaniment to the automobile. And both of these things are sort of fitting perfectly into the way people live in Los Angeles and into this version of the American dream. I'm talking to Ben for a few reasons. For one thing, he's very smart. He's got a PhD from Berkeley and has taught and researched at a variety of institutions. He also spent five years writing a book about the future of meat

called Meat Planet, Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food. And in writing that book, he spent a lot of time thinking about the humble burger. Cheeseburgers are delicious and there's everything desirable about the dream of social mobility that America has wanted to stand for. The hamburger, it's meat, but it's also mobile meat. And there's something appealing and disturbing about that image all at once. There's so many ideas about this country that have been internationalized. And one of the ideas that's a very American idea is that meat is a measure of a good diet. Meat is a measure of plenty. Meat means having enough. When we talk about the globalization of the Western diet,

we're talking about an American diet. An American diet is represented by things like the hamburger. As in, it's delicious, affordable, and there's a lot of them available. Burgers on tap, everywhere you look, the American way. If there's such a thing as an American project, probably one would argue that it's always involved some element of democratization, the idea of equality of opportunity. That includes the equality of opportunity to consume lots of meat. The hamburger is as American as apple pie and much more popular. Once a simple meal, the hamburger today is anything but simple, and it has become the engine of a vastly changed meat industry. The nutshell version of this is that there's something terrible about the widespread

consumption of meat. There's something about it that hasn't scaled well. We've known this for a while. This is from a PBS documentary from 2002. Industrialization of our meat supply opened up a conduit for salmonella, for campylobacter, for E. coli, O157 infections. Historically speaking, were we to sort of zoom out, one of the things we would observe is that people now consume a remarkable amount of meat relative to their ancestors in almost every part of the world. Not only that, vastly more of us as a species than there have been in the past. Meat went from being a luxury good associated with the elites of most societies in Han China, say around the year 100 common era, most peasants are eating meat maybe once or twice a year after the annual slaughter of a pig. It's not something that people are experiencing day in, day out in the course of their lives. But then things changed. The way we thought about meat changed.

took place in my own grandparents' lifetime in sort of the early, mid-20th century and involved a set of processes that had begun arguably in the middle of the 19th century in the stockyards of Chicago. One of the really big jobs in this country, one that goes on every day of every year, is the raising of livestock and the preparation and distribution of meat. It's a job which keeps more people busy than any other industry in the United States. The driver here is to make meat available to more and more people. And there are various shifts in the way the U.S. government has regulated meat, has regulated slaughter, has regulated food markets in general, has attended to the health or the risks involved in meat production. But by and large,

the drive has been towards making it ever cheaper, not just for the end consumer, of course, but for the producer. Today, it doesn't take much to see this system here in America. I mean, you can smell it too. Driving around out of Los Angeles, seeing the feedlots here and smelling them, that's an experience I've never had before. Yeah, there's a very famous one you may have driven past on the 5 as you go north out of LA. It's often referred to by the rather offensive name Couch Fitz. Yeah, and there's a restaurant close by, right? Like you can drive down the road and you can have your steak a couple of miles away. Yeah, well, in one of the stories that rests within this has to do with how visible

animals are to people who eat them. Those of us like myself, I eat animals. I'm an omnivore. to people who eat them. Those of us like myself, I eat animals. I'm an omnivore. But basically, I am cut off from the lives of the creatures that I eat. And for most people who eat industrially raised animals, they're eating animals that were killed younger, that lived less productive lives, and that arguably developed less character and flavor in their meat because they didn't have, say, a life as a draft animal on a farm. So what their bodies are like is much, much different. I guess the ultimate example of this is a chicken. The domesticated chickens we eat for dinner are a complete freak show compared to a wild chicken. A wild chicken looks much more like a,

well, bird. They can fly and roost in a tree. The giant monstrosities we raise to kill and eat are a whole different beast. When it comes to cows, they're bred for eating too. More muscle, more meat. Mostly raised on giant feedlots, shoved in together, eating grain all day. The hamburger, of course, is an industrial product. It's completely abstracted from any particular animal. It comes from many animals, and it may not all be meat as you wish it were. I mean, yeah, I hate to think how many different individual cows are in the paddy that I'm eating. Yeah, it's something often best not thought about. There's these like cultural attachments to it, you know, like in Pulp Fiction, the royale with cheese. It's like as soon as you get to Paris, you have to get a royale with cheese.

It's like what you do. It's also that thing, and I think America is very good at this as well. It's like you know what you do it's also that thing and i think america is very good at this as well it's like you know what you're getting so if i'm in another country and i know there's a mcdonald's there i know what it's going to be oh yeah and same with like starbucks like a starbucks i'm somewhere i don't know where the coffee's going to be good i know at least starbucks will exist so america's like very good at creating this like defined product and then exporting it all over the world to places like new zealand in america did you have growing up like all the characters around McDonald's, like the

Hamburglar? Yep. And they had all the plot lines about what that'll do? In the game. I never actually participated in the game, but there's like a monopoly. Oh yeah. All those sort of like tie-ins, right? And you collect stuff in Happy Meals.

You collect stuff and you fill out your board and you can win a billion dollars. I had a whole collection of Transformers. So a little plastic thing of chips would transform into a dinosaur. Oh, wow. I've got all of those somewhere. Yeah, the Happy Meal, man. They find ways to hook you in. Do they still have cool toys in Happy Meal?

I haven't had a Happy Meal in such a long time. Me either. My guess is yes. Also, but look at that branding, the Happy Me. It makes you happy. All right. So back to Ben, our massively nerdy PhD meat thinking man. He had a really interesting parallel between burgers and another big type of industrial behavior. So this is Ben. I have this weird theory. If you were to look at a fast food hamburger, the other industrial product that might resemble it most closely would be a really cheap fast fashion t-shirt. You have these two industries that make money by doing something as cheaply as

possible. And they have very undesirable environmental externalities associated with them. They often have very undesirable labor practices associated with them. The abuse of people working in sweatshops or slaughterhouses has become famous. It's sort of a famous story of the abuse of workers worldwide. But both of these products have a really important signaling function for the people who use them. The hamburger signals having enough, the t-shirt signals having enough, and maybe being able to send a certain kind of signal by having enough clothing, having the right clothing, having fashionable clothing. in America as a way of saying, I'm part of the dream of social mobility that this country has long stood for. I think that what makes this kind of nightmarish is the link back to American dreams of having plenty, that old fantasy of having a chicken in every pot. When a food that used to be associated with affluence becomes associated instead with poverty, and I think that that's often the case with the McDonald's hamburger, something really interesting has happened. Just getting a good meal is expensive,

right? So the appeal of having a cheap burger there that fills up your belly and fills up your children's bellies, like that's a huge thing that McDonald's has going for it. So there's been this idea among more elite foodie types who have believed that the problem with the nutritional outcomes of the poor in the developed world has to do with education, has to do with people not knowing how to cook for themselves or not knowing what's healthy. There was a recent study, this sociologist spent a lot of time doing sort of longitudinal interview-based work with Americans of different class backgrounds, but many of them quite poor. And what she found was that everybody knows what's up. Everybody knows what's healthy and what's unhealthy. Giving soda to your kids isn't great for them. But that just as you say, cheap food, fast food,

soda, they perform a certain kind of psychological role in people's daily lives. And one of those psychological roles is that they're ways of showing love. They're ways of saying yes to your kids. They are ways of saying that you care about people. Our biggest food holiday of the year, which is Thanksgiving, hundreds of millions of people will use food and will use meat as a way of communicating love to one another. I'm longing to see. I hope that he turns out to be someone who'll watch over me. But is this love story due for a breakup, maybe even a divorce? I talked earlier about some of the problems with eating meat, and that's birthed the whole other industry here in America, fake meat.

And looking around, it seems to be catching on. I mean, Kim Kardashian's cooking fake meat. This video I'm watching has over 2 million views. And it cooks just like ground beef. It really does. The thing that I really love about Beyond Meat is it has zero cholesterol. That's like crazy. Everywhere I walk, certainly in liberal Los Angeles, I'm being advertised different meat-free burgers. Like it's a thing here that does seem to be kicking off. One of them we could call sensory mimesis or sensory copying. We'll take plant matter and we'll process it. We'll do all kinds of things to it and we'll turn it into a burger and we will

give it the sensory properties of meat. So if we take that strategy, which the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat companies take, they're basically saying, we think that strategy, which the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat companies take, they're basically saying, we think that what people really crave isn't so much meat itself as the experience of meat. I think that the desire to have meat by any means and to engage in these projects does have something to do with the symbolism of meat and the long history of meat being a way of saying we have enough, we have plenty, we're wealthy enough, we've sort of made it in some sense. The problem is we have a ballooning population. With about 8 billion people here on earth,

we're adding about 81 million each year. At some point, the environmental cost of meat production will outstrip available resources, and it'll be hard to create enough animal protein for the growing middle class around the world. Stay tuned for more Flightless Bird. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Flightless Bird is brought to you by the lost debate whenever you look for news you may feel forced to choose between echo chambers and mainstream media and conspiracy obsessed alternate media you know we're not competitive here we're happy to throw some love and other good things exactly the lost debate is a podcast it's a

youtube show for political eclectics who want to escape their media bubbles which we're're all in, and engage in good faith with ideas from across the political spectrum. I think it's great. I love that they have a video aspect so you can see the hosts. There's Ravi Gupta, a former staffer for Obama and school principal who founded Arena, an organization that's trained thousands of campaign staffers and helped elect hundreds of candidates. There's Corey Bradford, a political organizer for the Deep South turned TikTok star who once hosted a Fox News radio show. And then there's Ricky Schlott, a Gen Z New York Post columnist and libertarian fighting to protect free speech.

They cover it all. Latest news, ideas, trends, mainstream media overlooks. They are on top of it. They jumped in recently and had a really smart look at the depth trial which i hated and i just loved that they summarized it all so well and i could actually understand what the heck had gone on join the conversation check out the lost debate today new episodes drop twice a week find the lost debate on apple podcast spotify or wherever you get your shows I still eat meat today, even though I know it's a terrible thing to do. I'm talking to Isha Dutta, and the fact she eats meat is kind of funny because she's a big

advocate for growing meat in labs. She's the executive director of New Harvest, a research institute dedicated to cellular agriculture. a research institute dedicated to cellular agriculture. To me, the domestication of the cell for food is as massive a movement as the domestication of animals 12,000 years ago. She's a pioneer in the fields, involved long before all the hype caught on. If anything, she has a healthy dose of skepticism about it all. But she's still hopeful. Meat is huge.

We dedicate 27% of our planet to raising animals for food. That's more than we dedicate to living. That's more than we dedicate to wildlife. It's actually like the biggest use of planet there is. I mean, it's the center of pretty much every holiday. Every tradition has some meat element to it. I've experienced Thanksgiving and that is all about a turkey, this big giant creature. And I almost can't imagine American Thanksgiving without the death of this big fat bird. Even though I'm sure you haven't actually witnessed the death of that bird. No, it was just on a supermarket shelf. Yeah, exactly.

That's what gives me hope is that even though we consume meat, most of us have not participated in the act of slaughtering an animal or raising one. And I feel like if we can abstract that part of the process, we could also abstract growing it from cell cultures. And that gives me some hope about this kind of future where we eat cell cultured foods. The science of growing cells does get pretty complicated. But essentially, you have muscle cells from a living animal, then feed and nurture those cells so they multiply. You get the structure of meat by layering up those cells on scaffolding, and voila, chicken nugget or beef patty. There's also this prospect of growing proteins in cell cultures,

but you're not consuming the cell itself. So we like to differentiate cellular agriculture in kind of two areas, one where you're consuming the cells itself. So meat, leather, for example, are actually cells growing into tissues. And then you have another kind of class of proteins where you're just growing the protein via a cell. So an example is you're growing like bacteria or yeast and they're spitting out the proteins that you want. Yeah, it gets pretty trippy. When we domesticated animals, our entire world changed. We shifted from hunting to agriculture. And so this is about shifting from agriculture as we know it to cell culture in a completely different sense. And so when I think about this field, that's how big

I'm thinking is that, you know, if this takes thousands of years, that's fine with me. Like, I'm setting my expectations around this is how big that is. Because there is a lot of hype in this industry of meat replacements. There has to be because these companies all need to raise massive amounts of money to keep going. Listen to all the advertising and read all the PR and articles, and you'd think cell-grown burgers would be on sale tomorrow, everywhere. But while the promises are big, what we actually have is small. American company Just was the first to sell lab-grown meat at the end of 2020. Singapore was the only country that would allow the sale,

a very limited supply of chicken nuggets. Other companies are promising burgers, but there's still science to crack and food regulations in the United States, the USDA and the FDA. So when I look at the wins of today, I try and think of the wins in terms of the way the ecosystem has grown rather than just the idea of can we make a cell cultured burger? Because it's easy to make these prototypes and they stir the imagination. They get you really excited because you're visually like aroused by meat. I mean, and by food, like we're hardwired to be like that. I also think we need to temper our expectations about when this is going to come.

to be like that. I also think we need to temper our expectations around when this is going to come. I'd rather have something lasting and meaningful rather than something immediate that, you know, maybe doesn't actually adhere to the vision as well as it could, or it's just, you know, a race to the market. Because I think this idea is so much bigger than chicken nuggets or burgers. What are the main problems in this field that you're running up against? In my mind, there's two things. There's the fact of like getting this meat is good or better than actual meat. And at the moment, there's like some sloshy nuggets that you can get that have been growing in sales. But I haven't seen a big juicy steak yet. And the other problem seems to be like doing it on a scale where you can actually make a lot of this stuff because there's a big difference between making like a couple of nugs and 20 million nugs totally there's a lot of technical challenges which is why i'd love to see the public research elevated a lot more in this field scale up is just you don't know it until you're doing it kind of thing i mean those are some of the most expensive experiments you can do because you have to build a pilot facility, build big machinery to try out your

processes. And similarly to how it's so different cooking for two people versus cooking for 20, things just change when you do things at a large scale. So just because you can grow cells at 100 liters does not mean they'll behave the same way at 100,000 liters. So yes, that's huge. And then the second one you mentioned about sloshy nuggets or making products that are good or better. That is really tough. And I actually think that that ties somewhat into the marketing and the conversation around cellular agriculture. We talk about it as we can make the exact same meat without animals. And that was something I even said for many years. But now I'm starting to wonder, should we actually temper our expectations, manage them a little bit?

Because the version 1.0 product is going to be the worst product because it's the first one. And it probably won't be as good as meat as we know it. And we should be excited about those products still because they put us on the path to the version 200 product, which is that juicy steak that you're talking about. America is such a meat-oriented place. And we've kind of had this unofficial symbol of the burger in cellular agriculture as like the emblem of the field. And that's a super, super American food. I wonder how long it is before the ground up fake stuff turns into more solid items like steaks and ribs i think of kim kardashian earlier on frying up that plant-based meat in a frying pan i'll become obsessed with that video then i

remember dax has done fake meat ads too they taste just like regular burgers, but they're made from plants and they're delicious. Honestly, would we lie to you? This question of is it all hype? Maybe. I tell myself if this all fails, it'll still have been worth it because it's such a big question that not pursuing it would have been the biggest failure. And for my old friend Ben, the historian who turned his eye to meat, well, sometimes he just wonders what all the fuss is about. This is why I continue to think that the problem with meat isn't a technical problem. It's a social and political one. Human beings don't really have a hard and fast nutritional need for meat. It's been a convenient food for our species, but it's not something that provides us with things we can get nowhere else and that we need for a healthy life. The question becomes,

why must we solve the problem of meat with more meat? And I think that the answers to that question come out of our history and their cultural and psychological and character. It's hard for kids to understand that you don't have all day to fix dinner. I'm starving. But that doesn't mean you can't whip up a meal that seems like you had all day. Beef, it's what's for dinner. I got very distracted about cellular agriculture while exploring the burger. I just find it fascinating that the burger is so important here in America. That's what all these very technical, expensive companies are focusing on recreating. Even with these alternative meats, it's for vegetarians or for people who are trying to come off meat. And yeah, it's like instead of just not eating a burger.

You could always eat less burgers or no burgers. You could just not eat burgers. But no, we just have to find a version of a burger that makes sense for me. Like it's not even what you're getting from it. It's just the idea and the experience of eating it has to hold true. Yeah. It's just a very trippy concept. And what I just find personally disturbing is when I listen to this and I hear the parts about cellular meat, I'm

more grossed out by that concept than I am by killing animals and smelling it on the street and eating it. Like what is wrong with me? No, I think it's not just you. I think that's what these companies have the huge hurdle in front of them is convincing people that lab-grown meat, even how it's described as lab-grown meat, that label is working against them because it's like people don't want to eat stuff in a lab. They want to eat something natural. And a cow, even if it's eating not its natural diet and is being treated badly, it's more natural than whatever they're boiling up in a lab. Yeah, but that's fucked up. Like, it's not true. It's not true that anything we're doing to these cows is natural.

It's not. No, and that's the trip. I find the whole idea of recreating the taste and texture that the plant-based meats are doing, like trying to create a patty, not using the cells, but just tricking you into thinking the plants are meat. That's so interesting because there's so many ingredients in that and it seems so unnatural the debate rages on and on and on and it's like a very confusing thing to get your head around like what is the healthy option yeah with the fake meats the highest praise you could get is it tastes just like meat yeah that's what

they're going after instead of this is just a different thing. Completely. And I also think it's funny that there's these people desperately trying to grow meat outside of the animal, but it still has to come in the package of what we're used to. So, like, I think with all this technology, you could get meat in like a, I don't know, like it could come in any form you want if you're growing it in a lab. It could be like a sheet of meat. It could be anything, you know, but it has to be like a patty. Yeah, they want your neurons to fire like a patty yeah things we already know neurons to fire in a nostalgic way and that you want it so you feel like you know this thing that is actually made in an incredibly foreign way i was talking to a guy because i was doing some research about meat last year i was actually talking through the process of the idea of why are

we growing cows like could i grow a bit of me? Like, could I create a farrier patty? And yeah, you can. Like, I could get one of my cells and I could immortalize my cells. It's this immortalization process. Because I can't just, like, do a little biopsy and, like, pop that on a petri dish. And, like, it's not necessarily going to grow and grow and grow if it's fed. So you've got to get the cells. You've got to immortalize my own cell line.

And I could grow a little farrier patty. Wait, is it going to be a grow and grow if it's fed so you've got to get the cells you've got to immortalize my own cell line and i could grow a little barrier patty wait is it going to be a patty shape or will it be like a tiny you it's not if you wanted you could layer up um the scaffolding in a way that it is a little model of me my idea i really wanted to create like a little patty just like mincemeat of me oh my and God. And then have a little dinner party. You've said mince so many times here and I've just had to fight the urge because we just don't call it that. What do you call it? Ground beef? Oh, ground beef. Oh no, it's mince.

It's mince here. Okay. Yeah. No, I've been saying that word a lot. I know. Also, my dad in New Zealand works in like a slaughterhouse. So right from a kid, I've always seen how that process works. That whole process is pretty fascinating as well because it's pretty brutal in a way.

A lot of people don't see what that process is like. Yeah. Wow, so many David tidbits. You grew up running around a slaughterhouse. Well, no, it's unusual, my dad, because he was a veterinarian. Oh, my God. So he was into sort of saving animals for quite a while and then he made the switch no just switch into um working at a meat processing plant a lot of it was just to do with like job security i imagine

and all that kind of thing but it is a very funny transition to make one thing that i did find really interesting when he said that it's not something we need. Burgers are not something we need for vitality. Not in any way whatsoever. At all. But I think we do need it psychologically. Totally. It makes us feel like we're part of a society and it's a way to share food and it's a way to do things, right? I'm going to conjecture here that that's going to be a running theme in this podcast. America is so obsessed with individuality. We really like to stand out and be individual. But really, we want to be the same.

We want to be part of the club and we want to be a tribe. We all want to connect around burgers and Disneyland. And turkey at Thanksgiving and all those like stereotypical things. Yes. Again, it's almost like an out. It's like a respite from needing to be my own thing. Yeah, completely. And I also think so much of the discussion around meat replacements is focused, I think, on the West andica and how we consume food like this whole push to create meat that isn't meat and to get away from industrialized farming that's not a problem if you're in a village and you're just like killing a goat and it's your one goat for the year like that's a very different life

like all of this technology focused on creating the fake patty exists because we're in a culture where we are eating too much of the stuff like it's just so excessive and that's why this whole other industry in silicon valley exists of trying to create burgers in another way yeah yeah because we're unwilling to give that part no we won't give it up absolutely like that's the thing for all the talk about trying to save the planet and have less cows farting and greenhouse gases and all the rest of it. Like, if we just ate less meat, like, that would solve so many problems than trying to trick people into eating things that aren't meat. I know. That are trying to be meat, you know?

But we like having a burger. I like having a cheeseburger when i want to have one speaking of that bachelorette party we were driving to the airport and i was so startled because there was a mcdonald's but the golden arches which is so iconic so iconic were blue what yes I was disgusted. I like had to say out loud in this bus full of people like, what is going on? Do you guys see that? Why is that McDonald's sign blue?

So you're having a stroke or something? Yeah, yeah. I didn't feel comfortable. One person said, well, in certain areas, there's ordinances about color on signs. Oh. So I think that's probably what it was, but it was horrible. In New Zealand, our most intense McDonald's, it's in an airplane. So it's like an old aircraft. I don't know, you could fit maybe like 50 people on it. It's not like a big Boeing sort of size thing.

And it's a McDonald's restaurant. And it often makes it onto lists around the world of like the most unique McDonald's. And yeah, it's a McDonald's in a plane. often makes it onto lists around the world of the most unique McDonald's. And yeah, it's a McDonald's in a plane. I've been there once when I was a kid and it was amazing. Wow. The other funny thing about creating cruelty-free meat, there's a catch to all this in that the companies that are trying to grow cells in a lab, they're growing it in a growth serum that is fetal bovine serum.

So it is still animal based like an animal has to die to extract that growth formula that these cells are being created and so that's like this huge problem why does it have to die they can't like just take it from them it's from the blood of unborn cow fetuses so yeah it's this whole situation and you need a lot of it as well to grow these cells. So there's like problems built into the system that we're still trying to figure out. That's why I just find the hype about all these alternate meats. It's not quite as here as we think it is. So we're just going to have to like eat one less burger a week

if we want to save the planet. I tried this. We had Jonathan Safran Foyer on. He wrote a book on the environment, but he also has a positive twist on it. He's like just little baby things. I was really inspired by that. I created a whole system for myself like, okay, so I can have meat two times a week. I'm not going to eat meat two times a week. God, I had like all these rules for myself. And it was like a fun challenge. Sounds very intense. It was a really fun challenge, but I couldn't do it. And I am pretty like, if I have a goal.

You put your mind to something and you'll do it. I can do it. But for some reason, I was like, this is too hard. And why do you think that was? Was like that you're eating just so hardwired into how you live your day and like the joy you get out of the day i think so mixed with there's always an excuse of convenience especially in this country it's like i have work i have this all these priorities so i'm just gonna order the

burger so i don't have to deal with cooking or figuring out how to get vegetables or whatever it just is the easy option and that overrides any other bigger idea of how you're going to make a better impact on the planet. Which is a bummer. Look, I know it's bad. I'm going to get back on my plan. Yeah, but it's all, no, I'm not going to guilt you out. But it's also that thing of fast food. We have limited time. Our lives for a lot of us are getting more and more stressful and more full. And so fast food, it's so appealing because it's that human need to eat and have substance is just taken care of so quickly. I think that's a big part of why burgers are so popular here because it's fast and easy.

Yeah. And I think fast and easy in our brains translates to gratitude. Yeah. Like we then feel grateful for that thing. And so we're never going to give that up. That's a God sent to us. That'd be insane to do that. That's a gift. Yeah. Would you rather eat a plant-based alternative patty in your burger that is full of 30 different

ingredients to make up this patty? Would you rather have like a cow, which is just one ingredient in the cow? Or would you have, if it ever goes on sale here and is allowed to be sold in america would you have meat that is cow meat but it's grown outside of the cow in a lab you've got to have one of those things for the rest of your life oh for the rest of my life and you can't swap it up have we revamped that the the fetal bovine serum for this scenario that has been fixed and we're growing these cells in a cruelty-free, animal-free soup. Yes, I would pick that. But they're going to have to figure out how to make a paste.

I mean, I find it very funny that the only place you can purchase a lab-grown meat item is in Singapore. That's the only food administration that would give that the tick of approval. The one country in the world. I find that very fascinating. We got to go there and eat it. We got to go to Singapore and eat it. A little day trip over to Singapore to have a little nug. That's the thing. A nug. Oh my God. I really want an Emily burger. What burger? Are you going to have a burger after this? Straight away? Perhaps.

I hate to think how many McDonald's cheeseburgers I've had in my life. How many do you think if you had to guess? Thousands. Really? Absolutely. Thousands of burgers. Because I'm always getting the double cheeseburger combo. So it's always two burgers at a time. Sometimes I have to eat them quickly because Rob's hovering and I don't want him to know that I'm eating. He's always there. He's always there to call you out. He's there now. It's creepy. It's always there. I do hope I do get to do that experiment and create my own patty at some point. All right. We'll get back to that. David, you learned about paste. I learned a lot today. You're one step closer to being a full-blown American. That means so much. Thank you. That's all I want in my life

is to be 100% American. You're getting there. I think I'm at about maybe 4% and I'm climbing up today to like a 5% today. I can't wait to about maybe 4% and I'm climbing up to maybe to like a 5% today. I can't wait to see what you do next and get you a little bit closer. 7%. Here we come.