Instant Genius - The food of the future, with Evan Fraser

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Will we be eating lab-made meats in the future, or will vegetarianism be the new norm? And what will happen to the world’s thriving farming culture? We spoke to Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute to find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Alex Hughes, staff writer at Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm joined by Evan Frazier. He's the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph and co-author of the book Dinner on Mars. He talks about what our diets will look like in the future, meat grown in labs, and the changes we'll see in farming agriculture. He even talks through our potential diets

once we all end up on Mars. So meat is a huge part of a lot of people's diets. How sustainable is this if we continue to eat meat at the levels that we currently are? So I think we need to realize is a couple of pretty important facts. The first is that having animals integrated into what might call a farming system or sometimes people call them agro ecosystems, like an ecosystem based on a farm, having animals in a sustainable agro ecosystem is really important because animals cycle nutrients

and provide a whole range of benefits to the environment. That's the first thing to say. The second thing is approximately a billion people on the planet, many of whom are poor, depend on animal agriculture for their livelihoods. And then the third thing we have to say is many of the ways we currently practice animal agriculture through very, very intensive, what are called confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs, where you take animals and you put them into a fairly small space and you feed them an intensive, often grain diet. Many of the ways we do modern animal agriculture are deeply unsustainable and are not able to provide, I don't think, adequate nutrition with a small enough environmental footprint to be useful, to be sustainable, to be

resilient over the next generation or two. And so I think what we're facing is what you might call a really wicked problem in that we need animals on the land to do all sorts of good things for the environment. We need to be aware that animal agriculture is vital for many parts of the economy, and many of the ways we currently do animal agriculture are deeply unsustainable. I think the obvious alternatives to not eating meat at all are obviously vegetarian or vegan diets, but there's also been a lot of talk about instead of having animals that were farming that we move to lab grown meats instead. Could you explain a little bit what lab grown meats actually are and what it is that we're actually eating in this case? So the search for solutions to this

wicked problem include looking at alternative sources of protein. And let me just start by saying there's no or or buts in these statements. It's really a this and of that. We're going to need animal agriculture and we're going to need alternatives. And some of those alternatives will be plant-based and vegetarian diet-based. And that's great. And that will work for a percentage of the human population, a percentage of the time. And we need alternatives to those as well. And often we were talking about is synthesizing animal proteins or proteins that would otherwise come from animals or we would normally associate with animals, synthesizing them somehow in a laboratory like setting. So sometimes this is called lab grown meat, sometimes because it's called cellular

agriculture, lots of different monikers or names that we've got. And it's such a new technology, we don't even really know what to call it. And within the broad area of cellular agriculture, for lack of an easier way of describing it, we've really got two different approaches technologically. approach number one, which gets actually the majority of the attention by the media, is called tissue culturing. And essentially, you take some stem cells from an animal through some sort of biopsy, and then you grow those stem cells in what's called a bioreactor, which could just be a great, a petri dish, or it could be a great big stainless steel vat.

And you feed those stem cells, a nutrient-rich broth that's full of amino acids and things like that. And you then get all these stem cells, which replicate it. and growing in the bioreactor. And then you've got to sort of either press them or extrude them using a 3D printer into some sort of shape. And that becomes then a burger or a chicken nugget or some other sort of product. So that would be the tissue culturing approach to cellular agriculture,

where the consumer is essentially eating, you know, stem cells that have been grown in a vat instead of stem cells that have been grown by an animal. The other way is called precision fermentation and where you would use a, a microorganism, usually a yeast or maybe a fungi or an algae, some sort of microorganism that would eat or digest starches or carbohydrates and metabolize or produce some sort of protein that we care about. And this is pretty commonplace technology. Most of the world's insulin for diabetics comes from a fermented process.

The rennet that's an enzyme that makes cheese has been fermented. It used to come from the stomach lining of cows. about 25 years ago, we started fermenting rennet instead of using it from animal-based sources. And what we're seeing right now is the broad area of precision fermentation is really picking up pace where companies are starting to find other proteins that they can ferment in this way. And so there's a company in California making way protein, which is a pretty common protein that you find in milk. And they're making ice cream, animal-free,

dairy ice cream using fermentation. So, I mean, what we've got essentially is tissue culturing and precision fermentation sitting under the broad heading of cellular agriculture or test tube agriculture or things like that. You were saying a little bit about with the tissue culturing, is that something that is still, I guess, a long way off from being commonplace, or is this something that is actually growing quite rapidly? So the answer to that question is that this approach, tissue culturing, is both advancing very rapid. but is still a ways off of being commercially viable. So I'm not aware at the moment of any commercially viable tissue-culturing approaches,

with a possible exception of a chicken nugget that's sold in a small number of restaurants in Singapore. And it's sold at a loss. It's more of a tester. I believe that that's the first commercially available product using tissue culturing. Interestingly, the United States Department of Agriculture just recently in the fall of 2022, approve some tissue-culturing chicken products as okay for consumers. So my guess is that these products are going to enter the market soon, but there's still a number of scientific hurdles that need to be overcome, technical hurdles that need be overcome before. Tissue-culturing approaches

to cellular agriculture, I think will get into the mainstream. For example, once you've biopsied an animal to get the stem cells and you've separated out the stem cells, you put those stem cells into this nutrient-rich broth, that broth, that nutrient-rich broth that the stem cells actually grow in, the growth medium, is very, very expensive right now and very, very hard to scale at volume. So we need better approaches or different approaches to creating that soup that the stem cells grow in before this technology really goes mainstream. There's a number of other technical problems, but that's just an example of one of the things that scientists have to work on before I think we'll see this stem cell and tissue culturing technology really become sort of commonplace on grocery store shelves.

I guess with most or pretty much any kind of innovative technology, there's always that stage before it becomes mainstream where you see it in some uses at extortionally high prices. So it's, I guess for here, we've just got to get to that point where there's an option where the broth could actually be affordable enough to bring to the mainstream. Yeah, that's 100% right. So there's a few barriers. I just listed one, the development of cheap, affordable volumes of the broth that the stem cells will grow in, that the tissues will grow in. There's the capacity issue. I mean, we don't have the capacity to do this at scale yet. So like there's a, you know, that mostly this stuff takes place or the magic happens in large stainless steel tanks. And we just don't have that kind of infrastructure built in order to do it. That said, places like,

Israel and the Netherlands have poured money just in the last 12 to 18 months into increasing their capacity to do this kind of research. So the landscape is changing quite quickly. Then there's a whole issue of regulatory and policy responses. I mean, we need to have these products approved for markets and we have to make sure they're tested and safe and whatnot. I don't think there's major problems on the horizon in that regard, but there's still a regulatory process that has to be undertaken as well. And then really, frankly, the food science, scientists, the product developers, the folks that are actually taking the different ingredients and making the final product ends up on a person's shelf or a kitchen, there's a huge amount

of food science that has to happen because fundamentally these aren't final products we're producing. They're ingredients that could go into final products. And so there's a what's being described as a golden age of food science emerging as all these new ingredient possibilities emerge and can be combined. So there's a lot of steps here. that have to be undertaken before something like tissue culturing as an approach to alternative proteins will become viable. My own feeling is that the precision fermentation route, which gets a lot less media attention, is a lot closer to mainstream. And there actually are precision fermentation products available today. Why do you think it is that it gets less attention as a alternative?

So I don't know why it gets less attention. I think precision fermentation sits under the radar, perhaps because we've been fermenting, humans have been fermenting things for, you know, tens of thousands of years in the form of fermenting alcoholic products and other stuff like that. In terms of sort of modern applications of fermentation, there are, you know, these two very big examples of where it's already being done at scale in the economy. One is insulin. And so initially, when Banting and Best, the scientist that discovered insulin or got the Nobel Prize for discovering insulin, did their work. They extracted insulin from the pancreas of dogs, if memory serves. And then throughout most of the 20th century, most of the insulin diabetics got,

came from slaughtered pigs. But at Brown 1992, I think it was 1992, the world shifted, and actually it synthesized insulin through precision fermentation, which is the vast majority of the world's insulin supply for diabetics. The same sort of thing happened with the enzyme rennet for cheese in the early 2000s. And for about 20 years, most of the world's rent it that goes into allowing cheese to form has been coming from a fermenting process, not from the stomach lining of dead cows. So we've got some examples. And so maybe that's the reason why it's a slightly more commonplace technology. But it's only been in the last couple of years where companies have started to use fermentation to produce. Well, goodness, there's all sorts of products that are

being fermented right now. So the heem that is the, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the enzyme that makes the impossible burger and the Beyond Burger, sort of meaty and pink looking, that is a fermented product. There's a fermented way protein that is used for vegetarian ice cream in the States and cream cheese. There's a number of other products like that where I think that science is simpler, the pathways to consumer and regulatory approval, consumer acceptance and regulatory approval are much more straightforward. And what we're going to end up with, I think, in the very near future,

is a lot of these precision fermentation products entering the market. And indeed, we're already, just in the last two to three years, we're already starting to see that happen. And with this fermentation process, is that the same, I guess, level of research that's going into it? I mean, you've spoken about a number of products that are already available, but is there something that is, I guess, equally seen as a future for alternative foods? You know, it's a really interesting question.

my note my sort of what I'm noting in both the sort of the media and like popular descriptions of these technologies as well as the scientific research literature that that I you know as a scientist I contribute to is people are you know initially five years ago six years ago everybody was talking about tissue culturing as the end of animal agriculture and the solution to the climate problem and there was a lot of really really excited probably overhyped expectations about what tissue culturing could do. And I think that there's still significant scientific hurdles that the enthusiasm hasn't gone away on that one.

It's just become a little more tempered and a little bit more measured. Whereas most people who are working in this field, I think, are now seeing, you know, the pathways to creating new low greenhouse gas emission products that are healthy and probably very nutritious, you know, that the pathways through precision fermentation are, are much faster and much more evident. And so I'm starting to see a fair bit of research flowing into that area. I'm seeing a lot of energy in the entrepreneur, startup community, exploring this, and I'm seeing big research labs that had been working on tissue culturing, now working on tissue culturing and fermentation both together. So, you know, there's sort of, they're two very,

very complementary pathways to provide the future with low environmental impact proteins. and so I'm very excited about this space, but I do think that precision fermentation is likely to beat tissue culturing to the market for most of us, in terms of most of our experiences, say, going to the grocery store. We'll start seeing fermented products earlier, or products with fermented proteins in them earlier than we start seeing tissue cultured. I mean, both of these methods, does it actually make sense for us to be looking into growing meats and labs or even just change your diets?

or should we just be cutting down our meat consumption in general? Is it a case of cutting it out completely or just lowering the amount that we're eating is across the world? So I'm going to retreat to my standard statement on what I think the future should look like and say it really depends on who you are, what culture you come from, what type of lifestyle you lead, and ultimately feeding the future in a way that doesn't destroy the plan. planet will require a bit of everything. So I fully expect there to be more vegetarians in the future than less, and more people will choose vegetarian lifestyles. And they will be happy and well served by alternative protein products and able to live, eat affordably and eat healthily. I fully expect many more people to become, we might call flexitarians or reducing meat consumption or choosing lower impact meats than higher impact meats. And my family would fall into this category where

we eat tofu more than we eat beef. But we don't really cut everything, anything out specifically. But over the last 10 years, our meat consumption in particular, our red meat consumption has gone down. The number of vegetarian meals has gone up. And we're adopting to the world in that way. For some people, for whom meat is intrinsic part of their culture, and I'm thinking in particular about, say the Inuit in northern Canada, where the culture is based on things like seal or caribou or whatnot, I wouldn't presume to say those people must have a vegetarian diet. That would be extremely colonial of me to sort of make those sort of statements and impose those sort of values on different cultures. So for some people, their cultures are embedded in consuming animal products.

Athletes, for instance, will probably have a hard time having the same high quality protein through plant-based or alternative sources as delivered by beef. So for that sort of person, they'll make different decisions. But on net, I think the humanity will need to overall reduce its meat consumption. And by major strategy in doing that will be defined these alternatives and develop these alternatives like precision fermentation and tissue culturing and bring those new alternatives up to a scale and industrial scale of production. And, I mean, let's just pause for a second.

Right now, there's about a billion and a half cows on the planet. And the number of, the body mass of cows, by far, like orders by orders of magnitude, outweighs all of the natural wildlife left on this planet. And that is not a sustainable situation. We need to have far fewer cows, pigs, and chickens than we currently do. And while I fully acknowledge that having cows, pigs and chickens are a very important part of many sustainable agro ecosystems, we need to be. be reducing our consumption and our production of those, in particular of those three species that represent the vast majority of human livestock. So we need to be reducing that number significantly. You touched on this a little bit there, but when I'm talking about the future of foods in terms of specifically lab-grown meats where we've mentioned before about its cost and also the fact that most of the research has done, I guess, in places like the states and Europe, what does the future look like for other countries, maybe those who aren't from such strong socioeconomic backgrounds? Yeah, so this is a really interesting question. And one of my big concerns with the development of,

sorry, let me back up a second, one of the big challenges associated with the development of alternative proteins, whether they come from plant-based sources and get turned into, you know, tofu or, you know, new veggie burgers or whatever, or whether they're really like, what we're, technologies we're talking about here, which are cellular agriculture, were really the proteins that we eat actually are a product of some sort of industrial process in a giant stainless steel tank. I mean, many of the benefits, though, or when you think about where those new industries are going to physically sit, they're going to sit probably on the outskirts of major cities. And you're going to see, I think in the future, we're going to see new companies open up

on the outskirts of London or Leeds or Toronto where I am in Canada. And that's where those sort of new tech-oriented food companies are going to sit. That means the benefits of these new technologies are probably going to go first to urban areas in the developed world or the G8 or the global north or whatever you want to call it. And the people who are going to lose out are going to be people who traditionally rely on animal livestock, which are rural areas in the global south. So we have to be really aware that the emergence of these technologies, may have problems in terms of equity, that people who are already kind of on the margins of

the mainstream economy are likely to be pushed further to the margins unless we're really careful about how this technology emerges. And we have to then think about what the unintended tradeoffs or consequences of developing this technology may be. And it may have tremendously good benefits in terms of, say, the environment or human health or things like that. But we're going to also have to think about what sort of policies, perhaps training and retraining policies, perhaps sometimes they're called payment for ecosystem services, where farmers in the hinterlands or away from the cities who maybe don't need their land for agriculture anymore because society's using other methods to get their food, maybe those farmers should be paid for providing habitat

for biodiversity or other things like that, or sequestering carbon, or using management practices that absorb greenhouse gases. And maybe there's other ways that we can reward stewards of the land that are away from the cities in a future where maybe the need for that land to produce food is less because we've got these other ways of producing food. But maybe those people should be rewarded for doing environmentally good things. And that's a question of policy and for society to think about how major corporations could enact that sort of program.

or how governments like the European Commission, which is already leading the way on exactly this sort of policy, could create incentives for doing good environmental management in areas that are no longer needed for agriculture. And for me, that would be the best possible outcome, whereas the worst possible outcome would be, we develop all these space age-sounding labs to grow meat in the outstirts of cities, and people who are currently dependent on animal agriculture for their livelihood, simply go out of work and lose their businesses. That would be the danger that we have to avoid. Correct me if I've completely misconstrued what you're saying here,

but there's a lot of talk about the options of land sharing or land sparing where you can combine farming land with, I guess, natural land for animals and habitat or just completely removing farming land, accepting that it will be lower production and using that for more natural habitat. Do you think that's the kind of thing that's worth rewarding in the same way that you're talking about? Yeah, that's exactly the right way of thinking about it. And often the scientific literature on this topic talks about, and you just said this, land sparing versus land sharing. Land sparing being farming very intensively in one area, thus sparing land that's not needed for agriculture in another area, versus farming less intensively and sharing the landscape for both food production, a lower level of food production and biodiversity. And both of those strategies are exactly what we need to be thinking of.

If we can take pressure off of the land by farming intensively, say, using cellular agriculture, then can we just take land entirely out of production? And can we, in areas that are, say, marginal for production, do both biodiversity, habitat, restoration, and food production. But we're not going to get either of those beneficial outcomes. Those are theoretical outcomes. We're not going to get either of those unless there's actually financial incentives that reward farmers for doing that.

So if we simply, it would be naive to simply assume that by farming intensively in one area, producing lab grown meat in the city, we would just naturally see land being spared in the hinterland for biodiversity. We actually need to be thinking from a land use policy perspective, a financial rewards perspective, from a business risk management perspective, about ways to actually reward the current owners of the land and stewards of the land for doing those sort of good things for the environment. And so we need to be very deliberate that may set that as a societal goal supported by policy. So if we're looking to the future and we're questioning what our diets look like and what our farming methods are looking like, do you think it's, I guess,

not so much a question of what the one particular thing we could be doing is. It's not a question of lab meat is the full force we should be behind or. We shouldn't be fully behind vegetarianism. It's a case of all of these different things coming together for the future of how we're going to be eating. My vision, my optimistic vision of the future is a very much of a blended portfolio of approaches, where on one hand, many of us, you know, throughout the week, get the majority of our proteins from a highly intensive plant-based, lab-based, fermentation-based set of systems. that are really, really intensive and have very, very small footprints on the environment in terms of, say, the amount of land they use or the amount of water they use.

At that at the same time, we have policies that say to farmers, say, with land that's not then needed for ranches, here is some financial incentives to produce a small amount of ranged animals that will be sold at a premium so that when someone like me, maybe Monday to Thursday, I eat a fairly vegetarian diet or, or lab-grown cheese that comes from a precision fermentation system or whatnot. On Friday night, when I'm having my friends over, I buy a really nice roast. I spend a lot of money on it. And that creates a financial reward to ranchers to be really, really good for the environment. And I'm sort of helping using my pocketbook and through my tax dollars, helping support that kind of approach.

And I think if you start talking about these blended approaches where overall we're reducing consumption of meat a bit. Overall, we've got a better system for rewarding farmers for protecting the environment. Overall, we've got new technologies that allow us to produce more food on less land, the fewer emissions. When overall, that portfolio has the effect of reducing the number of cows on the planet, yet providing dignified livelihoods for people who currently are producing huge amounts of protein. And that overall, humanity develops a diet which has a sort of an environmental impact, which is actually sustainable because that's not the situation we're in today. If we were to zoom out, zoom out so far that we're now in space,

and if you were to believe the plans of a certain billionaire social media owner, we'll all be living on Mars in the future, what happens to our diets in that instance once we're off Earth? Do we have to switch then to a full lab-grown food system to fly up there? What is the future of food once we leave the planet? So that is a thought experiment that my friend Lenore Newman, who's a Canadian academic and I, spent all of COVID wrestling with. And we wrote a book on what we would eat on Mars, called Dinner on Mars. And I think if we're talking about a truly extraterrestrial system like on Mars, there might be some fish, but that's about it.

Cows don't travel in space well. chickens don't travel in space well. The radiation that an animal would be exposed to is punishing. They take up far, far too many resources to produce a relatively small amount of food. The one non-lab based or plant-based source of protein that I can imagine working on Mars is perhaps some fish in complicated what we'd call aquaponics situations, where the fish are grown sort of in the same modular units as, say, some rice. And you've got fish rice systems where you feed the fish a little bit of maybe some insects or some pellets of protein, and the fish poop fertilizes the rice, and you've got

sort of a tidy ecosystem based on fish, rice, and maybe some insects. That's about as high up the food chain or the trophic levels as I can imagine. imagine a Martian system going. I think the Martian system will be extremely vegetarian with protein that comes mostly from advanced fermentation and some tissue culturing with like I said maybe a few little cubes of sashimi on the side for taste. But that's about as far as I can imagine using non-plant or lab-based systems on Mars. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Geneal. That was Evan Frazier, examining the future of food.

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