Revisionist History - Frankenfood | The Mistakes Series

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Would a tomato by any other name taste as sweet? What about a steak? Malcolm sends Ben on a mission to investigate the cutting edge of food technology and two mistakes: one from the 1990s and one that’s unfolding as we speak.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bushkin. Sue, I went to California at your behest. Did. I wish, first of all, I know you wish that you had been there yourself because this is your favorite place. This is one really hurt. And I'm...

We should just say what we're talking about. Okay, so I sent you Ben on a mission because I couldn't go because my wife would leave me if I took one more trip, basically. And so with a heavy heart, I handed the reins to one of my favorite places in America, which is the food lab at Mattson. Mattson is like, Mattson's like the R&D. If you're a food company in America and you want to do something new or cool,

maybe you try it in your own lab, but mostly what you do is you pick up the phone and you call Mattson out in the Bay Area and you say, can you make me and fill in the blanks? The most delicious potato chip that also prices, you know, is priced under X or... They've got like the walls. The walls are lined with like a pantry shelf of just like every product you've ever had and enjoyed. And like they're like franzias on there. It's just like all the hits.

Things that I can't even mention because they're NDA are on the walls. Oh, my God. It's like if you walk through a grocery store after going to Madison, you're like, oh, that's Manson. Oh, that's Madsen. Oh, and you realize my diet is basically Madsen. I interviewed two people out there, who you know, of course, from other revisionist history episodes.

Steve Gundrum, their chief AI officer, who was at the time of our first mistake, the CEO, and knows everything about why we like what we do. And Carecake became a phenomenon at first because of the airlines. And Barbara Stuckey, their chief new product strategy officer, who is an old hand on revisionist, and is just a font of amazing tales from the Maddenian. in archives. In the case of this, the challenge was, if you've ever opened a pomegranate,

it's not exactly, you can't squeeze the pomegranate. Like, I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work, everyone. Do you get that sense of my? She was so pumped. It was, I found it so delightful. She's so excited and, like, in a true believer in this amazing sense in what they do. I want, I wanted to take my, with an old take my two daughters out to the Bay Area. And I want Barb to do a version of Take Your Daughter to Work Day, only take my daughters to work day. And I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job.

So I sent you out there. Now, Ben, you tell us, what was, why did I send you out there? So you sent me out there because you had reached out to Barb about a mistake that has loomed. very large over the entire food industry that she wanted to tell us about. And so the story is, basically, Barb, who's more excited than anyone you've ever met to go to work every day, is going to work in 2018, 2018-2019 area, and is at a conference where she comes face-to-face with the future of the food industry and then realizes that, the food industry is about to commit Harry Carey on a much broader scale than even McDonald's,

and she has to try and stop it. And so it is the story of two mistakes. The first one, a mistake that we made in the 90s, and the second one, a mistake that Barb is trying to stop us from making today. Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Natt of Affrey. And in this our final episode of the Mistake series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pantheon of food science, the hallowed halls of Mattson. It's a place you may remember from way back in Season 2 episode 9, McDonald's broke my heart, all about McDonald's French fries. But my mission wasn't as greasy. I was sent to Madsen for a more cultivated reason. Okay, so our story begins in 2018. Barb's at this conference for an amazing new technology that

everyone's calling lab-grown meat. And she starts to get this pit in her stomach. It was really the year where this technology was starting to happen. And companies were figuring out how they were going to isolate the cells that they wanted to use to make the type of meat that they wanted to use. And it was just mind-blowing. So the idea here is very simple. It is to be able to make meat by using cells of meat to make more meat. And that idea just, to me, it was just brilliance.

And also no animals will suffer. And there's not, you know, factory farming, things like this, you won't have. So many things that we don't have to worry about anymore. It can be done inside. So it just seemed, it seemed like magic. It just felt like something's happening here. This would be like huge for me because my wife is an ethical vegetarian. And if I could tell her that there was nothing killed in producing meat that we were eating,

I would suddenly be eating meat again at home, which would be thrilling. Steak would return to the African household. And not just when Julia's out. But there's like there are all sorts of potential upsides to this technology. And Barb's just sitting there thinking about. them. There's like 10 different environmental reasons why we would want to. Cattle farming is one of the single greatest contributors to global warming. It sucks up enormous amounts of water. Methane emissions. Methane emissions. You could make a case that we're replacing the cattle industry with something that

comes out of a lab would be one of the single biggest things we could do in favor of the environment. I mean, there's no huge. Yeah, there's like, there's obviously there's like runoff to runoff from cattle farms. Fertilizer, I mean. So there are all these, like, huge upsides. And Barb, who's, you know, the person who's most excited to go to work is just thrilled about this. However, there was a problem. It started with an image. And I'm going to show you the image.

So we're looking at a petri dish of what looks like a perfectly round patty of raw ground beef. Yes. And to me, having it in a petri dish, not good. Not at all appealing, delicious, or anything I want to put in my body. And already, like, raw meat is not something I see and think, not super appealing. Not so sexy. So I sat through the conference, and it was probably three or four days, and I kept hearing these terms, cell-based meat, lab-grown meat. And it just, I was so horrified by the language that I grabbed the executive director and I just, you know, pulled on his jacket and I said, can we talk?

I think that we need to work on the naming and the communication around this technology. That if we don't do it now and we don't explain it right and we don't bring the consumer along from the beginning, we're going to end up like GMOs. and nobody's going to want to use GMOs in their formulations, and consumers are not going to want to eat it. And we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world. I have tasted meat made this way, and I was shocked at how much it tastes like real meat. But it's not. No one's going to get there if it's called lab-grown meat. Exactly.

Going to end up like GMOs, which is our first mistake. That's after the brink. break. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHartPride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at IHartRadio.com. So the first mistake we had to talk to Steve, who was the CEO at the time.

And it starts in the 1990s, late 90s, early 2000s, when a company called Zeneca, now known as AstroZeneca, so of the COVID vaccine fame, approaches Mattson and says, we have created a genetically modified tomato and we need your help. We're here to talk about the story of the tomato. I mean, why did this GMO tomato exist? What problem was it solving? It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing. So tomatoes by their very nature are delicate. So the most optimum tomatoes for the hedonics and the organoleptics and how it tastes and, you know, All those criteria were very difficult to harvest economically.

Because you had, if you let it ripen on the vine, you had... Too long. It was a very short window in which you could ship it or if, and it was easier to puncture. Yes, exactly. They became delicate. They were harder to harvest. Basically, it's like tomatoes are a really difficult crop. Because if you pick them ripe, then they're very soft.

You have lower yields because they're using these huge, combines to harvest them. And so you're likely to lose a lot of tomatoes, which then drives up the price of the tomatoes that you do ship. And then you're shipping these ripened tomatoes, which means they have a very short time to get to wherever they're going to be sold and then used. So the way they would handle this, there were a few ways people handle this, but one way was that you would literally pick a tomato green, ship it green, because it was firmer and not yet ripe, and then gas it with ethylene gas before it hit the market shelves, which gave it the sort of red look that you expect from a tomato. So it was like overall a suboptimal situation for

tomato lovers. And GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin. And then in 1994, it's applied to foodstuffs. And the first thing that gets approved by the FDA is a tomato. It's called the flavor saver tomato, which is basically trying to solve this basic problem of how you like pick and ship tomatoes. So there's an, this is one of those first GMO products that Zeneca brings to Mattson. And what they're asking Mattson to do is not develop the tomato, which they've designed basically with the end use of puree, uh, soups, things like that, but basically solve this crucial problem of GMOs, which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to like buy into this thing?

because I was in the early 90s covering the FDA for an NIH for the Washington Post. So I was writing about all these early things in that period. And I feel like it was predictable. It was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of genetic modification on all levels, right? Because it was so new back then. I mean, you have to understand it's now we've, you know, we've had 30 years of this. But in 94, it was like science fiction. That's the sort of problem they're grappling with.

I mean, people don't even, can't even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something. And so that, I feel like the backlash has shifted over time. But the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystification. I was thinking about the flavor savor of tomato is 1994. Jurassic Park comes out in 1993. So it's like if you have a cultural reference point for what the scientists are doing, it's like dinosaurs we're going to eat you alive. You're kind of like, we're not supposed to be doing that, right?

Yes. It fits in with, you know, there's a kind of moral element, which we don't see as much today, that we should not be disrupting God's creation. in this way. So Steve talks about this, actually. They begin to bring people in to

actually encounter the tomato, the Zeneca tomato, and study how they respond to it. In these focus groups, would people try the tomato? So do you recall how people would react when they tasted it? Yeah. Yeah.

This is a great tomato. I remember especially cutting them open. There was one thing, you know, people handle them. So you put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say one of these is genetically modified? No, not that way. You just start talking about how are they grown, where are they grown, are they good for you? What makes a bad tomato?

What makes a good tomato? You kind of build up to the aha moment. You do a slow reveal. You know, what if the best pasta sauce you ever had was, made with a hybrid tomato that had never been grown before. You kind of start off with baby steps. And then you're like, this was made in a lab. This is a new hybrid tomato.

Then we just kept going deeper and deeper into the story until we found the point where they push back that, okay, now you've crossed a line. Where was that? You've got scientists who are not, just breeding. These aren't agronomists and agricultural specialists. This is like stuff in the lab where you're modifying the seed genetically. I mean, these were words that were not, genetics was not a common word back then. The word modified organism sounded like, I remember consumers sounded like bugs, you know, or bacteria or,

You know, there were all kinds of... So all three words. Genetically modified organism. And you have a nuclear... Frankenfood. Right. It came from professor at Boston College and then got picked up by the New York Times

and ended up in an op-ed and off it went. Lewis wrote, quote, If they want to sell us frankin food, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches, and head to the castle. Steve basically finds that everybody has already been freaked out by the name genetically modified organisms, and they call it Frankenfood. And so, like, what they try to do at Mattson has come up with a story that says, like, this is not really that different than what we've already done for centuries. Like, think about the way we make apples by grafting parts of one apple tree onto another apple tree, and they come up with these analogies.

And the thing is, like, it just, it doesn't really see. stick because they've got this name, GMOs, that hangs over everything. And he even talks about how people just shortened the acronym, like pronounced it by the acronym, like they called them GMOs. And it was this, it was like this banner that nobody could really get past. And what the banner meant to people is, science is involved in this. There's like some sort of like hubris, we're treading in a place where we shouldn't tread. Like what they were eating may look and taste like a tomato, but it's just like in some fundamental way it's not. There was some kind of line.

What they wanted to be sure was that what they were still eating was truly a tomato. That it somehow was not so synthetically bred that it kind of crossed the line that it was no longer truly a tomato, but some kind of red delicious fruit? It's a zombie. It's a zombie to me. Yeah, it is, it is, they have attached one of the most kind of elemental, dystopian human fantasies.

Right, right. This thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually... Yes, it has the appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign. I mean, every, you know, there's a huge category of sci-fi movies that are just about this thing.

Yes. Everyone's worried that they made the zombie tomato. And I think basically, it's like, however good the analogy is, it's like, Zeneca's tomato loses out.

Like, at one point, it has a 60-something percent. It sells way better than like the average tomato puree in UK supermarkets. And then after some of the backlash to the flavor saver tomato, Zeneca, like, vastly loses market share.

It plummets. And now you can't get a Zeneca, GMO tomato. on the market. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons, but like a big one is that there's this huge resistance to GMOs, frankenfood GMOs. Wait, so when I buy tomatoes in the supermarket today, are none of them GMO? I don't think that none of them are GMO, but I suspect that the vast majority are not GMO, which honestly I get. I think if you gave me a choice, I would prefer a naturally occurring tomato, which is not something I'm proud of. But there is something about the intensity of the

anti-GMO thing that I relate less to. This morning, I open up my morning yogurt. And when I open the lid, on the lid, it says made from milk from non-GMO cows. It's like, and it's sort of like screaming this thing at me that I, like, it was a question I wasn't even asking. And it's just like, oh. Or I had, like, I made my friend mutter-penier the other night and I used this, these, like, this chili spice I had. And it says like non-GMO chili. And I was like, that's, it didn't even occurred to me that this might be GMO, Shilly. It's become this rallying cry where whatever Mattson wanted to happen, whatever Zeneca wanted to happen, with the way people would respond to GMOs, the exact opposite happened. And it's because, I think, like, they never could change

the name. The first time I heard Franken food, I was like, okay, this is bad. Words are very powerful. And for whatever reason, I think it was a hard story. Stop. So all of this brings us to our second mistake, the one that we are, that Barb is trying to stop us from making again, which is, it's 2018. She goes to this conference, and it's all about this thing called lab grown meat. And she's sitting there getting all excited about this technology and then hearing this word thrown around. And she's just like, oh no, we're about to do it again. Whiplash

Whiplash. Maybe this is a good time for a commercial break. Okay. We'll be right back. Five months, Toronto. Pride is an opportunity for you to create your own space, to celebrate your existence. Iheart Radio is proud to be an official sponsor of Pride Toronto Festival, and we won't stop. Celebrate Pride.

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And she keeps hearing these names for it. Lab-grown meat. Cell-based meat. And she's like, it's happening again. So how did you go about trying to solve this problem? Because basically, let's not make. the GMO mistake twice. That's right.

It was really a rallying cry for everyone on the team. Imagine if it were lab-grown organisms. Oh, that makes my stomach click. Not so happy. So she starts doing the mats and things. She gets a bunch of people together in a room. She starts testing, how do you feel about this? What do you think?

How does it look to you? It was one of my friends that I was trying to explain the technology to her. And she said, oh, no. No, I don't think God wants us to eat that. Interesting. Yes, one of my friends. I don't even know how to explain it, but it did occur to me that there could be some very different opinions. And it turns out that even to this day, there is a very political skew for whether or not you're interested in this kind of a product.

Florida, in fact, has bans. Yes. this product and Alabama and... Yes, so yeah, but it's now become a political issue. So it was like a religious thing that has become political. It's somehow in a weird way, it's like, it plays in the cluster of neurons that has something to do with abortion also. Yes, exactly.

In vitro is a word that applies to both of these, to the gray areas of both of these universes. I would say, you know, the Venn diagram of people who are anti-abortion are. going to be anti-cultivated meat, too. That's really interesting. Anti-labron meat. So what does she, does she have a term that she wants to use? She gets these people together to start thinking about the story and what name can emerge from the story. Some were better than others.

Okay. Well, here's... I'm sorry, nano-pastured meat got five votes. What? Unbounded meat, slaughter-free, propagated, minimalist agriculture. I don't remember these. Celebration? No. No, definitely not.

You know, we went through this huge list of names. I think she had something like 100. And it is a really hard problem to solve, like what to name this thing. Because the whole challenge is you have to come up with a new name for a thing that doesn't foreground the fact that this is, a new thing. And there's just that paradox inherent in the project. So then the question is meat,

like, how do you package it such that it's not like, they're lying to me, this was grown in a lab. You're like, this is slightly different. But they do land on this one name that splits the difference, I think, pretty well. Do you remember when you hit on the one that you landed on? We had a shortlist.

And I think once we got to the short list, it seemed like a no-brainer. And what was it? And that was cultivated meat. How does that name strike you? Well, on the list of names that she was considering, the one I liked the most was minimalist meat. Because it's the claim about,

it's more about it's foregrounding the benefits. And also it's capturing the kind of virtue of this, which is this is meat that's leaving a much smaller footprint on everything. It's, and minimalist suggests a kind of clarity and elegance and simplicity in the way it's produced. I mean, the bit about cattle farming is, this is insanely messy and convoluted. I don't know. I like that, but I'm not, you know, I would be, I'm not, I'm not the typical consumer here.

I was already pro this before I even needed a new name. Same. Yeah. Yeah. But I think like minimalist, I would all, I like minimalists. I like cultivated. You like cultivated. I like cultivated.

Yeah. I like it. Well, there is a lovely play on a cultivated person as a sophisticated, you know, as a kind of person of elegance. Well, and I think also like there's the old truism about lawmaking and food, you know, how the sausage gets made. The lesson of which is that nobody, nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made, that the sausage becomes less appetizing if you know how it gets made.

Yeah. And so there's somebody like genetically modified organism really spells out how the sausage gets made. Lab-grown meat spells out how the sausage gets made. Cultivated meat, I think, is obscuring that. And then, you know, it signals that it's different. It's not misrepresenting. But it's also not like throwing the peach dish in your face, which I think is kind of crucial because at the end of the day, people basically don't want to know a lot about how their food gets to them. But that is why she's trying to change the name.

Exactly. Because it's like, can you obscure, is there a way to like hide the words that make it clear that this is an innovation and not just like the way things should be? She's absolutely right. And I agree. I remember being really excited and being like, I can't wait to try that.

And so obviously because Mattson has the necessary connections, I went to try it. Oh, you tried it. I tried it. Oh, my God. But I didn't know that. And now I feel even more bummed about letting you go. So I did, I had to try, I had to try a lab-grown meat.

Sorry. Oh, God. Ben, cultivated meat. So I would say the cultivated meat industry is somewhat downtrodden these days. But there are still people doing this and figuring out how to scale it. And the big one is a place called upside foods. So they are conveniently located in Emoryville, so also in the Bay Area. And I went there and they have these like huge tanks.

And I think they're like stainless steel tanks basically on an industrial floor. And in these tanks, they are using cells taken from a chicken egg years ago to brew, cultivate this meat at the scale. Chicken. And chicken in this case. And so I met with a woman there named Aaron Santi, vice president of PR and communications at upside foods. Honestly, I think the number one thing to me is tasting is believing, right?

People ask us all the time, what does it taste like? And the most common thing someone says after they try it, we'll see, I'm preempting this before you try it. Tastes like chicken. And we say, funny thing that, because it is chicken, right? And I think that's a big part of it. I mean, at the end of the day, what we do and the innovation that has led to us being able to do this has tons of science and technology at its core. But ultimately, we make food.

It's something you eat. And so what better way to have you connect with that than have the opportunity to try it? So you go in there and they prepare in front of you. They take their meat and it looks just like chicken. Tell me, tell me what I'm looking at. Yes. Okay. So we have a little appetizer, which is a buttered chicken samosa.

And then this is a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich. Both look like the normal version of the product. And it's got a little mint chutney on top. Okay, that is delicious. Did I call it? Does it taste like chicken? That is seriously delicious. That's really good. It was incredible.

It tasted exactly like normal chicken. Granted, they haven't been. Very excellent chef on staff. But if you had not told me, if I were not in this pristine, futuristic place where they're making this thing, if I didn't know the whole story, I would have had no questions. I would not have wondered was this chicken produced differently than the chicken I get at a fast food place that comes from God knows where. What did the people at Upside say about the naming question? What do they call it?

They call a cultivated meat. So Barb has won the day? Barb was able to basically get like a coalition of people together through the people who are hosting that conference and like get a lot of buy-in from the people in this space to like use this term cultivated meat. And so we'll see what happens in the future if that can actually, that plus the storytelling around it

can actually overcome people's anxieties. But to me I think like, What upside seemed committed to is the idea that, like, tasting is believing. That where they want to start here is not in packaged goods that you get off the shelf, but basically, like, with restaurants. So you will go to a restaurant, you'll try this. You'll know you're trying something different, and you'll have the experience that I had, which is like, okay, this is, like, it's quite good.

And, like, in no way does it taste different to me? Do they think they'll be safer? Do you get salmonella outbreaks? And there's no antibiotics, obviously, you know? You don't get salmonella outbreaks from cultivated meat. And in fact, there are like, in the future, you could imagine things like low cholesterol beef. So if you, like, if your doctor says, like, cut down your cholesterol that you want to keep eating beef, like, there are ways to handle this process such that you make a healthier piece of meat.

So they're now doing this at scale, a greater scale than they've ever done before. And then it'll be a question of, can we get the story right? can we get the communication right? Yeah. And I think cultivated meat will see, but at least it's an attempt to not make the same mistake twice. I am so down for this.

I wish Barb every good luck in her campaign. And I, for one, will be lining up to have my cultivated steak. Yeah, let's just hope that when that steak hits the market, there's a name in a story that makes you want to eat it. Revisionous history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Kemp. Karen Chikurgy. Fact-checking by Angeli Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith,

engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Scarea, sound design and mastering by Marcelo Di Oliveira. Special thanks to Justin Schimmick. I'm Ben out of Haffrey.