Science Friday - A Lab-Grown Salmon Taste Test And More Foodie Innovations

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

After years of development, lab-grown fish is taste-test ready for the public. Four restaurants in the US are serving up cultivated salmon made by the company Wildtype. Producer Kathleen Davis gives Host Flora Lichtman a rundown on how Wildtype tastes, initial public perception, and the upstream battle to take cultivated meat mainstream. Plus, SciFri heads to Burlington, Vermont, where scientists are cooking up the foods of the future—including the building blocks of cell-cultured meat. Flora digs in with foodie researchers Alexis Yamashita and Rachael Floreani about why innovation is critical to a sustainable food future.Guests: Adam Tortosa is a chef and the owner of Robin in San Francisco, California.Alexis Yamashita is a community organizer and PhD student in food systems at the University of Vermont. Dr. Rachael Floreani is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the menu, the future of food, including a serving of lab-grown fish. What does it taste like? It was bright orange. My first thought was, oh my God, this is Nemo on a plate. If you order salmon at a restaurant, you often have options. Socki, Kohoe, Atlantic, farmed, wild caught. And in four restaurants across the country, you may always.

also have another option you haven't seen before. Cultivated salmon. Also deliciously known as lab-grown. Lab food correspondent and adventurous eater Kathleen Davis, a sci-fry producer, sampled the petri dish fish at a high-end sushi restaurant. She's here to tell us the fish tale and take us on a deep dive into the state of the lab-grown fish industry. Hey, Kathleen. Hey, Flora.

Okay, set the scene. So about a month ago, I was in San Francisco, and I had a lot of... quite the West Coast techie experience. So I took a Waymo self-driving taxi for the first time. I'm scared. But it's actually a very smooth ride. I feel actually like I'm in good hands. Flora, I don't know if you know this, but they're straight up piping spa music in those cars as, I think, a relaxation tool. I would need that to help relax me in a self-driving car. I did. I did. But my car did deliver me in one piece to Robin. which is one of the four restaurants in the U.S. that is serving cultivated salmon. So I've been covering lab-grown meat for a while, but mostly it's been in the context of things

that are meant to be cooked. So think like a beef patty or like a piece of chicken. This was going to be raw. Did you have any hesitation about trying it? Honestly, no. I was just excited to be along for the ride, honestly. Okay. So take me there. Okay. So the chef at the restaurant, his name is. is Adam Tortosa, he served me up two pieces of sushi. So one was traditional salmon, and the other one was cultivated salmon, which is made by this company called Wild Type. So Wild Type is the only company that is making and selling lab grown fish to restaurants in the U.S. Okay. And how are they serving it at

Robin? So the fish at Robin is served Noguri style, which is like a strip of raw fish on top of a little rectangle of rice. So I'm sitting at the bar. Chef Adam brings out the Wild Type. salmon. And I have to say the first thing that I noticed is that it has a blinding color. Blinding how? It was bright orange. Like in a yummy way? Okay. My first thought was, oh my God, this is Nemo on a plate. Like it really did kind of look like a clownfish. It was bright orange. It had those little strips of white fat running through it, which is similar to regular salmon. But that is the headspace that I was in going into this. Chef Adder's. Adam did say when I commented to him about this, that that orange color is a little closer to wild salmon.

So maybe it's not as far off base as it struck me. Maybe I'm just getting crappy grocery store salmon. Gray. That's where my head is at going into this. And so I had asked Chef Adam to make me the wild type salmon like he serves it at his restaurant to guests. I wanted the full Robin experience. And that turned out to be very seasoned. We serve it with truffle butter, truffles that we preserve. truffles salt that we make. And I have to say truffles, not my favorite flavor. I find it really overwhelming in a dish. It's hard not to think that the truffle is, like, masking something in the eating experience. Could you taste the salmon part of the salmon?

Yes. So I recorded myself, obviously, and I tried it next to the regular salmon to compare. All right, I'm going to try the wild type. Let's see. I mean, it has the texture of salmon, for sure. But yeah, texture-wise, I would say it's pretty spot-on to what I've had before in a traditional salmon. So from what I could taste from the fish, it was mild. It wasn't too fishy.

It didn't smell particularly strong. And the texture was soft in the way that you would expect from sushi fish. And now I'll try the traditional salmon. Okay, so the traditional salmon almost more, and maybe this is just the other flavors that were going along with the other piece. almost a stronger salmon flavor in the traditionally grown salmon as opposed to the wild type. Okay, so it seems like it was fine. I mean, I don't know, is no news good news when it comes to lab grown fish? Yeah, I mean, it definitely was not a bad experience, especially considering what Chef Adam told me about the first version of wild type that he tried.

I got introduced to Wild Type. My guess is like five years ago when they had like essentially a prototype. and their prototype, to be honest, was like very bad. Like, this was a long time ago, right? And it was like wet beef jerky. That's like the best explanation I could give. Okay, so yay, it's not wet beef jerky now. How about Chef Adam?

How did he describe the difference between the cultivated salmon and the, you know, traditional salmon? Yeah, I was super curious about that. And this is what Chef Adam said. I've touched, like, so much salmon in my life. probably more salmon than most people, I would say. So for me, it's like very obvious. The way that it breaks when you slice it or when you eat it is not exactly like real salmon.

Because of the textures of the meat or whatever, like it breaks a little different, where the wild type salmon breaks more rigid. Chef Adam also said that the fish didn't react to heat like a normal piece of fish. So, for example, he torched the piece of traditional salmon as part of its preparation, but he didn't do it with the wild type because he said it just didn't take well to torching, which is something that I heard from another chef as well. So I also talked to Renee Erickson.

She's a chef in Seattle at another restaurant that serves Wild Type. The restaurant name is very Pacific Northwest. It is called the Walrus and the Carpenter. Love it. So she serves Wild Type in a Saviche, so it's raw. It's all chopped up. It's very fresh. When I talked to her about what it's like to cook with Wild Type, she said,

look, it's nothing like real salmon. It's not like a muscle that's been swimming for years. She actually said it cuts more like tofu than a fish, which I found super interesting. Okay, that is really interesting. I mean, how does it do on the menu? Do people order this? Yeah. So Renee, who's the chef in Seattle, she said she's been getting a pretty positive response from people who try it. She does say that her restaurant does cater to more of like an adventurous eating crowd. So at a baseline, people are probably going to be more open to try and cultivated meat. chef adam in san francisco was a little bit more conservative he said that the interest in trying it is about half and half with the people who come to his restaurant and there's like 10 to 20 percent

of people who are like absolutely not i'm not going to try that there's no way does he or do you have a sense of what people's aversion is yeah i mean that was a big thing i was curious about in reporting this story and in talking to these chefs and other people in the industry a common thread was that it can feel very biomedical. And that's a huge reason why most people in the industry really don't like to say lab-grown meat when they're talking to the public. Yeah, that's not great branding. Not great branding. The more accepted terms are cultivated or cell cultured because those terms lean away from like the clinical nature of things. Even cell cultured though does feel a little clinical. I think you're right. And at the end of the day, it is a hurdle for people. I think it's easier to have a

positive response at a restaurant that leans more into adventurous eating. But, you know, that's not always the mood people are in when they eat out. And I did ask Chef Adam if theoretically he would consider having more menu items come from cultivated fish. So I would like to think I would say, yes, I could see a future where we have whatever. 10% of the menu is three different types of cell cultured fish. Granted, it all depends on guest reaction. at the end of the day. Like, we're here to make guests happy. So if they have positive reactions to it, then me personally, I am happy to serve it. If for whatever reason, they don't react positively, then I don't think we would. Okay. I mean, there are also states that ban lap meat, right?

Yeah. So right now, there are restrictions on cultivated meat in seven states. These restrictions range from you can't sell it here to even you can't even experiment on it in a lab setting. I will say that the folks that I talked to didn't seem terribly worried about these bands because right now they're so limited. Okay, so there are obviously some hurdles for, you know, mainstream consumption of cultured meat. But I know that the other big challenge is scalability. You know, can this scale? So I talked to Justin Colbeck.

He's co-founder and CEO of Wild Type. And he said that right now in Wild Type's fishery, which is what they call their facility, they can produce less than 10 tons of meat per year. For context, millions of tons of salmon are eaten every year. Right. So at their best, we're talking about a drop in the bucket. Yeah. And it currently takes two to three weeks to make one, like, filet, that's sushi chef ready.

And Justin says it's being priced to restaurants to be competitive with, like, premium Pacific salmon. Chef Adam in San Francisco said it's on par with the most expensive fish that they buy, which is fatty tuna. And what I kept hearing from people on the industry side of things is that scaling up cell cultured meat is really going to come down to money and investment. Because more money could mean, you know, like more innovation potential, improving product, helping new companies get off the ground. And actually in general, a lot of biotech money has been rerouted to AI over the past few years. That's just been a general trend in this industry. Okay, I mean, given all that, what is the goal here with lab meat?

Yeah, I mean, I will say everybody who I talk to who's in this industry said, we know this is not going to replace traditional agriculture or traditional aquaculture. It's just not possible. There's always going to be a demand for like your traditional burger or your traditional chicken breast. The goal is that cultivated meat is just going to be another option available to people. And one thing I want to point out to you is that the cultivated meat industry, is really global. There is industry in Asia, in Europe, in Australia. There is a whole ecosystem for this outside of the U.S. And another thing that I came away from my reporting on this with was an

understanding that the people involved in this really care a lot about the environment. A lot of the people I talked to were super passionate about sustainable fishing. So their particular interest in wild type is that maybe they can alleviate some of the pressure on the seafood industry. So for them, it's worth it to take a gamble on this product. that maybe still needs a little bit of work, but they feel really encouraged by what they're seeing right now. And the people I talk to are super hopeful that this is going to become more normalized and more and more people are going to try it. And then they'll tell their friends, hey, I tried this interesting thing. And then it'll just kind of spread by word of mouth in some

ways, too. That's exactly what happened today. Now all of us know someone who's tried it. You. Exactly. I'm happy to be your man on the inside for this one. I appreciate it. Thank you for your fantastic reporting. You're welcome. Kathleen Davis, science Friday producer, and lab-grown meat correspondent. Don't go away because when we come back, we're serving up more food innovations from lab steaks to overlooked heirlooms. We design materials that look like, feel like a steak, and then when we put cells on them, that's where the flavor comes from. Stay with us. Our food science feast continues, and for the next course, how about a lab-grown steak with a side of mung beans?

Last week, we took Science Friday on the road to Burlington, Vermont, for a special live event with our friends at Vermont Public. And the theme was the future of food. So we're bringing you that conversation with two scientific tastemakers who are innovating food in very different ways. Alexis Yamashita is a community organizer studying food systems at the University of Vermont, and she's growing mung-com. beans and trying to get them onto more plates in Burlington. And Dr. Rachel Floriani is a mechanical engineer at the University of Vermont who cultivates meat in her lab. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Okay. Rachel, you're an engineer. How did you get into cultured meat? Yeah. I started off in orthopedics, so designing hip implants, believe it or not. And it was five years ago that I had a student come into my lab and he said, you know, the things that you're looking at, trying to move away from plastic, engineering bones and muscles, you can make food.

And I was like, no, you can't. That's crazy. But after 24 hours on the internet, I found out he was actually right. And so I came from orthopedics, getting people back out on the golf course in the ski hill to now. trying to create steaks that have less of a carbon footprint and taste good to everyone. Is that the problem that you're trying to solve, sort of the carbon footprint problem? No, actually, it's a multifaceted problem, and it's going to take everyone on board. Cultivated meat is just one of the solutions.

The biggest thing for me coming from Vermont is trying to feed people, especially Vermonters. This is my community. And one in ten children go hungry every day. So that's sort of the goal here. What is your lab's role? What do you do? Yeah, so we actually create the ingredient that goes into cultivated meat. So if I just took cells from your body, it would look like goop. And that's not very appetizing.

And in fact, let me retract, it's not coming from your body. Okay. So we have these cells and we have this goop and we take them from farm animals using anesthesia. But in order to have something like a steak or you go into a restaurant and it, it's familiar to you, it has to look like a steak. And so what we do is we design materials that look like, feel like a steak, and then when we put cells on them, that's where the flavor comes from. Is that the scaffold? That's right. That's right. And is the scaffold sort of like, I don't know exactly how to picture it. Should I be thinking of it as like the bone and a T-bone steak,

or is it something different? Yeah, that's a really good question. So it looks like a sponge. And if I were to ask you to close your eyes and touch this, you may have trouble like differentiating this from a stake. And so the idea is that really it has the same properties. That's where the mechanical engineering comes in. But it's colorless and tasteless. And then it's up to nature and biology to actually turn this into something that we recognize. Once you make the scaffold, what happens to it?

Yeah. So the scaffold has to be cleaned and pasteurized, just like if we were to come. create any other food product. And then we put it into a soup pot, if you can imagine something like that. And then that soup pot is maybe some chicken broth. And that chicken broth has all the food and the nutrients. And maybe we add a little fish tank bubbler to it. Okay. So the cells are getting the oxygen. They're getting all the food they need. And what they do is they find that little sponge and that becomes their little home. And so they stick to that sponge. They crawl inside of the sponge so that eventually when you cut that scaffold open, it oozes. Is that that

appetizing when you put it that way? Use your imagination. It oozes. Alexis, you are championing the mung bean. Yes. Initiate us. Tell us why the mung bean. Why the mung bean? So in Vermont, we have many communities where mung beans are at the heart of their food cultures. And, And most of the mung beans that we have present in the United States are actually produced internationally and imported in. So that is really at the heart of my work is to really cultivate a local scene where we have mung bean seeds, you know, integrated into our gardens, our farming, and really to be able to serve more broader communities and food access with their culturally related. of foods. Are they, where are they native to? So Hmong beans are native and grow in many different areas predominantly in East Asia, Southeast Asia, but also Africa as well. Do they grow well here?

Yes, they actually grow really well here. And right now, my work, we have trialed over 50 different varieties among beans here locally for the past two years. And many of those, varieties are very happy in Vermont. Are they like heirloom mung beans? Like should I think of them that way? Like what I would find at the farmer's market with tomatoes or what what's the difference between them? Yeah. So they are, many of the varieties are what people call heirloom. And heirloom there is not a unified definition of what that means. It just means a old variety that's been around for many years. Many of the varieties we're working with are open pollinated. So what that means is that farmers and gardeners can actually save seed from these varieties

and grow their own mung beans. And as we know, the more that farmers and gardeners are engaging with the seeds, growing them locally, they're going to adapt and be stronger to our region. I know that you're both focused on protein. How does that fit into sort of the grand scheme of the problems you're trying to solve? Yeah. One of the problems I guess that we're trying to solve is multi-fold, but the increase in the world's population is going to put more of a demand on food or more of a demand on how to be more efficient with the food that we do have. But in terms of the protein, a lot of it comes from culture. There's a lot of data out there saying that it would be easy if everyone just became a vegetarian. That's not going to happen.

right like so in order yeah and in order to get around that we we are just trying to make it familiar it's almost like this healthy indulgence and the the focus on protein and we have now what protein infused like cheese puffs or something it's it really is like how you receive the protein and you don't necessarily need it for meat but that's what people want what about you at lexas so one fun fact the common beyond burgers that we see just eggs on the shelf, one of the main plant-based proteins in those products is actually mung bean. So, yeah, and I know there are other products out there too that are in line with that. So there is, you know, interest really emerging because of the protein nutrient density that mung beans have.

To also looking at including them in products that are trying to really, advocate for more plant-based diets and alternative proteins. I mean, when you guys go to food sustainability conferences, is there a rivalry between the veggie people and the meatheads? I don't, to be, that's a really good question. I feel like you're hesitating. I am a little bit. So I'm going to choose the academic route.

So when we... No, no, no. Okay. Have people paid to be here? Okay, fine, fine, fine, fine. Dirt. So then if we talk about those conferences where you have these companies that are trying to make a lot of money off of this, to be honest, there's a lot of collaboration because the idea is really to feed more people and to do it in a healthier way. And so if we can all just work together and it's really hard to convert people's diets. So really, I have never honestly sensed a rivalry, but really like how can we work together? And I will echo what Rachel said about. you know, it is also really hard to ask somebody to change their food preferences. So I think really, instead of asking people to change their food preferences, it's a matter of us going, okay, how can we

honor those food preferences? But, you know, also what we're talking about, and even some of the points to Rachel is mentioning, we're going to need diversification of solutions. And really when I think about how that pertains to my work is also embracing many new and innovative uses for among beings too. Let's go to a question from the audience. Go ahead. Yeah. So Rachel, I'm a molecular biologist. And so when I think about tissue organization, their cells communicating and talking to each other, when they come together, like just having cells glum together is not quite the same as a tissue and an organ. So what's the engineering solution to that? Yeah, that is a really great question. So I mentioned the mouth feel and trying to get those same properties that we would get in stake. But if we talk about

how nature grows, it grows on a substrate, and that substrate kind of dictates what type of tissue develops. And so your bones and your muscles and your tendons all come from one cell that starts to differentiate. So what I actually use is way protein. It's upcycled from Cabot Creamery. and I luck, I guess, but I was the first one to show that we can actually grow muscle cells on a way protein scaffold. We don't have to use collagen. One of the reasons for that is we're trying not to kill animals in this process. But if I can make that scaffold or that sponge hard, then I can start to get bone. But if I make that scaffold or that sponge squishy, then I start to get fat.

And we almost need all of that when we talk about meat. So that's where the mechanical engineering comes in. Yeah. Where are we with scaling cultured meat? Like what are the goals around how big this should be or can be? And what is it going to take to get there? Yeah, that's a really good question. So when cultivated meat research started off,

it followed the same process as the pharmaceutical methods, which are actually quite expensive. And so that model was not going to work. And then we looked at the vaccine. community and scale up. And we were like, okay, well, how do people do that? And so the scale is actually a huge problem because in the beginning, you didn't have a cohesive team working together to solve these problems. So the industry, unfortunately, keeps sort of hitting these walls and bringing more people to the table, but it'll take some time. Let's go over here to the audience.

I'm sorry, but this is an unfortunate question. Will climate change help or hurt the mong bean? Oh, that is a good question. So I think the answer I will choose for that tonight, to be a little concise, is that the mung bean can help us really adapt to climate change. So what I'm doing with mung bean is really working closely with farmers and gardeners to make sure that the breeding efforts, the trialing, are going to happen in their fields. And when you have the actual breeding efforts, you know, working closely with the people that will be growing them in the environments, the seed will adapt to those environments. So this is how we can strengthen our seed access locally to also really be able to navigate climate change.

So, yeah, when I think about, like, will climate change hurt or help the mung bean, I like to think about, that they are extremely adaptive and they can really help us. You are serving a community, people who want this in their diet, but how do you know when you're testing all these different varieties that you have a tasty one? Yeah, and that is a really good question. So as a part of the work, really what we're looking at is really asking the people what makes a good mong bean and taste texture. And we're going to use this information to then inform

variety selection. So texture is very important. And with the specific community members that we were working with, they like a soft, smooth texture and almost kind of creamy too. We've got a question from the audience. Go ahead. Rachel, this is a question for you. Are there any differences in health implications or nutrients from a lab grown meat as opposed to a traditional animal produced meat? That is a really good question. It depends on. the nutrients that you're looking at. So the amino acid profile will be there. But if you're looking at other components that come from the vasculature or the blood in red meat, that would be difficult to actually mimic. The ability that we have in this technology of cultivated meat is to make it more

nutritious. So you can imagine what if we had meatballs and SpaghettiOs. Okay. So SpaghettiOs are one of those things that are sold at a gas station that families that live in remote areas will have to get to, what if we could actually cultivate the little meatball that's in there and make it three, four times as dense, nutrient dense. So that is something that we have the ability to do. I think we have time for one more audience question. Go ahead. I know this is going out to a national audience, so maybe answer this with lowered voices, but how do we keep this in Vermont to, or further into the regional food system? Yeah, I think that's a really good question. Here in Vermont, we have a lot farmers and I come from a farming community. They are some of the most innovative, passionate,

caring people that I know. And if we can just embrace that community and welcome technology and science into that, then I think we can have a very strong footprint. Absolutely. There is no reason why we have to go to Boston or San Francisco. And that's why I started my company. So I'm a professor, but I saw this talent leaving the state because there weren't jobs here. If we can do something like food tech. People are really passionate about food. What's in their food? Where does food come from? We have something here now in Vermont to keep that talent here, raise their families, get more elementary schools. Yeah, that's sort of the goal. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm, I'm curious about that too, just sort of how both of your efforts fit into the bigger picture.

I mean, you brought up hunger right at the beginning. And like even in LabMate, for example, biggest incarnation, it feels like a piece, right? Not like the whole solution. And I want to know how you think about that. Like where you think it's most effective? I think it'll be most effective if we look at fast food chains, actually, and in restaurants, college campuses, where there is a lot of food that's going out. But for me, it's not just food security or making more food. It's food access. That's a big reason why I'm doing this, is that if we can get it to a price where it's cheaper, and we can make way more meatballs or something here in Burlington, then imagine the power we have to take that to a food shelf or something.

So that's really the driver of why I'm doing that. Alexis? Yeah, I think really bringing this all together is really looking at regionally based work. Commonly people think about grapes, you know, and wine of how the flavor is really tied to the environmental conditions, that they are grown in. This is food across the board, including mung beans. Because as we know, a lot of the, like, industrial food out there, when it's bred for transportation and make sure it doesn't bruise,

it can stay fresh long, but not necessarily the taste. So if we are naturally breeding to get mung beans into a local system that fit taste preference and taste good, the climate adaptation will follow. So that is really at the heart of my work is having local mung beans, but local mung beans that taste amazing. I think that's a perfect place to leave it. Thank you both. Thank you.

Alexis Yamashita is a community organizer and Ph.D. student in food systems at the University of Vermont, and Dr. Rachel Floriani is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. Today's episode was produced by Kathleen Davis and Rosh. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.