Science Vs - Lab-Grown Meat: We Grill It

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Silicon Valley seems to be constantly pumping out "solutions" to fix our broken food system. The latest and greatest: cell-cultured meat — meat that's grown in vats, without needing to kill animals. Companies say their new techy meat will be safe and better for the planet than what we have now. We join forces with Chase Purdy, author of “Billion Dollar Burger,” to find out if this stuff is all it’s cracked up to be. In this episode, we speak to Ira van Eelen, Dr. Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats and Dr. Carolyn Mattick. Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/2IbvIu1 This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Chase Purdy, with help from Rose Rimler, Nicholas DelRose, Michelle Dang and Hannah Harris Green. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Hanna Tuomisto, Dr. Marco Springmann and Dr. Lini Wollenberg. And special thanks to Livia Padilha, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against fleshy food. When did you fall in love with food? Are you in love with food? I am in love with food. I've always liked cooking with my mom. This is Chase Purdy. He's a journalist who reports on the inner workings of our food system, like how meat gets from our farms to our plates.

Which made me start questioning, like, meat, because when you learn about how our meat system is made, you start having lots more opinions about the food that we eat. When you know literally how the sausage is made. Exactly, right, yes. And when Chase started diving into this, he quickly saw what a mess our meat system is. Like, just looking at what it does to our environment. It's estimated that 15% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions

comes from livestock. 15%. It also uses up a lot of land, and when these animals poo, it can ultimately get in our waterways. And then there's just the fact that we're killing a lot of animals. Billions of land animals every year. Fish is harder to track, but they estimate between one and two trillion fish. So it's a hell of a lot of animals that sort of end up getting slaughtered to feed our appetite for food.

This is a broken food system. A lot of us have heard about this broken food system. And it feels like every year Silicon Valley is giving us new solutions. One year it was soylent. Remember, we were going to get all of our nutrients from a bottle. Next, it was fake burgers made from plants, like the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger. And now, there's a new solution on the horizon.

It's one of these wild ideas that just might work. And a little while ago, it brought Chase to the headquarters of a tech startup in Berkeley, California. You okay with the sun? Yeah, for a bit. I have a little bit to be worried about, more than you. The sun's problematic for me because I'm bald, and so... Chase is with Uma Valetti, the CEO of Memphis Meats,

and he's about to taste meat from the future. Yeah, so we're, like like sitting there on the bench chatting and someone walks out of the front door of the company, which I can see from where I'm sitting, and he comes over with like a plate. So this is the Memphis Meats duck. It's grown right here. The meat is just seasoned with salt and pepper,

but the meat is really the star of the show. What did it look like? It looked just like a chicken tender. I mean, if you went to like a McDonald's or an Arby's,. What did it look like? It looked just like a chicken tender. I mean, if you went to like a McDonald's or an Arby's, that's what it looked like. It was actually a duck tender. A juicy hunk of duck, real meat. And yet, no duck died for Chase's lunch. And the idea is that by making it, we wouldn't be killing the planet either. We took a little bite and... This is wild.

It did taste like duck. That's tasty. That's really cool. That's really, really cool. And the reason that this is really cool is because this meat, it was cooked up in a laboratory, grown in a vat, cell by cell. So it really took Chase by surprise that it didn't just taste like meat,

but it also looked like meat. I expected to pull it apart and it to be kind of mealy or kind of just like very processed looking like a chicken nugget when you pull it apart. But the mind blowing thing about it was that it had all of the elements of like what the texture and feel of like of, like, the quote-unquote real thing would have. That's wild and cool. I just thought in my brain at the time, like, they did it. Chase has been following the lab-grown meat industry for years. He just wrote a book about it called Billion Dollar Burger. And he says that after years of flopping about, lab-grown meat is finally making it into the big time.

There are about 50 start-ups all around the world trying to hit the market first. Chase calls this the edible space race. Like there's one in Singapore that's making shrimp. You have chicken nuggets being made, chicken tenders, duck foie gras. I mean, you name it, there's a pet food, cell-cultured meat company making mouse mincemeat for cats.

What? That does exist, that's real. These companies are saying they're the answer to our broken meat system, that their meat is better for the planet than what we have now, and it's going to save us from climate change. So today, we're going to sink our teeth into this weird world of lab-grown meat. We'll find out where did this crazy idea come from? How exactly do you grow a duck tender in a lab

without carving off a piece from an actual duck? And finally, could this mad science really give us a cleaner and greener food system? When it comes to lab-grown meat, there's a lot of... This is wild. But then there's science. It's all coming up after our lunch break. You're all afraid of ghosts. How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. We'll be right back. show Chili's. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeye's before it ghosts you for another year.

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Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Welcome back. Today, we're diving into the world of growing meat in a lab. And this technology is so new that the nerds who make it are still arguing over what to call it. I talked about this with food writer Chase Purdy. Yeah, the names are super weird. You have motherless meat, which is just strange.

Motherless meat. Yeah, that really evokes what you want on your plate. You know, the industry for a while tried to get clean meat to be a thing to like give this idea of clean energy. Don Draper approved that one, clean meat. Right, exactly. But the issue with that was that several Dutch scientists spoke up and were like,

in our language, this sounds like it's been run through detergents. So I like to call it what it is in a very scientific level, which is just cell cultured meat. Cell cultured meat. So that's what we to call it what it is on a very scientific level, which is just cell-cultured meat. Cell-cultured meat. So that's what we'll call it. And the first question we had about this technology is just, where did this idea come from?

And it turns out that while cell-cultured meat now has millions of dollars of investments, fancy offices and CEOs from Silicon Valley. Where this idea started, it couldn't be further away from all that. I'm in front of a porthole. There's a huge thunderstorm going on. So I'm floating on the water in Amsterdam. This person who lives on a houseboat in Amsterdam is Ira van Eelen.

And we called her up because her dad, Willem, is known as the godfather of cell-cultured meat. He's the guy that started this. He was a dreamer. He was extremely charming. He was bright. He died a few years ago. But Ira grew up hearing him tell the tale of how it all began.

There are real heroes in there. It all started during World War II. Willem was a young soldier and he was captured by the Japanese and taken to a POW camp. Which was horrible. He was basically left to starve. And years later, that memory of being so hungry, it stayed with him, even after the war ended and he moved to the Netherlands. Ira remembers her dad telling this story of a time when he was just gazing at cans of food in a store window.

So not at a jewellery shop with an expensive watch. That wasn't a big treasure. The big treasure was a piece of canned food. The day Willem started thinking about growing meat in a lab started off pretty normally. Soon after the war, he'd enrolled in medical school and was touring the labs. And there, he saw something that lit a fuse in his mind.

He described it as if he saw a fish tank, let's say a small fish tank, with a piece of tissue in it. Scientists had put a chunk of animal tissue in liquid in a glass tank and they were trying to keep it alive, hoping that one day they could grow organs, like livers and kidneys, from scratch. But Ira says that because of her dad's experience in the war, he was always looking at things and thinking...

Hey, I can eat that. So when he saw this piece of tissue floating in that glass tank, he wasn't thinking about the future of human organs. Everybody else was looking at it as, like, wow, this is great science. And he was looking like, hey, I can put this in a frying pan and eat this. Willem started thinking more about this. Like what if instead of taking a cell and trying to grow, say, a new heart, we took a chicken cell and tried to grow chicken fillets,

like thousands of them, or steaks? Because if we could do that, then maybe it would be easier to get more food to more people. For decades, he tried to convince scientists to join him without much luck, but he kept calm and carried on. If you can recover from Japanese war camps, this is just a minor glitch in your life. So Willem started tinkering with his idea, basically on his own. In 1997, he was the first to file a patent detailing how you might do this, cook up meat in a lab.

And several years later, other people started taking notice. By the mid-2000s, Willem and others convinced the Dutch government to pour some money into cell-cultured meat. And that ultimately led to the moment in August 2013, when Willem's big idea burst onto the spotlight. Now, the world's first lab-grown cultured beef burger has been cooked and eaten at an event in London. The raw ingredients may sound unappetising.

Half-millimetre thick strips of pinkish-yellow lab-grown tissue... Which were then combined and made into a patty. ..in a room full of journalists, food critics tried the burger. There's quite some intense taste. It's close to meat. It's not that juicy. Chase Purdy, who was watching all of this happen, said that this taste test, it was basically a publicity stunt to show people

that you could actually eat meat that was cooked up in a lab. Because Chase says that these burgers, they were far away from getting into our supermarkets. It was painstakingly created. Like, literally four or five scientists growing tiny bits of ground beef, little bits at a time. It's like they were sewing it by hand, like a delicate quilt or something like that. Kind of. They were growing it bit by bit by bit, which took a while.

They also use this kind of gross and very expensive ingredient called fetal calf serum. It literally comes from the blood of a cow fetus and it helps to get the cells to grow. All in all, it was estimated that one of these burgers would cost more than 300,000 US dollars. So bottom line, if this technology was going to work at all, these companies were going to have to find a whole new way to make cell cultured meat. But that was in 2013 and since then the tech has come a long way. We've got dozens of startups beavering away trying to perfect not just mince meat in a burger but they want to make thick slabs of steak, cocktails of bouncy shrimp, they want to make Sunday roast. And they're trying to make it way cheaper

without using the blood of cow fetuses. So how are scientists working it all out right now? To find out, we caught up with the guy who shared a meal with Chase at the start of the show. My name is Uma Valeti. I'm a cardiologist and I founded Memphis Meats. Uma walked us through step by step the kind of bizarre ways that they're cooking all this up. So if you're trying to make chicken fillets here's how it starts. Using say a needle Uma and his team can suck up cells from a real living chicken and not just any cells. Yeah these are stem or stem like, which means these cells can continue to multiply and grow and become muscle tissue or fat or bone.

And that's what we're talking about. Once you take the cells out of the chicken, they're all naked and alone, no longer in the warm, natural cell factory of a chicken's body. And since these cells don't have a body to grow in, Uma has to make's body. And since these cells don't have a body to grow in, Uma has to make a body. And to do that, he uses a big cauldron called a bioreactor. And inside it...

It includes amino acids and fats and vitamins and minerals. He adds proteins, sugars and iron, hormones like insulin. Chicken cells also need oxygen, which in a real bird would flow through their body via their blood. Uma's bioreactor doesn't have that. So instead, he passes oxygen through this witch's brew. Ultimately, you end up with a kind of watery goo, which Uma says tastes a bit like blood. Many of us remember if we had a cut putting our finger in our mouth, right? And it tastes a little salty. That's the best way I can describe

what this tastes. It has a little salty flavor in there. You might have a little bit of a metallic taste in there, but you know, that's kind of what it reminds me of. So that's the basic idea. You take some cells, grow or culture them in a lab. That's why it's called self-cultured meat. But Uma has been toiling away at this for five years. And he says, it's just really hard to mimic the innards of a chicken. I mean, seriously, just try it. Grr, grr, grr, grr.

I mean, chemically, it's hard too. So, for example, Uma told us that sometimes his cells just don't play ball. He'll give them their salty slop, hoping they'll grow into a big, fat chicken tender. He'll leave them for weeks to do their thing and then come back to the lab and be like, hey, where is the tissue? It didn't grow at all. And we didn't know why it was not growing after

spending a week, two weeks trying to feed the cells. And they'll just sit there and sit there and just keep eating. They just won't grow. They refuse to grow. How many times did it not work? Did you come back to the reactor and all the cells were dead? Yeah, I mean, it happens even now. There's a number of times that we felt like this is never going to work. I'd say, you know, we stared into that absolute despair of, will this ever work more times than I can count? But little by little, Uma has been learning how to work through this

by playing around with his secret recipe. These days, they're also trying to only work with the most cooperative cells, the ones that will do really well in his watery slop. He saves those for the next batches and tosses the duds in the bin. Essentially, what Uma's team is doing is kind of breeding cells. You can think about it like taking a wild jungle fowl and breeding it generation to generation until you get a plump, fat chicken. And while Uma is working through that puzzle, he's got another problem to deal with. You see, if Uma just shoved cells into

a vat to grow any which way, he'd basically get a meat milkshake. So some companies build scaffoldings, which are like a jungle gym for cells to grow on. Memphis Meats has managed to find the right mix of ingredients in their goo to help kind of coax the cells to grow in these little layers. So in the early stages, the tissues are very, very thin. You can only see them under a microscope. But as they start growing, once they get to a couple of weeks, you'll start actually seeing with naked eye that these are like tissues, like meat has this very light pinkish kind of hue. And as

they start growing and once we harvest it, you'll start seeing it as little chunks of meat. So like imagine cubed chicken. So how those little cubes look like, except we don't have bones in there. So it's just cubed boneless chicken is what I would describe it as. Mmm, cute boneless chicken. Gah. But seriously, this has been a real struggle. And now, Uma can almost taste victory. And the moment that he actually thought, we will do this,

was when his team cooked up beef in his lab and then made fajitas. And I still can't forget the moment in which I've, you know, put that fajita in my mouth and just was eating it. I'm like, that intense flavor that came off, the meaty flavor, is when I'm like, okay, this is meat. Memphis Meat says that it takes several weeks to go from a bunch of cells to chicken, beef or duck that you can eat. So we are getting really close.

But the billion-dollar question is, will this meat live up to its hype? Right now, this is all basically happening in small photogenic laboratories. But if this is really going to work, it's going to need to be scaled up in a massive way. And that means we're going to need huge vats filled with thousands of litres of that weird salty goo bubbling away. And if all that happens,

will this really be that environmentally friendly? That's coming up just after the break. Will this really be that environmentally friendly? That's coming up just after the break. So I first came to Edward Jones with a great deal of trepidation. When I first met with my advisor, and I really was feeling vulnerable about what I would have to share, I was of course pleasantly surprised to find that there was absolutely no judgment and a lot of support. And when it was time to get serious, he really took my hand and helped me to do that. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different.

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The big promise here is that this is going to be the great new hope for meat eaters. All the burgers you want and you don't have to hurt the planet while you're at it. But is that true? Hello, hello, hello. Hi, can you hear me? Hey, I can. This is Dr. Carolyn Matic, an environmental engineer at the University of West Florida. And she has analyzed every step of making cell-cultured meat

to see if it really is Captain Planet approved and better for the environment than the meat we're making now. And to help us see how this fancy new tech might use up energy, Carolyn painted a picture for us of a cell-cultured meat facility. That facility is going to look like a really high tech brewery. So people involved in cell-based meat have coined the term carnery. Oh, like instead of instead of a brewery, a con, because con, like carnivorous. Yes. Isn't that clever? So these carneries are basically going to be full of big metal vats with piping all over them. And these vats are going to need power to run them.

To circulate the water, to circulate the nutrients, to circulate the oxygen, maintaining the temperature. And some of this just isn't necessary when we're growing, say, a cow or a chicken, because the cow and the chicken do all of those things kind of, you know, internally. Oh, right. Because like a cow is naturally 37 degrees Celsius. Exactly. Right. But we will need to do that with electricity or whatnot when we do it in a lab. Exactly, yes. We will have to do all of those functions for them.

And while with this new kind of meat, we're not going to need to grow all the grains to feed the cows to then feed us, we'll still need to feed the cells with stuff like sugar. And that doesn't come for free. So in the US, a bunch of sugar comes from corn. We mill it and we dry it and that becomes sugar. So that in itself is an energy intensive process. But the big question Carolyn was ruminating on was, is all of this going to be more energy intensive, say pump out more greenhouse gases, than making meat the old-fashioned way?

Because what we've got now is pretty bad. And a big reason for that is that we currently have millions of cows burping out this really potent greenhouse gas called methane. So you put it all together, who is better, cell-cultured meat or bad old agriculture? Carolyn estimated that cell-cultured meat would probably be better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than beef because there's much less of that pesky methane to deal with. But this new technology, it could end up spitting out more greenhouse gases than pork and poultry. Potentially, yes. You know, a lot of the messaging around the environmental implications of this technology is that it's good. It is better than conventional meat.

And I look at it as not being inherently better or inherently worse, but being different. And there were a couple of things where cell-cultured meat really looked like the clear winner. That was to do with water pollution and land use. Carolyn estimated that without so many animals crapping all over the countryside, we'd have less of that poo running off into our waterways. We'd also probably need less land, partly because we wouldn't need to grow all those acres of grains to feed the animals to then feed us. Other work has found similar stuff here. It is very likely that producing meat in a factory will require

less land. It is very likely. Now, Carolyn's study was published a few years ago. It's based on what she knew then. And by the time this meat makes its way to your barbie, a lot could change. But Carolyn's broader point is that this technology isn't necessarily going to be great for the environment. Like, if these companies don't properly treat their waste when it runs out of their bioreactors,

or they use ingredients in their witch's brew that are just really bad for the planet, then it's going to be bad. From where we're sitting now, though, Carolyn is optimistic. I do think it has the potential to be environmentally beneficial. It's not automatically an environmental win across the board, but I think it has a lot of potential. And then just a quick gut check. Is this stuff going to be safe to eat? Well, as with any new food that's hitting our grocery aisles, whether it's Pop-Tarts or Flamin' Hot Cheetos or cell cultured meat, we're not going to have any randomized control trials to show that this is safe in the

long run. But curiously, there is this one way that this new meat has the potential to be safer than the stuff we're eating now. So raw meat that you buy at the supermarket at the moment often has nasty bacteria in it, like E. coli and salmonella. And it gets there because this bacteria is hanging out in the guts of cows and chickens. And when the carcasses are carved up in the slaughterhouse, the bacteria can move onto the meat. With cell-cultured meat, no guts, no slaughterhouse. Here's Chase.

You know, one of the scientists told me in one of the labs, I was like, I was looking at some of the raw meat that was coming out of a bioreactor, and I just sort of said, what would happen if you ate this right now? And he said, I wouldn't want to do this because I don't think it would taste great without being cooked, but it's totally safe.

You could just spoon it right into your mouth. If everything goes to plan, though, and this beef cooked up in a carnery is exactly like beef from the ranch, it's still not going to be the healthiest thing around. We know that eating too much meat can be bad for us, which kind of takes us to the giant pumpkin in the room here. If we're worried about the environment and our health,

we don't really need to scoop our brekkie out of vats in Silicon Valley. We can just eat more plants. Work comparing cell-cultured meat to beans or nuts has found that this snazzy new technology, it just can't compete with these simple foods. The lab stuff is worse for the environment than just eating plants. And this is probably true for a lot of the sparkling start-ups pumping out these complicated processed foods like Impossible Burgers.

Chase has spent a lot of time thinking about all this. So I took this meaty issue to him. I just can't help but think we should just be eating less meat. Just like, and that's the singular message. We should all be eating less meat. I should be eating less meat. We don't need to be investing millions into this brand spanking new thing. Right.

We shouldn't need to, but I don't think that we can make a good bet that people are going to suddenly go vegetarian because of the planet. Because we've been asking them to for a long time. Certainly you and I haven't made that switch yet. And we know the science pretty well. And the fact of people's heads, cell-cultured meat offers, like, another possibility. These companies are ultimately banking on the fact

that we are so obsessed with meat that we will shovel it out of bioreactors rather than quit meat, cold tofurkey. And, you know, maybe they're right. That's Science Versus. Hello. Hey, Chase Purdy, food writer and writer of Billion Dollar Burger. Hi.

Who helped us produce this week's episode of Science Versus. And live to tell the tale. Yes, my pleasure. So tell us how many citations are in this week's episode. Looks like we have 82 citations. And if people want to find those citations, then they should look at our show notes and click on the transcript. Sounds good.

What are you having for dinner, Wendy? You know what? I'm going to have roast veggies for dinner. I ate an early dinner and I had an orzo and wilted spinach pasta. No meat. No meat. Look at us. Baby steps. Baby steps. For sure. Thanks, Chase. Thank you. If you want to know more about the edible space race, which is trying to get cell-cultured meat onto your plate, then you've got to check out Chase's book. It's a great read and it's called Billion Dollar Burger.

Also, if you want to read more about what Ira Van Eelen is doing in this space, then head over to www.kindearth.tech. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Chase Purdy, with help from Rose Rimler, Nicholas Delrose, Michelle Dang, and Hannah Harris-Green. We're edited by Blythe Jarrell. Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Sam Baer.

Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Hannah Tuomisto, Dr. Marco Sprigman and Dr. Leni Wallenberg. A special thanks to Livia Padilla, Jack Weinstein, The Zuckerman Family

and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll fact you next time. I do have something fun I could show you if you want. Basically, it is a futuristic cookbook on what you can make with cell-cultured meat. Okay, so when we flip through, what do we have here? We have whiskey-glazed celebrity cubes. What? Is the idea that you would actually have cells from Kanye grow in the middle of a lab and eat them?

If they were feeling super promotional, yes, that is the idea. As you can see, and you see on this other page over here like they're cubes of meat with little toothpicks sticking in them and on the other page it says forget autographs or posters prove that you're the ultimate fan of a celebrity by eating him or her takes you to a whole other level the future is nigh