StarTalk Radio - Clean Meat, with Paul Shapiro

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the future of clean meat and animal agriculture with comic co-host Maeve Higgins, author and animal advocate Paul Shapiro, and Dr. Liz Specht, Senior Scientist at The Good Food Institute.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/clean-meat-with-paul-shapiro/Photo Credit: World Economic Forum (File: The Meat Revolution Mark Post.webm (7:53)) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. My co-host today, comedic co-host Maeve Higgins. Hi, good to see you. It's been so long, it's been too long.

Yeah, I know. I was in Ireland, I had my sister's wedding. You don't need to hear all this. Okay, okay. And you're a longtime veteran of StarTalk, and you're host of the podcast, Mave in America. Yes, that's right. Cute title. I did your podcast. You did, yeah. I hope I did okay.

You did great. I mean, my podcast is about immigration, and your point was, we're all from Africa. Yes. So that really blew my podcast out of the water. Everybody is an immigrant to where they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter how far back you look. Exactly, yeah. So, yeah, don't come to me telling me, well, you're an immigrant and you're are. It doesn't matter how far back you look. Exactly.

So don't come to me telling me, well, you're an immigrant and you're not. You're native. No, nobody's native. Right. Not even the people who call themselves native are native. That's true. Right.

But you know, it's hot. It's a hot topic. We're all natives of Africa. Right. If you want to go all the way back. Right, right, right. Which is why it was cool when the English went and claimed Africa. No, I'm just kidding.

So today we're not talking about immigration. We're talking about the future of meat. Meat. And meat as it might appear to have a future in the laboratory. That's according to Paul Shapiro, author of the recent book, Clean Meat, how growing meat without animals will revolutionize dinner and the world. And we've got him in studio to give us all the details on the future of this sustainable, humane, and... Tasty?

Tasty. Indeed it is, man. So,? Tasty. We hope. Indeed it is, man. So, Paul, welcome to StarTalk. Not your first rodeo with us. No, I'm very honored to be back. Yeah, yeah. Excellent, excellent. You carry a title, Vice President of Policy at the Humane Society of the United States.

That's a thing. That is a thing. Yeah, amazing. I know. But it's great to be here. And I'll tell you that if you go back to the time when we were walking around the plains of Africa, when we're is our the cradle of humanity. Never since that time have we had the ability to divorce meat production from live animal raising or killing. And now, scientific

advances are allowing us to do just that. And there's a lot of reasons that we want to do that. So, for example, Neil, your brother from another mother, Bill Nye, often points out that raising animals for food is one of the leading contributors to climate change and a lot of other pressing environmental problems. Well, agriculture in general. Agriculture, but especially animal.

Especially animal raising. Right. And so one of the solutions could be just eat less meat and enjoy more plant-based foods. That's a great solution. We ought to do it. I feel like that's something we all know and not many of us do. Maybe you're hitting me on the head. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I've heard that. You try to change people's behavior. Right. And it's hard. It's like exercise. And we're like, mm-hmm, I absolutely mean to. And I will do this. I had intended to this morning that's right

all the more reason why we want to divorce meat production from livestock raising and so now if the problem is that we're raising too many animals for food one of the solutions may lie within those animals themselves that is within their very cells like if they could learn to speak they'd be like stop it that is one of the things we need a pioneer to enable them to have a voice. But until then, though, there's now a group of startups that are creating what's called cellular agriculture, the process of growing real foods like real meat from animal cells as opposed to animal slaughter. And what these companies are doing is producing real animal products.

We're not talking about alternatives to meat here. We're talking about real meat simply grown with vastly fewer resources than are needed to produce whole animals only to slaughter them. I know it sounds like science fiction and indeed in many sci-fi plots. But they're not animals. They're not animal products. Well, they come from animal cells a lot of the time. So you're growing meat from animal cells.

But they don't have like... You're culturing the cells. That's exactly right. So basically you're producing this through cell culture. And so it's been the domain of sci-fi for a long time. Everything from Star Trek on the USS Enterprise, that's how they ate meat, was eating clean meat. But now it's not sci-fi.

In fact, it's science fact. And that's what you cover in your book. That's right. So how real is it? Is there a restaurant that's going to get a T-bone steak that you grew in your lab? Perhaps one day. But for right now, these companies are making ground meat products. Think more like hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, sausages.

Stuff where the texture of the meat is lost from its original fibers anyway. And there's so many meat products that are on the docket for that. As you said, just ground beef anyway. Hot dogs, sausage, that sort of thing. Because you're not growing creatures, right? They don't have bones or brains or organs. It's just like the stuff we use. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So we just need the meat. There was one of the Gary Larson comics and it said, boneless chicken ranch and the chickens have no bones. They're just like on the ground. There's a sliver of meat. Like a rubber chicken farm.

Yeah. Well, maybe this will be like the brainless chicken ranch where it's just a bunch of cells of chicken scattered all over the lawn. Yeah. So how soon is this going to happen? Well, these companies are not yet commercialized with the exception of one, a company called

Geltor, which is producing gelatin from basically through cell culture. Gelatin has always been like animal hoofs or something. Yeah. Proceeds from- Hooves or skin or skeleton. Gelatin is basically just like- The day I learned that, I said, no, I don't need jello that badly. I'm sorry. I don't need jello that badly i'm sorry i don't crave jello they never like branded it differently they were like gelatin jello like the link is so

there for us all to know about well with the exception of gel tour which has commercialized these companies are looking at introducing products like meat or milk or eggs or even leather really they can make eggs oh yeah yeah absolutely and so what we're talking about is probably for some of them like leather and egg whites and milk probably another year or so uh then with the meats you're looking probably more like 2021 although one company hampton creek does pledge that within 2018 they will start selling some product that is a clean meat product. And they're called Hampton? Hampton Creek.

And it's like a race, right? Like, so I can imagine there's all companies. Is it like the space race almost? Like where they're all trying to get there first? Oh, that's got to be hugely lucrative. Hugely lucrative. These companies are bringing in millions of dollars from venture capital funds in Silicon

Valley, and even agriculture giant Cargo is investing in this space because they see clean meat as part of the future of humanity's protein consumption. Who's going to be the first to adopt clean meat? Would it be vegans? No, quite the opposite. The reality of the surveys shows that the more meat you eat now, the more likely you are to want to eat clean meat. The less meat you eat now, the less likely you are to want to eat clean meat. The less meat you eat now, the less likely you are

because this is meat. It's real animal meat. And so vegans and vegetarians- But you're not enslaving and killing animals to get it. Yeah. And that has been one of the many arguments posed against meat eaters. So that is one of the reasons

why some people choose to be vegetarian or vegan. And for those people, that problem is addressed through clean meat. People have other reasons too. But the fact remains that the more meat you eat the heaviest meat eaters so to speak are the people most interested in eating this and why how do you know they'll be most interested one is i want my t-bone out of the rib of a cow right and none of this newfangled frankenfood yeah no scientist to put Like a barbecue guy Right barbecue guy Right

Well interestingly enough Memphis Meats Which is one of the companies Leading the space Is See that's the kind of name Memphis Meats Yeah

Well one of the guys For those of you Listening on the radio Neil is wearing a cowboy hat It just appeared Out of nowhere It just materialized It just materialized

As soon as the voice started But anyway Yeah they are One of the top people of the company is a guy whose family owns a chain of barbecue joints in Memphis and the surrounding areas. And they have pledged they want to be serving queen meat on their menu as soon as these guys get it ready.

And what they're envisioning is something to be pretty cool. So they want to do, like, imagine right now a restaurant. You might think in the back they're brewing their own beers. Maybe they got their own type of IPA. Imagine restaurant i live in brooklyn that's like every yeah instead of brewing their own beer they're brewing their own meats and you could even imagine like the mascot like a pig from whom these cells were biopsied in the restaurant and you could pat the pig on the back and say, thanks, pig. In fact, the company we were just talking about, Hampton Creek, did exactly that. They took a sesame seed-sized biopsy from a chicken, grew real chicken nuggets from his cells,

and ate them while he pecked them out of the grass right before their feet. Wow. So creepy. Yeah. No, that's cool. It's sci-fi in the moment. Now, what is this that NASA has to do with this? In the moment.

Now, what is this that NASA has to do with this? I know that there's a huge food research group in Houston to keep food fresh for the length of space missions. So I know they think a lot about food texture, food taste. So what's their role in this? I have that in my notes, and I'm like, where's that coming from? Oh, they're the progenitor. So NASA was doing research around the turn of the century, funding this research into growing meat, because if humans are going to travel the cosmos, they're not bringing Noah's

Ark in tow. If they want meat, they're going to have to grow it. And so NASA funded this research. It's not a separate spaceship for the cow. Yeah, right. It's the cows and the chickens. That's exactly right. NASA needs to be ultra efficient with how they're producing food for anybody who wants to go on long distance cosmic tourism. And the way that you do that is you grow it. And so they funded this research to grow real fish meat outside of the fish. And it got a lot of attention when they did it right around the turn of the century.

And that spawned this whole industry because people thought to themselves, wait a minute, they won't do that out in space. Why not here on Earth? We have a real problem with animal agriculture. And if we could address some of the key problems of sustainability with animal ag you could address huge problems from climate change and so many other issues do you know enough about the molecular structure of the different cuts of meat to be able to duplicate that in the lab so i know it's t-bone meat versus uh you know so far they don't have the capacity to make those type of whole cuts of meat.

Yeah. So right now, what they're doing is, like we said, ground meat. And so, yeah, they can do different cells. I mean, they could even do like a turducken type thing where you take cells from a turkey, cells from a duck, and cells from a chicken and mix them all together. So you could do that. That's a thing of turducken? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I can't say I've ever had that urge. You know, these three birds, i want to put them all together but you know this field of cellular agriculture it is still a nascent industry i mean this is really these companies easier to make fish than it is to make like steak yes absolutely in fact uh one company called finless foods i i ate their queen fish recently and uh it is definitely easier to produce fish. And then the next would be like avian, like poultry meat. And then mammalian meat comes later.

But these companies are doing it all. And their goal was to compete with animal products, not in some type of a way where these are a niche product, but rather to compete on cost and on taste with commodity meats. Is fish easier because almost no matter where you are in the fillet, it tastes the same? Or is this not so with the side of a cow? That may be one reason, but a bigger reason is that fish are in a much colder environment that we're in, and so the cells don't have to be kept at such a high temperature, so you have far fewer energy costs because fish cells can be kept

at the temperature in which the fish live. Oh, that's right. So, yeah, I didn't ask you about the energy and the cost to make it. So, first, let me agree with you. If you make hamburgers this way, you can just transform the hamburger market. Everyone's going to agree. Yeah. No one is going to deny that.

I agree. Completely. And that's a huge part of the American diet is the hamburger. And I might even eat more hamburgers knowing that this is what it is. So, what would is so uh what what would per pound what's your what's your lab meat gonna cost yeah well the franken meat hardly the first ever clean burger that was ever produced was in 2013 and sergey brin the co-founder of google funded it and it was for a bargain price of 330 000 per,000 per burger. Okay. Now, the second burger is the one that costs $5, right?

Yes. And so, in the last four years, the price has come down more than 80%. They took all the diamonds out of the burger. Let's start again. Now, the burger's only $20,000 rather than $300,000. Yeah. I don't know why they didn't use ketchup instead of gold dust. Right, right, right.

But no. So, now, these companies are saying they think by around 2020 or so, they might get it down to like $11 a burger. But there's a long way to go. But the first iPhone was over a billion dollars to produce. And these companies have only been in existence for a couple years. They're already driving the cost way down

and clean meat will become a reality within years, not decades. So Paul, recently I posted a tweet that I didn't think would be controversial. I thought people would just be intrigued by it. The tweet was, cows are biological machines invented by humans to turn grass into steak. And I thought the blunt truth of that would just sort of wake people up and say, oh my gosh, is that what this, oh, I didn't know that kind of thing. I think many people don't know that we invented cows.

There's no herds of roaming cows terrorizing the hillsides. Right. Because that's what cows do. Terrorize. That's what they do. The herbivores are always terrorists. Oh, man. Yeah.

The gang of herbivores. Yeah. So they so and it received a very strong negative reaction i would say 80 20 negative to positive or to neutral and and i i didn't see that coming did you see that coming uh you follow you follow me on twitter right is that right i certainly do follow you on twitter um he's the one i'm the one. I will say, though, that the wild animals from whom they were domesticated, the auroch, they were turning grass into meat, too, before we ever saw them. That's what ruminants do. That's what giraffes and camels and deer and elk do.

They turn grass into meat. So I don't know that we caused them to do that, but to the extent that we did create cows by domesticating the auroch. Well, our cows do it way more efficiently than the auroch did, I'm sure. Otherwise, we'd still use the aurochs. Yeah, well, uh yeah we actually exterminated them they're extinct the last one died in the 1600s that's what i heard they actually came farther into modern times than just the ice age yeah debacle of the mammals but did you don't you think that it's because like people were just feel so bad and weird about that stuff and that's why when you just said the blunt truth they were like no that's not it you know it was like the cows are feeling creatures i said my tweet has nothing to do with that right yeah i think for some people to separate it i think yeah

you're right mave i think the idea of an animal being a machine is what some people found offensive because a machine implies that they're not sentient that they don't have i said biological machine yeah oh i think for anybody who follows in the eye. That's a very scientist kind of thing. No, no. It could be a mechanical machine. There's a biological machine. Because in a way, we are biological machines too.

Of course. Right. Of course. Right. Exactly. Of course. But that one has a very tuned purpose. That's all.

We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more on the future of clean meat. When StarTalk returns. when we come back more on the future of clean meat when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got my co-host, comedic Maeve Higgins. Yeah, here I am.

Maeve, and host of the podcast Maeve in America. Maintaining an Irish accent since 1981. Was that on purpose? Right. You actually have a Brooklyn accent now. You're hiding it. Thank you. Sorry.

So our special in-studio guest is Paul Shapiro, author of the recent book, Clean Meat. How growing meat without animals will revolutionize dinner and the world. Cool subtitle there. And we've been exploring just the cutting edge technology that paul says is going to revolutionize everything about how about our relationship to animals that are farmed for their products it wouldn't only be food but leather presumably or other and other products we're going to bring in some more expertise here uh joining us on video call to help us just break down the science inside the laboratory is biologist Liz Specht. Liz, welcome to StarTalk.

Hi, Liz. Thanks so much for having me on. Excellent. So you're a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute. Correct. Okay. Who's the senior scientist at the Bad Food Institute? That's what I want to know. Her arch enemy. No, no. Her arch enemy in the parallel universe. I want the scientist in the Badass Food Institute. How about that? Oh, that I'll own.

So you use biotech in the field of synthetic biology to make clean meat. And I don't know that that's a common term yet today, synthetic biology. It sounds almost oxymoronic. Could you define that for us all? Absolutely. Yeah. So my academic background is in the field of synthetic biology. And the way I like to explain it is to think of biology like a Lego set. So in all of the millions of years that biology has been doing its thing through evolution, we've developed this really cool tool kit of all of these various enzymes, metabolic pathways

to make cool molecules, structures that have different functions and properties. So synthetic biology is simply looking at all the Lego pieces across a lot of different Lego sets and building new things that never existed before, rather than just building the objects on the front of the Lego box. What's cool, though, is that you actually don't need something like synthetic biology to make clean meat. So that's, you know, certainly there's room for synthetic biology to do more sophisticated tricks down the line. But clean meat is just farming animal cells, muscle cells and fat cells and so forth, rather than farming the whole animal.

So when we grow and multiply these cells in culture, it's kind of the most natural thing for cells to do. There's nothing really synthetic about going from one cell to two, two to four, four to eight. That's what they do best. Okay. Did you just diss Paul and his book? It feels like you just dissed his entire work here. No, I think there's definitely room for synthetic biology. I think, you know, folks who kind of assume that there's something engineered or synthetic about clean meat might be wary of it as a technology going into their food. Obviously, you know, we find our food very personal. So certainly there's room to

leverage synthetic biology. And obviously, I'm incredibly excited about the potential of that. But we can grow these cells in a very straightforward way in culture. So if I understand you correctly, you're interested in creating transgenic life, life that nature itself hadn't produced or doesn't know to produce, and you had some clever need for one kind of animal or bacterium or virus versus another, and you just go at it. Is that a fair characterization? So certainly that's been part of my research background. Yeah. And again, I think there's a role for that in clean meat. But it's not it's not necessary. So clean meat is separate from whether these will be genetically engineered cell lines. near the cell lines or not, you completely decouple the manner of production from the animal itself. So now we're open to all of the species we could possibly want to farm for their meat.

It's just as easy for us to make an antelope steak as it is a cow steak. So, Paul, if you're just duplicating cells or culturing cells, whatever the proper bio word is. Does that mean you could also manufacture organs for transplant? Yeah. Interestingly enough, the lead company in the cellular agriculture space, a company called Modern Meadow, they're making clean leather. It was founded by a father and son team that before that had founded a company called Organovo, where they were making human organ tissues for experimentation purposes and one day for transplantation purposes, too. One key distinction, so you can use synthetic biology, for example, to make some of these products like milk and egg whites and so on. The clean meat companies,

though, not the liquid products, but the solid products really are just using tissue engineering uh not so much um the type of syn bio so to speak as the others are using okay so i'm i'm just curious if there might be part of the world who's afraid to eat food that a scientist made in the laboratory i heard that there was a reason, of course, because if it's the same cells. Right, it's the same. It would be out of the absence of awareness and knowledge of what you're actually doing and the fear factor that comes with every new wave of scientific discovery.

Yeah, I heard there was a restaurant around the corner here that got busted. They were trying to make their food more palatable and so they were throwing sodium chloride on it. Oh, can't do that. I know, I know. So, I can't do that. Oh my gosh. I know.

So of course, as educated listeners of this show will know, it's just table salt. But for most people, they hear sodium chloride or dihydrogen monoxide, and they think like, you know, these are real problems. Of course, it's just table salt and water. And so I think that there are some people who have a concern about technology as it's applied to food. But keep in mind, virtually everything we eat has had some type of food technology applied to it. I mean, most people aren't concerned about eating a seedless watermelon, despite the fact that it's hardly natural. A seedless anything.

Yeah, that's right. So Liz, are you the weird one at the Thanksgiving table? Well, I think the weird one might be that father and son team who were like, well, we used to make human organs, but now we make bacon. Okay. Yeah, I'm just wondering, how are you received by would-be friends or family? I think I am lucky in that I reside in pretty nerdy circles. circles. So I think most people that I interact with day to day really, really get the value of leveraging all the tools that we have to build more sustainable food system. I think a lot of

people who kind of initially push back on this, same thing with genetically modified organisms in our crop species, once you actually explain to them the benefits of having that type of precision when you're developing, you know, better foods, it really resonates with people. Very cool. And tell me, Paul, why did you choose, maybe not you, but your people, if not you, choose the word clean meat? Because that, you know, that's a little unfair because it implies that meat from a living animal is dirty. Well, the term... That's not, you know, would you agree that you're playing dirty pool there? The term clean meat was really popularized by the Good Food Institute where Liz works.

And I'll tell you, one, like clean energy, clean meat is just cleaner for the planet. But it's also just literally cleaner. So think about it. Right now, we're warned to treat raw meat in our kitchens almost like toxic waste. Why? Because it's riddled with feces. E.coli, salmonella, campylobacter. These are all intestinal pathogens that can sicken us if we don't cook the crap out of our meat, literally.

Cook the crap out of the meat. I like that. Literally cooking the crap out of the meat. But when you're growing clean meat, you don't need to grow intestines at all. You don't have those intestinal pathogens. You're just growing the muscle that you want. And so that's why it's both literally cleaner and cleaner for the planet.

Okay, you've convinced me. Great. I didn't think that would happen. We got a cosmic query from somebody. Oh yeah, we're ready for cosmic query. Cosmic query section. Yeah, this is... Wait, wait, wait.

I have to introduce it. Now is the time for cosmic queries. We have two good experts about this topic and I will just sort of watch as this unfolds. Okay, wait. I have to introduce it. Now is the time for Cosmic Queries. We have two good experts about this topic, and I will just sort of watch as this unfolds. Okay, go. So this came in through Facebook. There's a huge fascination with this whole topic, right? This is Daniel S. Haltgrew,

and he said that he read that clean meat tastes bland because it's muscle cells and there's no fat cells. So what do you need to do to get stranded fat marbling like that you find in a good steak and how far away is that yeah yeah so liz you know if i'm choosing a steak it's it's the marbled steak because it's not of course it's not just the meat it's the fat uh absolutely and and that this is and the the kobe steaks and all that that whole other sort of branch of steak eating uh that's fat level very high fat level. So what's going on there?

Yeah, and fat is such a flavor carrier, obviously. So it also provides some nutritional value. There's all kinds of reasons you would want a genuine marbled steak. So for this question, I would just urge that all of the companies that have developed products so far, these are early stage prototypes. They're working with single cell culture. So yeah, some of the products so far have just been muscle cells. But of course, there's the ability to co-culture multiple cell types. So to have muscle cells growing right alongside fat cells. What's cool and what really geeks me out is that when you have these cells grown on what's

called a scaffolding material that's helping to kind of structure the final product, you can actually use that scaffolding material to help guide the cells where spatially you want them to differentiate into muscle versus fat. So imagine having the perfect marble steak and you can make a million of those with that exact marbling pattern because you are defining it at that level. Yeah, so you would need someone to study the perfect steak under natural causes and then duplicate that or possibly even improve on it now that you have laboratory controls. Very cool.

So you can cultivate fat cells the way you can protein cells. Okay, I didn't know that. I'm thinking fat is just fat. Yeah, well, so it's... You need to just sit those cells down in front of Netflix for three weeks. That's how you get them. Nachos all the time.

Eat nachos. That's how you get it. So you got another query. Okay, so this is Shay, and he wrote in Instagram. He asked how much energy would be consumed growing meat in a lab versus raising animals?

Pound for pound. Pound for pound. Pound for pound. So there are a lot of different life cycle analyses that have been done so far. And they show generally, not always, but generally that you're talking about a big energy savings, but also way fewer greenhouse gas emissions, way less land, 99% less land, much less water use. But as Liz correctly points out, these are still early prototypes. They don't know what it's going to be when it's at commercial scale yet. Presumably, it will be even more efficient. But for right now, it's looking pretty good. So what you're saying is the projections for

the land use, water use, power use are so much better than anything going on now that even when it becomes mass market commercialized, you win and you're going to win every contest up against whatever used to be required to get the same product. Hands down. Hands down. Water use, everything. Yep. Right, because you don't have to create the grass that the cow eats to make the steak.

Right now, an animal is doing all types of things that require calories for things that we don't care about. Breathing, digesting, thinking, seeing, walking. When you're just growing the muscle that we want or the fat that we want, you need way fewer resources to do that. And even don't animals taste better when they can move around and you give them space?

Like they actually need more space? I don't know. I space? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't think that's what they say. Wait, do you eat meat? I don't, but I've eaten it many times. I don't think that's what they say. But you know, like free range chickens taste better than chickens who live in a cage forever.

Well, usually the free range also have other aspects about them that make them... Like a little treadmill. Yeah. That's right. I'm sure there are no treadmills you don't want to buff no you don't want like a big muscular like chicken on your table what else you have okay so mason um everest on twitter he asks how long roughly that's nice that he gave you that out roughly um it's a process from animal cells to edible product.

So I guess he's talking about like two cells in the beginning. Yeah. So Liz, if you start with like one cell and then it doubles and quadruples and whatever, how long does it take just physically if you were to watch it happen? Yeah. Good question. So we can work out the math on that. Obviously, cells are growing exponentially.

The doubling time for these types of animal cells is typically on the order of 20 to 24 hours. I've done some calculations myself when I'm trying to look at how close might we get to cost parity and so forth, where I'm trying to bound how long a process might be from, say, a starter vial to growing, say, a 20,000 liter tank full of cells. And for that process, being pretty conservative with doubling times, we're looking at something between maybe three weeks and five weeks. Right.

And keep in mind... And that's for a whole batch, kind of from start to finish. But as with any scale process, you'll be making use of the latter end of that exponential growth curve and simply harvesting, get another doubling and so forth. Right, but it still feels short to me because if you 2 to the 30th power if you go over a month,

what do you get there? You get 5 billion, I think, something like that. You're a better mathlete than I am. But cells are very small, so 5 billion cells, that's not very much. Is that like a Shake Shack double burger? That's right. But because doubling time is in your favor,

that if you don't have what you need in the 21st day, you might have what you need in the 22nd day. Because what happens in the 22nd day duplicates what happened between day one and day 21 so really this is a non this is a no-brainer here literally yes is he good he's good he's good

okay what else you got okay this is one more question before we take a break okay cool um how do the nutritional benefits and this is from frank Kane on Patreon He's one of our Patreon supporters You were supposed to read his question first Oh I am? Yes. Patreon get their questions first Oh let's edit this Sorry Frank Kane How do the nutritional benefits Of clean meat stack up to soy

And bean based meat substitutes that are already available Oh good one Good one. Who's going to take that? Paul? Yeah? I'm happy to. Do you eat soy? Oh, yeah.

So you're a vegan or a vegetarian? Well, I've eaten clean meat many times, so whatever that makes me, I'm a clean meat-itarian, I guess. Were you so happy to eat it the first time? The first time I ate clean meat was in 2014 and at that time more humans had gone into space than had eaten meat real meat grown outside of an animal so in that i was happy i thought it was a cool thing to do but it didn't do much else for me other than that but since then i've eaten clean beef fish duck chorizo liver yogurt like lots of these products

all in one go yeah it was like the ultimate turduck and just everything all together uh no um i've eaten them separately one of the benefits of writing this book was that these companies want to share their products with you but nutritionally yes so you can control so as liz was saying you can control how much fat the types of fats i mean theoretically you could, you could envision putting, instead of saturated fats in, maybe omega-3 fatty acids. So you would have a hamburger that, rather than causing heart attacks, would prevent them. But right now, they're just trying to get it to the point where it's just the same, the same exact thing. So the same amount of protein in meat.

So then you could just do a comparison directly with soy as with regular meat. Yeah. Right now, the clean meat products are trying to get them to be exactly like the meat that we have, except much safer. Then when you compare it, let's say, to plant-based products, plant-based products are very nutritious. They're good for you. They're sustainable. They're very energy efficient. And they're great.

We want them. Clean meat is not an alternative to them. It's really a supplement. Because if you think about it, think of it kind of like fossil fuels in that fossil fuels are such a big problem. You want more than one solution. You don't want just wind. You want solar. You want geothermal.

You don't put everything in one basket. The same with the problem of animal agriculture. It's so bad. It's so serious that you want many alternatives, including plant-based meats and whole plant-based foods, but also clean meats too. All right. Well, we've got to take a quick break. And when we come back, more about clean meat. We're back on StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, with my co-host, Maeve Higgins.

Yep, here I am. And our topic today is clean meat and I've got someone who literally wrote the book on it Paul Shapiro I literally wrote the book because I literally wrote the only book hence the book on it how growing meat without animals will revolutionize dinner and the world and joining us on video call is Liz Specht, senior scientist at the Good Food Institute. And you're joining us from San Francisco. That's right. Yeah.

So thanks for being on the show. And just a quick question. I heard before the break, Paul just slipped in, talking about vegetative meat. Plant-based meat. Plant-based meat. I don't know what that is. What is it? Is it just the fake, like the soy burger and that sort of thing?

Yeah, I don't know if I would call it fake. It's fake. It's very real natural food. It's just we use plants to mimic the taste and texture of meat. Have you seen the YouTube video where it's meat eaters talking about food the way vegetarians would? Oh, I haven't seen it. I need to. Okay.

Well, have you tried this celery made from animal meat? We've taken out the flavor and put in celery flavor, so it tastes just like celery, except it's made from burger. It's a whole video skit. It's pretty funny. You know what it reminds me of a little bit? I want to just tell a very brief story. So in the mid-19th century, you had a huge natural ice industry. They're harvesting lots of blocks of ice from frozen lakes in the north,

transporting it all around the world. Then you have the advent of industrial refrigeration. And all of a sudden, it's a lot cheaper to produce ice from the water right in front of you. Just cool it down. The natural ice makers... By the way, that took major understandings and advances in physics and thermodynamics. Yeah, big advancements. To be able to take heat from something that's...

Take heat out of something that's already colder than the environment to make it colder. That was a major advance in sort of the engineering physics of thermodynamics. But go on. Well, the natural ice people, the barons of the natural ice industry were really upset by this because it threatened their market. And so they derided what they called artificial ice. And they said, oh, be careful of the artificial ice. The ammonia used in the cooling could leak in. It could hurt you. The irony at the time was that the so-called artificial ice was actually much safer than the natural ice, because the natural ice, one, is coming from waters

that are polluted with Industrial Revolution pollutants, and they've got horses dredging the ice out, going to the bathroom right on top of the ice, as they're pulling out, whereas the artificial ice was being produced from water that had been filtered or boiled. You fast-forward to today, and virtually every one of us has an artificial ice maker in our homes. We call them freezers.

And nobody thinks there's anything unnatural or fake about it. We just call it ice. Right, right, right. So, Maeve. Yep. We're still in Cosmic Queries mode. Yes, we are. So, give it to me.

Okay. This is from Chris Ryu, and he's on Patreon. Now, he opens by saying, nice to meet you. Okay? I just want to say that. Who's he meeting? I mean, M-E-A-T. Oh, nice to meet you.

None of us have ever heard this joke. You've never heard it before. I'm sure you haven't. That's very nice of you. So he's asking, how does the clean meat process compare with organic farming when it comes to greenhouse emissions, energy consumption, and the space that you need? So he's writing from

the UK, actually. So what do you think? Organic farming? Yeah, Liz. Sure, I'll hop on this. Paul took a lifecycle analysis question. So I think the most relevant attribute here is really the amount of resources used. Like Paul said, when we're growing meat by funneling calories through an animal, it's an inherently inefficient process, just thermodynamically. There's no getting around that. So organic farming, just like industrialized animal agriculture, will always be much less efficient. In many cases, organic farming often ends up taking more land because you're not able to kind of get the same yield out of the same area of land for the feet for example for these animals

That's organic farming relative to traditional farming even takes more land for the same for the same yield. That's what you're saying Okay Yeah, so Yeah, so it's more efficient than all of the above is is what this comes down to, whether or not you're organic. So it could put organic, have them rethink. Because you can have organic animals, of course. Organic is not just vegetables, right? So this would completely transform.

It means that they're not given, I guess, antibiotics and hormones and stuff, right? That's what an organic animal is. It's not formally defined organic. Right. this is an interesting question from a chef his name is aaron nelson and he said um i'm a chef i'm interested in the idea of lab-grown meat as it stands um where a cow is raised how it's raised what it eats all affect the flavor and the texture of a steak do you think lab-grown meats could open the possibility of designer meats with customizable taste appearance and texture. Yeah, because I've been in restaurants where they say,

this meat, no, it's cheese. You can buy cheese. This is spring cheese versus fall cheese. In the spring, the cows are eating on this side of the hill, and the grass is this. But later on, it's a different grass. Right, there's like fires on them. Yeah, yeah. So so liz do you do you

know the molecules well enough to duplicate the subtleties that go on not only in the food we eat but in our capacity to taste it are you there like a sunshine morning in montana that's where this and the monks treated this, massaged this cow. The cow felt uncomfortable. You have the monk massage gene in there. They actually have monks stirring the bioreactors. Give them something to do. They add their secret sauce. Not there yet, just because people haven't looked at it yet.

But I think that's a relatively straightforward question to answer. And I think what's so exciting about this process is the degree of control you have over it. So you can do an analysis of what are all of the subtle flavor components that you're getting when, you know, you're fermenting grass from a certain area. And you can figure out what that actually is. And then you make your cell culture media, their nutrient feed to have exactly that composition. So from a culinary perspective, I mean, you could, you could patent your formula of what you're feeding to yourselves. And that can be your, you know, your five star, um, meat, one of a kind that you hang your hat on as a chef. Wow. I hadn't thought about that. Patent

your own steak. And what it would also mean is whatever might because it's not just whatever the cow didn't donald trump have his own steaks yeah he did he's such a leader in scientific thinking well how lucky we are so the uh it seems to me there's not only whatever the cow ate giving whatever flavor and texture to the meat that was in it that you now can possibly duplicate but there's also the topical dressings you might put on it the the dry rub in principle you could infuse your cultures with with like texas barbecue sauce right so then you just get the meat cook it it's got all the flavor you would have put on it after the fact. That's just like Iberico ham, right?

The pigs eat this special type of acorn and then they taste so good. I didn't know about this. Oh, it's delicious. But it's basically your idea. Yeah, yeah. It's happening. We're going to drop acorns in with the cells. There you go.

Yeah. It would be an interesting cocktail, I guess, when you do that. What else you got? Time for a couple more questions. Okay. So, I mean, this is from Instagram, the granolin. I can't wait to try this. I hope it's good enough to shut all the vegans up. I mean, vegans do love

to be vegan. Yeah, yeah. It's a thing. It's not all of them, but we all know the ones that do. We do. Right. And it's odd because, Paul, I mean, I'm the senior citizen here. There was a day where you were invited to someone's house. They didn't ask you what you couldn't eat. You just ate what you were served.

Any allergies or drink? Well, I'm vegetarian. I'm this and I'm allergic to these seven. Okay, I will now accommodate you. That is today. But back in my day, no, you ate what was put in front of your face no matter what. So the whole culture. It was snowing outside too all the time.

All the time. No shoes. Back and forth to school. So I'm just intrigued how, like you said, it's almost as though people's food habits have become their religions. And you choose friends based on it. So it would be nice if we can do away with that if we just manufacture everything in the lab i'm a scientist just go go for it i'm there for you yeah i mean already our food a lot of our foods do start out in a laboratory

right like you think about cornflakes i mean they're not it's not like they just grow on a tree some some white cut scientists in a lab created cornflakes, and now it's produced in a factory. Eventually, clean meat isn't going to be coming from a lab, it'll be coming from a menu, like a brewery, basically. And so, sorry, Liz, go ahead. levels the playing field in terms of what globally we can all eat because we're, we're lowering the resource burden of making meat. So this is no longer a, you know, wealthy Western world type, um, uh, luxury. This is now something that could be accessible to everyone. So I think, you know, in some ways it makes eating less politicized because we're, we're all using a much more effective method that makes this kind of democratized and that's good we just pause on that moment right politicizing food this is beautiful that's beautiful is because like here in america we have so many options is that right and but like

we could be making the options we take for granted as well right i mean that doesn't really like already we have like so much here, but it hasn't evened things out around the world. No, of course not. Right, right. Just we have access to too many resources. Right. We're just getting so chubby.

Yeah, I mean, a diet heavy, a diet that's very heavy in meat is a first world issue, right? Like there's a reason why the poorer nations of the world don't eat that much meat because it's very resource intensive. And so I think Liz is right. when we're talking about democratizing food if you could have these type of systems where you're producing meat much more efficiently you could

make it available not only to people who don't have access to it today but to the billions of people who are going to come onto the planet primarily in developing countries like china and india brazil yeah right and who are going to want to eat like americans not a developing country uh to the billions yet born they're still they're still who are going to want to eat like the Americans do. China's not a developing country. To the billions yet born. They're still coming into part many countries. China has a space program. They're not a developing country.

Okay. Fair point. Let's keep that clear. But what you're hoping for like in it would be like kind of trickle down chicken nuggets.

We got time for one last quick question. Okay, great. Okay. So if I this is from andre frost uh if i want to support the development of vat grown meat and haste vat grown meat that's the first thing to do andre is to stop calling it that that's your first thing okay and haste and

its commercial viability which company or organization should i throw money at so uh you know one thing liz doesn't want to be so self-serving to say it, so I'll say supporting her nonprofit, the Good Food Institute. That's a not-for-profit. Yes. Okay, cool. So I will say that's a great place to invest your money, Andre. The Good Food Institute.

But also, you know, if you buy the book, which you can get from cleanmeat.com. Which is not a not-for-profit. Yeah. That's true. You can see the main companies that are leading in this space right now because I profile those companies in the book. Profile in a good way. Yeah.

Because in my world, it's never good to be profiled. That's right, yeah, right. Yes, good point. They are historically profiled, meaning that I chronicle their exploits, and so you can check them out. But, Andre, go can check them out. But Andre, go to cleanmeat.com and see for yourself.

Well, excellent. So I trust and expect and hope the book will do well and help sort of change the dialogue out there. And Liz will be keeping an eye on you. I want my T-bone steak in... Three weeks. Three weeks. Medium rare. But we'll be looking at the Good Food Institute.

And good to know we've got good people out there just trying to change the world, all for the better. So thanks for being on StarTalk, Liz. Thanks so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure. Yeah. And Maeve. Yeah. Always good to have you.

Any final thoughts, Maeve? That was so fun. No, I'm hungry. Yeah, I think the actual role of science, yes, it has affected information technology, it's affected transportation and can still. There are many more places that science has yet to tread in our lives that it could just transform civilization as we know it.

And it's always science that transforms civilization. And this seems like it would be the next one and it would be welcome to us all, all 10 billion of us sharing this planet in the year 2040? 2050.

You've got it. Well, we've got to end it there. You've been watching and more likely listening to this episode of StarTalk. Thanks, Paul, Paul Shapiro, Maeve, Liz. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Talk. Thanks, Paul, Paul Shapiro, Maeve, Liz. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.