Technology, Connected - Is Cultivated Meat the Next Agricultural Revolution? - Bruce Friedrich

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Would you eat meat made in a lab? Could cultivated meat replace industrial farming without asking billions of people to change what they eat? Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat, explains why the future of food may depend less on changing human behaviour and more on changing how meat is produced.For more than 12,000 years, humans have relied on animal agriculture to produce meat. Bruce argues that this system is reaching its limits. We explore how cultivated meat is made, why it is attracting support from governments and major food companies, and why some of the biggest meat eaters are also the most open to the technology.Along the way, we discuss the environmental cost of livestock, antibiotic resistance, food security, infrastructure, consumer psychology, regulation, and whether this technology could become as transformative as renewable energy or electric vehicles. We also examine what happens to farmers, why culture may be harder to change than technology, and whether cultivated meat can ever reach price parity with conventional meat.If the next agricultural revolution is already underway, it may not begin on a farm.Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack🫵 Choose your own technology adventure 📺  Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube 🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram --Chapters(00:00) Who Eats Cultivated Meat?(02:37) Cultural Significance of Meat(06:09) What Is Cultivated Meat?(08:25) The Science Behind Cultivated Meat(10:48) How Much Does Cultivated Meat Cost?(14:46) What does cultivated meat taste like?(17:10) Emerging Companies in the Lab Meat Industry(19:08) Industry Support for Alternative Meats(21:06) Government Role in Innovation(24:40) The Future of Animal Agriculture(28:25) Agricultural Policies for Sustainability(31:41) What Are Fermented Meats?(35:48) Meat And Antibiotic Resistance(39:32) The Invisible Costs of Meat Production(42:26) The Future of Cultivated Meat

People who eat meat are largely enthusiastic about cultivated meat. And interestingly, it's the people who eat the most meat who are most enthusiastic about cultivated meat. So, I mean, the hypothesis of the book is we're not going to change culture. We're not going to convince people to eat less meat at the sort of scale that we would need to make a dent on a massive upward trajectory. But what we can do is we can make meat that doesn't require antibiotics, that doesn't contribute to pandemic. that requires a fraction of the land and water and pesticides and herbicides that doesn't require slaughterhouses and cruelty that's associated with that. Today's guest is Bruce Frederick.

He's the founder of the Good Food Institute and author of the book, Meat, how the next agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favorite food and our future. Bruce, welcome to thinking on paper. Thank you for thinking on paper with us today. Thank you so much, Mark. delighted to be here. We're delighted to have you. I hope everyone is well fed. They've had their breakfast, their lunch, or their dinner, wherever they are listening to this. Bruce, before we get into cultivated meat and plant-based meat, do you have any data on how much meat we're eating,

how many cows, how many sheep, how many pigs, how many chickens? Yes. I think I could probably do all of that off the top of my head, but I will say for a total volume of land animal meat, It's about 370 million metric tons, which constitutes about 80 billion land animals. It's another, I think, roughly 165, 170 billion tons of sea animals, which if you're including both fin fish and things like crustaceans, it goes into the trillions of individual animals in the U.S., which is sort of toward the upper limits in terms of per capita meat consumption, where north of. of 200 pounds of meat per American every single year. And if you're looking for the five highest years in America for per capita meat consumption, it's the most recent five, which a lot of people are surprised by. Is America winning the per head consumption of meat globally?

Is it being every other country? I know. I think there might be a couple of countries that are even higher. I think Brazil is a little bit higher, although Brazil is going to be disproportionately beef. So maybe we have more individual animals than Brazil does. There are, I think, some Eastern European and other countries that have even higher per capita meat consumption than we do. But we're certainly toward the top. Before we get into infrastructure and some great analogies that your book presents, I want to dive into the cultural side of this thing.

Because in my show preparation, I did some research into some people that were looking at meat and it's tie to culture. Specifically, there was a book called meat. meat a natural symbol. Nick Fiddes, I think, Fiddez, I'm probably not pronouncing that right. And Carol Adams is another author that tracks how meat is kind of woven into the masculine identity. There's some deep stuff happening with our connection to eating meat and our eating meat as dominance over nature that a lot of these anthropologists talk about.

how difficult is that is it going to be to kind of change culture because I think that's what we're trying to have a shift. We're trying to direct a culture shift a little bit with this. Talk me through that a little bit. I don't know if we are trying to direct a culture chef. I mean, the point that I make in the book is that, yes, meat is culture, meat is a natural symbol, kind of all of what you said. But I think when you ask people what it is that they love about meat, whether it has, to do with tradition or culture or even masculinity. There aren't that many people who are pointing toward the need for slaughterhouses.

And the people who do are generally the sort of Joe Rogan RFK types or some of my uncles and cousins that are hunters. They are not buying industrial animal meat. The people who are buying industrial animal meat, which is 99% plus of meat, certainly in developed economies, those people, what they love about it is it's delicious. It's reasonably priced. It's a high, very high in protein, very high in some micronutrients like iron and B12. So they're looking to it for nutrition or they're looking to it for deliciousness. They want it to be affordable. So in the same way that when we wanted electric vehicles to start to replace gas-powered cars

or we wanted nuclear or solar or wind to replace fossil fuels, what we had to do is we had to satisfy consumers. We had to bring down the price of solar or wind. We had to make sure that the supply was not intermittent with electric vehicles. We needed to make sure it had a reasonable battery range. It was a charging infrastructure. The prices were reasonable. So especially with cultivated meat, it's exactly the same product, but significantly cleaner, safer, healthier. And at the end of the day, as you know from reading the book, I walk through a bunch of consumer research.

and people who eat meat are largely enthusiastic about cultivated meat. And interestingly, it's the people who eat the most meat who are most enthusiastic about cultivated meat. So, I mean, the hypothesis of the book is we're not going to change culture. We're not going to convince people to eat less meat at the sort of scale that we would need to make a dent on a massive upward trajectory. But what we can do is we can make meat that doesn't require antibiotics, that doesn't, contribute to pandemic risk that requires a fraction of the land and water and pesticides and herbicides that doesn't require slaughterhouses and the cruelty that's associated with that. So that's, I mean, it's kind of the hypothesis of the book that we're unlikely at any scale

to change how people think about meat. So we should change the meat. You have to speak to it about cultivated meat. So first of all, what is cultivated meat? Yeah. And let me also just take a quick step back. And, you know, just sort of point out that if you look at the definition of technology, it's the practical application of scientific knowledge in a particular area. So it is a technology that we learned in the first agricultural revolution that we could domesticating animals. We could grow crops to feed to those animals so we wouldn't have to keep following them around. And we could make meat in that way. And that's what we've been doing for about 12,000 years.

That's how we've been making meat. That's the technology. It is shockingly inefficient. So the most efficient animal at turning those crops into meat is the chicken. And it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out, which means you've basically got 800% food waste. So nine times the land, nine tons of water, nine tons of pesticides and herbicides. And then also multiple extra stages of production.

So it is just a shockingly inefficient way of making meat. And it comes with a bunch of other harms that are. obviously hugely problematic. So with cultivated meat, basically just like you can take a seed or a cutting from a plant, bathe that seed or cutting in nutrients and grow a whole plant. You can take a small amount of animal muscle or animal fat, bat bathe that muscle or fat in nutrients, and grow essentially unlimited additional meat. And you can concentrate that in one factory, looks an awful lot like a brewery. So basically, you can have everything from the small brew pub to the massive, you know, Anheiser Bush or whatever brewery, except that instead of brewing beer, you'll be

making meat. And it really does look an awful lot like a brewery. It doesn't require antibiotics, doesn't contribute to pandemic risk, requires a fraction of land and water and pesticides and herbicides and everything else, requires far more land and inputs. So food prices can go down, which will contribute to alleviating hunger and malnutrition. And it takes animals large. or completely out of the equation, which means the animal cruelty goes away as well. The analogy with the seed to the plan is really cool, right? So if we look at like the seed of the meat is actually the cells of existing what we call meat,

and then that's used to create more of it. So once it goes through this process, you have meat pulled from an animal and meat cultivated in this process. how similarly, like biologically, do they look? And what are the differences, if so? There are obviously quite a few differences to the process. You don't have a live animal. You don't have the need to grow a live animal, which is what's required when you're feeding the animal currently.

But the end product is the same. It's just a different way of producing meat. And again, it doesn't, since there's no digestive tract, You don't have the E. coli, the salmonella, the campbellobacter. Since it's not a live animal, you don't have in the U.S., 100 different veterinary drugs at the USDA and FDA have approved at very low doses in meat. They have a maximum daily amount that they can find of 100 different drugs, including things like ivermectin and ractopamine.

I think most meat eaters would rather have no ractopamine and ivermectin and their meat. If it's sea animals, you're not going to have the microplastics, the dioxins, the mercury, which is the primary cause of mercury, poisoning almost all of it in human beings. All of that does away. But the output is identical. One thing that the two sort of fathers of cultivated meat point out, they're both medical doctors.

One is a guy named Mark Post in the Netherlands. The other is Uma Valetti, a Mayo Clinic trained cardiologist. Uma Valetti who started outside foods. Mark started Mosomit. They're both medical doctors, and they point out that we can isolate specific nutrients. and we could dial up or dial down good fats, bad fats, carcinogens, that sort of thing.

That's probably at least a couple of steps away. I mean, they could do it now, but it presents some additional regulatory hurdles that I think we don't need in the short term. And also some scientific hurdles that I think will keep be a couple of steps down the line. In the short term, you're looking at the exact same product. Malfield. Sorry, Mark, where are we? No, no, where are we today? Can I buy it?

In a very limited number of places, you can buy it. So the first regulatory approval was in Singapore, a little less than six years ago in December of 2020. The second and third regulatory approvals were in the U.S. in April of 2023. So just a little over three years ago, there are now a dozen regulatory approvals across five countries, which meets? So there's chicken available, beef available, salmon. There's a pork fat that is blended with pea protein. And then there's a company called Vau, an Australian company that's selling in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And they're making a sort of foie gras-esque product.

So it is actual meat, but it's kind of a duck foie gras blend thing. And one of the things that they point out and that other people have pointed out as well is the meats that we have have now are not necessarily the meats that are most delicious. There are meats from the animals that are most, that we're most able, that human beings have been most able to domesticate. So they're saying, you know, let's not stop at the limits of what we can domesticate. Let's stop at the limits of a human, human imagination. And the first of the foie gras for the French market, Bruce, how much for an eight ounce steak of cultivated beef? So I'm not sure. There's only one company doing steak.

It's called Olive Farms. It's in Israel. They actually sent some product up to the Space Station. They did a partnership with SpaceX and sent some cultivated meat up to the up to the International Space Station. And I don't know what their cost or production is. I think the one company that has announced is Mosomit. They said that their price of production is down by a factor of 100,000 from the prototype 12 years ago, so 99.999%. I crunched those numbers. And I think it was about $10.000. a pound, which is still, I think, twice the cost of goods sold for beef. But in 12 years, that's a much quicker trajectory than what we've seen for solar, for EVs, for, you know, most technologies. It's pretty good, although still too high. Could we taste the difference side by side? No, you can't taste the difference. And actually, I just yesterday was looking at a Kara Swisher has a, like, I want to live

forever, special on CNN, and she went and ate. cultivated salmon with the company Wild Type. One of their co-founders is also a medical doctor. That's pretty common and cultivated meat because it's basically, medical doctors are trained in tissue engineering oftentimes. And this is basically tissue engineering, but focused on growing meat rather than growing human tissue. And she tried it and said she was just completely blown away.

Absolutely could not tell the difference, which has also been our experience. I was having cultivated meat at one of Jose Andrace's restaurant when it launched in 2023 with the guy who was then CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. He's now a professor at Georgetown in the London School of Economics. And his name is Andrew Stier. He previously ran the World Resources Institute. And he said it was like the best cut of chicken he had ever had.

And that's a lot of people talk about the consistency of cultivated meat. So you've got a capacity where, you know, Kobe beef is going to cost the same amount as chicken, because it's going to be the same difficulty of creation. Obviously, creating the steak is going to be more expensive than creating like a burger. But once you've got the burger, it's like the best burger you've ever had. Or once you've got the chicken, it's like the best burger, best chicken you've ever had. And that will be consistently so. So oftentimes if people eat meat, you know, you can get some gristle, you can get some veins, you can get some particularly tough meat. This has a much greater tendency.

toward consistency, and it can be consistency aligned to whatever your preferences are. Does it cook at the same speed as a regular meat? So part of cooking is the preparation, and part of the culture of meat is the preparation. Does it cook in the same amount of time? Yeah. I mean, it cooks in the same amount of time because it's the same thing. The early iterations of a lot of this are likely to be blends. So it's likely going a lot of the early iterations are probably going to be like 10% cultivated meat, and then 90% either mycoprotein or plant protein, just so that they can hit taste parity sooner.

And because, as I'm sure you've experienced, most of the plant-based meats are not very good. So this will allow the plant-based meat to be indistinguishable from animal meat by having, you know, 10% actual animal meat, but produced in this new and better way. And then I imagine the cooking experience could be somewhat different, although I'm guessing that culinary scientists and plant biologists and

others, they can probably get it to identical cooking experience as well, I would think. So going back to the culture side of the fence, are there any, like, well-known chefs that are making waves in this world by using these ingredients and kind of generating some interesting buzz? I mean, as I mentioned a minute ago, Jose Andres has cooked with it a bunch of times, and it's been a very positive and enthusiastic spokesperson for it. There's a woman, Tracy Desjardin in San Francisco. She had a restaurant called Jardinare. She has been an enthusiastic proponent, another San Francisco restaurateur and Michelin-Starge chef. who I thought, oh, Dominique Cren has been an enthusiastic booster. There have been, there have been a few others, but those are the ones that, that leap to mind.

Have you ever heard of Mark? Have you ever heard of Umarro before? Umarro. Um, Maro, yeah. I first came across, I'm kind of a shark tank junkie, watch that show a lot. And Umarro was on, uh, season 13 of shark tank and actually got a million bucks from Mark Cuban. I've never tasted it. I've never seen it out anywhere.

What do you know about Amaro, Bruce? I mean, Amaro actually came out of. So I think we haven't gotten to this yet. But I, in addition to writing the book, Meat, a decade ago, I started an organization called the Good Food Institute. We're a completely nonprofit organization, and just like Environmental Defense or World Resources Institute,

works on energy transition and creating the policies and the science and the innovation that will allow, solar and nuclear and EVs and other technologies to be successful. That's what GFI does, but focused on plant-based and cultivated meat. We have about 250 team members around the world. The plurality of our team members are scientists. And the number one thing we're doing is trying to help governments recognize that plant-based meat and cultivated meat can be a boon to their economies

and also help their food security, food self-sufficiency, food systems, resilience. So that's what we do. But one of the other things we do is we grant $3 to $5 million per year through a competitive grant program. And it's focused on solving key technological challenges to getting to price and taste parity for these technologies. And Umero actually came out of a GFI, $250,000 grant to the two founders of the company. And I believe, I haven't looked into Muro in a little while, but I believe it continues to be on shelves. and they continue to innovate. Beth Zodder and Amanda Stiles are the two co-founders.

And yeah, it was a big moment for us when they were on a Shirtank and got that investment. And I think they have continued to innovate and produce their product. How about any of the bigger famous companies in England? You've got Linda McCartney. You've got these big industrial, vegan, vegetarian companies. Are they? Because, like, that, it's chicken feed, really, a million dollars.

It's not very much. not going to change. Yes, it's good for research, but you need a bigger splash here. Are any of the bigger companies doing anything? Yeah, I mean, the exciting thing, and I talk about this in the book, is one of the reasons that plant-based meat and cultivated meat have been able to stay out of the culture wars in a way that's obviously different from telling people what to eat. So your opening question was, why not tell people what to eat? Why do this? And I had a more utilitarian answer than this. But it's also the case that if you're telling people what to eat, You're very quickly in the U.S., and I think probably just about everywhere, certainly also Brazil, you're going to get wrapped up in other people screaming, don't tell me what to eat.

So by focusing on innovation and consumer choice and science and small business and all these sorts of things, we can stay above the culture wars. And one of the things that's allowed us to do that is that the largest meat and food companies in the world are enthusiastic about these technologies. So JBS is the largest meat corporation in the world, obviously also the largest meat corporation in Brazil. GFI, I mentioned what we do. We exist also. GFI is actually six organizations because we have GFI in the U.S. But then we also have India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Europe. And we work with the meat industry everywhere that we operate. We go to meat industry conferences and talk to and table to talk to people in the meat industry about the fact that this is meat. just produced in a different way. JBS of the three largest meat companies in the world is probably the one that has been most enthusiastic about both cultivated meat and plant-based meat. They actually own the vegetarian butcher in Europe, which I think is Europe's largest plant-based meat company, and they're doing a bunch of stuff on their own focused on commercializing and advancing innovation and cultivated meat. And then Tyson and Cargill, the world's number two and three

meat companies, the U.S. is number one and number two meat companies are also enthusiastic investing in both plant-based and cultivated meat. I mean, GFI has done amazing work, and some of the things you're talking about are pretty incredible, and yeah, I did some research on it as well. Let's talk about governments catalyzing innovation. We talk about that a lot on the show that, you know, the space tech industry has largely been helped out by governments. The recent executive orders on quantum computing are helping the quantum industry out. Correct me if I'm wrong. You guys did, GFI did a needs assessment in 2025 to kind of say this is the number that we need

to basically jumpstart the industry. I think it was $10 billion. Can you explain like how that needs assess? was put together and what the $10 billion would generate for the ecosystem. Yeah, so that was a McKinsey needs assessment that we are leaning on. I expect that we'll have a new one, circa January. We're definitely going to have a beta version of a technological readiness analysis in January. Up until maybe six or eight months ago, our science team, their response to the idea

that it would be useful to have a comprehensive analysis of what's going to be required to get to price and taste parity, is that there's just too much that we don't even know that we don't know to try to isolate every single step to get us to price and taste parity. They now feel like they can do a reasonable job of that. So in January, we're going to have a, we will have a sort of beta version, and then we'll sort of do a wisdom of the crowd's analysis to try to hone it into something. that can actually be peer review published, et cetera, and we'll have in January our best understanding of literally everything that has to happen to get to price and taste parity for both plant-based meat and cultivated meat. And there's going to be a fair amount of R&D on the front end so that $10.1 billion number, I believe that 4.7 of it was research and development,

And then five point, I think actually four point four of it was R&D and then five point seven of it was infrastructure and scale out. And the entire goal is basically to get plant based and cultivated meat to price and taste parity, at which point markets can take over. So very much if you're talking about advanced chips or you're talking about incentives for things like solar and nuclear energy or you're talking about incentives for incentives for other sorts of. Biopharma or other innovations, what does it look like to get them to price and taste parity at which point the private sector can simply take over, produce, and scale. And that's what those numbers were focused on. They were done now five years ago. And what we know scientifically now versus five years ago, it's probably at least 35 times as much, maybe quite a bit more than that. My expectation is that the R&D side of those numbers is going to go down

and the infrastructure size number will probably go up. But the thing to remember about the infrastructure number is you get all of that money back if you get to price and taste parity, which is the entire goal. So those would be investment, things like long-term low-interest loans and other things that can incentivize the industry

and get it where it needs to go. Can I just ask you to clarify, because you keep mentioning taste parity, but earlier you said that I wouldn't be able to taste the difference and that that podcaster whose name we shall not mention said that she couldn't taste the difference. Yeah, indistinguishable. So when I say taste parity,

I mean indistinguishable and then better, but people who love the taste of meat need to eat it and immediately say, yes, this, I would have thought this was conventional meat. And ideally, I would have thought this was the best conventional meat I ever had. It hasn't passed the Jeremy's barbecue test yet. It's not the same. It doesn't taste exactly the same.

Happy to sample if you wanted, you know, we can do some R&D at the Gilbertson household this summer. Cultivated meat has. So cultivated meat is at taste parity. People who eat cultivated salmon, cultivated chicken, cultivated beef, the bowel product. they think it's indistinguishable. And as I mentioned, Andrew Stier said, it was like among the best chicken meals he'd ever had. So cultivated meat is there.

Plant-based meat is close. I think they're like six products where people who love meat, half or more of them say that it is indistinguishable, but not everybody. And I think four of those six products are by impossible foods. So we have a little way. to go and all of those products cost at least twice as much. The beef costs twice as much. The

chicken costs like four times as much. So we have a ways to go on scaling so that we can get to price parity. We have a few products that most meat eaters like as much. But with cultivated meat, we're there on indistinguishability. Bruce, a few weeks ago, and this happens quite regularly. I spend my time between the UK and France. And sometimes I need to go back to England from France. or I need to go back to France from the UK. And on more than one occasion, I've been stopped from travelling because of French farmers. They are very protective.

In the UK, the lobbies in America, I don't need to speak about the beef and the milk lobbies in America. Everyone's well aware of how powerful they are. The numbers are blurry, but let's say, ish a billion people are reliant on animal agriculture, in some way, maybe the numbers less than that, maybe it's not that high. It's a lot of people. What happens to those?

We speak about collateral damage on this show a lot, the collateral damage of the progress for tech. What happens to these people? Can they pivot into producing this meat? Yeah, I mean, I spend some time on this in chapter 10 of the book. And this is obviously not something that is automatically salt by a chef to plant-based and cultivated meat. But because it requires so much less land, it's the sort of thing where if we brought the political will, it could be solved.

So I start from the observation that farming is already and ranching is already really, really hard. A big part of that is the ethos of get big or get out everywhere in the world. The number of farmers, the number of ranchers is going down. And most places in the world that's happening even as volume of production is going up. And none of that has to do with plant-based or cultivated meat. So French farmers are pissed. Indian farmers are pissed. American farmers are pissed.

And none of that has to do with plant-based or cultivated meat. So it would not be self-executing. But we- That is to do with their livelihood been taken away. And this would do the same thing. Well, but the observation in the book is that it is already incredibly hard. So let's start there. They're already incredibly angry.

Let's start there. What would it look like to create policies that leaned in on prioritizing the needs of farming families in France, in the U.S., in Brazil, everywhere? If we are going to need, like right now we use about 3 billion hectares of land for animal agriculture. It's about 80% of agricultural land. The World Resources Institute says if meat consumption keeps going up at the level it's expected to be going up, we're going to need to double that. And they say there will be no wild spaces left. No forests, no savannas, no wild spaces. Three billion hectares is about how much we've got left globally. It's hard to imagine how we turn back the clock on get big or get out and change the policies that farmers are angry about now if that kind of need just continues. So my hypothesis in the book and my hypothesis generally is that if we can require vastly less land, that will over. open up opportunities to increase regenerative ranching, which has higher price points for farmers and ranchers, to increase organic and foods for human consumption, instead of having

to grow the vast majority of crops for chickens and pigs and farmed fish, we could incorporate ecosystem services into how we think about land stewardship. It's not just let's ranch animals and grow crops, let's put some of this into nature-based carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation. Those sorts of things, and there's a group called Green Alliance in the UK that actually modeled this in Europe. They looked at 10 European countries and analyzed if we shifted meat production, meat consumption in these 10 countries to two-thirds alternative meats.

And we used a third of that land for domestic consumption, a third of that land for ecosystem services, in a third of that land to increase the amount of organic and regenerative animal farming, what would happen? And it allowed for four times as much, just on a third of the freed up land, allowed for four times as much agroecology and regenerative ranching. Now, again, that doesn't happen automatically. What you do with that land is going to be, you know, up to markets, but we could have government policies that incentivize that kind of farming, which would be very good for farming and ranching families. And if we need more and more and more land,

it's really hard to imagine what the solution for farmers and ranchers is going to be. So it's not self-executing. The alternative meats don't naturally solve agricultural consolidation, but they certainly open up a room to solve agricultural consolidation. And that's why we would love to see alliances across alternative proteins, agorology, regenerative ranching, farmer cooperatives and all that sort of thing as well. Let's talk about where the money is coming in and where it's going from an investment perspective.

We always like to look at that. I don't know if this is accurate, but according to my research, I found that 75 cents out of every dollar that comes into this alternative protein market goes to fermentation. Is that correct? And if so, what the heck is fermentation related to all of this as an alternative protein source? I'm not sure if that number is correct. That might be the correct number for the last couple of years. It wouldn't surprise me. And there are two forms of fermentation.

In the introduction to the book, I point out that the company Corn, Q-U-O-R-N, you can actually like find them this year self-identifying as a plant-based meat company, but they're actually not. They use mycoprotein. So for the vast majority of people, they're not going to know that Q-U-O-R-N is not a plant-based meat because mycoprotein fungi, most people, I think, assume is a plant unless they're like asked. Maybe most people could get the answer right. But the main thing is fungi, mycoprotein has to be fed. They don't have photosynthesis.

They don't make their own food. And that's part of that fermentation number. actual companies like corn, the better meat company, Nature's Find, other companies that are basically making whole products designed to replicate meat, but using mycoprotein, much like impossible uses soy or beyond meat uses peas. And then the other half of that, and I think probably the bulk of the investment money, is something called precision fermentation. And precision fermentation involves basically taking yeast and programming the DNA of something like casein, into the yeast. You could also program the DNA of a meat protein or an egg protein or whatever into the yeast. And then just like you can use yeast to spit out alcohol, you can use yeast to spit out animal proteins. And that is actually how the heem and the impossible burger is made is using precision fermentation. It's how something like 99% of the rennet in cheese is made and has been since the mid-1990s, it's how insulin now is made. Insulin used to come from, I think, pig intestines, rent it used to come from calf stomachs, and now they're using synthetic biology, which is also

called precision fermentation. Interesting. So when I read that fermentation, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about kimchi and like, you know, that sort of thing. But this is entirely different in the precision nature of actually reprogramming the biology of things to, to, to yield. the different result. Super interesting. I was thinking about wine and beer, not kimchi. Yeah, or sourcrow or famously over here, RFK Jr. talked about how he eats a lot of meat and he eats a lot of fermented foods. So he actually travels with sauerkraut, which is kind of interesting. But in any of that, yes, this is in the intro of the book, I say most people, if you're thinking about fermentation, you're thinking about kimchi or beer or sourcrout.

crowd or something like that. So it's unhelpful. So I fold mycoprotein biomass fermentation into plant-based in the discussion of the book. And then I fold precision fermentation, which is going to be used either for ingredients in plant-based meat or it's going to be used to create the feed for cultivated meat. So I just folded into those two discussions. But we do have it. It is one third of the alternative protein equation. And we have significantly more than probably any of your viewers and listeners would want to know on the GFI website into the science of both forms of fermentation. So that's just gFI.org.

Let's get scary. scare us a little bit, Bruce. Let's talk about antibiotic resistance. I know on your TED to talk, that was the button. So scare us. Yeah. I mean, it is a little terrifying. antibiotic resistance.

So if people really want to scare, you could Google the end of working antibiotics, and even bigger scare, add the word China to your Google search. Also, if that, add that to anything who makes it scarier? Yeah, I mean, at least in this case, it's real. I mean,

the world has not banned a lot of human-relevant antibiotics from use in foreign animals. And this is chapter three of the book, 70% of the medically relevant. So 70% of human prescribed antibiotics are currently fed to farm animals.

Not because those animals are sick, but because if you're going to cram 50,000 chickens in a shed, 100,000 salmon in a tank, your death losses are going to be astronomical. And the industry realized, actually they won't be if we just drug these animals up. They can live through these conditions

until we slaughter them. And that is one of the top two probably the top cause of antimicrobial resistance, which is leading us toward the end of working antibiotics. And both of the top causes overprescription in humans and use in animals get worse every single year and have been getting worse every single year for decades. We are very unlikely to make progress on overuse in humans because that's actually an equity issue. We have underuse in humans in developing economies, but we can eliminate the use in animals, which would go a long way toward preserving working antibiotics if we just phased them out in animals, which plant-based and

cultivated meat allow us to do. And the end of working antibiotics is the end of modern medicine. You cut your knee. You could, you know, the antibiotics that the doctor would prescribe don't work. You get a tooth infection. The antibiotics are not going to work. So dental surgery becomes impossible. things like cesarean sections, death losses from infection, from C-sections with skyrocket. Every kind of medical procedure that benefits from antibiotics, like all of those death losses just skyrocket. How do we measure the effectiveness of antibiotics? How do we measure the resistance? So they can figure out, and they do figure out when antibiotics stop working.

there's a journal of the American, no, the Lancet published a review a couple of years ago, and it said that right now, 1.3 million people per year are dying from antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Their prediction is that it's going to be 10 million people per year by 2050. And in addition to the 1.3, which are a direct result, there are another 3 or 4 million where antibiotic-resistant superbugs were a contributing factor to people's. staff and that number is going up every single year. And in each of the sort of opening chapters, the first chapters that hunger and malnutrition, second is environment, third is antimicrobial resistance, fourth is pandemic risk. In addition to the link between the way that we produce meat

right now and those harms, I also dive into what's being done outside the realm of the meat industry to address those harms. And the only one where we're making any progress on anything is hunger and malnutrition across the environmental issues, across antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk, none of the other potential interventions are making any progress either, but plant-based and cultivated meat could just simply remove the top cause of pandemic risk and one of the top two causes of antimicrobial resistance, which could spell the end of modern medicine. I feel like I'm on Diary of a CEO. That we used to put that out as the trailer.

That is a mic drop. Well, it's a common thread, I think, that we find a lot on this show is, you know, another, another, you know, analogy maybe if we want to entertain it is like when we are on our phones using an app or we're on our computers using Claude or chat GPT, the extensions and repercussions. of pushing a button on your laptop are not completely visible to the user. Bruce, would you say that's invisible? Right? Yeah, mostly. I mean, that's it. How do we quantify that as something across, that happens across these systems?

Because it's similar, is it not? I mean, it's, it's, you know, I mean, it's so similar that has a name, external cost. And I don't think anybody in economics has figured out how you, incorporate external costs into the price of things beyond regulations. And once you have an industry as powerful as the tech industry or an industry as powerful as the meat industry, as well as like consumers that are not going to want higher prices either, something as omnipresent, especially as meat consumption, the implications of internalizing the external costs are higher prices, which most people are not enthusiastic about. And from an energy consumption standpoint,

We do have gas taxes, and we do have for the external cost of tobacco, tobacco taxes, or alcohol to excise taxes, that sort of thing. But really, they don't go that far. Tobacco industry is doing great. The oil and coal mining industries are still making massive profits, et cetera. But if you can do renewable energy, if you can do electric vehicles, if you can actually make the product in a different way, that can be part of the solution. I don't know what the solution is on the,

on the tech front, although I agree with you that the analogy is apt and the external costs of tech use are obviously significant. Obviously, countries like Australia and the UK are attempting to address it. I don't know how likely that is in the U.S. Not very. Yeah, that's my assessment too, unfortunately. That's my assessment here too. I mean, if you look at sort of the history of attempting to make any progress on any of these environmental or health regulations that might in some way increase the price of meat.

They've never gone anywhere or changing subsidies, never gone anywhere. But if we can make meat from plants, if we can cultivate meat from cells, that can have the same effect solving those problems or markedly ameliorating them without meeting with opposition from incumbent industry,

which I think makes the intervention tractable. Has the action to your book fueled your optimism or dampened your optimism? I mean, it was interesting writing it, and it's interesting to me how many people read it and take kind of an exclusively optimistic message from it because it's not, you know, it sort of has two competing messages. One of the messages is we can do this. The science looks good for both plant-based and cultivated meat. There don't seem to be any science or engineering challenges. They're insurmountable. And not only that, it's probably a lot easier than something like getting where we are on solar. solar and electric vehicles and probably multiple other technologies. But at the same time, the fact that the science and engineering works doesn't mean that it's going to happen.

So I really liked in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's book, Abundance, they have a line that's like the world is filled with innovations that are waiting to be discovered or something like that. So it's not self-executing. And I walk through a bunch of examples of things like MRNA and penicillin, how long it took for electric vehicles and solar to catch on, that sort of thing. And it's really, I mean, it's taken decades longer than it could have if the world had brought the well. I think the same sort of thing could be true here. So it's kind of a call to action. We can do this, but it's still

very possible that we won't if we don't bring the well. So the conclusion of the book is sort of, if you agree with me that this is critically important, here are some ways that you can pitch in and try to make it happen as fast as possible. How are you thinking about this, Jeremy? Are you going to cancel your barbecue for the weekend? No. I've tried to plant-based meats, and they just, they're just, they're's funky, man. And they, but I do have a bigger picture.

Look at this with the, with the cultivated meat sounds really interesting. And once the, once the price parity comes together, I think it's super compelling. And the reasons to rewrite that. system are tremendous. So I want to do a quick comparison, Mark. This is where my head's going with all of this. So we talk about this is a technology. Food is an energy source. Food is energy, right? And we're talking about infrastructure. So Bruce, we unpacked something in the space tech industry that NASA put out, basically a user's guide to the moon. And it basically cast out, hey, here's what we need from the industry to make a permanent presence on the moon happen.

If we did an analogy to this ecosystem, to this infrastructure, and you could put out, you know, our guide to embracing cultivated meat, what would be like four key pillars that, you know, the private industry could take action on and potentially benefit from the investment into? Yeah, I mean, the private industry is doing that. right, like JBS is working on cultivated meat. They're building out infrastructure. They're putting money into R&D. Tyson and Cargill are investing in cultivated meat companies,

as well as plant-based meat companies on both sides of that equation. I mean, one of the things I point out in the book is that because the way we produce meat right now, it's not just that it needs nine times the calories for chicken and even more for everything else. That's nine times the land, the water, the pesticides, the herbicides. but you also have the feed mill, you have the farm, you have the slaughterhouse. For every unit of shift in the direction of plant-based meat or cultivated meat, you actually require significantly less inputs, significantly less land, etc. So your net infrastructure cost, if you were not factoring in the sunk cost of the current system,

your net infrastructure costs over time go down significantly. So in terms of long-term planning, your net infrastructure, cost go down significantly. But it's a significant cap X cost on the front end. And I do start to model some of that. I look at what the steel needs are going to be for 100% cultivated meat globally to replace all land animal meat, 370 million metric tons, would require something like 2% of the annual global steel production. So it's pretty inconsequential. It just feels eminently doable. And in the book, I offer, I think, three ways that it could happen fairly quickly. On our current trajectory, I think I say in the book that I think the transition is inevitable eventually, but eventually

is doing a ton of work in that sentence. It could be decades. But I think if a major company like JBS or Nessly or ADM decided to go all in, they have really bad profit margins, so that might be not possible. But that would be one option. Another option would be a country like South Korea, which has the lowest food self-sufficiency ratio in the OECD, and is probably the standout leader in Asia after China. But as a per capita investor, it's a standout leader. They could probably do it all by themselves. And then a company like Anthropic or Microsoft or Google, Google's DeepMind,

if they decided we are going to solve this, they could probably solve it pretty quickly. And it would not be, especially if they were using this sort of of AI capacity that they have to solve the R&D questions, the AI capacity that they have to solve the sort of infrastructure, bio-manufacturing questions. It could probably happen pretty quickly. I think Elon Musk could add it to, you know, he's going to do Starlink and he's going to do electric vehicles and he's going to do these other things. He'll do this too. One of the people who I quote in the book and also who has endorsed the book as a SpaceX board member named Steve Jervison

and his line in the book is we're not going to have slaughterhouses on Mars. So you could even imagine Elon deciding, okay, we've been making meat in the same way for 12,000 years. Now I'm going to solve this. But I think the science and engineering challenges just are not anywhere near insurmountable. But they do require more will than we brought so far. Although as I walk through in the book, we are like the amount of government funding every year is going up. The number of scientific papers every year is going up. The number of patents every year is going up. So we're certainly trending in the right. direction, but we do still have scientific challenges and we have even bigger infrastructure and scaling challenges, both for plant-based meat and for cultivated meat. As we approach the landing of the plane, you've painted a very, very, very good picture of what this could look like. Ten years ago, I believe we were all going to be in grasshoppers and insects and we're not. What makes this different? Why we're in the same? thing happen to cultivated meat that happen to, we're all going to eat insects?

I mean, grasshoppers and insects is a diet change intervention. We have to convince people if they want to eat grasshoppers and insects. With plant-based meat and even more so, with cultivated meat, it's just a different way of producing the exact same thing. If you were polling people 10 years ago about eating grasshoppers and insects, there was just overwhelming revulsion in developed economies. There's still overwhelming revulsion in developed economies. There's still overwhelming revulsion in developed economies. But even if there weren't, there's not overwhelming revulsion to eating more beans. And yet the world is not eating more beans. There is something distinct about meat. In the book, I talk about people who say, well, look at how much plant-based milk

people are consuming. And I point out that plant-based milk has been winning taste tests for more than 25 years, whereas plant-based meat has never won a taste test so far. It's come close, but it hasn't gotten there yet. And then cultivated meat, it's just, it's literally these same things. So it's certainly possible that in 10 years we will not have made a lot of progress. We do need to get to price and taste parity. We're moving in the right direction, but moving in the right direction is not the same as getting there. And we do have to get there. And until we get there, gains in terms of say, so I think we will have made a lot of progress in 10 years, but we might not have a lot of sales in 10 years. It's very similar to, if you look at the trajectory of solar or

the trajectory of EVs, with EVs, General Motors launches the EV1 in 1996. They spend a billion dollars on it. They end up crushing all of the cars by about 2001. And most of the world just rode off EVs. Tesla wasn't even founded until 2003. And we didn't get to 1% EV sales until 2016, but now EV sales are shooting up the S curve of adoption. In China, they passed 50% in nine years. And that's because of bringing down costs, improving battery range and setting up a charging infrastructure. The same thing can happen for cultivated meat, for sure, maybe for plant-based meat. I think it's likely that it could be like many times what it is now for plant-based meat. But they do need to get to price and taste parity. That is an eminently solvable problem.

Can we do it in 10 years on our current trajectory? Maybe not. Could we do it in five to 10 years if we really brought the will? I think almost certainly. Forget about the utility grid to support data center infrastructure and technology. You figure out the utility grid to support humans. I love this conversation. Bruce, very amazing answers, well detailed, great information for our guys.

And me and Mark, this was fantastic. I'd love to have a follow-up to kind of see how this industry is progressing and the things you're tracking and really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you very much, Jeremy. I appreciate that. And I am at your disposal and people who want to check out the book. It's just meetbook.org. You can find out much more depth about everything we've just been discussing.

Thank you very much. And since we're on websites, www. thinking on paper. xy-Z for this episode and every other episode. in the Thinking on Paper Canon. If you're listening to this and you have eaten plant-based food, if you eat plant-based meat regularly,

please let us know in the comments why you like it, what you think about it. If you've tried cultivated meat, please tell us if it passes your taste test and what you'd like to see happening in the future of meat. Until next time, stay disruptive, be curious.

Keep thinking on paper.