Presenting M4F: Ep4. Alternative "meat"

We continue featuring the Meat: the four futures series with our second exploration of four different futures for meat - Alternative "meat".

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What do some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, animal activists, and environmentalists have in common? They each envision a future where meat alternatives can tackle the environmental impacts and animal suffering caused by global livestock production.

But in this futuristic vision of replacing livestock with plant-based substitutes and cultivating meat in labs from animal cells - are we living in a utopia or a dystopia?

We speak with scientists, investors, and CEOs from across the world to better understand the motivations, scientific basis, and evidence that either support or raise concerns about the future of alternative "meat".

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Visit the episode page with more resources: https://tabledebates.org/meat/episode4

Project webpage: https://tabledebates.org/meat

Take the values-based quiz: https://tabledebates.org/meat/quiz

Music by Blue dot Sessions and Epidemic sound.

Transcript

Matthew

What is that some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, animal activists, and environmentalists all have in common? They share a belief in a future where meat alternatives can tackle the environmental impacts and animal suffering caused by global industrial animal agriculture.

Steve Jurvetson

So the prediction I’m willing to make for 2050 is that it will no longer be a debatable proposition, anywhere on planet Earth, that our future will be entirely clean meat.

Isha Datar

My extreme vision is I would like to see a world where we actually don’t need to farm animals for food.
  

Matthew

In this futuristic vision of replacing livestock with plant-based substitutes and cultivating meat in labs from animal cells - are we living in a utopia or a dystopia?

Welcome to the Alternative Meat episode of the Meat: the Four Futures podcast, presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide for the series, that dives into the science, the vision, and the pathway for four different futures: Efficient Meat, Less Meat, No Meat and Alternative Meat.

Paul Shapiro

We want to create a 21st century kind of meat industry, where we continue eating all of the meat that humanity wants, but without the need to cause so much harm to the planet and to animals.

Matthew

Can this future replace the traditional beef-burger on most western plates, and can it meet the increasing demand for meat as the world’s population grows?
  

Varun Desphande

Our vision is one that stewards the welfare of farmers that provides nourishment for millions, that creates economic growth across the global south.

Matthew

Here we speak with scientists, investors, and CEOs who are committed to developing meat alternatives that closely replicate the taste and texture of animal meat, without the slaughter and welfare concerns associated with traditional animal sourced foods.

And while we are putting forward the best arguments for this future. We’ll also dig into the evidence that might make you a little skeptical of what it’s promising.

If you haven't listened to the previous episodes of this series, you can find them in your podcast feed to hear the whole  story. 

And we want to hear what surprised or challenged you while listening. You can record yourself in a quiet room and send the audio to podcast@tabldebates.org. And your voice might be featured in a future episode.

Part 1 - The why

Paul Shapiro

When most people eat meat today, they're not sitting around thinking, Ah, I'm so glad an animal was tormented and slaughtered for this meat.

Matthew 

Paul Shapiro, author of ‘Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World’ began thinking about animal welfare issues when watching television as a child.

Paul

If you go back and watch Star Trek, they don't make meat from animal slaughter on there, they have replicators that just make meat.  

Clip from Star Trek The Next Generation:

Riker: We no longer enslave animals for food purposes.

Antican delegate: But we have seen humans eat meat.

Riker: You’ve seen something as fresh and tasty as meat, but inorganically materialized out of patterns used by our transporters.

Paul

And it's not just Star Trek. This has been in science fiction for a very long time. And the question is, can we turn science fiction into science fact can we actually produce meat experiences that can be made inside of a fermenter or a cultivator rather than inside of an animal's body.

Antican delegate: Sickening. It’s barbaric.

Matthew

You have probably heard of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, and maybe even tried one of the many plant- and fungi-based meat substitutes in the last decade, or possibly long before that. Since this isn’t actually a new idea.

Paul

The first time there was any recipe for creating a meat experience without animals goes back to more than 1000 years ago in China, where there's a recipe for a mock lamb dish that relied on soybeans, and on wheat gluten. You fast forward to, let's say, like the 1980s. And all of a sudden, you started having companies like Tofurkey, and Lightlife, which started to create foods that were kind of meat-like, but they wouldn’t fool a carnivore, they were really designed for vegetarians.

Matthew

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of companies and private investment into alternative-meats. And part of that reason is companies are starting to target meat-eaters with their products.

Paul

We're going to try to create experiences that are comparable to meat, so much so that meat lovers will want it, not just vegetarians.

Matthew

I should point out here that Paul Shapiro is now the CEO of one of these companies - The Better Meat Co., operating out of Sacramento, California. They aren’t using plants as a base for their product, nor are they using animal cells.

Paul 

We run fungi fermentations, in order to create meat experiences that we believe are more economical and more effective at mimicking animal meat than the other two kingdoms are capable of doing today.

Matthew

On the wall of the Better Meat Co’s facility, looming above their large bioreactors, is a 40-ft mural that was envisioned by Paul’s colleague.

Paul

Her name is Prachi Jah, and she envisioned a transition of the way that humanity has procured meat over the last few 1000 years. So it's six panels. And the first panel is of a First Nations person hunting a bison. And that, of course is how humanity used to get meat by hunting and gathering. Of course, those people and the bison were removed by cowboys and cattle.

Matthew 

So the next panel is set around 200 years ago in the North American plains showing the near-extermination of the bison and the cultures that sustained it. This is the beginning of the scaling up of beef production. Where train tracks are being built across the continent to help transport beef to people living far away from where the animals are raised.

Paul

Then you move to the 1950s where you had the inception of factory farming. So animals start to be confined, but they're not yet in total confinement. Then you fast forward to the present. In the year 2022, where nearly all farm animals are confined permanently indoors, wing to wing inside of windowless warehouses where they are living in their own feces, these animals are genetically selected to grow so big, so fast that many of them can't even take more than a few steps prior to collapsing underneath their own unnatural bulk.

Matthew

Paul describes the last 2 panels, which paint his company’s vision of a new meat future.

Paul

Which are a fermentation fueled future where we can continue serving humanity all of the meat that it wants to eat, except without the need to raise animals. And so in these final two panels, you see a fermenter producing all of this meat. And you see a group of people standing in the wild where the bison are back on the land, the turkeys are back on the land, and we're not harming animals to procure meat anymore.

Matthew

So this is what the Better Meat Co is setting out to create.

Paul 

Not necessarily a path to the way that we did things in the past as a species. But we want to create a 21st century kind of meat industry, where we continue eating all of the meat that humanity wants, but without the need to cause so much harm to the planet and to animals. And that's what we're trying to do here by using fermentation to turn microbes into meat.

Matthew

A lot of people are attracted to Paul Shapiro’s vision –  where animal suffering is greatly reduced, and land that was used for animal agriculture is transitioned back into wildlands and forests for wild animals to thrive.

One of Better Meat Co’s supporters is Steve Jurvetson - an early stage venture capitalist whose investment portfolio includes SpaceX, Tesla, Skype and Upside foods.

Steve Jurvetson

Look out 500 years, there's no doubt that we won't slaughter animals for meat, there's no doubt that we will not burn gasoline for cars. And there's no doubt that we'll be colonizing other worlds. This is our inevitable future.

Matthew

As we talked about in the efficient meat episode, we’ve made incredible advancements in animal agriculture over the last 50-60 years. But Steve Jurvetson sees the potential in building a new paradigm around the production and consumption of quote “meat”.

Steve

Imagine you could somehow magically cause no suffering on the part of the animals, you still have the land use, the greenhouse gasses, all the other problems where you’re facing a 10x efficiency disadvantage versus cellular agriculture - why would you do that?

Matthew

For Steve, this isn’t only an environmental fix. It’s also a wider moral question.

Steve

It just seems so obvious to me that once we have an alternative to meat manufacturing that will actually cast an eye to how we do it today, in a way that we just psychologically can't. The cognitive dissonance is too high, right? Meat eaters don't want to visit slaughterhouses, even if we could. 

I can tell that I was blinded. My own psychology wouldn't let me truly dwell on animal suffering, and that my future self would once I had a credible alternative.

Matthew

Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist, wonders why we would continue to raise animals for slaughter when alternatives now exist. 

So we’ve been talking about meat ‘alternatives’, something that can replace meat by imitating its look, taste and texture. But there are a lot of alternatives out there. Some are plant-based or as Better Meat Co uses, ones that are based on fungi.  And there’s cellular agriculture - where you take cell cultures from animal products like meat, milk or eggs, and grow them in a lab.

We now visit Canada and speak to a real pioneer in this field. She is such a pioneer that back in 2015 she actually coined the term ‘cellular agriculture’.

Isha Datar

I think what moved me the most was seeing the environmental impact of animal agriculture on the world.

Matthew 

And can you introduce yourself?

Isha

My name is Isha Datar. I'm executive director of New Harvest.

Matthew

New Harvest is a research institute dedicated to advancing the science of cultured meat. They’re the longest running non-profit in the field starting in 2004.

Isha

Where I grew up here in Edmonton, we're very fossil fuels oriented place, and to see that animal agriculture had such a huge outsized effect on our environment, in all these different ways was quite shocking to me, because I really did think farms were, you know, rolling pastures, some kind of like cyclical relationship with the earth. And really, it's not like that.

Matthew

After learning about animal agriculture’s impact on the climate, Isha Datar’s first thought was that everyone could shift their diets.

 Isha

First, I thought,  We're gonna all become vegetarian, then I realized that, you know, that has been a message for literally like 1000s of years. 

Matthew

And we’ll be exploring what a plant-based future could look like in a few weeks. But when she learned about cultivating meat in labs -

Isha

To hear that, we could grow meat from cells made me feel like oh, my gosh, this is like such an obvious next step for humanity and a real win win win when you think about not just reducing environmental impact, but also animals need not suffer anymore for food, and what would that mean, in terms of like an ethical and moral transition for humanity as well.

Matthew

And how have your motivations changed in the last decade?

Isha

I think what drives me towards it today is still that although now I'm a lot more aware that achieving that environmental impact is going to require a lot of scale, a lot of tech development, and so on. I think what drives me towards that is that I still think that cell ag has the greatest capacity to disrupt animal agriculture.

Matthew

So why does Isha Datar think animal agriculture needs disrupting?

Isha

Not only is animal agriculture one of the biggest contributors to climate change, especially through methane emissions, it is also one of the most prone to climate change. You know, a changing climate means that animals are not in optimal environments anymore. And so we see a lot of effects in terms of 10s, sometimes hundreds of 1000s of cattle or pigs being wiped out to just some kind of rogue storm or snow event or any other kind of climate event.

Matthew

Isha is concerned about how animal agriculture has been scaled into these high density environments – where lots of animals are crowded into a small building or piece of land. But besides the animal welfare argument, she is also worried about diseases.

Isha

So we have these epidemic viruses popping up all the time. Every year, you hear at least one gigantic outbreak where millions of animals need to be culled. And you know, very quietly in the background, we've been in the midst of a African swine fever amongst pigs that has killed at least a quarter of the pigs in the world.

Matthew

It’s true that in 2019 there were about 440 million fewer domesticated pigs than in previous years. China is responsible for half of the world’s production and they culled half of their pigs. It’s not 100% clear that it’s all attributed to African Swine Fever, but it certainly played a role.

Isha

We don't really hear about it in the media, but that is an enormous food security risk. That is an enormous public health risk. It's almost become so big that it will fail due to the way that it has become big.

Matthew

The search for meat alternatives is of course a global issue. A global issue driven by the planet’s population growth. Imagine: back in the year 1800, there wasn’t even one billion people on planet Earth. A hundred years ago, there were about 2 billion. When I was born, we recently surpassed 5 billion people. And last year we just passed 8 billion people. How big a role will meat-alternatives play in feeding the future?

Part 2: Meeting the global demand with meat alternatives

As incomes and populations rise across the global South, the trends are showing an increased demand for meat. Here we speak with people building an alternative-meat future in Asia, the continent with the largest population, and Africa, the continent with the fastest growing population.

Hakeem Jimo

Africa is a key market.

Matthew 

Hakeem Jimo, CEO of Veggie Victory, the first plant-based food tech company operating in Nigeria.

Hakeem

I'm all in for everything that helps getting animals out of the food chains.

Matthew

Africans consume a lot less meat per capita than Europeans or Americans, and that’s not the only thing that’s different.

Hakeem

I always talk about leap frogging. We have seen it in other technologies like. we never went for - didn't have the chance to go for landlines. Too expensive to have it. Or personal computers, we had to go for mobile phones, mobile computers. And there's this concept that if we can also leapfrog the meat – before we start eating meat – let's jump that and go into good meat or whatever you want to call it, you know, whether it's from I hope it's from plant-based, I think it's the most efficient, easiest, quickest. But if it's clean meat, or what you call it - cultured meat, cell meat, insects, well, still better than cows. Bring it on.

Matthew

So he is excited, but he is also a little skeptical of meat grown from animal cells.

Hakeem

I know It will probably not work in Africa for a long time, because it's another premium thing. I know technology will bring prices down. But at the same time, how much time do we have left? Shall we now wait for 10 years now. In 10 years meat consumption is doubling.

Matthew

Hakeem Jimo strongly identifies as a vegan. He sees a path forward for a plant-based future so you’ll hear more from him in that episode.

We also spoke with The Good Food Institute India . You’ll first hear from managing director Varun Deshpande.

Varun Deshpande

We do have major challenges in this part of the world relating to undernutrition. Of course, we also have as the rest of the world does overnutrition, diabetes, issues like hypertension, obesity, etc. 

Matthew

India also has some unique challenges, which includes feeding 1.5 billion people.

Varun

 But perhaps what's special in this part of the world is undernutrition. Issues like iron deficiency anemia, neural tube defects arising from folic acid deficiencies, these are really, really debilitating issues that they rob our population of their ability to shape their own destiny.

Matthew

And the COVID 19 pandemic and climate change only make the situation more dire.

Varun 

Studies from the likes of the International Food Policy Research Institute, from the UN environmental program, they're all identifying that climate change is going to result in hundreds of millions more hungry by 2030. COVID-19 is resulting in hundreds of millions more in extreme poverty by 2030. So we have this obligation, we have this responsibility to create food systems that are more nourishing, that are more efficient. And we really don't have time to waste.

Matthew

The Good Food Institute has a shared vision to greet these challenges across all of its global branches from California to Brussels, São Paulo to Tel Aviv, and Singapore to Mumbai.

Varun

We're focused on building the alternative protein sector from the ground up. We work across business, science and policy. And our work in India, as it is across the global South is actually quite special because it's focused on locating alternative proteins within the context of the developing world. 

Nicole Rocque

Alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy present compelling solutions to address both sustainability as well as food security in the developing world.

Matthew

Nicole Rocque, Senior Innovation Specialist at GFI India speaks to why they focus on alternative proteins.

Nicole

Relying on animals for protein is an inefficient use of the world’s resources. Meat requires more energy, water and land to produce than any other food source.

In order to halt a climate catastrophe, we need to immediately cut methane emissions, halt deforestation, prevent agricultural sprawl, and shift consumptions towards plant forward diet.

Matthew

Animal consumption is going up around the world, which affects everyone. More farmed animals means more animal feed has to be grown. And with how interconnected our global supply chains are - any decision about production, consumption or distribution in one region has knock on effects elsewhere.

Good Food Institute envisions an alternative to today’s global industrial animal production, and Nicole Rocque is especially excited about the role that India can play in building an alternative protein sector.

Nicole

We have the potential to accelerate new product innovation as well as lay down the path towards cost reduction globally, essentially advancing the sector on various dimensions around taste, price, and accessibility, while simultaneously establishing a model for the sector's growth in the developing world. 

Matthew

Nicole says India can be incredibly competitive when it comes to developing meat-alternatives, not only on cost, but also by providing a highly skilled work force.

Nicole

By leveraging and advancing our inherent expertise in biopharmaceuticals, industrial fermentation food processing, we see huge potential to build a globally competitive manufacturing supply chain for the sector out of India.

Matthew

Varun Deshpande, managing director of the Good Food Institute India, describes a vision for alternative protein that centers the importance of small-scale farmers in the future.

Varun

What governments and folks in the private sector are trying to do is to get farmers to do things like step away from the crops that they've been growing for decades, which are perhaps cash crops that crops that are not as nourishing to the soil crops like rice, wheat, sugarcane, that were prized during the Green Revolution promoted during the Green Revolution, but that have served their purpose over the last decades, right. And the kinds of crops that they're being asked to move over to are millets, pulses, nitrogen fixing highly sustainable crops by comparison. But the issue is farmers are really unable to make this transition unless they're able to then sell those raw materials into lucrative fast growing end markets. And that's where smart protein comes in. We're seeing companies in India and all over the world that are producing next generation ingredients for plant based meat, egg dairy foods, that are needing to procure these crops at huge volumes, that could be that lucrative and market for farmers to sell into. I mean, you can't really build a value chain that leads to nowhere.

Matthew

I would say that Varun Desphande’s vision is a little broader than the ones you usually hear in North America and Europe. Instead of focusing on replacing livestock with environmentally friendly alternatives, Varun emphasizes the crucial role of farmers in shaping this future.

And even though he is optimistic about this future, he acknowledges it’s an uphill battle ahead.

Varun

I think unfortunately or fortunately, meat as a part of the diet - the demand for meat, the taste of meat, the juiciness of meat, the aspiration of meat, that's not going away anytime soon. So yeah, I think this is a necessary part of the future. And our hope is that we can establish it as a lucrative industry so it can grow towards the end of this decade and beyond to truly provide a viable alternative.

Matthew

Next we dive into the science behind the production.

Part 3 - The What

Matthew

So just to be clear, in this “Alternative Meat future” We’re exploring how novel foods aim to replace the slaughter, the suffering, the emissions, the land,  water, and other resources used by livestock. Some, like Paul Shapiro of the Better Meat Co, are even exploring new branding for restaurants.  

Paul Shapiro

People often talk about ‘farm to fork’ dining, I often talk about ‘fermenter to fork’ dining.

Matthew

There is more than one category of meat-alternative. There’s plant-based meat substitutes, which use plant ingredients to try to mimic the taste and texture of meat. This has the longest history. A second is protein  made from microorganisms, where fungi, algae or bacteria are grown and multiplied under controlled conditions to also imitate meat.  The company Quorn, with a Qu, has been doing this for decades now. And then there is the new kid on the block, which gets a lot of attention in this space, where animal cells are grown in a lab to end up with meat on your plate. 

Lots of names have been proposed to call this last group, ranging from Cellular meat, lab-grown meat, clean meat, cultivated meat or cultured meat. It’s worth mentioning that any suggestion of ‘meat’ in the name draws criticism from the livestock industry. Just like the dairy industry challenges the idea that nuts, seeds, or cereals can produce ‘milk’. But if you can produce something that is indistinguishable to the eater, or even identical at a molecular level, the question of where you draw the line isn't obvious.

And how does it actually work? This depends on the meat alternative. Let’s take each, one at a time, starting with plant-based meat substitutes.

Paul Shapiro 

Let’s just take the Beyond burger , which is the maybe the most well known of these products. So their hero ingredient is called pea protein.

Matthew

You may recognize pea protein from reading the ingredients list on the back of a food product like a plant-based burger. So this process starts with a farmer growing a field of peas.

Paul

You take that field of peas, you harvest it, and you mill it into a flour. Now you have a pea flour, but pea flour is not that high in protein. So you basically undergo what's called a fractionation process where you strip out the fiber, you strip out the fat and you concentrate it down into a pea protein powder that an athlete might take as a supplement.

Matthew

So you start with peas, grind it to a pea flour, and then concentrate it into a pea protein powder, in a process that’s similar to the traditional way of making tofu - but you don’t yet have the texture of animal meat.

Paul

So then it's subjected to something that's called extrusion, which is a fancy way of saying lots of heat and lots of pressure. And that changes the structure of the protein to go from being globular to becoming stringy. So plant proteins are typically globular like a globe, and animal proteins are typically stringy. And so that's why companies like Beyond Meat are so focused on extrusion practices, because they can change peas into something that ultimately has the texture of animal meat.

Matthew

So that's the heart of making plant-based meat alternatives - though a lot of other processes can be involved, especially when trying to recreate the flavor of meat.

Then there’s proteins made from microorganisms and we’ll focus on one in particular that the company Quorn and others use. They use a fungus called ‘Fusarium’’. This a really fibrous texture that is used to mimic the chewiness of meat in vegan and vegetarian alternatives. 

To produce it, you take this fungus through a fermentation process and grow it in big tanks in a nutrient-rich soup that includes glucose, nitrogen and other vitamins and minerals–this growing medium can be made from feed crops, food waste or agricultural waste. The fungus grows in size by eating up all these nutrients and converting them into protein called ‘mycoprotein’. 

This is then harvested, purified and processed into different cuts of meat that we are familiar with, like fillets or nuggets or minced meat. 

So that’s plant-based substitutes and mycoprotein. And now moving on to cultured meat.

Isha Datar, who we heard from earlier, explains how we start with sampling cells from animals and end up with something meat-like on our plate, using a surprising analogy.

Isha

The process of culturing meat is, it comes to mind to me, like almost like a nested drop down menu, because like, you can talk about in a simple way.  And then like, each one of those ways could be multiple different approaches. So just keep that in mind.

Matthew

So at the top of the drop down menu, you’ve got a few options.

Isha

You get a cell from an animal and the drop downlist, there is, it could be a biopsy from a living animal, it could be a sample of tissue from an animal that was slaughtered, it could be from an egg. That cell could come from one of many different types of sources.

Matthew

Depending on where that cell comes from, you then choose your medium to grow it on.

Isha

The medium is what provides all the nutrients that those cells need to grow and divide. There's kind of two different stages: there's the growing in number. So first, you want the cells to multiply. And then after a certain number of multiplications, you want that those cells to grow by maturing into muscle fibers.

Matthew

Isha points out another possible drop down. You can mature these cells into muscle fibers by growing them on different types of scaffold.

Isha

And the scaffold is kind of like the surface that the cells like to adhere on the scaffold, sometimes like signals that the cells need to stretch or can provide some kind of stretchiness for them.

Matthew

The scaffold is also what helps give the cells a certain shape.

Isha

And then all of that growth would take place in a bioreactor. And so the bioreactor is more or less like just a giant stainless steel tank that provides everything that the cells need in terms of like oxygenation and carbon dioxide and kind of waste products being removed and some movements so that the cells are all kind of bathed in media and nutrients are being brought to them evenly.

Matthew

So after you grow these cells, you can mature them into something like animal tissue or a make burger-like texture.

Isha

Or you might seed them onto the scaffold, as I mentioned, and create something more like this kind of sashimi or fish or like more structured stuff. So there's, there's a lot of flexibility but it kind of comes down to those four main elements: cells, medium, scaffold and bioreactor.

Matthew

Most of the market now is made up of plant-based meat substitutes and some are using Single cell proteins to imitate meats. People in this field expect animal cell cultured meat to make a big splash in the next few years and decades, though there are a few important unanswered questions:

How much will it cost? Can we trust that it will be safe for us to eat?  Will it pass a blind taste test? And does it really have such a low environmental impact?

Part 4 - What we know and what we don’t know

Matthew

Alternative meat technologies sound great, and it’s easy to get swept away in their big claims and their promises. In fact, of all the four futures – they are the most charismatic of the bunch, having had much more practice pitching their visions to find funding.

But some people against or at least hesitant about these technologies wonder if these alternatives are really as good as they’re claiming to be. And since some products, like the ones that are culturing meat from animal cells, are barely on the market, it’s a little hard to say. 

We talk to some researchers who have begun to explore some key questions like - is the product healthy? Is it more ethical? Is it actually better for the environment?

Raychel Santo

Nearly every environmental impact we looked at followed a pretty similar pattern.

Matthew

Raychel Santo, researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, co-authored a paper in 2020 that looked at plant-based and cell-based meat substitutes from a public health and food systems perspective.

Raychel

With few exceptions, conventionally farmed beef has the highest environmental impacts among all foods. So if you're using that as your comparison point, almost any alternative will look sustainable.

Matthew

Raychel and her colleagues found that plant- and cell-based meat substitutes had lower emissions than meat from animals. But there is some variation, which depends on the individual studies they looked at, and it depends on the animal.

Raychel

Not all meats are the same. And that really means that substituting these meats means that the substitutions aren't necessarily the same. In some cases it’s slightly misleading, I think, to be advertising the potential benefits of a meat alternative, whether plant based or cell based, and always using beef as the reference value, because they're always going to look better.

Matthew

We’ll link to the study so you can dig in more yourself, but here are some summarized findings when comparing the environmental impact of animal agriculture to these alternatives.

In general, plant-based substitutes and mycoprotein showed lower land and water use, and lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to the animal products they imitate. The difference in greenhouse gas emissions was less pronounced than it was for land and water use; some plant-based meats had comparable climate impacts to poultry and eggs, which emit less greenhouse gasses than other forms of animal protein.

For cellular agriculture, the environmental impact varied substantially. Some products performed better and others worse than all other animal products except beef.

So why is there such a large range? Part of the answer is that we don’t have very good data yet: Raychel and her co-authors looked at all of the studies available at the time, which for cellular agriculture, were very few.

On the positive side for alternatives - you don’t have to grow animal feed, which has lots of land, water and carbon emissions associated with that production. On the other hand,

Raychel

The substantial processing footprint associated with cell based production might limit some of their potential benefits compared to other farmed meats.

Matthew

The studies showed a range of possible emissions from each cellular-based production system. And this came from having different assumptions about

Raychel

The processing side of producing cell based meat -  So the facility size, the potential density, the proliferation of cells.

Matthew 

Raychel Santo  acknowledges there is an opportunity to reduce emissions through scaling these operations, so studies in the future might show different results. Think about the cost of solar panels now compared to 10 years ago? Or even the efficiency of poultry production compared to the past? And when we consider the fact that most of the greenhouse gas emissions from cellular agriculture are from the energy required to run the bioreactors, if and when countries shift to renewable energy – which should be an urgent priority – that would dramatically cut down on the emissions profile of cellular meat.

There’s absolutely room for efficiency improvements over time, but one important note here - there are some technical challenges around scaling cellular agriculture that the industry has not yet found a solution for. 

Raychel

In terms of animal welfare. A big variable in the case of cell based meats is that fetal bovine serum, or more accurately finding a replacement for it is one of the biggest remaining challenges in the industry. 

Matthew

So fetal bovine serum is a growth supplement used in cell and tissue culture media. It’s not only used in this industry, but also in drug and vaccine production and tissue engineering. 

Raychel

And it comes from the blood of a live cow fetus after the mother is slaughtered for meat processing. So fetal bovine serum is a byproduct of the meat industry, it's not something that animals are raised and slaughtered for solely for its production. But since the overall goal of cell based meat production is to be no kill, or to involve as few animals as possible, one of the critical pieces moving forward is to find a viable replacement for it. 

Matthew

Alternatives, like serum free growth medium do exist, and there is lots of ongoing research into bringing down the cost of alternatives. 

Many companies are currently using fetal bovine surum their trials. Though not all of them. The company Upside Foods who received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to begin producing cultivated meat for markets in the United States are not using fetal bovine Serum.

And while animals do need to be slaughtered to produce this serum, it’s worth acknowledging that the number pales in comparison to the estimated 80 billion land animals killed each year for meat.

So that’s a little on the environmental and ethical considerations. How about nutrition – are these products healthy for you to eat?

Raychel

Even though plant based substitutes are made from legumes like soybeans, and peas, which are quite nutritious and which may reduce individual's risk for certain chronic diseases.  We don't yet know whether these highly processed versions of legumes will offer similar benefits as if you were to eat the whole legumes directly.

Matthew

In the case of cellular agriculture – companies aren’t only trying to mimic the taste and texture - but also the nutritional profile of meat.

Raychel

Some researchers have speculated that you could tweak the nutritional profile of cell based meats to be healthier, but we haven't yet seen evidence of that.

Matthew

So the health impacts of eating these products aren’t clear at this point – at least not as clear as the health benefits of eating whole plant-based foods like legumes, whole grains, vegetables and nuts, or even processed soy like tofu.

This research is especially hard to do since every company has a different process– so it’s hard to generalize the benefits and it’s hard to scrutinize every individual company’s claims. 

Raychel

The main message I like to emphasize is that it's urgent that we reduce our meat and dairy consumption, particularly in high income countries to avoid the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. 

Matthew

In summary, Raychel Santo of the CLF isn't so sure that meat alternatives are the silver bullet solution to problems with the food system - but hopes we can continue to have nuanced  and critical discussions around the potential benefits and limitations of these alternatives..

To examine another important question - will people eat these products? We look at some recent trends.

Jayson Lusk

Four or five years ago, we started to see the emergence of products that really brought a lot of food science to bear to try to mimic the taste of traditional, mainly beef products, even though there are other products out there now. 

Matthew

Jayson Lusk, Agricultural economist at Purdue University, who joined us for the efficient meat episode - and is actually quite hopeful about the development of these products -

Jayson

And for a while those experienced some pretty significant market share growth. So if you start from, say 2018 to 2020, pretty astounding increases in sales of those emerging products. 

Matthew

They started from a very small base, but 

Jayson

There were some astronomical percentage growth, you know, 50% 100% growth of some of those products. I don't know that the pandemic caused it, but about the time of the pandemic came in, we started to see these growth in, in many of those product categories start to slow.

Matthew

In the last two years, the big growth that Jayson was just describing started to either plateau, or even decline.

Part of what these companies are betting on is that they can cater to meat eaters and not only vegetarians. And are they right to think that?

Jayson

A lot of the people who tried plant based meat alternatives also bought meat. So on the one hand, you might think that that's good for the plant based meat alternatives, because they're crossing over, pulling traditional meat eaters into this category, which is a much bigger group, of course than just vegetarians. So that is true, we see that in our data. At the same time, though, you can also see that the people buying the plant based alternatives in general bought a lot less meat. 

Matthew

So it seems that more vegetarians are buying these products than meat eaters, but meat eaters are still eating them! The question remains if people will actually replace more of the meat in their diets with these products.

Some evidence shows it was the novelty factor that was driving the growth - people were excited to try something new, but they didn’t keep buying it. Other data shows it seems to be more popular with the younger generation, so that could be a bright spot for these companies in the future.

But with the global pandemic and cost of living crisis - it’s not surprising that people aren’t running to eat these new products, especially when some cost more than meat. Jayson Lusk raises one more consideration, the quote ‘unnaturalness’ of these products.

Jayson

I see it discussed a lot on social media and those sorts of things. And that is, you know, the, the emergence of the plant based meat alternatives is running up against another trend, which is this move towards, quote, unquote, clean products, unprocessed products with fewer numbers of ingredients. 

Matthew

So will people prefer the real thing, rather than the alternative.  Despite some big recent headlines saying that meat-alternatives are overhyped, it’s genuinely too early to tell. 

I see three different futures here: 1) Alternatives have already hit their peak, which doesn’t bode well for the future. 2)  We could see small changes that continue to bring down the price and improve taste to convert more people slowly over time, or 3) a technological breakthrough around scaling cellular agriculture could be a game changer.

Part 5: Different roads to a 2050 alternative meat future

Matthew

When we talk about the future, we need to talk about at least three different categories for alternative meat. There’s plant-based meat substitutes and mycoprotein, like we talked about earlier. They’re already here. They’ve been here. You may have been eating them recently or for a long time. And the products are becoming more ‘meat’-like.

Then there’s cellular agriculture or cultivated meat – which has more unknowns – but they all share the same goal – of partially or completely replacing industrial animal agriculture.

So how do they plan to do that? There are a few different visions.

Jan Dutkiewicz 

It was the first salmon I've had in probably close to 20 years. And it was - I've had I had it in the sushi form, and it was incredible. I hope that doesn't sound like boosterism, but it just was just  so  - it was just like a wonderful culinary experience.

Matthew

That’s Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at Harvard Law, who recently tasted salmon from a company called Wildtype. Yes, they’re also working to replicate fish. The product was a blend of plant-based ingredients and some grown from animal cells. It’s safe to say he is excited about the future of cellular agriculture. 

Jan

I think it's a technology that we should strive to develop. And that is a good in and of itself, whether it's developed with public funding or by the private sector, or what have you. I also think it's very important to put a huge asterisk beside the technology given that we don't know whether or not it's actually viable at scale. 

Matthew

We don’t know if the science and engineering behind cellular agriculture will develop to outperform meat on price, on taste, on quality. Part of what this technology looks like in 2050, depends on who is investing in it.

Jan

Most investment has come from venture capital. And on the one hand, that's great in the sense of there was nowhere else to get funding for this technology, it doesn't quite fit traditional funding models.

Matthew

Universities and public funding did help develop the prototypes of these products, but venture capital is really getting it off the ground, though Jan Dutkiewicz  has some concerns about the impact of that.

Jan

if there's a lot of venture capital invested in this space, then two things happen. Number one IP so intellectual property becomes extremely important.

Matthew

So the sector's tendency to rely on intellectual property means companies are likely to be more protective of their technology and wish to develop their own patents - rather than work together  to develop the sector as a whole. There are fundamental questions about infrastructure and lab protocol and safety that public funding could help resolve.

Isha

when you kind of privatize a field out of the gate,  there's going to be a lot of redundancy…

Matthew

That’s Isha Datar again, the executive director of New Harvest.  research institute dedicated to advancing the science of cultured meat.

Isha

I can guarantee you that most of these companies are doing approximately the same thing, or have done approximately the same thing for the first year or two of their lives. And that's, that's just a waste of energy. Because they're not publishing, they're not sharing that knowledge. They don't have people kind of going around talking about it at conferences.

Matthew

And besides intellectual property, Jan Dutkiewicz sees another challenge

Jan

Eventually venture capital no matter how quote unquote, ethical the investment, eventually will want to see a return on investment. 

Matthew

Jan worries that these prototypes will be brought into the market too early, to grow their business. And there is a strong incentive to do that – it’s an important way to attract more investment. 

Jan and Isha were two co-authors of a recent article that shares its concerns about racing to put these products on shelves. They worry that moving too quickly might come at the expense of what’s motivating this group in the first place.

Jan 

Which is ultimately to displace conventional meat with a product that beats conventional meat on all metrics, a product that is more sustainable, a product that does not use animal products, a product that is healthy and economically viable at scale. 

Matthew 

There’s been around 2 billion dollars of private investment into the sector – The NGO that Isha Datar is executive director of, New Harvest recently got 10 million dollars from the USDA. But Isha had 2 billion dollars…

Isha

I would have put at least a billion just into the fundamental research, make sure that there are kind of the building blocks of the field are publicly available and open. And then give the other billion to the companies who are taking those building blocks, and then turning it into something adding their special sauce and turning that into products.

Jan

So Yes, I think the technology is getting there, at least when it comes to flavor and texture with some products, but now the real big question – the real big question is scaling and being able to make this a viable business. And I think this in part is where public funding can help.

Matthew 

So both Isha Datar and Jan Dutkiewicz see public funding as foundational to scaling.

But Paul Shapiro of the Better Co. is following another trend in the industry.

Paul Shapiro

The largest meat company on the planet, it's called JBS, it's from Brazil just announced a 100 million US dollar investment into what's called cultivated meat. Tyson Foods, Cargill, these are companies that are all investing in this space. Right now

Matthew 

Paul looks at this and thinks.

Paul 

I want to solve this problem. The problem is that we're raising billions of animals for food, it's the leading number one cause of deforestation on the planet, it is a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, it's the number one cause of animal cruelty on the planet. And so I want to do whatever it takes, like we are in an environmental crisis, the ship is going down.

And so if scaling and concentration ends up getting this problem solved quicker, meaning that you can have lower prices, which is what you really ultimately need in order to compete, then I’m for it. It's not that I have some philosophical preference for it, I don't, I would rather see a decentralized economy, that would be great. But the problems are too dire and too urgent to let that be the big concern that would prevent us from moving toward this future.

Matthew

Paul wants a paradigm shift – to change how we think about meat.

Paul

In the past meat has basically meant a hunk of flesh from a once living animals body. Now, people are starting to think about meat in a far more diverse way, where we're thinking about meat coming from plants coming from animal cells coming from microbial fermentation, and more.

Matthew 

Paul and others want to think of animal slaughter for meat as a thing of the past, an outdated technology. And he invites any combination of ways to get there, to bring humanity in that direction.

Paul

In the alternative protein world where it may not be one thing and may not be one technology that ends up replacing the exploitation of chickens and pigs and cows and turkeys. But it's really a combination of them. And I think that in the same way that many of us would never dream of using a horse drawn carriage to get around to anywhere today, our descendants will never dream of locking animals up in cages and slaughtering them, and so on. And they'll think I'm so glad that innovators created better ways to feed ourselves. In the same way. We are glad that people who innovated and creative ways to get around that don't involve horses.

Steve Jurvetson

We can't feed the world with the technologies of the 1800s.

Matthew 

Steve Jurvetson again, venture capitalist who has been funding companies like Upside Foods and Better Meat Co describes a potential decentralized vision.

Steve

So you could envision a future where meat is manufactured all over the planet, close to the point of consumption. That is not being trucked around on trains, it's not going to major meat hubs, you're not doing slaughterhouses. There's all this element of complexity you don't need. If you can make and consume, all within a local area. 

In fact, a lot of the urban parking lots that are probably not going to be needed once we have fully autonomous cars, and you don't need to park so much could be converted to meat manufacturing locations within city centers where the majority of people live.

Matthew 

He also sees a future where the company that can scale most efficiently can dominate the competition. 

For Steve Jurveston, what will really launch the growth of these products is actually experiencing and tasting them .

Steve

And isn't it patently obvious that there's a better way in front of us, and maybe as a venture capitalist I saw before others because I actually toured these places, tasted their product. But once you've had a bite of the future, how can you deny its inevitability. And wouldn’t you want to say in your life that you helped make that happen.

Matthew

Is this the future for meat and livestock that you’re most excited, or most concerned about? If seems like the plot from a science fiction movie, how do you think it will end? 

Well, it’s not a fantasy. You can find plant-based meat like products in markets today and possibly animal cell cultures in the next few years or decades.

 I have so many questions still - but will need to be patient for some of these answers. On one hand, the first lab grown burger in 2013 cost 250,000 euros. Now it’s less than 10 euros. And in big news for the industry, the company Upside Foods received approval in the US to begin producing cultivated meat. They join the company Eat Just who has been selling ‘no-kill’ chicken in restaurants in Singapore since 2021.

But it’s not clear to me that cellular agriculture will be able to scale and be safely available on markets. And if it does, will it only end up as a high-end product in expensive restaurants, a pathway that really wouldn’t put a dent into industrial animal production, or will it be affordable for everyone in retail markets?

And given the option, what would you choose? If at was at the same price and the same taste - would you eat a cut of meat from a lab rather than from a farm? Or maybe you wouldn’t want anything meat or meat-like at the center of your plate at all!

You can let us know what you think by recording your voice in a quiet room and sending it to podcast@tabledebates.org and we might include your thoughts in a future episode. Thanks to everyone who has written and called in so far and please continue to do so.

There are so many companies that we could have talked to for this episode - some who are 3D printing meat, others who are trying to grow protein from just sunlight and nutrients. But one group we did speak to was those who are farming insects. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode where we look at a bug-based future as a possible sustainable food source.

Next week we’ll visit the farms that some of the people in this future hope to put out of business. You’ll hear farmers and researchers make the case that livestock shouldn’t be thought of only as providing good nutrition, but also as having many other benefits. Like managing ecosystems, reducing food waste, and converting land that isn’t suited for crops into nutritious meat and milk.

Per Frederikson

I dont’ see how I can produce cereals in a good way if I don’t have cattle in the crop rotation

Emma Kritzberg

We know we cannot eat this much meat. We can eat better meat, but regardless we need to eat less meat.

Matthew

Thank you for listening,  If you like the episode and this series. Please leave us a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen. It really helps us spread the word about theshow.

And a big thanks thanks to all the voices you heard on this episode. If you want to see the mural that Paul Shapiro was describing? Visit our website at tabledebates.org/meat. 

Meat: the four futures is funded by FORMAS in Sweden, and produced by TABLE - a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University. This episode was edited and mixed by Matthew Kessler and Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and a huge team of support. Special shoutout to Tamsin Blaxter for all your script notes on this episode.  Music by Blue dot Sessions and Epidemic sound.

Talk to you next week in the less meat future!