Latest / What's Your Problem? / The Fake-Meat Frontier

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The Fake-Meat Frontier · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Dan Pashman, host of the Sportful podcast, Jacob Goldstein,
0:23
Speaker 1: host of the podcast What's Your Problem. I am here
0:26
Speaker 1: in your kitchen in the Sportful test kitchen. Welcome. So
0:29
Speaker 1: we're old friends. We've collaborated back when you were a
0:31
Speaker 1: planet money and you're more like business tech economics reporter
0:35
Speaker 1: guy and I'm more nerdy food guy. Yes, and we
0:39
Speaker 1: found a story that is the crossover podcast event of
0:44
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, right, and the story is this, so
0:47
Speaker 1: we'll go with that short. Come on, yeah, this is
0:51
Speaker 1: the Sportful. It's not for food ease, it's for eaters.
0:54
Speaker 1: I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsessed
0:56
Speaker 1: about food to learn more about people. And I'm coming
0:58
Speaker 1: to you from my kitchen with my friend Jacob Goldstein,
1:01
Speaker 1: host of the podcast What's Your Problem? The show where
1:03
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're gonna say change
1:07
Speaker 1: the world. The show where entrepreneurs talking about how they're
1:09
Speaker 1: gonna change the word about say solve if your problems,
1:11
Speaker 1: you gotta work. I'm memorizing your own tagline, kind of
1:13
Speaker 1: anti tagline. At this point, like people know what the
1:15
Speaker 1: show is. They pushed play yes, Yes, Today, Jacob, we're
1:22
Speaker 1: gonna talk about the past, present, and future of alternatives
1:26
Speaker 1: to meet Meat from animals is clearly a problem in
1:29
Speaker 1: the world right now right. It's a huge driver of
1:31
Speaker 1: climate change, a huge driver of land loss, of biodiversity decline.
1:34
Speaker 1: And so this is a real high stakes problem in
1:37
Speaker 1: the world, and people are spending billions of dollars to
1:40
Speaker 1: try and come up with new technologies to give us
1:43
Speaker 1: meat without animals. And I know a lot has been
1:46
Speaker 1: said about this, but I really feel like we have interesting, new,
1:49
Speaker 1: big stuff to say here. That's right, things have changed
1:51
Speaker 1: in the past year. Some of the things that looked
1:53
Speaker 1: very promising are struggling. Some of the things that felt
1:56
Speaker 1: like pipe dreams are becoming more real. So we're gonna
1:59
Speaker 1: get into all of that. The moment that sort of
2:03
Speaker 1: sets the stage for our story. Really, hippie is essentially right,
2:07
Speaker 1: Hippie vegetarian is right. And there is this chef who
2:10
Speaker 1: is who is kind of hippie adjacent. His name's Paul Winner,
2:13
Speaker 1: and in the seventies, he has this restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
2:17
Speaker 1: It's called the Garden House, and he wants to figure
2:21
Speaker 1: out what to do with his leftover food at the
2:24
Speaker 1: end of the day, and you know, he's got rice
2:26
Speaker 1: peel off. He's got to sort of random veggies, and
2:29
Speaker 1: he tries a few things, and he comes up with
2:31
Speaker 1: basically making it into a patty and cooking it and
2:34
Speaker 1: putting it between two buns, and he calls it the
2:37
Speaker 1: garden Burger. This garden burger that he invents in his
2:40
Speaker 1: restaurant becomes the garden burger. That was the go to
2:42
Speaker 1: veggie burger in the eighties and definitely in the nineties.
2:45
Speaker 1: But it wasn't a high end thing. It was almost
2:48
Speaker 1: the kind of thing where like when a bowling alley
2:50
Speaker 1: wanted to offer something vegetarian, they would have the garden Burger,
2:53
Speaker 1: or a chain restaurant or like a one level above
2:56
Speaker 1: a diner type place. Yeah, and you could also buy
2:59
Speaker 1: to the store. And you can't get the garden burger anymore.
3:03
Speaker 1: That just last year. Actually it got phased out. But
3:06
Speaker 1: I think you got sort of the closest thing, right.
3:07
Speaker 1: That's right. Let me step over here to my freezer
3:12
Speaker 1: and I have Morning Star Farms garden veggie burgers frozen.
3:21
Speaker 1: What's cooking up while we're talking about it. Yeah, let's
3:23
Speaker 1: do it. So let's just say before we even put
3:28
Speaker 1: it in, the veggie burger starts out brown. It looks
3:32
Speaker 1: to me, actually, it looks kind of like a like
3:33
Speaker 1: a hash brown. It's gotta that's got a brownish, almost
3:37
Speaker 1: like Cure Aid potato type vibe. Unlike meat, right, Like,
3:42
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not really supposed to be like meat. Right.
3:44
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be a thing you can eat between
3:46
Speaker 1: a bun when your friends are eating meat. So, so
3:50
Speaker 1: now we're gonna put the veggie burger into the pan.
3:52
Speaker 1: Let's see what kind of sound it makes. Oh, there's
3:57
Speaker 1: a little bit of sizzle, but not much. Yeah, I
4:02
Speaker 1: think I think the sizzle is just like because it's
4:05
Speaker 1: maybe a little icy from the freezer. So what happens
4:10
Speaker 1: to Paul Winner and his restaurant in Portland in the eighties.
4:13
Speaker 1: He winds up closing the restaurant, but the gardenburger turns
4:16
Speaker 1: into this product. He turns the gardenburger into this thing
4:19
Speaker 1: you can buy at the grocery store that restaurants buy
4:22
Speaker 1: to have a sort of token option for vegetarians. You know,
4:25
Speaker 1: it fills a need in the nineties if you want
4:28
Speaker 1: to get something for vegetarians at the barbecue. You pick
4:31
Speaker 1: up a pack of Gardenburgers. It's the go to veggie
4:35
Speaker 1: burger of the era. Right, It's functional. That's a great
4:37
Speaker 1: word for it. And that's why Gardenburger gets so big.
4:40
Speaker 1: It's doing a job in society. And this company blew up.
4:44
Speaker 1: It did great in the nineties. The Gardenburgers a big deal.
4:47
Speaker 1: The company actually has an IPO, it goes public, they
4:49
Speaker 1: sell stock. This chef who ran a vegetarian restaurant in
4:52
Speaker 1: Portland is like a multi millionaire from it. And maybe
4:56
Speaker 1: peak Gardenburger comes in the late nineties. It's huge. The
5:01
Speaker 1: stock is doing well. They advertise on the Seinfeld Finale Wow,
5:07
Speaker 1: which is like, you don't get more nineties than that.
5:09
Speaker 1: That's like Super Bowl ad level. Yeah, oh no, I
5:13
Speaker 1: want something and yo, Gardenburger the burger and the squeals
5:19
Speaker 1: would be like, so they were big time and Samuel L.
5:22
Speaker 1: Jackson generating their kind of strange Seinfeld ad. Yeah. So
5:27
Speaker 1: the instructions say that we should heat burgers over medium
5:31
Speaker 1: for seven to eight minutes, turning burgers over frequently throughout
5:34
Speaker 1: heating time. So I got my spachelor ready, I'm going
5:36
Speaker 1: to turn the burgers periodically, and while we hang out
5:38
Speaker 1: here and cook, Jacob, why don't you continue your story?
5:42
Speaker 1: So now it's the two thousands, and the Gardenburger isn't
5:46
Speaker 1: the only mediocre veggie burger game in town anymore. There's
5:51
Speaker 1: enough competition that you can't just get by on being
5:54
Speaker 1: the one anymore. And Gardenburger eventually goes bankrupt in two
5:58
Speaker 1: thousand and five, and if I remember correctly, Kelloggs purchased
6:00
Speaker 1: garden Burger and they kept selling these patties forty years,
6:03
Speaker 1: like they just discontinued them last year. But Kelloggs also
6:07
Speaker 1: owns morning Star, which is the company that makes this
6:09
Speaker 1: Garden Burger adjacent patty that we have in the skillet
6:12
Speaker 1: right now. And it looks like it's done, actually should
6:15
Speaker 1: we Yeah? Yeah, we have ketchup, we have mustard, and
6:17
Speaker 1: then I have my burger sauce, which is basically shake
6:21
Speaker 1: shack sauce. I'm in your hands, all right, let's do
6:24
Speaker 1: the shack sauce. Then no, they don't. They don't give
6:28
Speaker 1: out the recipe for the shack sauce. But I don't
6:29
Speaker 1: know if you know the recipe developed with Kenjie Lobo
6:31
Speaker 1: salt you will not take for hamburg No, and just
6:44
Speaker 1: kind of likes that. Being said, eating this does take
6:49
Speaker 1: me back. It's had a little more of a more
6:52
Speaker 1: of a pepper taste than I remember, but just that
6:55
Speaker 1: sort of that texture, that kind of crispy edges and
6:58
Speaker 1: mushy interior. It still scratches a nostalgia itch for me.
7:03
Speaker 1: I gotta say not for me. I'd rather like eat
7:06
Speaker 1: Cheetos or something if I want nostalgia food. Garden Burger
7:21
Speaker 1: and the similar burgers. They are veggie Burger one point zero,
7:24
Speaker 1: the sort of basic puck you can eat like a
7:28
Speaker 1: burger if you don't eat meat. And so around twenty
7:31
Speaker 1: ten we get the start of this really different new
7:35
Speaker 1: era in veggie burgers. You know, the old one was hippies, vegetarians, natural.
7:42
Speaker 1: The new one is Silicon Valley high tech like engineered
7:48
Speaker 1: in a lab. And there are two companies in particular
7:51
Speaker 1: that get founded in Silicon Valley. You know what they are.
7:53
Speaker 1: Say the names I'm gonna go with Beyond Meat and
7:56
Speaker 1: Impossible Foods very good. And I have to say I
7:59
Speaker 1: have been a big customer of these companies. My wife
8:01
Speaker 1: doesn't eat meat, my daughter doesn't eat meat, and our
8:04
Speaker 1: definite preference in our house is for Impossible, And I
8:08
Speaker 1: can say I haven't tried both. I agree that I
8:10
Speaker 1: like the impossible better. So partly because of that, I
8:13
Speaker 1: talked with Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible. He does
8:18
Speaker 1: not come from a food background. He was not a chef.
8:21
Speaker 1: He was a Stanford biochemist who spend his career studying
8:25
Speaker 1: the genome. And then one day, as one does, Pat
8:28
Speaker 1: Brown thinks to himself, let me think about what are
8:31
Speaker 1: the biggest problems in the world that I might work on,
8:35
Speaker 1: And he decides not to start a podcast, but rather
8:39
Speaker 1: it decides that the biggest problems in the world are
8:41
Speaker 1: climate change and the decline in biodiversity, and he decides
8:47
Speaker 1: that the way to fight those for him personally, is
8:50
Speaker 1: to start a company that can make fake meat that's
8:54
Speaker 1: as good as real meat without using animals. And so
8:58
Speaker 1: his goal in starting this company and starting Impossible is
9:01
Speaker 1: to entirely replace real meat with fake meat. This industry
9:06
Speaker 1: is supported by people who love meat, okay, and for
9:09
Speaker 1: us to compete them out of existence, we have to
9:13
Speaker 1: give them exactly what they want and do it better
9:15
Speaker 1: than the animal I love vegetarians and vegans as much
9:18
Speaker 1: as the next guy. But we don't accomplish anything by
9:21
Speaker 1: making better meat for vegans, and that's a completely different
9:25
Speaker 1: project and it requires technology and science. Right, So he's
9:31
Speaker 1: thinking about meat as a scientist, and in particular, he
9:37
Speaker 1: thinks about all the amazing things that happen when you
9:39
Speaker 1: cook meat. One of the striking characteristics of meat in
9:44
Speaker 1: general is that it behaves like an active chemical system.
9:47
Speaker 1: It starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively
9:52
Speaker 1: not very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you
9:55
Speaker 1: cook it, in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms,
9:59
Speaker 1: and in the process it produces this explosion of aromas
10:03
Speaker 1: that weren't there at the beginning. That's why a barbecue
10:06
Speaker 1: smells so good, exactly exactly, and you will notice that
10:10
Speaker 1: you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you
10:13
Speaker 1: barbecue broccoli. You also don't get similar behavior when you
10:17
Speaker 1: cook a garden burger, right right, It doesn't transform. It
10:20
Speaker 1: looks at the end basically like it looks at the beginning.
10:23
Speaker 1: And so Pat Brown knows that he needs to capture
10:27
Speaker 1: that magic transformation that happens when you cook meat. And Patchman,
10:30
Speaker 1: I know you bought a couple of impossible burgers also
10:33
Speaker 1: for us. Maybe we should start cooking those here. Yeah,
10:35
Speaker 1: let's do it, right, you want to crack these open, Jacob, Yeah,
10:44
Speaker 1: we've got two impossible burgers here. And just to compare
10:49
Speaker 1: them to the garden burger, right, like the garden burger
10:52
Speaker 1: look brown like a piece of bread. These look red
10:56
Speaker 1: with little flecks of white, like ground beef. And it
10:59
Speaker 1: was also interesting to me, you know, these are all
11:00
Speaker 1: the little details the garden veggie burger. You keep it
11:03
Speaker 1: in the freezer. The instructions say keep frozen until cooking.
11:06
Speaker 1: The Impossible Burger label says, treat this just like meat.
11:09
Speaker 1: If you're gonna cook it, defrost at first. In practice,
11:12
Speaker 1: if the end result is good. In theory, it shouldn't
11:15
Speaker 1: really make a difference how it starts. But it made
11:18
Speaker 1: me feel like, oh, treat it like meat. It made
11:22
Speaker 1: it feel that much more like meat to me. That's
11:30
Speaker 1: a real sizzle. And you can see that the bottom
11:38
Speaker 1: of the burger, the part touching the pan is browning
11:41
Speaker 1: and change in color as it would for any normal burger. Right,
11:45
Speaker 1: so so it goes in red burger color. And yeah,
11:50
Speaker 1: it looks not exactly like a burger, but a lot
11:54
Speaker 1: like a burger. So, just to go back to the
11:59
Speaker 1: story of Pat Brown, he wants to capture that that
12:02
Speaker 1: incredible smell and color and texture change that you get
12:06
Speaker 1: when you cook meat. And he thinks about this molecule
12:08
Speaker 1: called right. Hem is a naturally occurring molecule. There's a
12:12
Speaker 1: ton of it in meat. We also have it. Right,
12:14
Speaker 1: You may have heard of hemoglobin in our blood. That's
12:17
Speaker 1: hematologist is a blood doctor, very good, and hem is
12:21
Speaker 1: in all animals. It's a big part of what makes
12:23
Speaker 1: meat taste like meat. So Pat Brown's going to find
12:26
Speaker 1: a way to get hem into his burgers without animals.
12:30
Speaker 1: There's a version of hem in soy, right, soy leg hemoglobin.
12:35
Speaker 1: It's a version of hem that occurs naturally in the
12:39
Speaker 1: roots of soybeans. It's very molecularly similar to the way
12:43
Speaker 1: heme occurs in meat. They decide to genetically engineer yeat
12:48
Speaker 1: cells to produce soy leg hemoglobin. So this genetically engineered
12:53
Speaker 1: version of soy leg hemoglobin works and it becomes essentially
12:59
Speaker 1: the secret sauce in impossible meat. Should I prep these up? Yeah,
13:05
Speaker 1: let's each buns, so you cut it in half. For
13:11
Speaker 1: us to split and it is what you call this
13:14
Speaker 1: medium rare medium is a little line of pink in
13:16
Speaker 1: the middle. That's right, Okay, let's see it. The fact
13:22
Speaker 1: that this thing reacts like meat from the second you
13:24
Speaker 1: take it out of the fridge, and that you can
13:27
Speaker 1: cook it medium rare, and that it's even reminiscent of
13:30
Speaker 1: a burger is pretty amazing. That being said, you still
13:36
Speaker 1: wouldn't fool me in a taste test. And can you,
13:39
Speaker 1: as a professional describer of food, like talk about why
13:43
Speaker 1: you still like the burger better. So the things that
13:46
Speaker 1: this does have. It has a little bit of a
13:47
Speaker 1: crispy edge like you get in a good burger. It
13:50
Speaker 1: has it has the texture down very well. It has
13:53
Speaker 1: a meatingness, but it's still a tenderness like you would
13:55
Speaker 1: get with a good burger. It's still missing that hardcore
14:00
Speaker 1: beef note. It's it's it's like a band without a
14:03
Speaker 1: bass player. I like it, so not bad, but the
14:06
Speaker 1: bet you kind of miss something. You miss something that's
14:09
Speaker 1: there's like a deep guttural that isn't quite there. So
14:13
Speaker 1: let's go back to the story sort of on that note.
14:16
Speaker 1: So Pat Brown is making the impossible burger that people
14:18
Speaker 1: at Beyond are making the Beyond Burger, and they come
14:21
Speaker 1: out in the teens, in the two thousand teens, and
14:24
Speaker 1: then their big moment, the real sort of rocket ship
14:27
Speaker 1: blast off, turns out to be the pandemic. It turns
14:30
Speaker 1: out to be twenty twenty. I talked about this with
14:33
Speaker 1: Laura Riley, she covers the business of food for the
14:35
Speaker 1: Washington Post. A lot of us, you know, let's say
14:38
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty through the end of that year,
14:40
Speaker 1: a lot of us had a lot of time on
14:42
Speaker 1: our hands. We were panic eating frequently, and we were
14:46
Speaker 1: looking for new things to do, so a lot of
14:48
Speaker 1: us at least dabbled in the whole kind of alt
14:52
Speaker 1: meat space. Also, the Impossible Whopper. The Impossible Burger comes
14:56
Speaker 1: out at Burger King just before the pandemic in twenty nineteen,
15:00
Speaker 1: and during the pandemic that wound up being big for
15:02
Speaker 1: my family. Obviously we weren't going out to restaurants, but
15:04
Speaker 1: drive throughs were still open. Not everybody in my family
15:08
Speaker 1: each meet, and I have to say that is my
15:11
Speaker 1: favorite version of the Impossible Burger is the Impossible Whopper.
15:15
Speaker 1: It was pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't a smash.
15:18
Speaker 1: But what every fast food restaurant wants to do, and
15:21
Speaker 1: they've tried all different things over the year's salads, etc.
15:24
Speaker 1: They want to remove veto power. So you have a
15:27
Speaker 1: family of four and mom says, I don't feel like
15:31
Speaker 1: a burger. So you know, that's what you're always trying
15:34
Speaker 1: to do. You want to have enough menu items that
15:36
Speaker 1: you can appeal, you can find something for that person
15:39
Speaker 1: who would veto it. You know what's interesting about that
15:42
Speaker 1: is that's actually the same motivation as the garden burger.
15:45
Speaker 1: We have one person who we can't please with the
15:47
Speaker 1: regular menu, so we're going to have this thing in
15:49
Speaker 1: the freezer. And it is also not the dream of
15:52
Speaker 1: Pat Brownet impossible foods, not the dream of beyond right again,
15:57
Speaker 1: not quite there yet, but it's good enough right that
16:00
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty it's new. That is like the big
16:03
Speaker 1: boom for fake meat both you know, the impossible whopper
16:07
Speaker 1: people are buying at grocery store. Everything's great. It feels
16:10
Speaker 1: like we're in this new era of fake meat until
16:13
Speaker 1: we get to twenty twenty two, which is when everything changes.
16:16
Speaker 1: This last year is when really the kind of air
16:20
Speaker 1: starts coming out of the fake meat bubble, and you
16:23
Speaker 1: see this in a lot of different ways. One place
16:26
Speaker 1: you see it is the most important fast food restaurant, McDonald's,
16:31
Speaker 1: which in early twenty twenty two comes out with its
16:33
Speaker 1: mcplant burger, which is a collaboration with Beyond. They were
16:38
Speaker 1: massively late to the game, and they debuted it in
16:40
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Bay area, the Mcplant, and also in
16:45
Speaker 1: Dallas Fort Worth. So they roll out the mcplant in
16:48
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty two, and what happens. It bombs and
16:53
Speaker 1: they basically they cancel the mcplant. So okay, So the
16:57
Speaker 1: failure of the mcplant, that's like piece of bad news
17:00
Speaker 1: number one in twenty twenty two for this new era
17:03
Speaker 1: of fake meat. But there's more bad news. One thing
17:05
Speaker 1: that happens is just the growth really stop. Right. This
17:09
Speaker 1: sector had been growing, growing, growing at the beginning of
17:11
Speaker 1: the pandemic, and now it's not growing anymore. Essentially, one
17:16
Speaker 1: theory of why that happened is that people tried it.
17:20
Speaker 1: It was a novelty and like kind of like you,
17:23
Speaker 1: It sounds like they were like, yeah, it's pretty good,
17:25
Speaker 1: I would eat it, but I don't like it enough
17:27
Speaker 1: to keep buying it. But I actually think the most
17:30
Speaker 1: important thing that hurt fake meat last year was inflation.
17:36
Speaker 1: Food inflation was particularly high, and fake meat crucially being
17:42
Speaker 1: problem they haven't solved yet. Not only is it not
17:44
Speaker 1: quite as good as real meat, it's way more expensive,
17:47
Speaker 1: and people are feeling acutely higher prices at the grocery store.
17:51
Speaker 1: It's like, no, I'm not going to pay more for
17:53
Speaker 1: this thing that's not quite as good. Laura Riley the
17:56
Speaker 1: Washington Post reporter. She says, we do need another sort
17:59
Speaker 1: of technological leap forward, and the same way that there
18:01
Speaker 1: was a leap from the garden burger to the impossible burger,
18:04
Speaker 1: we need the next one of those. We need the
18:06
Speaker 1: next technological leap. What it's been launched so far is
18:10
Speaker 1: mostly patties or nuggets. What we need next in order
18:14
Speaker 1: to kind of grow the category is we need things
18:16
Speaker 1: that are really thought of more as ingredients, you know
18:19
Speaker 1: what I mean? Like that I'm making I'm having friends
18:22
Speaker 1: over tonight and two of them are vegged. So I'm
18:25
Speaker 1: going to make a stir fry with this plant based
18:28
Speaker 1: sliced chicken. The bowlless, skinless chicken breast is beloved by
18:33
Speaker 1: home cooks. We need to get to whole pieces of meat. Yeah, exactly,
18:36
Speaker 1: we need meat. We're coming up, Jacob. We're gonna hear
18:41
Speaker 1: about people growing meat right now, and we'll hear from
18:44
Speaker 1: my friend Sean Rama's farm who went out to California
18:46
Speaker 1: and tasted lab grown meat. Culture. You love to go
18:55
Speaker 1: to California. He's still got that edge, the no kid's edge.
19:10
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Speaker 1: Ni dot com. All right, I'm back in my kitchen
20:33
Speaker 1: with my friend and collaborator for this episode, Jacob Goldstein,
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Speaker 1: host of the podcast What's Your Problem, and we're talking
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Speaker 1: about the past, present, and future of alternatives. To meet
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Speaker 1: now for the next and final stop on our journey, Jacob,
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Speaker 1: I've been looking into cultured meat. Okay. This is where
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Speaker 1: you take cells from a real animal, you take them
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Speaker 1: into a lab, and you grow meat using those cells.
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Speaker 1: So in theory, if it works, it will be real meat,
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Speaker 1: but you won't have raised or killed an animal to
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Speaker 1: get it. Now, The underlying technology here is not so new, okay.
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Speaker 1: The idea of growing cells in a lab has been
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Speaker 1: around for many decades. I mean, this is how they
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Speaker 1: made the polio vaccine. What's new is using this technology
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Speaker 1: to create something you might eat. Okay. Now, the first
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Speaker 1: success with this was when a Dutch professor made a
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Speaker 1: lab grown burger. That was in twenty thirteen, ten years ago, okay,
21:21
Speaker 1: ten years out in this new kind of era. Now,
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Speaker 1: just in the last few months, it's got a lot
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Speaker 1: more real, especially here in the US, because in November,
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Speaker 1: the FDA declared cultured chicken from one company, Upside Foods,
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Speaker 1: to be safe for human consumption. That's a major milestone. Now,
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Speaker 1: it's still not going to be in stores quite yet.
21:37
Speaker 1: It's got to get past the USDA, and even when
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Speaker 1: that happens, it's going to be you know, expensive, and
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Speaker 1: in just a few places. So it's still early days.
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Speaker 1: But I mean, we talked about this in the Sportfull
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Speaker 1: a few years ago, and my impression then was like,
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Speaker 1: this is space age stuff. So the fact that it
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Speaker 1: could be coming to any kind of stores soon seems
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Speaker 1: like a major development to me. I mean, I know,
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Speaker 1: sort of On the business tech side, there has been
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Speaker 1: a ton of a venture capital investment into fake me
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Speaker 1: not just beyond and impossible, but to these kind of
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Speaker 1: next generation sell culture fake meat, although I would say Jacob,
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Speaker 1: I would not call it fake meat. It might not
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Speaker 1: be a whole animal, but I think it's meat. And
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Speaker 1: one company working on making cultured chicken and beef is
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Speaker 1: called eat Just. They aren't have a product in grocery
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Speaker 1: stories you may have seen called just egg. It's a
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Speaker 1: plant based egg, and now they're getting in to grow
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Speaker 1: in their own meat. To be clear, this is not
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Speaker 1: the company that got the FDA approval, but they are
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Speaker 1: one of the big players in this space. Their headquarters
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Speaker 1: are in Alameda, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco.
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Speaker 1: I wasn't able to visit, but my old friend Sean
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Speaker 1: Ramas Farm, host of the excellent Daily News podcast Today,
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Speaker 1: explained he went there and saw it himself. Here's how
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Speaker 1: he describes the setup at each just there's all these tubes.
22:48
Speaker 1: There's very serious scientists hard at work. There's like big
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Speaker 1: chambers and fridges and steel this and that, and rows
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Speaker 1: and rows of lab equipment. It looks like, you know,
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Speaker 1: there's like a billion COVID tests going on at once,
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Speaker 1: with like little droplets of this going into little droplets
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Speaker 1: of that. I don't know that COVID test is the
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Speaker 1: metaphor I want for my cultured meat. I think he's saying.
23:11
Speaker 1: You know, there's that generic newsreel footage that we've seen
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Speaker 1: on TV ten thousand times now anytime they talk about
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Speaker 1: COVID and tests. You see those people in the coats
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Speaker 1: with the droplets, and that's what it looks science. So
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Speaker 1: after all these droplets that Sean described, the cells go
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Speaker 1: into a bioreactor that speeds up their growth. And the bioreactors,
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Speaker 1: as they're described to me, there like giant steel cylinders.
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Speaker 1: They look like a brewery. You've ever been all those
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Speaker 1: restaurants is also a brewery. You see the big steel tanks.
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Speaker 1: It's like that. So to find out what happens next
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Speaker 1: in those bioreactors, I talk to a scientist who works there.
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Speaker 1: So my name is Vitor Sento. I am the senior
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Speaker 1: director of cello Agriculture at Good Meat, which is a
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Speaker 1: subcb area of heat just so Vitoor Santo trained as
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Speaker 1: a tissue engineer. In past jobs, he worked on using
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Speaker 1: cell cultures to regenerate human bone and cartilage. So he
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Speaker 1: was in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Now he's growing meat. So
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Speaker 1: once the cells are in the bioreactor, we feed them
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Speaker 1: a solution, so it's in a liquid farm and it's
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Speaker 1: a combination of different nutrients. So think of proteins, I
24:14
Speaker 1: you know, acids, vitamins, fats like miracle grow. But for meat,
24:19
Speaker 1: pretty much think of what you would what you would
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Speaker 1: feed the chicken, like the soliditade of a chicken, but
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Speaker 1: you just turn that into a into a cultural broth.
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Speaker 1: When the sales come out of that bioreactor, they're not
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Speaker 1: done yet. A lot of times people expect you to
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Speaker 1: see a full steak or a chicken breast coming out
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Speaker 1: of the bioreactor, but that's not really what happens. What
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Speaker 1: do you see is more like think of a slurry
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Speaker 1: or a concentrator which doesn't have yet a lot of structure.
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Speaker 1: So not that they ask, but my tip to them
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Speaker 1: would be stop using the words slurry to describe any
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Speaker 1: part of your process. Slurry, we don't want to bioreactor. Basically,
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Speaker 1: don't let a scientist talk to it. Just show me
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Speaker 1: the chicken. Yeah, like, I don't want to eat meat
25:03
Speaker 1: that at any point was a slurry. But so so
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Speaker 1: they get the slurry and they need to make it
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Speaker 1: into a chicken breast, and to do that they need
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Speaker 1: to add what they call scaffolding. All right, This is
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Speaker 1: plant protein extract that is formed into a three D
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Speaker 1: model of a piece of meat that the cells can
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Speaker 1: then attach themselves to in order to get the shape
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Speaker 1: and texture of a chicken breast. Now, I know it
25:23
Speaker 1: sounds very sci fi, but Beator says, it's not as
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Speaker 1: far out as you may think. And what we're doing
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Speaker 1: that by our reactors, to be honest, is just mimicking
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Speaker 1: the natural process. We're just feeding. Instead, let's say, of
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Speaker 1: having cells growing in tissues and organs and having blood
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Speaker 1: circulating through them in the animal body, we're mimicking them,
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Speaker 1: but inside of a stainless steel by a reactor with
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Speaker 1: this mixture of nutrients. Now, as we've been saying, Jacob,
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Speaker 1: the goal is to get whole cuts of meat like
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Speaker 1: a chicken breast, right, But they had to start with
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Speaker 1: a simpler project, the chicken nugget, and Viator still remembers
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Speaker 1: the first time they made a chicken nugget that actually
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Speaker 1: had the taste and texture of a chicken nugget. It
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Speaker 1: was a turning point, I would say at eat Just,
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Speaker 1: it was a little like touching the moon almost. In
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Speaker 1: December of twenty twenty, Single Poor became the first country
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Speaker 1: in the world to approve lab grown chicken for sale,
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Speaker 1: and eat Just began selling their chicken nuggets in one
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Speaker 1: fancy club in Singapore and since then now there's another
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Speaker 1: restaurant in places in Singapore. Now eat Just is moving
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Speaker 1: on to whole cuts of meat, like chicken breasts, which
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Speaker 1: seems like profoundly harder than a chicken nugget, right, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: I mean you can kind of throw anything into ground
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Speaker 1: meat or a chicken nugget and to mimic the quote unquote.
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Speaker 1: I mean, like, like like what's real in an original chicken nugget,
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Speaker 1: Who knows. But when you're talking about an actual chicken breast,
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Speaker 1: there's so much about the eating experience that you might
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Speaker 1: not even consciously know, but you're gonna know if it's missing.
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Speaker 1: I mean, that feels like a bigger leap. If we
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Speaker 1: think of the leap from the garden burger to the
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Speaker 1: impossible burger, like that's big. But going from a faked
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Speaker 1: chicken nugget to a fake chicken breast that feels like
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Speaker 1: an even bigger leap. It's huge. Do you think about it?
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Speaker 1: Like a chicken breast has those kind of you pull
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Speaker 1: up hearted chicken breasts has those sort of striations. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: the sinews right, you had to chop across them when
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Speaker 1: you're exactly right, and like the idea of creating that
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Speaker 1: in a out of a flurry. Our friend Sean Rama's farm,
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Speaker 1: he when he went there, he got to taste their
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Speaker 1: chicken skin and their chicken breast. We started with an
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Speaker 1: appetizer that looked something like like a pork rind. It
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Speaker 1: was like chicken skin on top of a sort of
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Speaker 1: mix of vegetables, and you know, because it was crispy,
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Speaker 1: it was sort of hard to tell like like what
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Speaker 1: the difference was, and so it was hard to be like, wait,
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Speaker 1: is this chicken or is this is this not chicken?
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Speaker 1: If it tasted just like the real thing, what do
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Speaker 1: they served to you? Next? Next up was the piece
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Speaker 1: de resi stalls. I suppose it was another mix of
27:53
Speaker 1: vegetables over like a muscular, fatty piece of chicken that
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Speaker 1: felt like a kin to a piece of chicken breast,
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Speaker 1: but again with with skin on it, And as much
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Speaker 1: as I wanted to doubt, I was very impressed. It
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Speaker 1: was you know, it had the texture, it had the taste,
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Speaker 1: and it had the flavor of the genuine article. It
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Speaker 1: was legit. So it sounds like you went in skeptical
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Speaker 1: totally and you were impressed. I was impressed with the product.
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Speaker 1: Now I remained skeptical that this is going to happen
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Speaker 1: anytime soon, Jacob, What what Sean's alluding to is like, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: they made tremendous advances on the taste and the texture.
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Speaker 1: What they're struggling with is the cost. Yeah, okay, right now, vetours,
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Speaker 1: does it cost them about fifty dollars to make one
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Speaker 1: chicken nugget? Amazing? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's so they
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Speaker 1: got a little ways to go here before this is
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Speaker 1: gonna be a big product. In fairness, that's way cheaper
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Speaker 1: than it was a few years ago. They're doing better,
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Speaker 1: but they still have obviously a long way to go.
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Speaker 1: They got to scale up, They gotta get cost down.
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Speaker 1: They need to find a way to grow more cells
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Speaker 1: per batch, faster and without spending so much to feed
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Speaker 1: the cells. But it's a constant struggle, Viator tells me,
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Speaker 1: because if they push too much in that direction, the
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Speaker 1: quality of the product can suffer. That as an impact
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Speaker 1: on the flavor of the cells. Maybe they don't taste
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Speaker 1: as much as chicken anymore, or they are the flavor
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Speaker 1: maybe is a little less powerful. Yeah, I mean this
29:28
Speaker 1: is a really interesting, profound question, right, Like making things
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Speaker 1: get cheaper and better or at least equally good, is
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Speaker 1: like a core technological problem in history, right, And maybe
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Speaker 1: the most important thing in the world economy for the
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Speaker 1: last fifty six years has been the way computing power
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Speaker 1: has gotten better and cheaper. Right. There's this famous thing
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Speaker 1: More's law that every two years computers basically get twice
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Speaker 1: as good, and that has been this huge driver of
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Speaker 1: like everything in Silicon Valley. Right, And this is very
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Speaker 1: much a Silicon Valley universe. You have venture capitalists. This
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Speaker 1: company is in the Bay Area. They're pouring money, and
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Speaker 1: what they want is a computer like outcome. Right. They
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Speaker 1: want it to get twice as good at half the
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Speaker 1: price constantly. And it's not obvious that just because it
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Speaker 1: worked with computer chips, it'll work with cultured meat. It
30:20
Speaker 1: doesn't work in every domain. But I have to hope
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Speaker 1: that it will, right. I have to hope that all
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Speaker 1: this money will pay very clever people who are motivated,
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Speaker 1: who will make cultured meat, meat without animals, that is
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Speaker 1: at least as good as meat from animals and at
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Speaker 1: least as cheap. I think it's cool that they're trying,
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Speaker 1: and it's exciting to hear Sean say that as close
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Speaker 1: as they are, and I'm excited for the day that
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Speaker 1: we can really take this technology to the next level
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Speaker 1: of Jacob okay, because Vitor says that once they get
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Speaker 1: the template, they can make almost anything. As long as
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Speaker 1: you have the equipment, infrastructure, and the means, like the
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Speaker 1: culture composition to feed those cells, you can essentially grow
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Speaker 1: any type of meat, any type of meat. Jacob okay,
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Speaker 1: are you thinking what I'm thinking, Human beings? No, No, Jacob,
31:15
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park. This is like almost the same technology from
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Speaker 1: that movie. Okay, they got the dinosaur DNA, they made dinosaurs,
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Speaker 1: And in fact, there's a company in Belgium right now
31:25
Speaker 1: that says they're developing wooly mammoth burgers. You know, in
31:29
Speaker 1: foody circles, there's all this talk about your burger blend like, oh,
31:32
Speaker 1: we do like you know, twenty percent short rib, twenty
31:35
Speaker 1: percent brisket or whatever, and every chef thinks they have
31:38
Speaker 1: the best blend or whatever. I cannot wait to go
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Speaker 1: out to a restaurant and be like, I'll have the
31:43
Speaker 1: like half Dodo bird, half Stegosaurus burger. Please, I'm in.
31:47
Speaker 1: If it costs the same as a hamburger, it'll work.
31:50
Speaker 1: Oh come on, Jacob, you wouldn't pay an extra dollar
31:52
Speaker 1: for a stegosaurus burger. I'd pay an extra dog. How
31:55
Speaker 1: does it come with fries? Sure, I'll throw in the
31:58
Speaker 1: fries for free in I think the big question here
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Speaker 1: with the cultured meat is even if it does taste
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Speaker 1: the same, will people eat it? It still feels weird.
32:11
Speaker 1: I hear what you're saying. But a couple of things.
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Speaker 1: First of all, think about all the stuff in the
32:18
Speaker 1: whatever freeze or aisle of the grocery store. Like, look
32:21
Speaker 1: at the ingredient list on any whatever frozen pizza. It's insane.
32:26
Speaker 1: Nobody looks at it. I think basically most people don't care, right,
32:30
Speaker 1: And if you think about today the way some people
32:33
Speaker 1: care a lot, you can imagine those kind of meat eaters,
32:36
Speaker 1: some you know, small percentage of people who will always
32:39
Speaker 1: want their meat. But I think if you have something
32:42
Speaker 1: that is indistinguishable from meat and the same price or
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Speaker 1: even a little cheaper, let's dream big. I think people
32:48
Speaker 1: will get the cheaper thing that's basically the same. I
32:51
Speaker 1: also think that these things may be somewhat generational, you know,
32:54
Speaker 1: so like if you are have you been eating cultured
32:57
Speaker 1: meat from the time that you were five, then it
32:59
Speaker 1: doesn't feel weird to you. I think that I would
33:02
Speaker 1: probably I'm more excited about cultured meat than about the
33:08
Speaker 1: plant based I think they have a better chance of
33:11
Speaker 1: getting to the truth. What I would call it taste parody.
33:15
Speaker 1: It sounds like from what Sean said that they're already
33:17
Speaker 1: there in some respects. We agree with the impossible Burgher.
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Speaker 1: As impressed as we were, it's not quite there. And
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Speaker 1: to me, like I feel like I'm in the target
33:24
Speaker 1: audience for this because I'm not a vegetarian, but I
33:27
Speaker 1: care about the environment and animals. I try my best
33:29
Speaker 1: to buy meat that's been raised ethically. I don't always succeed,
33:32
Speaker 1: but I try so. If you said to me, hey,
33:34
Speaker 1: here's the thing that would check all those boxes and
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Speaker 1: it tastes the same and it's the same price. I
33:38
Speaker 1: would go for that. I think we agree. Fake meat,
33:42
Speaker 1: cultured meat, whatever you want to call it, meat without
33:44
Speaker 1: the animals. It's not there yet, but it really sounds
33:48
Speaker 1: like it's getting there. And if they can get the
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Speaker 1: price down, I think that'll do it and I hope
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Speaker 1: it happens. Cashman, this is great man. Thank you for
34:04
Speaker 1: having me in the Sportful Test Kitchen. Is my pleasure anytime.
34:08
Speaker 1: Let's tell folks real quick. So your podcast, Jacob Goldstein
34:10
Speaker 1: is called What's Your Problem? And actually we've been doing
34:13
Speaker 1: a few food shows now. We did a whole interview
34:15
Speaker 1: with Pat Brown, the impossible food guy, who you heard
34:17
Speaker 1: a little bit from in this show. We have a
34:19
Speaker 1: whole interview with him. We did another show recently about
34:23
Speaker 1: this app Slice that's trying to help mom and pop
34:25
Speaker 1: pizza shops compete with Dominoes. So well, lots of food
34:29
Speaker 1: content as well as other kind of business and tech stuff. Jacob,
34:31
Speaker 1: thanks for coming to the Sportfel Test Kitchen aka My kitchen.
34:34
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. This show is produced by me
34:37
Speaker 1: along with senior producer and producer Andreas O'Hara, with help
34:41
Speaker 1: this week from What's Your Problem host Jacob Goldstein and
34:44
Speaker 1: producer It's Our editor is Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is
34:49
Speaker 1: Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sportfell
34:52
Speaker 1: is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Colin
34:55
Speaker 1: Anderson Nora Richie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pash and
34:58
Speaker 1: I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more,
35:01
Speaker 1: eat better, and eat more better that