Farming

‘These $50 Chicken Nuggets Were Grown in a Lab’ ∞

October 25, 2019

Deena Shanker for Bloomberg:

At a 93,000-square-foot warehouse-office in San Francisco’s Mission District, they’re growing chicken. Not chicken the animal—chicken the protein.

Just Inc., the maker of plant-based mayonnaise and vegan eggs, is using cellular agriculture to take extracted animal cells and turn them into chicken nuggets. Technicians grow the cells (the company’s catalog includes both stem cells and not) in baths of nutrient-rich liquid media, a bespoke “feed” that includes salts, sugars, amino acids, and often, notably, no animal molecules at all. Just is turning huge bioreactors into mini chicken farms, getting cells to multiply naturally, without an animal body to house them.

I feel like paragraphs like these are intended to scare people, and maybe they should scare people. After Michael Pollan said we shouldn’t eat anything that our great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, stories like these are mental gymnastics for these new meat technologies — even the ones just made of plants. Even if we know they’ll naturally be better for the planet and animals generally.

And now they’re ready for the market:

The chicken nuggets are still being refined, but they’re ready for small-scale commercialization, Just says, and restaurant partners are already lined up. They’ll be the first cultured meat product available to consumers, even if, at $50 a pop to make, they’re limited to diners with deep pockets—and a taste for adventure.

I wonder who will get these first. I’m guessing they’ll follow Impossible’s template: a few restaurants in major cities (SF first because Just Inc. is there, and then LA and NYC), then a celeb chef or two, then expand in those cities and start hitting festivals with a truck.

In June the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit promoting cellular agriculture and plant-based foods, counted 26 companies focused solely on cellular agriculture, including Memphis Meats, backed by Tyson Foods Inc., and cell-based seafood maker BlueNalu Inc., which plans to introduce yellowtail and mahi-mahi in a Southern California test market in two to three years. These startups are selling the idea of a real, not plant-based, meat that’s better for the environment and public health and has zero animal-welfare concerns.

I love that everyone isn’t working on one singular kind of thing. I imagine a breakthrough from one company could be a sea change that pulls all up—in texture, taste, and form. Similar to what Impossible and Beyond have done for plant-based meats.

Just says it’s been market-ready since 2018, but before anyone can sell it, a government needs to give the cell-based industry the green light. And for that, all eyes are on Asia. […] Growing lots of meat in relatively tiny spaces is an attractive proposition.

I’m very interested in the language that will be used around these. As the price drops and they become more competitive with the traditional meat market, I think we’ll see a bigger corporate backlash than we did when veggie patties called themselves burgers and Big Beef went bonkers. Read this bit:

But the biggest hurdle may not be the science, or the regulators, or the funding. It’s disgust. Nobody can even agree on what to call the protein: clean meat, cell-based, cellular, cultured, cultivated? No stranger to controversy, Tetrick tested “slaughter-free” on this Bloomberg Businessweek reporter. (She voted no.)

My money is on cultivated meat because it sounds agricultural. And I think that would make people feel at ease.

‘The Key Ingredient in These Hot Sauces, Gins, and Jerky? It’s Seaweed’ ∞

October 23, 2019

Kate Krader for Bloomberg News:

It’s rare to get good news from the sea. Water ­temperatures are rising, fish stocks are being depleted, and the fish we eat are increasingly full of microplastics. But the oceans do hold one positive portent: seaweed. It’s ­regenerative—it can grow about a foot a day—and carbon- and nitrogen-sequestering. Research suggests that, per acre, it can absorb more than 20 times as much carbon dioxide as a forest.

[…]

“We are eyes on the blue green economy,” says Chelsea Briganti, chief executive officer of utensil maker Loliware. “Seaweed represents an opportunity, everywhere you look.”

That would be incredible if seaweed could cure our plastic problem. And this list is filled with possibilities. Hot sauce, sea grapes, one-use ketchup packets, sauerkraut, and this is just the beginning.

‘Going Vegan Won’t Save the Planet’ ∞

October 10, 2019

Mark Buchanan with an op-ed for Bloomberg:

At a recent food festival in Wales, I witnessed an enlightening discussion between two experts on the future of farming. Chungui Lu, a Chinese native who is now a professor in the U.K., spoke on the promise of vertical farming — high-tech indoor vegetable farming capable of producing more food per acre than traditional farming. In contrast, Patrick Holden, a traditional yet visionary Welsh farmer, argued for the human and ecological benefits of small-scale farming for the local sale of meat, cheese and vegetables produced using fully organic methods.

Their ideas seem to reflect a clash between technology and tradition. But I came away thinking that neither offered a solution by itself. Our problems are so deep and diverse, and multiplied by local variations in culture, weather and human density, that no one solution will suffice. We’re going to need many.

I’d imagine that someday soon we’ll see a new term for this distinction. There are too many facets of veganism that clash over the idea of what veganism encompasses. Right now, it seems to me that ‘veganism’ is a label for people doing it for the animals while ‘plant-based’ is often people doing it for personal health reasons. Thankfully both are aligned in the way they eat — and that means a reduction in animal use. This openness to understanding how we affect the world around us is the key takeaway.

From the ecological perspective, Holden said, the meat-versus-vegetable distinction isn’t the right one. Both can be produced in environmentally helpful ways as well as harmful ones, with the latter becoming the norm over the past half-century of industrial farming. Vegan and vegetarian diets may be good for CO2 emissions, but their blind pursuit can exacerbate other issues. He gives one example: It doesn’t help the environment to eschew a local organically grown egg in favor of tofu produced with intense pesticide application on a soy plantation carved out of the Amazon rainforest.

For me, eating vegan food means eating a meal that attempts to reduce the net suffering of animals. But understanding how to categorize and consider what happened to the earth to make that meal is a new facet. There are rarely labels that mention sustainability or some hint about the overall distance the parts of my meal had to travel to reach my plate. Every mile effects CO2. Each part an addition. And all of these things play a part in the future and I hope we can find a way to approach food menus and labeling in some way to indicate that.

‘Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?’ ∞

October 2, 2019

Tad Friend writing a behemoth of a feature for the New Yorker on vegan burgers (specifically Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat), the technology behind it, and our world as it chomps down burgers. This is easily the most comprehensive piece I’ve read on any vegan food. There is a lot to comb through. Everything in bold is mine and done for emphasis. It opens with a bang:

Cows are easy to love. Their eyes are a liquid brown, their noses inquisitive, their udders homely; small children thrill to their moo.

Most people like them even better dead. Americans eat three hamburgers a week, so serving beef at your cookout is as patriotic as buying a gun. When progressive Democrats proposed a Green New Deal, earlier this year, leading Republicans labelled it a plot to “take away your hamburgers.” The former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka characterized this plunder as “what Stalin dreamt about,” and Trump himself accused the Green New Deal of proposing to “permanently eliminate” cows. In fact, of course, its authors were merely advocating a sensible reduction in meat eating. Who would want to take away your hamburgers and eliminate cows?

Well, Pat Brown does, and pronto.

It’s going to be interesting in 20 years when we look back on this societal shift and here it call inevitable. Pat Brown’s language in this piece is revealing. It feels much more assertive and direct than Ethan Brown of Beyond Meat and Josh Tetrick of JUST, Inc. Pat’s language is practically confrontational.

Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.

[…]

Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.

Yikes.

“Legal economic sabotage!” Brown said. He understood that the facts didn’t compel people as strongly as their craving for meat, and that shame was counterproductive. So he’d use the power of the free market to disseminate a better, cheaper replacement. And, because sixty per cent of America’s beef gets ground up, he’d start with burgers.

There were lots of things that were news to me. I hadn’t realized that 60% of America’s beef is ground up. Any product broken down and synthesized like that is firmly in the crosshairs of veganism. It means that product is a blend or processed in some capacity — and, so far, plant-based products have made massive leaps specifically in these areas recently.

And then it becomes essentially vegan pornography, and will likely be the inspiration to the next Willy Wonka sequel:

Brown assembled a team of scientists, who approached simulating a hamburger as if it were the Apollo program. They made their burger sustainable: the Impossible Burger requires eighty-seven per cent less water and ninety-six per cent less land than a cowburger, and its production generates eighty-nine per cent less G.H.G. emissions. They made it nutritionally equal to or superior to beef. And they made it look, smell, and taste very different from the customary veggie replacement. 

[…]

[I]n taste tests, half the respondents can’t distinguish Impossible’s patty from a Safeway burger.

Buckle up, this next section has Glenn Beck.

Ninety-five per cent of those who buy the Impossible Burger are meat-eaters. The radio host Glenn Beck, who breeds cattle when he’s not leading the “They’re taking away your hamburgers!” caucus, recently tried the Impossible Burger on his show, in a blind taste test against a beef burger—and guessed wrong. “That is insane!” he marvelled. “I could go vegan!”

There ya go. I feel like every Impossible commercial should just be ranchers who can’t tell the difference. Like the Coke vs. Pepsi challenge but for protein.

“We plan to take a double-digit portion of the beef market within five years, and then we can push that industry, which is fragile and has low margins, into a death spiral,” he said. “Then we can just point to the pork industry and the chicken industry and say ‘You’re next!’ and they’ll go bankrupt even faster.”

It’s true. From here on out, the margins for plant-based protein can only become more affordable.

Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless Foods, a startup working on cell-based bluefin tuna, said, “Pat and Impossible made it seem like there’s a real industry here. He stopped using the words ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ and set the rules for the industry: ‘If our product can’t compete on regular metrics like taste, price, convenience, and nutrition, then all we’re doing is virtue signalling for rich people.’ And he incorporated biotechnology in a way that’s interesting to meat-eaters—Pat made alternative meat sexy.”

In time, I think people will forget that what brought most people into veganism or eating vegan foods was the re-labeling of vegan products as plant-based. The stigma around the v-word made it inescapable, but this gave flexible folks another-nother alternative.

Brown doesn’t care that plant-based meat amounts to less than 0.1 per cent of the $1.7-trillion global market for meat, fish, and dairy, or that meat contributes to the livelihoods of some 1.3 billion people. His motto, enshrined on the wall of Impossible’s office, is “Blast ahead!” During the six months that I was reporting this story, the company’s head count grew sixty per cent, to five hundred and fifty-two, and its total funding nearly doubled, to more than seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Brown laid out the math: to meet his 2035 goal, Impossible just has to double its production every year, on average, for the next 14.87 years. This means that it has to scale up more than thirty thousandfold. When I observed that no company has ever grown anywhere near that fast for that long, he shrugged and said, “We will be the most impactful company in the history of the world.”

Obviously, this is insane — but I love the insanity.

For another thing, meat is wildly inefficient. Because cattle use their feed not only to grow muscle but also to grow bones and a tail and to trot around and to think their mysterious thoughts, their energy-conversion efficiency—the number of calories their meat contains compared with the number they take in to make it—is a woeful one per cent.

Has anyone else seen this written anywhere else? That 1% claim would be a deal and I’ve never heard it said anywhere else.

“Another advantage we have over the incumbent technology is that we keep improving our product every week. The cow can’t.”

This is possibly the most interesting part of this article. I’m interested in seeing what they think are improvements over time. I remember years ago reading an article about scientists working on Doritos to find the perfect satiation point where people wanted more but also couldn’t burn out. Same thing I’d heard for sodas. Engineering is great to a certain point, but has its limits and a certain cultural stigma. I’ll be very interested to see how all of these companies navigate language and understanding of what it means to “engineer” food.

Brown remains mystified, for instance, by Americans’ eagerness to add protein to their diets when they already consume far more than is necessary. Nonetheless, he beefed up the protein in his burgers. “There are things we do that are effectively just acknowledging widespread erroneous beliefs about nutrition,” he said. “For the same reasons, we initially used only non-G.M.O. crops, which was essentially pandering. We’re not trying to win arguments but to achieve the mission.”

Brown sees himself as a guide rather than as a micromanager—“I have no idea if the company paid taxes last year. The C.E.O. is supposed to know that, I guess”—but he is determined to retain control. When Google made an early offer to buy the company, he said, he turned it down “in less than five seconds, because we would have just been one of their suite of nifty projects.” And he made it a condition of his deal with Khosla Ventures that Impossible couldn’t be sold without his approval to any of about forty “disallowed companies”—meat producers and agricultural conglomerates.

There is a small contingency of old-school vegan eaters that this is really important too. There’s a nice market in Los Angeles called BESTIES that only carries vegan food made by all-vegan companies. I would assume Impossible already alienated people who shop at places like BESTIES and similarily interested vegans with their heme testing for the FDA. Obviously, it’s a challenging line to walk.

While the Impossible Burger is still trying to match the flavor of beef, in certain respects it’s begun to improve upon the original. Celeste Holz-Schietinger, one of the company’s top scientists, told me, “Our burger is already more savory and umami than beef, and in our next version”—a 3.0 burger will be released in a few months—“we want to increase the buttery flavor and caramelization over real beef.”

This was news to me and I’m already excited for it. It’d be interesting if they made an annual event where they would release their new products like Apple does with the iPhone.

Early on, Brown believed that his burger would be cheaper than ground beef by 2017. His original pitch claimed, in a hand-waving sort of way, that because wheat and soy cost about seven cents a pound, while ground beef cost a dollar-fifty, “plant based alternatives can provide the nutritional equivalent of ground beef at less than 5% of the cost.” But establishing a novel supply chain, particularly for heme, proved expensive. The company has increased its yield of the molecule more than sevenfold in four years, and, Brown said, “we’re no longer agonizing over the impact of heme on our cost.” He now hopes to equal the price of ground beef by 2022.

It’ll happen even sooner if the government stops subsidizing beef. Spending $38 billion annually to subsidize beef and dairy while almost none on vegetables and fruit is an atrocity.

When Impossible meat is equal to or cheaper than the cost of beef, I want it to be the first national vegan holiday. Block parties, grills, neighbors, new friends, old friends. It’ll be one to remember.

‘The Fake Backlash to Fake Meat’ ∞

August 13, 2019

From Alex Trembath at OneZero:

I can’t help but notice that when fake meat was the purview of food utopians and visionary chefs, thought leaders were enthusiastically in favor of it. But as soon as fake meat hit the plastic trays at Burger King, they were fretting about how over-processed it was.

[…]

I believe that the problem with fake meat isn’t so much that it is ultra-processed as that it is mass produced. The conflation of exclusivity and goodness is actually endemic to large swaths of food culture. “Myths about superior taste and nutrition,” food scholar S. Margot Finn observed […], “mostly help the middle classes distance themselves from the poor.”

I think people also make a natural connection between exclusivity and quality because the journey to get to the place allows for better storytelling and a natural inclination to making that journey quote-unquote worth it.

In his book The Wizard and the Prophet, historian Charles Mann identifies the size and scale of a technological systems, not the technology itself, as the root of a certain kind of environmental opposition.

I understand this though. Look at Monsanto. It’s easy to not trust any food company who has that much skin in the game.

Obviously base classism doesn’t sell, and any food systems capable of feeding over seven billion people are going to be large-scale in some degree. That’s why critics of fake meat and other food reformers rely on vague epithets like “processed.” Food processing, after all, is a category so wide as to defy useful definition.

[…]

Certainly, food products loaded with excess sugar, sodium, preservatives, saturated fat, and exotic ingredients could more easily be labelled “ultra-processed” than foods that contain, well, lower portions of those ingredients. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s not clear to me, nor, seemingly, anyone else, where to draw the line between unprocessed and processed foods.

I do think we need to have a conversation about “processed” foods, but we need a spectrum to help us understand it’s relation as a net-positive or net-negative from the standard that it’s (often) replacing.

And the choice, ultimately, isn’t between large-scale mass-produced and small-scale non-mass-produced. It is between mass production that is more sustainable, healthier, and more humane — and mass production that is less so.

Bingo.

But when we find fault with a clearly beneficial innovation slotting neatly into modern food systems, perhaps the problem isn’t with the system, but with our own idealized vision for what an equitable, healthy, appealing food system should look like. Surely there are excesses and failures with the status quo, in the arenas of nutrition, corporate governance, worker rights, treatment of animals, and more. But while we work to actively address those issues, we might consider whether the systems we have designed over generations to feed billions of humans aren’t doing a relatively good job at that task already. After all, global hunger and undernourishment have been trending downward for decades, an achievement we should surely take into account.

‘Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer’ ∞

August 3, 2019

From Chris Newman, writing about the struggle of being a farmer and a farmer’s market vendor, with emphasis his:

Altogether, then, I’m paying $5,850 to participate in a large farmers market.

It’s pretty safe to assume that the costs of the other 99 vendors are similar. We’re shelling out a combined $585,000 to participate in just one market. Most of us participate in at least two markets, so let’s double the figure to $1.17m, then round down to $1 million just to be conservative.

A $1 million+ annual operating budget could comfortably lease, service, and staff a large urban brick and mortar market that’s open 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, year-round.

Instead, we spend it on a pop-up market that’s open just half the year (in my neck of the woods), for two days a week (remember, two markets), four hours at a time. And it’s probably outdoors — where rain, excessive heat, or a cold snap will effectively ruin your day.

As much as I like farmers markets, the amount of resources that small farmers pour into them is terribly misdirected if we’re serious about mounting a real challenge to the conventional food system.

Speaking on the idea of independence and farming he continues:

Our freedom also costs us results in the marketplace. The zeal for “saving the world” is undercut by annual sales at farmers markets estimated at less than $2 billion in the U.S., with the growth of markets slowing even as hundreds of billions of dollars of food is sold annually in grocery stores. As the link above states, part of this slowdown may be the result of an explosion in local food hubs, which are themselves riddled with competitive issues of their own, in addition to (generally) being non-farmer owned and little more than middlemen that force farmers to take prices.

Because of our insistence on independence and our failure to cooperate more closely, we’re being outsold at the grocery store by a factor of 400+. 

He concludes:

[Farmers] markets will still be one of the best ways to connect to the actual people growing your food and gain an understanding of what it takes to responsibly feed a hungry planet.

I’m always interested in what the word responsibly can mean when it comes to food.

✏️ by C. W. Moss