Technology

‘Plant-based meat could create a radically different food chain’

Smaller firms that specialise in ingredients for plant-based food have started to spring up, and more established ones, such as Ingredion, are moving into this space too. Its researchers are investigating whether other crops, such as yellow peas and fava beans, can make good meatless meat. They are also hoping to breed new varieties of soya and wheat. Earlier this year Motif Ingredients, a startup created by Gingko Bioworks, a biotech firm in Boston, raised $90m to develop specialised ingredients for plant-based products. Jon McIntyre, Motif’s boss, aims to make flavourings and other additives (to improve texture or bite, say) by inserting specific DNA sequences into the genomes of yeast. Fermenting that yeast will then produce their desired products. Both companies hope that their products will help even the smallest firms to create their own plant-based meats from scratch.

I read things like this and do a little dance in my chair. The future is exciting. New flavors and new experiences are going to be happening for the decades and decades to come.

‘Going Vegan Won’t Save the Planet’

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.

‘Lab-grown meat start-up raises $14 million to build production plant’

CNBC’s Amelia Lucas writing about Future Foods and their latest on in vitro meat, this part caught my eye:

Future Meat has managed to reduce production costs to $150 per pound of chicken and $200 per pound for beef.

I’m impressed they’ve been able to cut the cost that low. I feel like just a year or two ago it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make a pound. My brain remembers some of the burgers they had on the morning shows costing around $100,000 each.

By 2022, Future Meat plans to launch a second line of entirely lab-grown meat that will cost less than $10 per pound.

If they can pull this off, Willy Wonka would be envious. Imagine starting from scratch, and taking the cost of a product from over $100k to $10 in under 10 years. It’s incredible.

‘Introducing Atlast™ Food Co.’

Our core insight is that conventional food processing technologies can’t mimic the structure of meat. And neither can most plants. But certain mushrooms, when grown in a precise manner using the patented Atlast™ Food Platform, show promise of delivering that critical meat-like texture. (This fact shouldn’t be surprising given that certain hard to cultivate wild mushrooms have long been recognized as convincing meat substitutes.)

So about a year ago we started on our journey to grow a plant-based steak. Or, more accurately, a myco-based steak.

People have been doing some fascinating things with mushrooms recently, so I’m excited to see what Atlast can do. Their photos are intriguing.

If you’re looking for other interesting mushroom products, I’d start with Pig Out Chips. They’re smoked, delicious, and the closest thing I’ve had to bacon in decades. You can find them on their website, and I just recently saw them at Sprouts Markets. Check their website for other stores that carry their products.

And check out the ‘Seafood’ tower at the all-vegan Crossroads restaurant in Los Angeles. I speak about this experience with Jesse Mullenix and Alex Irit in episode 2 of the Vegan-Carne Alliance podcast.

‘Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?’

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.

‘What cell-cultured meat can tell us about our culture’

Sam Bloch (in bold) interviewed cultural historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft about the future of lab-made meat, and I found the end especially interesting:

John Berger said the zoo is an epitaph to a lost relationship between humans and animals. Part of what I believe you’re trying to do in Meat Planet is write cultured meat into that epitaph.

That’s what I’m implying. You could see industrial agriculture as a kind of epitaph. And you could also see cultured meat extending that process. It’s a product of the consumer imagination in which we don’t expect to be close to the animals that we eat. We don’t even expect to be close to other people, right? We’re still in the model of industrial production—we’re just trying to shift its basis.

Cultured meat is simultaneously a radical break and a conservative move. It’s a conservative move in the sense that it attempts to conserve a model of diet, and a way of living, and a set of ideas about markets and economic and population growth, that we’ve been living with for a long time. It’s friendly to the way business is already done.

‘Johns Hopkins launches center for psychedelic research’

A group of private donors has given $17 million to start the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine, making it what’s believed to be the first such research center in the U.S. and the largest research center of its kind in the world.

This is massive news.

I haven’t read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, but I think I’ve listened to every podcast he’s been on in his press cycle. I think the book will be help America understand and destigmatize psychedelics. In it, he writes about the tremendous research that is showing the benefits of LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) for treating depression, anxiety, and addiction.

Read a short excerpt of Pollan’s book here.

Bloomberg’s Burger Stalker

I needed this when the Impossible shortage was in full swing. Either way, this tracker from Bloomberg is glorious.

‘KFC’s Response to Chicken Sandwich Mania: A Bucket of Vegan ‘Chicken’’

After all the discussion of Popeye’s entering the chicken sandwich game, this was the more interesting story for our future:

Maybe that’s because KFC was too busy rolling out a product that is, in a way, the inverse of Popeyes’ new star: Beyond Fried Chicken, a plant-based fried “poultry” made in partnership with fake-meat startup Beyond Meat. Starting Tuesday, the faux fried chicken will be available from just one location — a KFC in Smyrna, Ga., northwest of Atlanta — in the form of nuggets or boneless wings, as the chain decides whether or not to broaden the test or to release Beyond Fried Chicken nationwide.

This ended up selling out in 5 hours. I’d assume it’ll be nationwide by early next year.

Herbs and Spices

Vegan Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton is expanding 14 new locations of Neat Burger over the next two years. In the write-up on Bloomberg, this part got me thinking.

Neat Burger will feature Beyond Meat Inc.’s vegetable-based burgers, mixed with its own herbs and ingredients.

That little bit made me realize how little I see restaurants playing with their Beyond and Impossible burgers by adding herbs and spices. I hope we see more of that.

It’d be nice to have a more unique experience at restaurants with the uniformity offered by Beyond and Impossible moving globally. Even at larger chains, it’d be nice to see a distinction between how Carl’s Jr. and A&W prepare their Beyond Burger.