It's really just like cultivating a plant, you know, you can take a cutting from a plant or a seed from a plant and you've bathed that seed in nutrients and the plant grows. In this case, you take that biopsy, the size of a sesame seed from an animal. You bath those cells in nutrients and the cells will provide in growth. And because there are no animals involved, you don't need antibiotics, which literally means anti-life. You don't need pesticides or herbicides for cultivated seed food. You're not going to have the diapsils or the mercury that collect in fish flesh. It is a far cleaner product at the end of the day. It's constantly far safer for people and their families to bathe the cells in nutrients. It looks like a year of root or eight, but instead of having these fats, you know, with beer and then you have these fats essentially with meat. That's Bruce Friedrich and this is episode 109 of the Proof Podcast. Hey friends, I hope you're healthy and keeping well. For a year listeners, welcome back. It's great to be back here again with you. For new listeners, welcome. It's awesome to have you join us. My name is Simon Hill. I'm the host of this show, The Plant Proof Podcast, physiotherapist, nutritionist, and I'm glad that you managed to find the show. I really do hope you get something out of today's episode that helps you become more mindful and conscious of the way that you eat. That's what each episode is about. A non-judgmental, non-preachy space to talk about diet, to talk about being mindful of our decisions and really an opportunity to sit down with inspiring people from all over the world. Doctors, nutritionists, dietitians, athletes, people who have overcome chronic disease and generally focus that are working hard to create positive change in the world. For those who are a real listeners of the show, you will know very well by now that not only am I interested or curious in how our food choice is affect human health but also how they affect planetary health. After all, the two are inextricably tied to one another. I'm forever curious about what changes we can make at an individual level but also at a community and population level to reduce the healthcare burden, live our best lives and do good by the planet at the same time. One thing that's clear is animal agriculture in particular is terribly unsustainable. And really the word unsustainable is somewhat of an understatement. The mass production of meat and dairy in particular across the globe comes at a huge cost, such an enormous cost. That cost, along with incredible solutions that may just help us turn things around, is the topic of today's episode with guest Bruce Friedrich. Bruce is a lawyer and co-founder of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit organisation that promotes plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy and eggs, as well as cultivated meat, also known as cultured meat and cell-based meat, as alternatives to the products of conventional animal agriculture. I first came across Bruce a few years ago now and have been actively watching and researching the space of cultivated meat from afar ever since. For those who are long-time listeners, you may recall an earlier episode over two years ago now with Thomas King from Food Frontier and in that conversation we explored some of this territory. I'll be at things have changed a lot in the last two years. It's fascinating, mind-blowing and at first it can seem outrageous. If given the seismic shifts that we need to take place, I really do see it as one of the most exciting industries in the world today. It goes without saying it was an absolute privilege to have him on the show and I really do hope you enjoy it. Please bring an open mind and listen a few times. Remember, it wasn't long ago that mobile phones and SMS messaging didn't exist. Folks like my mum were using pages. I'm a little too young to have had a page myself but I do remember playing snake on my Nokia 5110. All the 80s and 90s kids will be with me there. The point is change happens fast and I have a feeling this is going to be one of those spaces. So with that said, let's do this. It's time to hear from Bruce Friedrich and I'll see you on the other side for a quick debrief. I've been using Woop for over six years and I can confidently say it keeps me on track when it comes to my sleep and exercise routines. The next generation of Woop isn't just tracking your workouts. It's monitoring your sleep quality, your recovery state and even giving you insights into your biological age. No screen, no distractions, just continuous data on what your body actually needs. And here's what matters. Daily Woop where is linked to increased physical activity, to better sleep and improved heart rate variability. I have no doubt that my Woop is helping me train smarter, recover faster and make decisions that support my long term health. Head to join.woop.com/simon. Welcome to the show, Bruce. Thanks very much. I'm delighted to be here. Simon. It's a pleasure to have this opportunity to chat with you. You work in the fascinating world of plant-based meat and cultivated or clean meat as people may have heard of it before. I've watched both of your TED talks, your original one and your TEDx talk. I absolutely love the work that you're doing with good food institutes. Firstly, thank you for what you do and thank you for taking the time to connect today. That's incredibly kind of you, Simon. I'm delighted to be here and really looking forward to chatting. As I said, it's a very exciting space that offers what I believe and I know what you believe. It's a really strong solution to combat many global issues that we currently face from clochance to antibiotic resistance, zoonotic diseases, food security, animal welfare, etc. All things that you talk about frequently. There's certainly quite a bit that we can cover and clearly there's a lot on the line. I really want to step this out with you in a way that's easy for people to understand who may be hearing about this industry and some of these issues for the very first time. Why don't we start at a very high level to frame this conversation by defining these terms that I just used plant-based meat and cultivated or clean meat. We can move into this innovation and the transformation of our food system and why this is so important in terms of tackling some of these issues. That sounds perfect. Plant-based meat is what it sounds like. It's meat made from plants. Probably a lot of people are going to have some preconceived notions and just thanks veggie burger, veggie nuggets, or whatever. That's plant-based meat. The idea of plant-based meat is to actually replicate meat with plants. It stems from the ideas of people like Pat Brown from the possible foods and Ethan Brown from beyond meat to Brown's new relation. The central brainstorm is just that meat is made up of lipids, amino acids, minerals, and water. That is all meat is. And plants also have lipids, amino, minerals, and water. So up until Ethan Brown and Pat Brown, the way that veggie burger is veggie nuggets, vegetarian meats that to us, was that the sweet oil industry had a bunch of protein that they didn't know what to do with. The wheat harbohydrate industry, for things like pasta and bread, had a lot of protein that they didn't know what to do with. And they essentially reconstituted it into something that looked like a burger or whatever else and marketed it to flexitarians, marketed it to people who wanted to eat less meat. The brainstorm of people like Ethan Brown and Pat Brown is that, no, if we hire meat scientists and tissue engineers and chemical engineers, if we hire the right people, we can actually create meat from plants, something that has the taste, the texture, everything that people like about meat, but without the need for farms, without the need for slaughterhouse it's constantly at a much lower adverse impact across a range of issues that I know that we're going to get into. So that's plant-based meat. And then cultivated meat just takes tissue engineering for therapeutics and cross-applies it to food. So we know how to grow animal tissue.
we have mostly done it for human beings, for medical applications. But you can take the concept of taking cells, bathing them in nutrients on a scaffold and growing them. And you can figure out how to do that for food. And that's where cultivated meat comes from. So right now, you feed an animal, the animal cells multiply and grow. That's what the animal getting larger. That's what's entailed. Overwhelming inefficiency in that process. Instead, you can just take a biopsy from an animal, the size of a sesame seed, painless process, and feed those cells directly. So with, you want to grow a chicken, the slaughter weight, it's going to take you six or seven weeks. You feed the cells directly. You can get that same growth in six days. So it's just two different ways of producing meat. One involves pre-and-meat from plants and the other involves growing actual animal meat, but growing it from cells without all of the external cost of the way we do it now. I think some people listening that may have heard that for the very first time, sort of see that as something out of a science fiction movie, growing meat outside of the body of an animal. It seems like a very foreign idea. And after we sort of go through some of these issues and I guess why there is such great importance for this innovation, let's dive into a cell you'll meet a little bit deeper in terms of how they are actually cultivating these cells. And we'll just sort of explain that process a little bit more. But on the issues that these innovation in this space can help solve, why is it so incredibly important that right now we're looking at governments getting behind this space, we're looking at companies getting into this space. And why does the current food system need to transform in the first place? - Yeah, we generally put, we generally put the external costs of the present way that we create meat into three buckets. The first one is global health and something like antibiotic resistance. If your listeners and viewers want to scare, they should Google the end of working antibiotics and see what comes up. You want to even bigger scare? I'd rather work China to that. Or you could just Google pig zero and look at the front page piece in the New York Times from about six months ago. But if anybody listening to this, watching this gets sick and they need antibiotics, they're going to be put on a force of antibiotics somewhere between five and 10 days. The vast majority of farm animals are fed antibiotics for their entire lives. And it's not because the animals are sick, it's because they are kept in conditions that would make them sick if they were not fed antibiotics prophylactically. And what that means is more than 70% of antibiotics that are produced globally by the pharmaceutical industry, they're fed to animals, not fed to human beings. This is leading to antibiotic resistant super bugs. And when you or I get sick, the antibiotics that are prescribed may not work. This literally, according to the former head of the World Health Organization, will spell the end of modern medicine. If penicillin doesn't work, if the antibiotics that are used to stave off infection, if you get a cut, don't work. You're literally talking about use great gurney and you have to amputate your leg, sorts of, and sorts of outcomes. So the end of working antibiotics, the UK government released a report last year said the threat to the human race from antibiotic resistance is more certain than the threat from climate change. Similarly, argument can be made about the next pandemic. Pandemics start in animals. And this one started in a live market with people leading bats, it looks like. It could just as easily has started on an industrial pig farm or an industrial chicken farm. And that sort of thing, experts think is extraordinarily likely based on the way that we can find farm animals. - Do you see governments, I'm not sure whether, whether the American government has commented on this sort of, it's too early, but do you see governments around the world seeing at this shift in the food system that we're talking about today as a way of de-risking against further pandemics? - I think governments are gonna be more interested. I think for a little while, governments will probably be talking about things in terms of climate change, in terms of food security, and in terms of antibiotic resistance. That's just something that resonates in people's minds. It's something that people can see immediately. Obviously, we are all living through COVID-19. So we're living through a padet pandemic, and it's significantly less speculative to talk about that than it would have been even just six months ago. But talking about the next pandemic, no matter how certain scientists are that it's coming, they don't know the cause. And this definitely lowers the risk of the next pandemic, but the link between industrial animal agriculture and climate change, food insecurity and global poverty, and antibiotic resistance is just so clear and ironclad that those are probably the areas we'll be focusing on more. And just an in-equipment shell, we're gonna have 10 billion people to feed by 2050. The inefficiencies of cycling crops through animals really make no sense at all. It takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal splench. It's literally nine times as much land, nine times as much water, nine times as many pesticides and herbicides, super inefficient when you can just take the crops directly and biominic meat with those crops, or you can feed cells directly and lose all of that inefficiency. It's literally a part of leading to global malnutrition and start-action. And then the other issue is climate change and a range of environmental issues, but I'm sure many of your listeners and viewers are aware of the fact that the United Nations looked at the issues and said, no matter what environmental issue we're talking about from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global, the way we raise animals for food right now is one of the top three causes. And on climate change, the least climate change inducing animal was chicken, and yet 40 times as much climate change for protein calorie, for chicken, man, for legumes, like peas and soy. - Yeah, and. - One thing I've been thinking about more lately as I get older is brain health, staying sharp, maintaining focus, and protecting cognitive function long term. My day is involved constantly shifting between screens, emails, social media, phone calls, recording podcasts. All of this requires a lot of cognitive processing power and cognitive reserve. And there are stretches where I feel absolutely dialed in. And there are other times where the fog creeps in. And what I've come to appreciate is that there are biomarkers that you can measure that act as a window into your brain health. Things like inflammation, blood sugar regulation, nutrient levels, and hormonal health, all influence how your brain performs today and over time. If we're not measuring those systems, we're making assumptions that what we're doing is working. That's one of the reasons I use function. It gives you over 160 lab tests each year so you can see what's happening beneath the surface. For me, tracking things like inflammatory markers and markers of metabolic health, like triglycerides and HB01C, has directly informed how I train, how I eat, and how I recover. 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[email protected] for a special discount on your first order of IMAIT daily ultimate essentials, that's IMAITHealth.com and use the Proof Code Simon. Replace your cabinet full of supplement bottles today. - I mean, I think something that often gets forgotten. I mean, we've been talking about privilege the last few months that's become quite typical, right? And relevant and very relevant, rightly so we should be talking about it. But in this conversation of climate change, a lot of the damage to our planet is being done by the richer nations and the richer populations. But we'll be first felt and already is being first felt by poorer, less privileged nations and populations. - Yeah, that's absolutely right. I don't remember what the precisely numbers are, but it's something very close to 95% of climate change.
is happening is caused by the developed economies and then 95% of the death losses in particular, as well as the economic ruin is going to be felt in the developing economies. So it's really disproportionate the way that we do a lot of the polluting and it's the people who can least who are most on the precipice, who end up suffering the worst impacts. And I know that you used a great example in one of your talks with the the homeless sandwiches and you sort of spoke to the the inefficiency. I think you were using perhaps the conversion ratio of chicken feed to calories from chicken, but that that kind of also directly speaks to the fact that the when often when we think of food waste, we think of what waste is left when we finish our meal, not so much the wastage that's happening within the system. And when you start to understand that and you think about people in certain areas that are that are under noish malnourish and not getting enough calories, it just doesn't really make a lot of sense the way we're doing things. Yeah, and then let me just spell that out for people. So again, it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animals flash. So that's the energy that's the energy conversion rate. And chicken is the most efficient animal at turning props into meat. What that means is you're literally throwing away eight calories for every calorie that you consume. So I suppose not literally throwing away, but eight calories are burned off by the chicken or go into creating feathers or blood or something that we don't consume. The energy we don't get from that animal. So none of your listeners or viewers would go to the refrigerator, take out eight plates of food and throw them in the trash. But that is the relationship that we enter into. Eight hundred percent of the food that was grown, the props that were grown, are burned off by the chicken or going to something that we don't consume. So people are very upset about food waste and we should be upset about food waste. Something like 40% of food produced in the developed world is wasted. But just baked into the physiology of raising live animals in order to eat them is at best eight hundred percent food waste. So a few years back, the UN Special Envoy on Food that I named John Ziegler, he called biofuels a human rights crime because according to the FAO, a hundred million metric times of foreign and wheat were being put into biofuels. But that same FAO report pointed out that 756 million metric times of foreign and wheat were being fed to foreign animals, not even including the 85% of the global soy crop, another 200 million metric times of soy that are fed to chickens and pigs and other foreign animals. So if the economics indicate that competition for grain and wheat drives up prices and leads to global starvation and that's a human rights crime, what about something that causes that eats up more than 10 times as much of the crops globally? I mean, it feels like a human rights crime, it's something that we are involved in when we are participating in the system, but that message doesn't get through. For whatever reason, people are just not making their dietary choices on this basis for the most part. So looking for a global solution, GFI's is let's give people the meat that they want, but let's make it in a way that doesn't cause all of those harms. Where you've landed on that as your sort of mission, correct me if I'm wrong, that's decades of your personally exploring this area and essentially understanding that it's a hard slog to try and change someone's behavior or opinion and emotion that's attached to the way that they currently eat. Yeah, I don't know if it's biological or physiological or psychological. I don't know what it is, but yeah, I've been vegan since 1987, so a little over 33 years are going on 33 years. As a vegan, and the entire time I've been an advocate and have been talking with people about these issues and how pretty much everybody, like we all care about animals, we all want to make choices that are in viral malay conscious and none of us wants to entrench global poverty. These are things that people want to do, but there's just something about eating meat for apparently the vast majority of people. They're just not going to factor in ethical considerations. So I'm a big fan of continuing to educate people. I mean, the people who are making choices to dedicate their lives to re-creating meat. People like Umau Valetti, who founded Memphis Mates, the two Pat Nitham Brown, who I mentioned, who founded Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. All of the people who are founding these companies, and they're saying, "This is what I'm going to do with my life. I'm going to free make meat," are doing it because they got educated about the external costs of industrial animal agriculture. So I think that's important, but when we're looking for a solution that is going to reach rural China, when we're looking for a solution that's going to make that's going to reach literally everybody everywhere. If education is not even getting a vast group of people in Australia or Europe or the United States where education is at its most advanced about all the things that we're talking about, the idea that we're going to reach the whole world, it's going to be tough at best. So let's just remake meat instead of trying to remake morality. I mean, particularly given, I think the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement are 20, 30 goals. So the writing, I guess, to emphasize and further frame this conversation, is that we're not talking about changes that need to take place over the next 100, 200 years. We need to move relatively quick here, right? Oh yeah, no, the best time to act is 20 years ago. The best time to act right now is going to be right now. But I mean, one of the things that people sometimes say is we're past the point of no return on climate change. And I definitely think we are experiencing climate change. And as you rightly noted, we're experiencing it in the worst possible way in the areas of the world where people are most vulnerable. But that's not a good excuse to throw up our hands. So we should still do the best we can in terms of mitigation. Similarly, you know, COVID is meaning that for the first time ever, we're seeing global now-now-nutrition going back up the trend lines have been good up until now. And now they're looking like they're going to go track badly again. And that's not a reason to throw up our hands. That's a reason to double down and really get about the business of solving these problems. And even if the harms are inevitable, we can make them significantly less intense. So that's going to be meaningful for all of the people who are, you know, safe from malnutrition and who are who we preserve antibiotics and where all of the adverse impacts of climate change are less intensely adverse. Yeah, I think it's, I've heard people say that as well that we've done too much damage and it's irreparable and it's sort of is what it is. I guess it's a it's a little bit of a defeatist mindset. But even if this solution or these solutions that you're talking about in the innovation in this space wasn't too tangibly affect climate change, it's still going to affect the amount of calories through creating a more efficient food system, which means greater food security, which means less people starving. As you said, it's going to be tackling, you know, other things like antibiotic resistance. So if it didn't, if it somehow didn't affect climate change is still going to be leading to a better world in other ways. Yeah, no, it's a minute. It's it's critically important for global food security. It's politically important global health. The range of environmental issues were industrial animal agriculture is one of the top three causes and that's literally all of them. Everything from land use to soil dissertification, to water pollution, to water use to species loss for climate change every single significant environmental issue, the way the inefficiencies in the pollution caused by raising animals for food is one of the top causes. And in terms of it's not just the inefficiency right it's an right it's not just that you need nine times as much land and nine times as many pesticides and herbicides and nine times as much water. You also have to truck all of those crops to a feed mill. You have to operate the feed mill. You have to truck the feed to the farm. You have to operate the farm. You have to truck the animals to the slaughterhouse, you have to operate the slaughterhouse. I mean, these industrial farms and these slaughterhouses are extraordinarily energy intensive and extraordinarily polluting. So it's multiple extra stages of gas gas laying, pollution, fueling vehicles. It's multiple extra energy intensive and polluting factories. And that's why when you add all of those up, you come up with, you know, the UN report livestock's long shadow and the degree to which this is just, you know, this way of producing food is just unsustainable and hugely harmful environment. Okay, so let's break down these, these sort of two, I guess, sub-industries of this new meat industry in terms of being a solution to all of this. Perhaps we start with plant-based protein, plant-based meat. You mentioned before that we've come a long way and you talked about a few of these companies beyond meat and impossible burger who have, you know, really change the game in terms of experience through a plant-based meat product. Can you walk me through the last couple of decades what this evolution has looked like and where you see it going? Yeah, and there's another lot to walk through over there. Anything else?
than the last decade. So, 2009, Ethan Brown is working in clean energy. He's an MBA grad from Think Columbia Business School, but maybe NYU Business School. He's working in clean energy, and he reads livestock's long shadow. And he's like his motivating thing in life is climate change. And he looks around at nobody's dealing with industrial animal agriculture, the ITC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize, with Al Gore, is saying we need to eat 90% less meat. And he doesn't see anybody in the Environmental Community talking about this. He doesn't see anybody in government or business talking about this. And he has the Central Brain Storm, which is what came to be the good food institute, the whole idea that he just made up of things that plants also have. He reads about some research at the University of Missouri, and people at the research focused on actually creating meat from plants. And he starts beyond me in 2009. And at the end of 2012, the S's first product, John Matthew from Whole Foods is very, very excited about this concept, and signs a deal with Whole Foods to bring it in reach, and then the next year in 2013, to bring it in all across Whole Foods. It's a chicken-stripped product that Bill Gates tries, and Bill Gates says, "What I just ate is not just a clever meat substitute. What I just ate is the future of food." Really in complete parallel in 2011, on actually else, it's also in 2009, Pat Brown takes a two-year sabbatical. He said, "10-year professor of biochemistry at Stanford University." And he takes a two-year sabbatical, and he's going to focus his sabbatical on what he can do with his life that will allow him to make a dent in what he sees as coming, finite change apocalypse. And he figures education is the way to go. So he starts organizing forums, and this guy started the public library of science. Look at Patrick Brown. He is a big shot scientist, a member of the National Academy of Science, science, and really just an impressive human being. A 10-year professor of biochemistry at Stanford, one of the top universities in the world. And it's an academic, he thinks I just need to tell everybody what's true. And he quickly realizes that, you know, as Pat Brown did, it almost leaves at the same time that that's not going to work. And so he starts in possible foods in 2011. And unlike most food companies, remember, Ethan starts, "Beyond to me, in 2009, it takes him three years to have his first product." He pulled that product actually in 2018 because he said he was embarrassed by it. It's not good enough. Pat Brown started his company in 2011, had his first product at the very end of 2016. And the thing to underline about that is that neither of them was about the business of selling good enough products. Neither of them thought that this Silicon Valley concept of MVP, most viable, minimum viable product made sense. They want products that will satisfy me, leaders, out of the gate. And that's the central brainstorm about those guys. Manjash Tetra, at a company formerly called Hemp & Creek, now called Just, and basically was doing basically the same thing focused on eggs, also starting in 2011. So the first products in this vein didn't come around until 2009. And the signature products that both beyond to meet an impossible foods, the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger didn't launch until the very end of 2016. So it's a pretty new endeavor. So tell me, and I may be jumping ahead to cultivated meat, but I'm thinking it's a similar story here. These companies are essentially going after that person who would ordinarily be eating meat, right? What's the data showing? Who is buying these products? And what's that motivating? The main motivating factor seem to be for someone to sort of, I know that Beyond Meat is actually to my knowledge, they're in the meat section of some grocery stores, or at least they were when I was in the States. What's the motivating factor? Is it definitely doesn't seem like it's pricing yet? Is it taste? Is it the fact that they know that it's plants and it's better for the environment? What do you make of it so far? Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. And the motivating factor seems to be novel team for a lot of people. So the first thing to say is that more than 90% of the people who are eating the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger, more than 90% of them are meat eaters, which is which makes for some, you know, sort of for those of us who are vegan, it's mildly frustrating that the default at Carl's Jr. The default Beyond Burger has cheese, again, cheese has a variety of dairy ingredients on it. And so too with the Impossible Burger at Burger King, the default is not vegan, just just underlines the decree to which this is not being fueled by, you know, a bunch of vegans. It really is being fueled by people who are making the decisions. For really the number one decision is it's just new and interesting and people like to try new and interesting things. Number two is probably some variety of factors. So like people have a vague sense that the way that meat, well, it's not even vague, but I think when they're making food choices, they're not thinking about all of the external costs of meat production. But they understand that there are all of these external costs of meat production. If you stop somebody on the street and you say why isn't you know, meat bad, you know, they can lay out. It's inefficient at closet sales for separate these other things. It's not good for me. And so it's something where people don't have to sacrifice. They're eating meat, not because of all of these external costs. They're eating meat because they like the taste. And so they're given the opportunity to try something that tastes the same or better and that doesn't have these these other costs and they go for it. So for some people it's health, for some people it's environment. But for most people it's they're hungry, it's interesting. They want to try something interesting and new. Maybe they heard that Bill Gates or Richard Branson is into it. Maybe they saw, you know, one of the celebrities that is either invested in or promoting or eating it. And it just becomes sort of a hot new thing. Yeah. So what's it going to take to break through that hot new thing, that novelty? Is it the I mean, the taste is definitely there. I mean, from my experience, again, that's another good question for you. What's the experience and the feedback being from from meat it is in terms of how they think it tastes. And secondly, the pricing seems a little bit more expensive, but I'm assuming that over time as the demands increasing and and that's the raw material with the bulk amount of ingredients being ordered is increasing that that price is going to come down. And based on what we're talking about before in terms of how inefficient the the current animal agriculture system is, these products should in the long run be cheaper. Yeah, that's that's absolutely right. It's right now they are producing at such a small scale that economies of scale have not even begun to kick in. I mean, it's interesting. Jim Kramer, who's a very famous, probably the most famous TV host on CNBC, which is a business channel here in the United States. He's probably the most famous guy on there. He's got a TV program called Squawk Box. And he was talking to the CEO of Burger King like two or three days ago. And he was saying, I completely switched to the impossible burger. I absolutely love the impossible burger. I completely switched. So I mean, I do think with sort of veggie burgers 1.0, pre-deon, made and pre-impossible food, somebody would try it because it was novel. It wouldn't like it very much. And it wouldn't keep eating it. But with the impossible burger or the beyond burger or some of the other plant-based meats that are coming along, people try it. They love it. And they stick with it again because they're not eating meat because of how it's produced right now. They're eating meat despite how it's produced and paying a little bit extra for something that's healthier and doesn't give you the paying sub-conscious. And he's going to resonate with a lot of people. Yeah, I agree. I think most people realize that a reduction in meat is healthy and an increase in plants and vegetables and fruit. That's a message that dietary guidelines and governments have been saying for a long time, but you're right. This kind of product just makes that easier. It doesn't feel like they have to sacrifice something to make that change. Tell me, I know that some of the Nasey's may say that these products are using monocrops. What are the sort of current ingredients that these companies are using? And do you think moving forward that there are, again, as demand increases, that the market will open up to a lot more sort of plant-based protein-type ingredients, which allows for more sort of polyculture farming and things like that? Yeah, I think absolutely. Right now, in possible foods, as my possible foods was using wheat and potato protein in a possible foods version 1.0. They couldn't source enough of it. So then they went to Midwestern, so American soy as their primary ingredient. Beyond meat is using key protein and in direct response to the onto meat's spatter-acqueting demand for pea protein. A lot more pea crops have been grown in Canada and the United States. And both eat them grown in Pat Brown. Talk about the range of legumes that could be used as sourcing for the bio-memory of meat. It's because there is lots of soy that impossible pick soy and went back to soy. It's because they were able to source the peas, working with the Canadian government, as well as with pea farming trade associations who both candid in the United States. The beyond meat was able to meat their demand. But the Global Indigate Foundation is funding some mille
characterization research through the Food Institute that we're doing in India. And a lot of what we're doing, especially in India, is focused on figuring out other grains that farmers can plant that can be turned into plant-based meat. And that will happen more and more around the world. And the idea of get big or get out, which is characterized farming over the last 50 years probably, we can beat that back a little bit as we switch to plant-based meat and source it from a wider variety of products. So it's really interesting that Canadian government and Pierre Trudeau offered a fantastic statement maybe a week or 10 days ago as they funded the creation of a factory focused on plant-based products, including plant-based meat in Manitoba, which is in the heartland of Canada, and Canadian government funded that at $100 million. And it's looking at keep processing pea protein and candola protein. And I think we're going to see lots and lots more of that as the plant-based meat market sector continues to be on fire. The Canadian government, certainly from their dietary guidelines, seems to be very, very much about promoting a sustainable diet to their population. I think it was the 2018 dietary guidelines that came out and were very, very plant-forward. So that's certainly, certainly good to see. And I think it's also important, you mentioned soy then, but you made a good point earlier in this conversation that when a lot of people here of soy, they think, and perhaps they've read something in the media about the Amazon, immediately they think vegans. And this is a really important thing to understand. You mentioned 85% of soy is actually fed into the animal agriculture, the current system has feed for these animals. And then I think some's used as biofuels, which you also spoke about. And only about 6% of the world's total soy end up being fed to humans currently. And none of that's from the Amazon. So none of the Amazon soy crop is being fed to human beings. All of the export crop is going to your to feed the farm animals. That's why green peas unveiled this massive banner in the Amazon rainforest. It said KFC, Amazon, Creminolus, absolutely colossal. And that's because the rainforest is being chopped down either to grazing animals or to grow soy to feed to farm animals. That stuff is not being turned into tofu or any plant-based meats that we're talking about. Okay, so on the on the these plant-based meats, this might segue us into cultivated meat. What are the specific challenges that you see with plant-based meat in terms of bio mimicking meat and different types of meat out there? And where does cultivated meat perhaps have an advantage? You know, plant-based meat don't cultivate meat. They both have advantages and they have disadvantages. So it's interesting. If you listen to folks from the Good Food Institute, podcast interviews, we don't have, we don't speak with one voice on what your business is going to be harder on which it's going to be easier. So it's fascinating. I was listening to one of our scientists on a podcast the other day with the sentience institute and he was talking about how we thanks plant-based meat has this sort of big advantage. And I was thinking, I think plant-based meat has this big advantage. I, Elliot, and I should like debate one another on the podcast. But I think you're intuition on it is probably right, but on the valley or on here he would be disagreeing with you. It does seem to me that bio mimicking meat with plants is going to require a lot more technological prowess relative to growing the scaling up and getting processed down. And this is counterintuitive for a lot of people because people have eaten veggie burgers and people have not eaten cultivated meat, right? And so they figure it's got to be easier to process plants into something that bio mimics meat than to grow the cells directly. And that's certainly what we assume to be true when we were starting GFI back at the beginning of 2016. But we learn new stuff about plants and plant-based meat on basically a weekly basis. Whereas everything we thought to be true about cultivating meat, growing meat directly from cells back in 2016, like nothing's really changed. And the reason for that is that people have been doing tissue engineering with human tissue for a really long time. We know how to do it. So there's a trick, right? And then if you want to immortalize cells, that's not easy. If you want to create media that has no animal ingredients that works with with farm animal cells and that is cheap, that's no easy trick. The scaffolding's no easy trick. The bioramptus are probably the hardest of the scientific questions. But none of the critical technology elements and none of the questions are different today than they were five years ago. Like they're tough questions, but we're optimistic that we can solve them. So the science of plant-based meat strikes me as being sort of harder and less absolutely clear. And then it's just also the case that people have these preconceived notions of what vegetarian meats taste like and what they are and that they're going to be subpar. So we also need to challenge that. But I think I think there are huge opportunities in both zones and there are, you know, some pitfalls and difficulties in both zones. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. The supplement industry is lightly regulated and companies don't even have to list everything on their label. It's a low trust category. That's why I partnered with Momentus. Every product is independently certified by NSF for sport or in form sport. 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[email protected]/theproof, for up to $350 off the pod 5. And the cool thing is you get 30 days to try it at home, return it if you don't love it but I'm confident you will. That's 8thsleep.com/theproof, use the code, the proof. Okay so let's zoom in on the cultivated meat and you mentioned then sort of bioreactor and a few other words. And this, if this is the first time someone's heard this, some of those words may go over their head a little bit. So just talk me through the overarching idea of cultivated meat and what it is. How do you grow a piece of steak or a hamburger without the animal? It's really just like cultivating a plant. You can take a cutting from a plant or a seed from a plant and you bathe that seed in nutrients and the plant grows. In this case you take a biopsy, the size of a sesame seed from an animal. You bathe those cells in nutrients and the cells multiply and grow. Because there are no animals involved, you don't need antibiotics which literally means anti-life. You don't need pesticides or herbicides for cultivated seafood. You're not going to have the dionsins or the mercury that left in the fish flesh. It is a far cleaner product at the end of the day and consequently far safer for people in their families. But it is as easy and simple as cell multiplication. So you bathe the cells in nutrients if you want them to form into something like a chicken breast. You're going to need to do it on a scaffold that allows the cells to collect in the way that you want them to collect. And you do that in a cultivator. So it looks like a beer brewery at the end of the day. So that's, that's, Looks like a beer brewery and you have but instead of having
these fats, you know, with beer and then you have these fats essentially with meat. Okay. And from a texture point of view, you're growing these cells outside of the animal, but you're able to essentially produce that meaty tissue that people have come to know as meat and come to enjoy and love. And you talk about scaffolding. Is that using other types of engineered tissues like collagen or how does that work? You could do it with synthetic collagen. One of our scientists just had a paper published in the journal Nature about using called Nature Food. So one of the nature journals talking about using a soy scaffold. But you're going to want to use some sort of edible material to create the scaffold that tissues will grow on. You don't necessarily need that. You could cultivate the meat without that if what you want is ground beef or chicken nuggets or something like that. But if you want to approximate something with a bit more texture like a chicken breast or something like that, you're going to need scaffolding in order to cultivate the meat on. And it'll just be scaffolding. It can either be scaffolding that dissolves or scaffolding that is edible. And you mentioned that this is kind of not really new science. It's just a new part of an existing area of science. So where are the scientists coming from? What were they doing before they were working at Memphis Mates or other cultivated meat companies? They need a range of scientists. And actually this was the focus of Elliott Schwartz on our teams. Cynthia and Senska Dood podcast the other day was like, what should a college study and what sorts of scientists are necessary. And at the end of the day, he ended up sort of all of them. The one that people tend not to think about is we need meat scientists on both the plant-based side and the cultivated meat side. Meat science is a profession and both the plant-based companies and the plant-based field and the cultivated meat field need legit meat scientists. On the cultivated meat side, we particularly need chemical engineers. We need tissue engineers. That's what meat science is. But then we're also going to need chemical engineers to help design the binary answers. Because that's probably going to be the steepest climb, and solving all of the problems for all of the this-fail-up challenges that come with moving from the from a petri dish to a 20,000-liter cultivator. Okay, and that's the the beabury essentially what you described, Alia. Yeah, yeah, no, that's what that's what the cultivator of the buyer after looks like. It looks like a big year for a mentor. So currently, just can you paint the picture? Where is this industry at currently as today and what progress has it made? How long is it taking at the moment to produce a piece of chicken or a burger and what companies are sort of paving the way? Well, it's super quick to produce, but I mean right now it's a little like the first iPhone cost something like $3.4 billion or something, and then obviously the prices just came down by many orders magnitude before they commercialize. So the first cultivated meat burger costed about $330,000 in August of 2013. Now it's going to vary company by company, but some companies are talking about a pound if meat is under $500. Just says each nugget is costing them about $50 when you'll corporate all of costs, but we're very, really days in the whole cultivated meat endeavor. The first cultivated meat company was Memphis Mates. It incorporated in April of 2016. It raised its first funding in October of 2015, which was just $125,000 from the day area accelerator Indivio, and then it raised a little over $3 million in January, February of 2016 and incorporated in April of 2016. At the beginning of 2016 there were no companies. At the end of the 2016 I think there were eight but probably half of them had actually raised any money. Now they're more than 50, probably 25, maybe that raised a million dollars or more. Memphis Mates has raised, I think their last round was $183 million and they had raised the little north of $20 million before that. So roughly $220 $205 million, but that's really sort of a drop in the bucket. More exciting than the amount of money they've raised is the fact that Tyson and Cargill have both invested in addition to people like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, but the second and large third largest meat companies in the world have invested in Memphis Mates, which is pretty exciting. But it's still very early days. Some folks are saying they're going to have sort of proof of concept products on the market as soon as next year, which may happen, but if it happens they're going to be pretty expensive. It's going to be a little while before the price starts seriously coming down. The number one priority at the Good Food Institute, maybe even though it's been number one, two and three priority at the Good Food Institute, is to help governments recognize that for the same reason they're funding open access agricultural R&D for the same reason they're funding clean energy and other energy R&D for the same reason they're funding global health R&D. They should be funding open access R&D on the plant-based and cultivated meat side in order to basically lift all of the plant-based and cultivated meat boats. And this ultra-insition can happen a lot more quickly if we can get millions and then billions of government dollars focused on it rather than it all taking place independently and being sort of secret IP. Yeah, and one of the things that so GFI has three programmatic departments and one of them is science and technology and that's exactly what you were just saying with plant-based meat and with cultivated meat, what happened was you have people and they have an idea and then they have a company. So Pat Brown has an idea, then he has a company, he's a brand-housen idea, then he has a company, whom of a lady has an idea, then he has a company, and all of that R&D is protected by intellectual property and nobody before GFI had said, "Hey, let's lay out what is the technological readiness of these new ways of making meat? Where are the areas of exploration where it would make a lot of sense to apply scientific inquisitiveness and answer these really big questions? What do we know? That hadn't been laid out. What are we clear on that we need to figure out, but we don't know, that hadn't been laid out. Where are the areas of exploration to figure out things that we didn't even know we didn't know?" And that hadn't been figured out. So that was a big part of sort of where we started and then methodically identifying maximum impact light spaces and solving and answering those questions as well. It's a big part of what our science and technology departments have this time. So how's that process going with the governments in terms of what GFI is doing in terms of trying to encourage them to invest more in this space? Is that an open conversation at this stage? Yeah, we're making actually just yesterday on July 1st our Israeli office, co-hosted in an event alongside the Israeli Innovation Authority that was focused on plant-based and cultivated meat. Israel is really super excited about this as you would expect. Israel and Singapore countries with just top world-class universities focused on tissue engineering and plant biology and the sciences writ large. And then small countries that are not currently food security, which is to say most of their food is imported and they would prefer to change that. So Singapore and Israel in particular are really leading the way globally and taking alternative protein development seriously. But we're making excellent in roads in Brazil as well in India and Asia-Pacific even outside of Singapore as well as in Europe and the United States. We're sort of just getting going. So I think it hasn't happened to a huge degree yet primarily because nobody has come along and tried to make it happen. So we are meeting with enthusiasm kind of everywhere, including on both sides of the political aisle in the United States and Brazil and Israel and everywhere. You frame something in terms of you know make our country first get bragging rights for this new way of innovating in meat. And if you frame it in terms of science and innovation and small business and agriculture, these sorts of themes pretty much work with everyone. So you know, check back with me in a couple of years, so far across all of the six areas of the world where GFI operates a lot of volitioness and enthusiasm. Yeah, I guess it's important to be concentrating on you know like the developed countries like the United States where per capita meat consumption is already very high. But also the more developing countries who are quickly starting to mimic and follow the path of these developed countries like the United States. Yeah, we're not to me. GFI is not demand focused, we're supply focused. So we picked the areas of the world where we're operating on a basis of having one world-class universities that can do the science of bio-mimicking meat from plants or growing meat directly from cells. So in the six areas of the world where we operate, they have world-class universities. Then governments that put significant resources into research and development is the other factor. And then in some instances we're also looking at where are the biggest food companies, where are the biggest meat companies, and the largest meat company in the world is in Brazil, the largest food company in the world is in Europe, the other
biggest food and meat companies are in Brazil, in Europe, and in the United States. The biggest seafood companies are in Asia Pacific, and then India has more legume production than any place else in the world. World class universities on both tissue engineering, biochemistry, writ large, and plant biology, and then a government that is very enthusiastic about figuring out how it can feed its entire population, high quality protein, far more efficient weight. So that's kind of the the thesis for GFI, thinking about our philanthropic funding and how we can spend it most effectively. So there's a lot happening around the world, and you mentioned before the sort of the more efficiency that's been developed over time and the decrease in price per unit of cultivated meat over time that's been achieved, if you were looking, you know, with your crystal ball, when do you see cultivated meat starting to hit the shelves around the world? I mean, I won't be surprised if the promises of some of the cultivated meat companies of 2021-2022 at very high price points in a limited number, probably at restaurants, that will not surprise me if that actually comes to pass. I think scale up is going to be a function of how much government support we are able to mobilize, and our hope is that as environmental NGOs and global health NGOs, and food security NGOs recognize the degree to which the SDGs will be advanced by this new way of making meat, or hope in we're going to see more and more of a ground swell of support for these technologies that will create sort of a global R&D scientific race. The government that delegates that divorces meat production from the need for living animals is going to have bragging rights until the end of time. And, you know, we should wake up tomorrow and find that, you know, China, or the United States, or Germany has said we're going to put billions of dollars into this new way of making meat. When that happens, that will accelerate things way to that. Yeah, I guess they they're also I'm assuming we'd be getting lobbied fairly hard by the current animal agricultural system. Is there any tension there between this sort of new innovation and existing suppliers of traditionally grown meat? And how do you see that playing out? Is it always going to be us versus them scenario, or can it be a combined joined effort scenario moving forward? No, I mean, I know that at this a little bit a little bit ago when I pointed out that Tyson and Cargill, the worlds number two and three meat companies are invested in, cultivated meat. They're both invested in Memphis meats, and then they're both invested in another cultivated meat company. Tyson has also launched its own plant-based line. Cargill has a plant-based line that they tested at KFC and China. JBS, the largest meat company in the world based out of Brazil, working very tightly with the Good Food Institute on its plant-based line and on understanding cultivated meat as well. So we definitely think, you know, these these companies, their goal is not to raise light animals and slaughter light animals. They do that because that's how they get protein most profitably fed to the most people possible. But the value proposition of creating meat from plants and growing meat from cells, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that they would move into these alternative ways of making meat. Nestleate worlds, largest food company, is all in with their, it's not called the incredible burger anymore because they lost the lawsuit from impossible foods, but they have a plant-based meat as well. So I think we're going to I think we're going to see this be something that the conventional food industry and the conventional meat industry actually gets behind more and more as the products get better and better. And where would you say that that ultimately leaves the farmers, the ones that are that are currently raising the livestock? Yeah, and it's it's it's paddle ranchers are probably the only people at least in the United States and Europe who are raising animals on a large scale who have jobs that look like good jobs from a conventional sense. So at least in the United States, the people who are raising chickens and the people are raising pigs and the folks who are are overseeing the process of of creating eggs egg langhans and dairy products. Those industries have been so thoroughly vertically integrated. Those jobs are probably the worst jobs in North America alongside slaughter jobs and literally entire books have been written about how bad these folks lives are as well as as well as documentary movies. So it's worth noting that sort of with economics comes change for most farmers as we were discussing earlier. This will be a good thing. We are completely supportive of government programs that help to retry in that help to reconfigure farms to grow plant-based crops or to grow mushrooms for for notation production as well. So I think we can make it mostfully good like for all of the crop farmers going from massive feed crop production to legume production for plant-based meat is going to be in that massive positive. And then if we make sure that we're taking care of farmers and taking care of slaughterhouse workers as the transition happens, it's going to just be a net hugely positive for workers. And you mentioned before you said something about fish and I think that that brings me to a question about cultivated meat. The options are quite endless in terms of what can be made through this cultivated sort of process. We're talking like fish chicken dairy. I think I saw a big dairy company in the United States. Am I right? That's in this space. In plant-based, yeah. I mean, there's, I didn't know, has purchased white wheat, which is the largest of the plant-based plant-based producers. There are two different ways of producing dairy using cellular agriculture. The first one is what perfect day and a few other companies are doing. And perfect day, it raised some tens of millions of dollars, maybe north of a hundred million dollars, ADM is an investor, I believe, and some others. And they use fermentation technique, something called precision fermentation, which basically involves taking the dairy proteins and brewing them, like you would brew beer essentially. And then there are a couple of other new companies, one of them is called Pertotree Labs. I'm blanking on what the other one is called, but they culture memories of cells that then produce actual human breast milk. And that's for human breast milk right now, but it could certainly, as they scale up and bring the price points down. They could use it for cows milk as well. It certainly will disrupt conventional dairy because something like a third of conventional dairy is dedicated or a third of milk, maybe is dedicated to formula. You can't remember what the precise numbers are, but this is focused on human milk using cellular agriculture. Yeah, that could be huge. That's very, very interesting. Fascinating stuff, totally fascinating. So if someone's listening and perhaps they want to support this space, whether that's through donation or investment, or I mean, people can always support on an individual purchasing behavior with plant-based meats now, but from a donation investment or scientific skills, like what's the best steps for someone who is interested in supporting this space? Well, the Good Food Institute, we are entirely powered by philanthropy. So we are a 501C3 nonprofit organization, and we welcomed donations from anybody who would like to help us. GFI is focused, as we've been talking about, on raising all boats. So our work on the innovation side, our work with investors, our work with scientists, and our work across corporate engagement and across governments is all focused on making the entire plant-based and cultivated meat sector as successful as possible, as soon as possible. And we certainly welcome people's donations. There's an Australian organization called Food Frontier as well that is sort of a GFI sister organization, they're in Australia, and they are also a nonprofit organization. So we I would encourage people to check out their website, check out our website, which is just gf-i.org. We have times of resources there as well, and people can go there and find communities and find webinars and find our massive open online forests and all kinds of things that will allow people to get more deeply involved. If you're interested in getting involved to the meat industry and you're in Australia, I would encourage you to reach out to Food Frontier and where else? Well, including Australia, you can fill out various ones on the GFI website that will begin to plug you into the various communities. Yeah, I actually had Thomas King from Food Frontier on the show, it was a long while ago, it must have been a couple of years ago now. And I was reading the other day, they're actually used two or three startups in this space now in Australia. I think there's one called Val Foods and they're doing cultivated meat and change foods who are sort of dabbling in that dairy space that we just spoke about a moment ago. Tell me again,
playing devil's advocate here. I've read some information and it seems like it's an argument coming from livestock industry that perhaps cellular agriculture when it scales may use more energy. Is that something that you've come across and is it something that you've looked at in terms of the data of the sort of fossil fuels required to power these breweries versus the methane that's in the carbon dioxide that is attached to the current traditional industry? Yeah, I mean energy is the one area where because of energy to power and clean the bioreactor's energy, the numbers I've seen and obviously they're extraordinarily preliminary and we're actually contracting to create a new life cycle analysis. The last one is some years old at this point, but even when you factor in additional energy use for cultivated meat and some of the else the life cycle analyses that have been done, the climate impact is still astronomically better for cultivated meat relative to conventional meat. And it's worth noting that cultivated meat were a part of 99% less land than conventional meat production and that land can be repurposed for renewable energy production in which case 100% of cultivated meat can be powered by renewable energy which is obviously very different from the current system. It could also be repurposed to be rewilded to create carbon sinks. So in terms of water use, in terms of water pollution, in terms of species loss and land use and across all of the metrics other than energy use, clean need is a massive advantage. And then you ask where is the energy going to come from and if you're freeing up 99% of the land required for conventional animal agriculture that's funding to deal with the energy needs. And then of course we've also got the things like antibiotic resistance, cruelty, and all of that pandemic prevention, all of which get significantly better cultivated meat. And the cruelty to animals is one that we haven't really explored too much here, but I think there may be some interest I guess from a vegan point of view, would a vegan eat cultivated meat is that going to be an individual decision? And you mentioned before the medium, I think you talked about the growing medium, I believe is what you called it, can be from animal origin, but it also cannot be. Can you sort of walk me through I guess cultivated meat and the ethical component of it? Yeah, I guess it depends on why somebody has become vegan. So I've met an awful lot of vegans who just like they don't like the taste of meat. I think those vegans are probably not going to eat plant-based meat or cultivated meat. And if you have a sort of aesthetic aversion to eating animals, and I imagine a lot of people probably do, then you're probably not going to want to eat cultivated meat. At the end of the day, I think the cultivated meat companies are not really gunning for the vegetarians and vegans, that's not their target market, their target demographic, it's the people who like and eat meat. But if you're a vegan like me and I gave up eating meat 33 years ago out of concern for the global form and concern for the environment, and then over time came to also have concern for the animals involved. Those three problems are solved by cultivating meat. So I expect, I mean, I have eaten cultivated meat on half a dozen occasions and I expect once it's widely available to consume it regularly because the reasons I stopped eating meat are going to be taken off the table. But I mean, it's not a vegan product. So by definition, no vegans won't eat it. And that may mean that a lot of people just stop being vegan because the reasons for being vegan go away in a world where cultivated meat is available. Is that sorry to interrupt you on that? Is that because there is some animal involvement in terms of that initial biopsy? And that biopsy, what's the process? How frequently does that need to be done? And I guess at what level are animals involved in cultivated meat? Well, most, if not all of the companies, probably not all of them, but most of them and all of the big ones are going to be using what's called unworldly cells. And that means you take a biopsy from a chicken or a fish or a turkey or whoever. It's the size of a sesame seed. So it can be done painlessly and it can supply me not really forever, but many supply the world over for quite a while with a very few relatively speaking, a small group of cells that replicate in cultivators. So you can do it without a moralized cells. So you can imagine a situation in which there's an animal on a farm and periodically a cell culture is taken from that animal. A biopsy is taken from that animal, but that's not the way most of the companies are thinking about doing it. And I think especially in a world of cell banks, so two projects that GFI has funded one for land animals and one for sea animals is our cell bank creations, which we're referring to the frozen farm yard in first case. I can't remember what the other one is called, but basically the idea is that you don't need to go back to the farm because you have a cell bank and you can get your chicken cells or your pick cells or whatever from a cell bank. And so new liabilities continue to be required. And that seems like the direction that probably the entire thing is going to go. And then part two of your question, Xenofree Media is extraordinarily common for their therapeutics. And the animal free media, Xenofree Media means the animal free media is extraordinarily common right now for tissue engineering and all of the companies. Every single one of them is either there now or committed to be better. So in products that will be sold, no companies are going to be using growth media that including animal free media. The other interesting thing I think about this space of cultivated meat is that if we sort of look at all of the animals out there, humans probably only eat a handful. And I'm assuming and I have spoken with some guys in Australia that I mentioned before from a company called Vow Foods. I'm not sure if you've come across them. Are they doing kangaroo meat? Yeah, so their philosophy is that there's a bunch of meat out there that humans are not eating that may have offer certain flavors or certain nutrient profiles. And that's sort of their angle that they're approaching. But that is another interesting thing, I guess, to think about in terms of the endless possibilities that this could bring. Yeah, there's a tissue engineering professor at Harvard Medical School who likes to talk about the idea of eating mustard on. But yeah, we have picked the animals that were easiest to domesticate or catch. And I mean, this is something that both on the plant-based side and cultivated meat base that they talked about. With conventional meat, you are extraordinarily limited. You're not going to get any better or at least not much better from an energy efficiency vantage. You're not going to do better than physiology of animals in terms of that multiplier effect that we were talking about. Animals are just going to burn calories. They're going to create things we're not going to eat. And you're also not going to be able to do any better on takes. You can get a slight length that are cut at meat or whatever. But you're not going to get, you're not going to be producing full-new species of animals. And then for people who like something like Flaugra, something suddenly Flaugra has the same cost as Chippen as it scales up. So any sort of delicacy that might now be extraordinarily expensive no longer has to be. And then as you just mentioned, we're eating chicken because we're eating chicken and it's inexpensive. We can create something that we like far more with plant-based meat or cultivated meat because we're no longer limited by domestication of animals. How do you think consumers will respond or receive this area of cultivated meat? Do you think that they will understand it and see it as something that is healthier and cleaner and better for the environment? Or will they see it as some sort of science fiction laboratory-style food? So far, it's pretty fascinating to me. The polls that have been done, including one by an Australian researcher named Maddie Wilkes. The polls that have been done are super positive and bullish on cultivated meat. And they're even calling it. They call it Labra and they call it Infiatro Meat. Make it sound as scary as possible. And nevertheless, people are to some degree are too some degree conscious of the harms of the way that we produce meat right now. And you tell them, "Hey, we can give you the same taste, the same texture, and the same price." And people are like, "Yeah, I want that." And it's fascinating when you ask, I mean, even the people say no. So depending on the poll, it's somewhere on the order of 40 to 70% of people are like, "Yeah, I want that." And then a third of those people are like, "Yeah, I will pay more for that." But then you I, even when you tell people, taste the same, cost the same. There are various other variables that you say that in the question. And then you ask people, and it's like most of the people who said, "No," or like, "I don't believe that's going to taste the same," or "I don't believe that's going to cost the same." So once they try it, like, and really, once you have two products, and one of them is produced the way they need us produce now, and one of them is produced in this way that is far safer for people and their families.
even the naysayers out of the gate are going to be convinced very, very quickly that it makes sense to shift over. I agree. And speaking of naysayers, and I'm probably throwing a few of these out here, but I am conscious of playing Devils Advocate here because I think it's interesting. And I know that you've come across a lot of these questions before. Another thing that people may say is why focus on this and why not just eat organic meat from regenerative practices? Can you explain why that is not a solution to climate change and transforming the food system in the same way that plant-based meat and cultivated meat is? Yeah, I mean, there are people who will in response to that question dive into statistics and studies around regenerative agriculture and small scale farming. I tend to say, you know, welcome to the club as we attempt to do away with industrial animal agriculture for people who are willing to pay significantly more for meat that is less environmentally harmful and where the animals are treated less well. That's fantastic. They should continue to do that, but at least in the United States, that's less than one tenth of one percent of the meat industry, less than one tenth of one percent. And people are aware that those products exist, but people don't want to pay more. And so it ends up being an extraordinarily niche solution. And we're not suggesting that any of the people who advocate that solution stop advocating that solution. We're just suggesting that there's another solution for all of the people who want to eat the products that taste fantastic and that are lowest price. And that solution is let's make those same products from plants and grow them themselves. That's what we think has that highest possibility of actually decreasing industrial meat consumption globally. So if you were to sort of predict, I guess, 10 or 20 years from now, where do you think that split will be in terms of plant-based meats, cultivated meat, and perhaps regenerative or other forms of grazing in terms of a percentage of the total sales? You know, Pat Brown and Impossible Foods would tell you that we will be at 100% plant-based meat by 2035. So that's 15 years out. A 0% cultivated and 0% regenerative. So that's his sort of line in the same prediction. In my experience, there are a lot of people, I just really want to eat animal meat. And I don't know what the percentage is, but I would guess that at whatever point we have divorced meat from the need for live animals. At whatever point we have gotten to the fully grail and we have plant-based and cultivated alternatives to every type of industrial animal meat. I'm thinking that's probably going to be 60-40 cultivated plant-based. And then I think your instincts on this are right. I think there will be some and probably a higher percentage than there is now, regeneratively farmed meat. But it will just totally replace industrial animal meat. The meat that people buy because it's tasty and cheap. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for your time. I could literally sit here and talk to you for hours. I think we probably only scratched the surface, but I do think this is a great introduction episode for anyone who's new to this space and new to GFI and everything that you're doing. I think a nice way to finish this could be your iPhone analogy that speaks to how quickly we can see change if people are thinking, "Oh, this just sounds like this is going to take a long time." Do you want to walk me through that? Yeah, I mean, probably everybody listening has a phone within a reach. And if we had been chatting 25 years ago, we would not be doing a video call and now, the age of COVID, an overwhelming number of calls that we're having with people are over a video chat. If I had wanted to call you on the phone just 25 years ago, I would have had to find a landline and I would have had to pay a lot of money. And even just across the city, 25 years ago, you would have had to find a landline. You would have had to pay, well, you wouldn't have to pay that call for a city. But and now 25 years later, we all have these phones in our pockets and we've divorced phones from the need for cords and from the needs for wires. In one generation, I mean, 25 years is that historically. And yet the way that we communicate, we text message, nobody did that 25 years ago. We zoom or Google Meet or whatever else, nobody did that 15 years ago. It's a radical transformation and how we communicate that quickly. Similarly with the with the camera phone was invented 20 years ago and now something like 99% of photos are taken on the cameras in your pockets. Whereas we had it not exclusively in a long film, but digital film was insanely expensive and the vast majority of the photos were taken on analog cameras and you had to take the film to be developed 20 years. Again, it's nothing and how we take pictures is radically different. The infrastructure issues are going to be different, but we really can, if we can create products that taste the same or better and cost the same or less and we believe we can, the markets will kick in and you will see a very, very swift shift and basically we'll be if we're saying need from the need for live animals in the same way that in the same way long distance communication does require a wired phone and taking a picture does require an analog film. Thank you, Bruce. Was there anything that you felt like we've missed it all? People can get a lot more resources at gfi.org and if you would like to support us, you can do that there as well. It's been a pleasure. Certainly you are involved in what I believe is one of the the most exciting industries in the world right now for sure with such huge potential to to better the world and address so many issues issues that we we covered today. So I said at the start, but I really mean it. Thank you for for what you're doing. Please do come back and join me. I'm frequently in the States, so I'd love to catch up and do around two at some stage. I would love that Simon. I really enjoyed our time together and thank you very much for covering these issues and for all you're doing to make a more just and sustainable food system. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Simon. There we go friends. I hope you enjoyed that. If you have just heard of cultivated meat, I bet it sounds a little science fictiony and that's completely normal. I too thought that a few years ago, but now I honestly think we will look back in amazement in 30, 40, 50 years and and wonder why we were growing meat on animals in such an inefficient way. A bit like how we look back at pages. A much less efficient way to contact people compared to the mobile phones that we have today. What I like best about this area of cultivated meat and even plant-based meat, but probably to a lesser extent, is the capacity to which it can improve the footprint of our food industry. Putting the human health conversation to the side for a moment because I'm not sure these foods should make up a significant portion of calories in one's diet that is aiming to be incredibly healthy. And really, I would need to study their nutritional properties more closely when they're made available. The mere fact that such foods could literally replace all meat from factory farms without the consumer having to make a big decision is huge. The same product, the same price or cheaper, that tastes just as good or better, but is considerably better for our planet. That's a huge, huge win in my books. I'll leave you with that. Both Bruce and I would love to hear from you on social media. You can find Bruce @TheGoodFoodInstitute on Instagram and mine is @PlannedUnderscoreProof if we're not already connected. And finally, the biggest way you can support the show, if you're enjoying it, is by leaving a review on the Apple Podcast app. So if you can take a minute to do that, it would be greatly appreciated. And if you already have, thanks so much. Alright, that's all for this one. See you next week. Looking forward to hanging out again. Peace.
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