Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat
Entrepreneurs have invested billions in plant-based and lab-grown meats, and the possibilities are endless. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. T he chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. Today, youre going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet, Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. Kind of a classic, Davila says. Davila works for Upside Foods, a start-up disrupting the world of animal proteins from its base in Berkeley, California. After a few minutes, he places the dish before me. I inhale, smelling salt and sear. I cut the meat, the serrations on the knife shredding it into strings. I take a piece and squish it, observing it bounce back and dampen my hands. I put a small amount in my mouth, chew carefully, and taste, well, not much. It tastes like chicken. Is it chicken? It is chicken more than it is anything else. To be specific, it is what happens when you take a chickens cells, place them in a vat filled with a slurry of nutrients and amino acids, let them multiply, wash them, chill them, shape them, and cook them. The companies that make this animal flesh call it cultivated or cultured meat; the more common adjective outside the industry is lab grown. (The cells that I ate came from eggs, not from birds, by the wayso consider your next question answered .) This kind of meat is the future, or at least part of the future. Within the past decade, cultivated meat has gone from science-fictional to hyper-expensive to market-ready, fueled by billions of dollars of start-up spending. Chicken made by Upside Foods, which launched in 2015, is now available at the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco, and will be headed to more restaurants soon. Newfangled plant-based meat, cultivated meats cousin, has already made it to the kitchen table. Beyond Burgers are available in thousands of grocery stores. You can buy Impossible Whoppers at Burger King. Read: The coming obsolescence of animal meat At the moment, manufacturers want to make alternative meats that taste as good as their animal counterparts. In some cases, they want to make products that are indistinguishable from them. And for many, the ultimate ambition is to make neo-meat that tastes better than the traditional meat you can buy in a store today. Our first goal, and still our most important goal, is to make people recognize that this is the meat theyve always loved for thousands of years, Uma Valeti, Upsides founder and CEO, told me. Therell be things that we can predict will happen in 50 years that are going to be fantastical. Fantastical is not usually a word associated with the traditional meat substitutes that American vegetarians know all too well. The fundamental value proposition of alternative proteins, Bruce Friedrich, the president of the Good Food Institute, an alternative-protein advocacy group, told me, is that when they displace the products of industrial animal agriculture, they will have colossal climate, biodiversity, global-health, and animal-protection benefits. In short, they are meant to do good, not taste good. But the technological advances that companies have made in recent years exist whether or not these products end up cutting down the number of cows and winnowing carbon emissions. Plant-based and cell-based meats keep getting better and better. The scientists who are making them keep tweaking their aroma, texture, and flavor. And they are going to keep doing so in order to maximize consumer pleasure. Imagine picking up some Wagyu beef as easily as you can buy ground chuck. Imagine the fried wings at your local greasy spoon having the unique marbled quality of meat from a Bresse chicken . Imagine if the roast-beef sandwich you make at home had the tender heft of prime rib, or if shrimp from the supermarket freezer had the sweetness and minerality of fresh-caught langoustine. Imagine purchasing chicken with the nutritional profile of wild-caught salmon. Dont stop there. Imagine grilling duck thighs juicy with Iberico pork fat. Imagine eating meat derived from the DNA of a dodo or a brontosaurus; Australias largest cultured-meat company, Vow, recently made meat from mammoth DNA. Imagine consuming meats grown from the most delicious cells from a menagerie of animals and plantssea urchin, morel, blood orange. Imagine eating meat with the umami of a Dorito or the density of flavor of an Oreo. Vow is working on a food that, as the companys co-founder and CEO, George Peppou, put it to me, is not a faithful replica of animal flesh. Rather, it will have its own characteristicsan earthy, mushroom-esque, quail-based product unlike anything anyone has ever had before. Open your mind to unicorn meat. Because companies want you to open your mouthand your wallet. U ntil recently, few people were fooled by vegan burgers or expected a cultivated-protein nugget to taste better than chicken. Meat was meatdelicious, ubiquitous, all-American. Fake meat was fake. The bean burgers and not-dogs that began appearing in American grocery stores and on restaurant menus about half a century ago were generally aimed at vegetarians, hippies, and/or health nuts. In many cases, they were not meant to taste like meat; in even more cases, they were not that tasty at all. The deepening catastrophe of climate change has made fake meat a matter of moral urgency. By some estimates, 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come directly from animal agriculture . In the late aughts, a number of entrepreneurs cottoned on to the idea of reducing emissions by producing fake meat that carnivores could love. Venture capitalists have pumped billions of dollars into companies such as Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Eat Just, which set out to bring advanced materials science to bear on sausages, meatballs, and eggs. For plant-based meat to taste more like meat, it needed to become more like meat at the molecular level, Priera Panescu, a chemist at the Good Food Institute, told me. Scientists needed to figure out how to lace plant-based proteins with fatspecifically, with fat that is solid at room temperature and liquid when heated, as lard and schmaltz are. (Fun fact: To do this, some companies use the same cryogenic equipment used to make Dippin Dots .) They needed to figure out how to develop long, stringy proteins, like the ones in muscle fibers, using industrial extruders. They needed to develop a meaty taste in plant products too. One big leap forward came when scientists at Impossible figured out how to grow hemea compound that is found in blood and is a central reason beef tastes beefyfrom yeast. It took a lot of experimentation to expand the toolbox, Panescu said. Derek Thompson: The capitalist way to make Americans stop eating meat In time, experimentation did expand the toolbox; plant-based burgers and sausages went from being lentil-based fiber pucks to pretty good imitations of the real thing. The Impossible Burger, for instance, really and truly tastes great. The coconut fat will give it a lot of nice juice and sizzle and yumminess. And the heme will give it that red-meat look, feel, taste, Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Impossible, told me. When you put it on a grill, its gonna bleed, sizzleand youre going to have that whole sensory burger experience. A whole sensory experience very similar to the real one. In the past half decade, plant-based-meat companies and independent assessors have conducted blindfolded taste test after blindfolded taste test. Many consumers have proved incapable of telling what is real and what is fake; some chefs have too. In certain studies, people have even preferred the fake stuff . Lets stop and marvel at this for a moment. Human beings have been eating meat for as long as human beings have existed. We have fossil animal bones with definite butchery marks left by stone tools, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, told me. Two and a half million years ago, early humans, not even our species, were occasionally butchering animals, eating meat, and likely also eating fatty marrow. (These primates were part of our great-grandparent species, she said, still spending some time in the trees.) Eating meat is in our DNA. One prominent scientific theory even holds that meat-eating made us Homo sapiens . Humans have really big brains, Pobiner said. Theyre very big for our body size. Theyre very energetically expensive. And so there is a hypothesis that what allowed for human brains to evolve so big is a high-quality food resourcenamely, meat. Humans instinctively crave meat, seek it out, associate it with wealth and well-being. Frederic Morin is the chef and an owner of Joe Beef, one of Montreals most feted restaurants, and a co-founder of the International Society of Neurogastronomy, a group dedicated to the study of why things taste the way they do. We chatted for a while about why meat tastes good: its fat content, its minerals and micronutrients, the compounds that give it umami. He emphasized its emotional and cultural significance as well. Meat has a position in a lot of cultures as a celebratory dishthe ceremonial killing, or the slaying of the animal, he told me. Somehow, though, scientists have figured out how to make such a delectable product out of yeast and peas that we at times cannot tell the difference. In just a decade , plant-based meat has reached the point of taste parity. It has gone from being a niche food for vegetarians to a product consumed by four in 10 Americans. P lant-based meats techie cousin , lab-grown meat, has developed on a parallel path, though its advances have been slower and more expensive. Scientists first grew animal tissue in vitro at the turn of the 20th century, leading futurists to theorize that the era of the feedlot and the slaughterhouse might soon come to an end. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, Winston Churchill predicted in 1931 , before becoming occupied with other matters. Yet the first cultured meat did not debut until the late 1990s . The first cultivated burger arrived in 2013. The first cultivated meat was approved for sale to the public in 2020, in Singapore. Growing pig- or cow-muscle cells in a laboratory is not the problem, Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at UCLA, told me; making a large quantity of meat with an appetizing texture at a reasonable price point is. We can grow cells in petri dishes in a labthats what we do for biomedical sciences. But for that purpose, you might want milligrams of cells, she explained. For food production, you want kilograms. Its orders of magnitude more, and the technical challenges are different. Challenge one: gathering crucial ingredients without killing a lot of cows first. Until recently, companies primarily used fetal-bovine serum as a growing medium for cultivated meat. This was costly and raised significant ethical concerns: Producing a single burgers worth of lab-grown meat required extracting blood from the fetuses of numerous slaughtered pregnant dairy cows. (Firms now have access to a variety of synthetic and natural alternatives, such as those made from algae .) Challenge two: growing animal tissues in a lab environment without also breeding fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Sheep and chickens have an immune system that works up until the point of slaughter, keeping their muscles healthy within their body. Industrial vats of warm, nutrient-rich liquid do not, making contamination a tricky, expensive problem for cultivated-meat firms to solve. Challenge three: producing commodity quantities of meat. Ricardo San Martin, the research director of UC Berkeleys Alternative Meats Lab , explained that getting enough oxygen to growing cells is difficult: The cells excrete certain compounds. In a huge fermenter, you cannot get those gases out, which inhibits their growth. And once the cells start crunching together, the liquid becomes like a viscous soup. For that reason, cell-based meat needs to be made in small bioreactors, eliminating higher-order economies of scale. Indeed, the trade publication Food Navigator has estimated that it would take $1.8 trillion worth of factories to produce 10 percent of the worlds supply of meat by 2030. Challenge four: growing anything other than a viscous soup. Rowat explained that scientists have figured out how to grow muscle cells in a warm amino-acid bath. Compacting them into hamburgers, hot dogs, fish balls, nuggets, luncheon meat, and meatballs is straightforward. Making a uniform cut of meat, like a chicken breast, is challenging but feasible. But making multicomponent cuts, such as a steak marbled with fat, remains impossible for some firms and prohibitively expensive for others. (And nobody, I would note, is making a bone-in lamb leg or a shell-on shrimp.) Fortunately, making lab-grown meat taste good is not that difficult. Chicken cells taste like chicken. Cow cells taste like beef. There seem to be some intrinsic properties for cells to basically taste like you would expect, Elliot Swartz, a molecular biologist at the Good Food Institute, told me. Cultivated-meat start-ups grow tons of cells, then choose which ones taste the best. When we harvest certain cell types, some have a more organ-y flavor, Valeti told me. Well make a note and say, Hey, this one has more organ-meat-type features. What do the rejected products taste like? I asked a number of food scientists and start-up employees that question and was met with understandable omerta. Still, a few folks were forthcoming. Swartz noted that he had recently tried a 30-percent-animal-cell hybrid product made with shrimp; the rest was plant-based. If you have 100 percent of the [shrimp] cells in there, its actually so overpoweringly shrimpy that people do not like it, he told me. For whatever reason, those cells tend to aggregate the flavor molecules more efficiently than some other cell types. Several start-up employees mentioned problems with texture more than taste. One described eating a number of hybridized products: beef-muscle cells grown in a vat with pork-fat cells, for example; a kind of lab-grown bologna. It had a porridge texture, the person, who requested anonymity because they did not have permission to speak with a reporter, told me. It haunts me. Read: The woolly-mammoth meatball is an all-time-great food stunt The biggest challenge is the lack of elasticity, said Peppou of Vow, the company that recently grew meat from mammoth DNA. Meat has this inherent elasticity to it, which is really, really unique and special. Thats a really hard thing to replicate. And its a really hard thing to grow. A lot of time, you put it in your mouth and it has the flavor of meat, then you bite down and ... youre like, Hang on a second. Thats not right . He noted that the company had produced what I can only describe as bread. We had a bunch of cultured meat, which was bread. It was really surreal. Youre cooking it up. It smells like meat. You put it in your mouth, and it has exactly the texture of bread. He added that slimy meat was among some of Vows other crappy prototypes. Yet the scientific process has worked. Crappy prototypes have become good prototypes. And good prototypes are becoming better as cell-based and plant-based companies borrow techniques from one another. The future is not making plant-based sausages or lab-grown chicken. It is seeding plant-based scaffolds with animal muscle and fat cells, making technological marvels from synthetic and fermented and extracted materials. The plant-based products give the animal cells structure; the animal cells make the plant-based products taste better, and give the finished product that characteristic chewy texture and tender mouthfeel. (If any of this sounds gross, I would suggest looking at video footage from a meatpacking plant.) In the coming years, millions of consumers will have a chance to eat the kinds of meat that I sampled while reporting this story. Upside has focused on making chicken filetsthe meat equivalent of a Toyota Corolla. Other firms are thinking more about making Bugattis or Teslas. Orbillion Bio is one of the start-ups focused on luxury meat. What is the product we can bring out that is a premium experience and brings to the customer a fantastic first touch point? Patricia Bubner, the companys co-founder and CEO, told me. We really are married to that farm-to-table story, meaning we partner with farmers that have breeds with a 500-year breeding history, like Japanese Wagyu, where we know this is the best-flavored meat there is. Peppou, for his part, told me that hes worried about trying to re-create in a factory something normally grown on a farm. The first wave is trying to use familiarity as a way of anchoring to what people know, he said. But he is not thinking about producing a Toyota or even a Bugatti. Vows quail-mushroom combination is more like a spaceship. In the longer term, neo-meat pioneers will develop the ability to alter the nutritional profile of the meats they create, dialing down the fat and dialing up the protein, adding in more micronutrients. They want to alter taste and texture to match different palates. They aspire to grow huge amounts of rarely available cuts. They hope to create meats with no referent in a current supermarketones that taste wild, weird, beyond. W ill consumers want products that do not taste like the meat they already know and love? Will they accept lab-grown products that do ? I wondered about those questions as I ate my Impossible Whopper, grilled my Beyond sausages, and sampled Upsides chicken. Plant-based meats perform well against conventionally produced meat in controlled taste tests, but life is not a controlled taste test. A plant-based burger might taste as good as a decent burger, but it is hard to imagine it tasting as good as a perfect burgerlet alone replicating the experience of eating a rib eye. Were close in terms of taste, texture, and flavor, but were not there yet, McGuinness of Impossible Foods told me. And omnivorous consumers have only so much desire to buy products that are not there yet: The sales volume of plant-based meats has plateaued in the past few years. Lab-grown meat faces a similar challenge. Upsides chicken tastes like chicken because it is made of chicken-muscle cells. But the product has no blood in it, hence the strange yellow-gray color. It is made from one kind of cell, whereas a chicken thigh you buy at a grocery store might contain scores of different kinds. The replica tastes good. But I struggled to see how it might have the compulsively edible, transcendent taste of a crispy, salt-roasted bird. Not that I personally have a good sense of what such a thing would taste like. I havent eaten meat in something like a decade. Again and again, Ive marveled at how good these things taste, because lentils and black-bean burgers and chikn nuggets are my point of comparison. Yet, again and again, Ive heard omnivores describe them in appreciative but wan terms: surprisingly tasty for what they are . So one snowy night around Thanksgiving, I visited Frederic Morin at his temple of gastronomic excess in Montreal. We sat at the corner of the bar, and Morin spoke in French to his hyper-attentive staff; glasses and dishes began appearing in front of me. We chatted about surviving in the restaurant business, loving food, and raising kids. And I ate and drank. A loamy glass of red. Oysters, briny and sweet. A pastry. Then a small piece of beef, real beef, that Morin himself had personally aged in pomace . The preparation, the envisioning of the meal, he said. It is like pachamanca or Texas barbecue or Hawaiian luauthe long anticipation and preparation is part of the process. I was worried about being grossed out, spitting the food out or grimacing in front of the chef or getting sick. But it wasnt gross. It was just strange, far and away the trippiest thing that I had eaten in recent memory. In my notebook, I jotted down that steak gets bigger in your mouth when you chew it, something plant-based food categorically does not do. I noted that it tasted mineral, like licking a metal pole. I struggled to come up with words to describe it. It felt like food from Mars. This, I understood, must be what omnivores experience when eating lab-grown meatalienation and intellectual engagement. More than that, I understood that it might take decades for science to advance to the point where man-made meat will be able to compete truly and wholly with conventional meat, cut by cut, mouthful by mouthful. Even if it could compete, would people eat it? As Morin pointed out, taste is a psychological process, not just a mechanical one. Its not just about micronutrients and fats and texture; its about how people think and feel about the food they are eating. It is bigger than the sum of what the food contains, in my mind, he told me. To that point: Wine tastes better to folks if they believe it is an expensive label. Cheese and yogurt taste worse if the products are described as low-fat. Even if they got it 100 percent perfect, meaning that no one could tell the difference between cultivated meat and real meat, I still think theres going to be a lot of barriers that have nothing to do with cost or technology and everything to do with peoples attitudes, thoughts, and psychology toward things grown in a petri dish, A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at UCLA, told me. She pointed to research on what is known as food neophobia, for instance. People do not like eating new things, she said. Thats an evolutionary protection mechanism we have so we dont eat a random berry thats poisonous. She also pointed to research indicating that people prefer foods that seem natural. People want food to come from a farm, not a lab, she said. Morin, for his part, told me that he loves vegan food and junk food; he is not a purist. McDonaldsyou cant compete with that, he said, noting how perfect the chains french fries are. The only thing we can compete on is the narrative! But he said he rejects the idea of growing meat in a vat, whatever the taste. To me, it does not matter if it is a perfect facsimile of everything I enjoy in life, he told me. Lab-grown meat strikes him as scientific, strange, a rejection of the real. It reminds him, he told me, of cannibalism. He described it as an intellectual rabbit hole more so than food. Read: The secret ingredient that could save fake meat Yet for all that we humans seek out natural foods and avoid new and strange ones, we are also extraordinary omnivores. We are like raccoons and rats, which eat pretty much anything, rather than pandas , which consume bamboo almost exclusively, the Wayne State University anthropologist Julie Lesnik told me. Indeed, theres very little we wont eat, I thoughtendangered animals, Doritos, high-fructose corn syrup, hot dogs, blue cheese. And for all our mythologizing of our antelope-spearing ancestors, she added, those primates got much of their protein the same way our nonhuman primate cousins do today: eating bugs. Plus, the Smithsonians Pobiner, to my surprise, qualified what she said about the theory that meat-eating made us human. One theory does indeed hold that meat itself was the key variable, she told me. But she sees better evidence that processing food was what made us into ourselves. We do not really see a big increase in brain size, relative to body size, until about 1 million years ago, she said, when our grandparent species seems to have started cooking. Maybe its not so much raw meat; its cooked meat. Maybe its being able to get more resources out of the food you already have, making things palatable that would have been poisonous. She also pointed to research showing that other primates eat meat not just for the calories or the nutrients, but for social reasons: Hunting and eating meat helps chimpanzees bond with other members of their troop. Food scientists are extraordinary at making things palatable; the advances in alternative proteins in just the past decade are a prime example of that. Yet whether American consumers choose to buy neo-meat ultimately might have less to do with exactly what it tastes like than with what those consumers believe about it. Does it taste good? Do we think it tastes good?