Could Cultivated Meat Revolutionize Diets of the Future?

This Transcript is AI-Generated

Steven Lang: If you look at the statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the predicting that we need 60 percent more food than what we're producing today by 2050, just to support the population.

Dana: Diets are changing and arable farmland is becoming less viable. Could cultivated or lab grown meat offer a solution to the challenges we face today? on the earth and beyond. 

Steven Lang: The other thing I like to think about is that we're setting the foundations now that will allow us to colonize other planets and have a stake on those planets.

Micah: In this episode, we dive into the cutting edge technology of cultivated meats, the hurdles of scaling production, shifting consumer perceptions, and their potential role in the future of food. 

Dana: I'm Dana Clemenson. 

Micah: And I'm Micah Schweitzer. This is Balancing the Future from Mettler Toledo.

Dana: In 2013, Austrian scientist, Hanne Rützler, made history. In front of a live audience, she became the first person to taste a cultivated meat hamburger. 

Micah: At the time, new scientists reported that this single hamburger took five years of research, three months to grow, and cost around 250, 000. Keep those numbers in mind as we move forward.

They can tell us a lot about some of the challenges we're going to hear about in this episode. 

Dana: But for now, let's cover the basics. What is cultivated meat, and what is the science behind its production? 

Steven Lang: So what we're talking about when we say cultivated meat or cultured meat or lab grown meat, um, is the science of taking a single cell from a biopsy, be it an oocyte, a fertilized egg, or an animal tissue from traditionally farmed animals, and then essentially taking them individually and fermenter that, uh, is very much like how we brew beer or wine.

Micah: That's biotechnologist Stephen Lang. He's the current vice president of science and technology at California Cultured, where they use plant cell culture to make sustainable and ethical chocolate and coffee. Stephen was previously VP of bioprocess at Upside Foods, developing cultured chicken products.

Steven Lang: The end result, though, is that we're interested in not the broth like we would be for beer and wine, but the biomass that is generated. And since we're using cells from traditionally farmed animals, we can take those cells and then turn them into a food product that is cultivated meat. And so the, the biomass is generated.

The big challenge is how do we take those cells and scale them to the point where they are going to have significant mass and that mass tastes like meat in order to then feed the world. I think it's pretty well understood that cows are inefficient. It takes eight kilos of feed to produce one kilo of meat.

And um, this is a, the disparity that we're trying to close with cultivated meat by removing the wastefulness that is conventional farming. 

Micah: Stephen's journey into the cultivated meat industry really tells us something about the opportunities and challenges that this technology presents. After spending 14 years at Johnson Johnson, he transitioned to CENICOR, a small biotech division of J& J focused on therapeutics.

Unexpectedly, this paved the way for his move into cultivated meat. 

Steven Lang: What we were essentially trying to do was take and engineer cell lines that would produce the biopharmaceuticals. And when we're talking about biopharmaceuticals, we're typically talking about antibodies, which are proteins. They're drugs that are too complex for chemistry to create, and we rely on the cells.

in this case, hamster cells, to produce the antibodies. And the idea was to produce cells that produce very high levels of these proteins that we're interested in, so that we can supply the world with these very important drugs. 

Dana: Now, I can already see the parallels in the science between the biopharmaceuticals and the cultivated meat, but can you tell us how did you transition from pharma to pharmaceuticals?

into this new field of cultivated meat. 

Steven Lang: I was talking with a colleague of mine who I worked with at Genentech. I failed to mention that I went to Genentech for about four years after, um, Johnson and Johnson and met some of the best CMC chemistry manufacturing and control experts in the industry and got to work with them.

So learned a lot from them. And so Bob and I were having lunch and he was telling me what he was up to and he was hired into Upside Foods to help build a commercial production plant or manufacturing plant. And we started talking more about this and the absurdity of using biotechnology processing or biomanufacturing to produce a commodity food product was really interesting to me because the scientific challenges of Taking very expensive processes that we use in biopharmaceuticals to nurture these cells to produce very expensive drugs so we can help patients has a huge profit margin so you can really spend money on these processes and make sure they're really good.

If you look at the food industry, their profit margins are very narrow. And using an expensive process like biomanufacturing to produce a commodity where you're not going to have huge profit margins just doesn't make good business sense. So, Bob helped me dig into this a little bit more and I realized that this, this challenge that we're having of creating cultivated meat that, Not only tastes and feels like conventional meat, but then can be priced at the same level as conventional meat is huge.

And not only is it an interesting scientific challenge, but it's a socio economic challenge as well. Because we have so much more to consider in the supply chain and how to drive down those costs so that we can deliver these products to everyone with prosperity. 

Micah: This isn't the first time Stephen has explored ways to reduce costs.

It was a key aspect of his work in biopharma as well. 

Steven Lang: When I was with Johnson Johnson, I was teamed up with some of the leaders in the company to help drive down the cost of our drug substances that we were producing. And traditionally, the cost of goods were about 1, 000 per gram. And the goal that we had for this team was to get it down to 100 per gram.

And that is a huge mind shift in biopharmaceuticals, to really drive down those costs of how we're manufacturing our products. And so, I worked with some great leaders to really kind of walk through every step of the process and understand what is the critical things that we need to have either for safety, efficacy, or regulatory commitments.

What are the costly things and how can we avoid those? And how can we do things faster in order to get to that drug substance at a much cheaper price point? Take that example and apply it to cultivated meat, where we're using essentially the same technology, advanced fermentation or bioreactors, purification, and all of the quality and safety that goes into making sure that our drug substances are safe and efficacious, then apply that to cultivated meat, where you're You're trying to get the biomass down to pennies on the kilogram.

So it's just a step change in thinking as well as a processing that we have to do to really get there. And that's where I kind of get into the idea that I have total confidence that the science is there to be able to do it. Scale and produce cultivated meat and other proteins that are important for, uh, human health and nutrition, but it's the everything else that we have to work on.

It's the supply chain. It's the regulation. It's government support. It's consumer acceptance. And, you know, the lot of that is just marketing. 

Dana: You mentioned the word safe, and that's something I wanted to ask a little bit about. I can imagine the people of the future eating cultivated meat like it's, you know, no factor.

Nowadays, I'm sure there is a bit of a public pushback on, you know, is this safe? How much of a hurdle is that? 

Steven Lang: It is a hurdle and, um, you know, what I can say from a My experience at seeing multiple cultivated meat companies is that safety is paramount to everyone who's working there. And that's why we're using, and other companies that I've seen, are using the bio manu or bio pharmaceutical quality and safety guidelines as a starting point for this food substance.

So, I believe in a proper system that's set up with safety in mind, you'll have control around the inputs. That is the raw materials going into the fermentator or the cultivator, as well as then strict quality control and absolute control of the bioreactor, the living conditions that are producing those cells.

And then, of course, final specs that'll be seen over by quality organizations, as well as then we have commitments to the regulatory authorities to make sure that we're always producing safe food. Contrast that with, of course, the conventional meat market, where there's huge variations in the inputs of feedstock that they're giving to the animals, then relatively unsanitary conditions that they live in, especially at the very end when they're at the feedlots, and then all the processing that goes into the arbitrary, the slaughter of the animal and how each of those pieces are, you know, handled.

Um, so. Relatively, I believe that cultivated meat is going to be safer in the long run with stricter control. And what I, let me, let me give you an example of that is when we set up and do animal cell culture, we essentially create a sterile envelope. There cannot be any microbes or viruses that get into that fermenter because they will just take over the cells and take over the culture, and it'll be wasted.

That's not necessarily true in conventional, where you can have a bunch of viruses and bacteria floating around. That's why they use so many antibiotics, but in a sterile envelope that produces cultivated meat, We have to be very careful and we control it very carefully and monitor it throughout the production process to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Dana: So with cultivated meat, could you essentially have meat that you could store safer and you wouldn't have to worry about, you know, E. coli in your hamburger or salmonella in your chicken, for instance? 

Steven Lang: Yes, I mean, because it's coming out, if you will, cleaner, you could then package it and have a longer shelf life or storage conditions.

Micah: But are you also using antibiotics in the fermenter to keep it sterile? 

Steven Lang: No, no. 

Micah: No. 

Steven Lang: This is a big part of, well, back in academics when you're starting out doing cell culture you use a lot of antibiotics because you don't have very good aseptic technique and your cultures get contaminated all the time.

But in industrial science, and this was one of kind of the eye openers when I started out in the lab at Johnson Johnson, was no antibiotics. And that means that your, your scientists and engineers have to be very skilled in aseptic technique and be able to keep things from getting contaminated. And we have tools and processes in place to make sure that happens.

Micah: Yeah, I was just going to say, so it's a process based sterility, essentially, not a 

Steven Lang: Exactly. 

Micah: Not a chemical sterility. 

Steven Lang: Correct. 

Dana: And more into the problems of surrounding this conventional meat. Can we talk more about that? Why are we doing this aside from it's interesting and that we can, but what real problem here are we trying to solve?

Steven Lang: So the real problem is twofold in that we have a growing population and that growing population is becoming more important following the American diet. And. The preference is that people as they increase their income, they buy more meat. And if you look at the statistics from the, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the predicting that we need 60 percent more food than what we're producing today by 2050, just to support the population.

The problem is that the amount of farmable or arable land is diminishing. And so there's not a lot of hope that farmers with conventional methods are going to have the technology to really increase their supply while we have a diminishing amount of land. To use and that is a real concern. So that's where it becomes very apparent to anyone who kind of sees this problem that we need to start thinking about how we're going to feed our population in different ways and do it in a way that we can ensure safety.

Nutrition, and also hit on some other important things that we all care about, food security, the environmental impact. These are all positive externalities of investing in cultivated meat. 

Dana: That's a really staggering statistic. I just want to make sure I heard that right. So 60 percent more food by 2050.

Steven Lang: Correct. 

Dana: Wow. This alarming figure highlights yet another significant hurdle facing the cultivated meat industry. The staggering cost of raw materials required to produce even a small quantity. Think back to that hamburger we talked about at the beginning of the episode. It cost over 250, 000 and hundreds of hours to produce.

Micah: From specialized growth media to the cutting edge bioreactors that house the process, these essential inputs come at a premium. This makes it difficult for companies to scale production affordably. And until these costs can be reduced, cultivated meat will remain out of reach for the average consumer, making widespread adoption a distant goal.

Steven Lang: When we talk about biomanufacturing, we grow our cells in very special nutrient media. And typically, that media, if you were to buy it off the shelf, would be about a 40 per liter investment. And when you start looking at the scale of the conventional meat market, and if cultured meat were to take a small percentage of that, we would have to buy millions and millions of liters of meat.

media to produce that meat. And at that price point of 40 per liter, we just can't do that. It's just not feasible. No business would be successful trying to do that. So one of the things that we've talked about is, you know, supply chain, how do we get the raw materials, the prices for the raw materials down to the point where, you know, it's less than 10, 10 cents per liter.

Dana: Can you help us visualize the size of these bioreactors when you're talking about the biggest that we could do? What does that compare to? A house? A building? A swimming pool? 

Steven Lang: So, one of these bioreactors is either one or two standard swimming pools. 

Micah: And how much cultivated meat would come out of a swimming pool or two?

Steven Lang: So, you know, the yields need to be increased and what I would say it's typically about 5 percent of the volume is cultivated meat. Of course, a big part of our cost of goods reduction is how can we get those cell densities increased to the point of having much more cell mass coming out per liter of media that we put in.

And I have an anecdote from looking at the conventional meat market. I think it's, uh, the FOA says that we're producing about 600 billion pounds or kilos of meat per week. And if you try to take 1 percent of that, that's still a lot of meat that we have to produce. And Doing the math, that would come down to about, if we were just to take 1 percent of that market, it would be something like 12, 000, 100, 000 liter bioreactors.

And that's the scale of the conventional meat market, and just a small fraction that we think that would, uh, you know, help us in the environmental cause, set us on that path. 

Micah: So 12, 000 double swimming pools, plus minus. 

Steven Lang: Yeah, exactly. 

Micah: And out of each one of those comes one swimmer, as it were. Exactly. One swimmer mass worth of cultivated meat.

Steven Lang: Right, so you've settled on the exact issue of what we have to figure out, is how to reduce the costs and increase our efficiencies. 

Dana: And that's about the amount of meat that someone eats in a year, right? It's about between 200 and 250 pounds. Mm In a year. Okay. 

Steven Lang: Right. 

Dana: Yeah. 

Steven Lang: That sounds right. I didn't check that math.

But yeah. Yeah. 

Micah: How can we increase the yield of cultivated meat? We've already discussed the cost of nutrient media, but what about scaling up by building larger bioreactors? At the moment, it's unlikely that companies will invest in bigger vats to boost production until consumer demand grows significantly.

Dana: Could new technology be the key to increasing yield? That said, the small amounts of cultivated meat we currently produce aren't enough to address the massive challenges we face. Despite this, Stephen remains optimistic about the future. 

Steven Lang: I'm fully confident that we'll overcome the technical challenges.

It's, it's more of getting into consumer acceptance. Can we brand and market these products as truly an alternative to conventional meat so that, uh, people understand that they're getting the same nutrition, the taste, and the texture of meat without the sacrifices that we have to make through conventional farming.

And that is, of course, animal husbandry that contribute to 20 percent of the global greenhouse gases that are produced and any little bit that we can mitigate those greenhouse gases by taking cows out of the field and Turning that into meat coming from a bioreactor or a fermentor, there are life cycle analyses that have shown that biotechnology can be much more efficient than cows and chickens in producing healthy protein for human consumption.

And that's really important and there was some debate about that, but once the science kind of weighed in and the economics, the life cycle analysis has really kind of convinced us that biotechnology can do better. You know, alleviate some of those negative externalities that it comes with conventional farming.

Micah: So you're talking about like the feed, the water, the space. 

Steven Lang: Exactly. Especially the land use is important because a bioreactor, once you build it, will occupy a certain square footage, but it's nothing like the square footage that is required for a cattle pasture. And you have. Energy consumption, the feedstocks going in, as well as in the waste treatment, all of those are considered in a life cycle analysis, and it really shows that cultivated meat should be the way of the future.

However, let me just set expectations here. The conventional meat market is a 1 trillion market. And. That is huge, so we have to be realistic, cultivated meat is not going to take over conventional meat anytime soon, because it's such a behemoth. What we can hope to do is, as we scale this process, or the cultivated meat technology, we will be able to provide alternatives to consumers who are very concerned about the environment or animal husbandry, and that will, Eat into the conventional meat market, but it will provide options for the consumers, which is ultimately what we want.

Dana: When we talk about consumer acceptance, one thing that came to mind for me was health. So we all hear, you know, red meat is something we should avoid for our health. It's linked to heart disease. You know, there's meat that's linked to cancer. So how does cultivated meat compare or what are the health benefits that a consumer would see?

Steven Lang: That's a great question. And what we anticipate because we're focusing on hitting Parody or making cultivated meat very similar to conventional meat. Essentially, the health benefits are not there per se. What I can say, and this is a way, another thing that excites me. If we think in the future, we can actually start creating meat that is healthier for you.

Tastes better and is better for the environment. Those things you cannot do with the traditional farming techniques of selective breeding or even genetic engineering at this point. That is mind blowing to me because what you can envision, because we can take cells from any organism and cultivate them in these conditions that we're talking about, we may be able to produce Bettermeat, very much like in biopharmaceuticals, they're talking about bio betters, drugs that actually work better than the innovative drug, and the patient wins.

So, if we think about Bettermeat, what might that look like? And, uh, we have only scratched the surface of our understanding of that. If you really think about, you know, all of our work has been on traditionally farmed animals. There is a whole world out there where we can sample cells from, let's say, sea urchins, and we may combine those cells with something like a zebra to create a beautiful steak that is healthier for you and more cost effective.

So this is the kind of stuff that I get excited about the future that we, we kind of can see in our future. 

Micah: Is this hypothetical, or are these things that have actually been tested? 

Steven Lang: Oh, no, no, this is all hypothetical. Sorry, I was hand waving. I don't know that anyone's looking to combine a sea urchin with a zebra.

Micah: But just to show the sort of wild possibilities that exist for us, I mean. 

Steven Lang: Absolutely. 

Micah: Yeah, if there's some sort of nutritional or flavor benefit from the zebra or the sea urchin, you can bring those together. Well, can we talk a bit more about the, for instance, the nutritional optimization? I mean, when you talk about Us needing to eat less meat, for instance, if you change the nutrients in the food, it might change how much of it we need to eat or want to eat.

Steven Lang: That's a very good point. I mean, if you can essentially nutrient load a foodstuff and people then would eat less of it, you can also think about, you know, there are health benefits to eating particular meat. Um, like seafood with omega 3 fatty acids. We can engineer that in the future with, into whatever cultivated meat we want to.

If we understand the cell signaling pathways that then lead to that production of a omega 3 fatty acid and we can turn it on in the right concentration and make sure it works and is safe. So there's all kinds that we can think about on a nutritional side by understanding the risk of red meat with cardiovascular stroke and cancer.

How can we mitigate those? 

Dana: The zebra sea urchin hybrid might offer a vivid and striking glimpse into the future, but it's easy to imagine that the public would need some convincing to embrace something so unfamiliar in most diets. 

Micah: And yet, this type of crossbreeding isn't as far removed from what humans have been doing for centuries as you might think.

It's hard to believe, but everything from orange carrots to the mustard in our jars is the result of human ingenuity and a mastery of nature, as Stephen explains. 

Steven Lang: We have been fermenting food and selectively breeding animals and plants for more than 10, 000 years. So, in my mind, we have co evolved with our food systems, and we've gotten to the place where we are largely because we've, our early ancestors, have figured out how to train animals or breed animals to produce things that they want.

And the same with plants. And if you look at those plants and animals that we, you know, from 10 to 12, 000 years ago, they're totally distinct from the original species that was corn that has, we have bred into what we call corn now and everyone loves to eat on the cob. And we need to continue that trajectory of human history evolving with our food systems in this next stage.

And this next stage is going to involve genetic engineering and things like cultivated meat. And the other thing I like to think about is that we're setting the foundations now that will allow us to colonize other planets and have a stake on those planets. Thanks. And I know this is out there as well, but if you envision that we eventually get to Mars and we have people living on Mars, they may want to have a chicken nugget or, uh, or a hamburger.

We're not going to take a cow and some chickens to Mars because they require land and it just would be cruel. So we're laying the foundation for Essentially producing meat in a way that we can take it with us when we go to into space for either long periods or to colonize other planets. But it's that technology that we're now working on is just laying those foundations and it still is crude and, and tough, but we have this vision of where we could get to a point where an automated system prints a stake for you in space.

Micah: Speaking of timelines, can we get out the crystal ball briefly just for, just for a couple of, uh, just for a couple of questions around timing? 

Steven Lang: Sure. 

Micah: So if you were to look five years ahead, and then 20 years ahead, where do you see this industry? 

Steven Lang: So five years ahead, I think, you know, certainly we'll have some facsimiles of conventional meat on the market.

Maybe not in every grocery store. But certainly on the market and those will be good facsimiles. We will consider them highly processed foods, um, because there will be plant products, um, mixed in with the animal cells to give it texture or some flavors and just substance because, you know, going in with a hundred percent cultivated meat is, uh, at this point a failing.

Business outcome because it's just so expensive to produce. So sell. So we're current early products are going to be hybrid products that will have plant material in them as well, up to, you know, maybe even 50%. Then if you look 20 years out, I think you can really start thinking about. Truly efficient processes where buyer actors have gotten smaller.

It takes less energy and less food stock to, or feed stock to produce the same amount of meat coming out the end and that meat will be like we were talking before, uh, bio better, more nutritious, better for your health as well as the flavor. So that's what I would look for and I anticipate that will happen with the trajectory that we've had within biopharmaceuticals.

When I started out 20 years ago, we were very happy to get, you know, protein titers of about 100 megs per liter. And now they're producing cell lines and processes that produce 10 grams per liter very easily. So, these step changes that we're seeing are dramatic and I anticipate that will continue on.

And some of the innovations that we see in cultivated meat may go back into biopharmaceutical and help that industry reduce costs and make drugs more accessible. 

Micah: Do you envision a future where we buy meat from our local bioreactor? 

Steven Lang: Wouldn't that be cool? There is a company that is producing a at home chocolate factory.

And Basically taking plant cell culture and being able to produce your own chocolate. This is really interesting, but I would see that as the future. You know, having a bioreactor in your house that is producing food for you, it sounds Jetson, um, but very much, you know, if the technology continues on the trajectory that we're going with more advanced bioreactor design, better feedstocks, and better cell lines, there's so many possibilities.

Micah: So like, Dad, what's for dinner tonight? Oh no, I forgot to feed the bioreactor. 

Steven Lang: Exactly. Let's hope.

Dana: That was Stephen Lang. So Micah, that was a very interesting conversation. 

Micah: It certainly was. And you know, what sticks out to me is that for most of my life, and I think probably for most of human existence, meat and animals have been the same thing. And so it's a whole new way of thinking about this type of food when you think that The animal itself, the thing walking around on four legs for instance, is like an in between stage between water and grass and feed and a steak on your plate.

So the idea that you could skip the animal and simply have nutrient turn into meat, turn into dinner, uh, It is pretty mind blowing for me. 

Dana: Yeah, it just makes you think about how we consume meat now and how we don't consume different certain meats and we are socially accepted to eat other meats. So, would this technology open to a whole variety of different, like you said, nutrients, different tastes, different textures?

Who knows what the future will hold here. 

Micah: You mean like in terms of certain animals equal dinner and certain animals do not equal dinner, but now 

Dana: Exactly. 

Micah: That's sort of out of the equation. 

Dana: Yeah. And will we, maybe we won't call it meat. Maybe it will develop into a different name. Maybe, you know, the way we cook will be completely different.

It's really incredible to just think in the future and something that we probably don't think about technology and innovation as much. 

Micah: Or like the fridge right now is a holding place for people. products I buy outside of the house, but this idea that I could have a bioreactor on my counter making my food, I guess it's, in some ways, it's just a very high tech version of a garden, I suppose, but it still feels quite different from what I'm used to.

Dana: Absolutely. And, you know, if we think back 200 years, having a refrigerator stocked full of things you buy at the grocery store might not have been the norm for most families. So if we fast forward We don't know what, uh, the next generations of people will be doing in their kitchens. 

Micah: Good point, the, uh, the refrigerator at one point itself was futuristic.

Dana: Exactly. Now, just a staple, right? Like, you can't have a kitchen without a fridge. 

Micah: Can't have a kitchen without a bioreactor. Exactly. Maybe that's the future.

Dana: This has been Balancing the Future from Mettler Toledo. 

Micah: In future episodes, what questions about technology do you have that you want answered? 

Dana: Let us know by leaving a review. Or, if you're a Spotify user, in the comment section. 

Micah: And be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Dana: See you in two weeks.