Transcriber: Anastasia De Mey Reviewer: Michael Nystrom
A more pleasant, light-hearted speech, after Sofie’s incredible chat.
But mine is really about my love of food.
I love food.
A dinner consisting of roasted scallops with black pudding,
a middle course of black cod,
followed by a great steak topped with foie gras,
a glass of wine, with friends is the perfect evening.
I love trying new foods,
which put me in the strange position in life
of being the sixth person in the world to eat lab-grown meat,
moments after being the first person in the world to cook lab-grown meat.
Despite being an advocate of lab-grown meat, though,
I still adore eating conventionally-grown fish and meat.
But recently, I’ve kind of started to wrestle my conscience
about whether this is right or wrong.
And I think maybe sometimes it's my vegan friends
and their constant churning of self-importance
that’s ground me down,
or even the social media keyboard warriors
that often misquote American farming figures
and apply them to European farming techniques
that basically belittle the farmers that I know as friends
and how much care and effort they put into farming the land
and looking after the animals.
But then again, trailing the meat wagon, as they say, as they do the school runs,
and I live by all the farms and watching the animals go off to market,
kind of makes you feel a little guilty.
And also the idea that potentially
animals destined for the food chain caused a worldwide pandemic,
you know, can cut close to the bone, so to speak, but who knows?
But in the very medium,
we debate this energy consumption of the Internet
and social media uses 2% of the world’s electricity,
perhaps even the medium
in which we might purchase the meat in the future,
with crypto-coins, etc., might use more energy
than actually growing the animal and the meat in the future.
Yet cattle farming is considered
an absolute environmental disaster by some,
and the expression of “what if” and “imagine”
when discussing the future of meat
is both frustrating and disappointing to myself.
In all honesty, almost as much as when I see a chef just unnecessarily
destroy a piece of meat when they’re cooking it,
not giving it the care and attention the meat and the food product deserves.
But often within the meat industry,
the meat isn’t actually essential -
convenience foods
that lack the bold flavors and additives, bulking agents.
So why not just cook with an alternative protein
rather than carelessly waste the animal’s life?
We don’t need to imagine, though, about the “what-ifs”
or look back and think “if only.”
The future is here. I’ve seen it. I’ve cooked it, and I’ve tasted it.
The potential, though, has yet to be fulfilled.
Since the first time I cooked lab-grown meat in 2013, at a cost of €264,000,
140 companies now have participated in producing lab-grown meat.
They’re perusing the idea of scaling up meat production,
and they're raising significant funding.
Just last year, $1 billion has now been raised into the cultivated meat market.
But more money is going to be needed
if they want to get a market share of the meat industry.
And despite all of these finances from some of the wealthiest individuals
and, in some cases, state-backed,
a considerable amount more is still needed.
But with an ever-expanding population,
by 2050, production of the world’s meat needs to double.
Currently, we consume 300 million tons of meat, presently, around the world.
So far, Singapore has given approval for the use and consumption
of farmed meats or cell-cultivated meats.
And it’s hoped that later this year, the FDA in America -
the Food and Drug Administration -
will support it
and allow conventionally-grown meats to sit alongside stem-cell meat
and be sold and consumed by the general public.
But having personally cooked this back in 2013,
I’m still surprised at where we are,
and the debate awaiting for administrative approvals
is just, for me, frustrating.
I was informed when I was about to step up on stage back in 2013
that a billion people would read, talk, listen, hear,
watch about the burger and what we were cooking in London.
I was also told not to f*** it up.
(Laughter)
So, when cooking and eating the proof-of-concept beef burger,
not only did it taste perfectly normal,
but what really appealed to me from a kitchen perspective
was that we could control the amount of fat that we could put into the product.
So, therefore, the ability to cook healthier dishes to tackle world obesity
was simply a simple choice of deciding not to add in fat -
the concept alone giving lab-grown meats
an advantage over traditionally-reared animals in creating a balanced diet.
I'm frequently asked, obviously,
about the taste of the burger and quite commonly about the cost.
It’s a lot of money.
But what’s really memorable is that the burger tasted like a topside of beef,
typically a very lean, a very subtle cut of meat.
The only negative in the taste, in my opinion,
was that there was a residual salt that, in my opinion,
came from the growth serum in which the lab-grown meat was produced.
But after tasting it, I genuinely believed that
more meats would be in production in the following few years.
Once approval is given, financial stakes have been raised so high
that in-vitro meat becomes the equivalent of NFTs or cryptocurrencies
of the food production world,
creating vast wealth for the early pioneers.
In the music industry,
where downloadable music sales obliterated CD sales
as it adapted to a new form of medium,
vinyls became cherished
and far more greatly appreciated as their value rose.
Perhaps society will appreciate farmers for their contribution
in the same context and will be willing to pay more
for their conventionally-grown produce.
If more widespread approval was given,
this could change significantly how and what we could cook,
both as a chef and as a home cook.
With the success and cost-effective growth of new proteins,
it opens the doorways for chefs to request their dream food products,
from scallops the size of a brick
to marble beef 3D printed in your very own home, ready for cooking.
Technological advances in the kitchen have changed in living memory for some.
For example, the microwave - it was invented in the 1940s,
and initially, it was sold in the mid-fifties,
but it was far too expensive.
In the mid-sixties, the costs came down, and by the mid-seventies,
a million microwaves were being sold per year.
This is just an example of something in short-term memory.
The idea that we grow our own meat from starter cells in our own kitchen
could be a realization if we consider the microwave concept.
Better still, we can grow almost anything we can imagine.
And that’s exciting.
I’ve already created a wish list of meat products
I would like to see in my kitchens,
which became the foundation of the Bistro In Vitro virtual restaurant.
These include “friendly foie gras,”
avoiding the controversial meat technique altogether,
and an abundance of beluga caviar,
without the need for sturgeon farms and at a lower cost point.
If lab-grown meat is successful,
it will give chefs not only a chance to reinvent the wheel but supersize it,
like the idea of a scallop the size of a brick.
Society, from our recent surveys, appears more willing to try lab-grown meat
with one-third of the general public now willing to try it.
That’s the equivalent of this part of the room.
But I expect over the next 12 months,
more of us will have had the opportunity to try lab-grown meat
due to the production increases
and the claims of the cost of production has been significantly reduced.
We don’t need a quarter of a million to try it anymore.
But I’ve been wrong before in my forecasts.
Despite my previous timeline predictions,
I would like to think that when we’re having this conversation again in 2024,
many of you will have tried lab-grown meat.
Ultimately, I wouldn’t be happy eating an intensively farmed crushed avocado
from the once-luscious regions of the Amazon.
That’s a whole different problem with the food industry at the moment.
So we need to look at alternative methods.
Luckily for myself, our top scientists are looking at how to reinvent the wheel.
However, it is consumer purchasing that will get the wheels turning
for a more environmentally sustainable future.
The future of lab-grown meat will ultimately be judged on taste and cost,
as well as its environmental impacts on the planet by its early adopters.
So let’s see what science can bring in these next couple of years for society.
It can only be asked that people are willing to try new things
because, at this rate, the planet is going to need us to try new things
with the way we produce food.
Thank you.
(Applause)