FDA-approved science meat.
Of course, it was grown in a vat
instead of inside an animal's body.
And I am about to chow down on it.
- Let's head on in.
- Okay.
- This isn't like a soy-based fake meat.
It's real meat made from real chicken cells.
Right now, dozens of companies are trying to figure out
how to grow meat in unconventional ways,
and it's beginning to work.
- Why do this?
- Concentrated animal agriculture takes
a huge toll on the environment,
and with the demand for meat expected
to skyrocket in the next few decades,
well, it's a big problem.
- Meat is a product that we've loved for thousands of years,
and the demand for it is doubling.
- We have to come up with ways to be ingenious
and give people what they want in a more efficient package.
- We can meet this doubling of demand
with a production method that is safe, sustainable,
a lot more humane.
So the question is: "Why don't we need an opportunity
like this to be explored right now with urgency?"
- What if we could grow most
or even all of the meat we need with a much smaller impact?
What if we could make healthier meat, or meat that was
otherwise impossible to get?
- Science is about asking questions
that you don't know the answers to.
It's about recognizing the limitations of society
that you have at the time that you must overcome.
And what is the science telling you?
- This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Welcome to Emeryville, California.
It's right next to San Francisco.
Pixar is there.
There's an IKEA, and a pretty good mall.
And this place, a high-tech factory for cultivated meat.
This is Uma.
He's the founder and CEO of UPSIDE,
and we hear he's a blast at birthday parties.
- I grew up in a meat-eating family, loved eating meat.
One day as a kid, I went to a friend's birthday party.
We were having fun in the front,
and then I walked to the back of the house,
and that is where they were slaughtering the animals
that were being used to feed the people in the front.
It was the birthday, death day happening at the same time
with incredible joy in the front
and incredible suffering in the back.
And I think that was the first time
I came directly face-to-face with the duality of meat.
I am a cardiologist by training.
During medical school, we would take stem cells,
re-inject them into the person's heart
to regrow the heart muscle.
And to me it felt like, "Oh my gosh,
what if you can take cells from an animal
and grow meat from it?
What would that be?"
- From a scientific standpoint,
cultivated meat is an unbelievably simple idea that's been
around for probably as long as people have been eating meat,
which is if I just want a chicken wing,
do I need a whole chicken?
- This is Eric, our tour guide
and professional scientist.
And I'm gonna guess, basketball player?
- College basketball, and not very good at it.
- Anyway, after we got all suited up
with these super fashionable beard nets, Eric gave me a tour
of the facility where they make the meat.
- What do you feed the cells?
- We feed the cells the same thing you and I would eat
except in a much more simplified form.
So if we're eating, say, meat or protein
or starches in like a potato,
we just break those down to its components:
amino acids in the case of protein,
sugars in the case of starches,
vitamins, minerals, those sorts of things.
You take cells which are living,
and as long as they're fed, kept warm,
and given a place to grow without competition from bacteria,
they'll continue to grow using their genetic programming-
and they will produce the same thing
that's in an animal.
And then you can eat it.
- This way, you can grow the meat
without needing to grow the rest of the animal.
No bones, no skin, no nervous system.
The only problem with this is
that it also doesn't have an immune system.
So if bacteria gets into the process,
it pretty much ruins the whole batch.
- And the most important thing, of course, is that,
once we put anything into the system,
it is in fact sterile.
We monitor all the different types of bacteria in the air
and on the surfaces.
We also monitor what's inside here,
but more importantly, what's not here.
- Right.
- Bacteria, viruses.
Our main line of defense is prevention; is effectively
just never letting bacteria or viruses in.
- Effectively, we are the immune system
in a facility like this.
This is important
because one of the main advantages of this technology is
that you wouldn't need to use antibiotics like we do now
in animal agriculture.
- The moment we take the cells directly from a farm animal,
we have to pierce its skin in order to get the cells.
There's gonna be bacteria there.
We use a small amount of antibiotics
to make sure no bacteria transfer into our system.
And this is I'm talking about over the course of years
before we actually get them into production.
Once they're in production,
we do not use antibiotics at all.
- Cultivating meat at a small scale
has been done for a while,
but the challenge for the folks at UPSIDE is
how to grow this production up to a commercial scale.
- Oh, this is great.
This is great. So many more tanks.
- So much more room for activities.
- In case you missed it, Eric just referenced
the classic movie "Step Brothers."
- 'So many activities.'
- Which means he and I are about to become best friends.
- 'Did we just become best friends?
- Yep!'
- This is the production floor.
Things that work here gets scaled massively up
for commercial-scale production.
- Right.
- So this facility can do up to about 400,000 pounds
of cultivated meat per year,
which is a lot for cultivated meat.
But in the grand scheme of meat, it's a very small amount.
Our commercial facility will be able to do in the tens
of millions of pounds of cultivated meat per year.
- If this can be done at a scale that competes
with existing meat production,
it'll mean a much cleaner environment.
- It takes two years to raise a cow
before it goes to slaughter.
It takes nine months for a pig before it goes to slaughter,
and it takes two months for a chicken
before it goes to slaughter.
It takes us two weeks to grow meat
and everything we make can be eaten.
Therefore, we just see first principle advantages
that are significantly superior to conventional meat.
- But for all of this to work,
two things need to happen.
Companies like UPSIDE need to be able
to make this stuff at an affordable price,
and people need to want to eat it.
So, what does it taste like?
Let's find out.
Currently, UPSIDE's only FDA-approved product is
their chicken filet, which is made in a small-scale process
to replicate the look and feel of a chicken breast.
But they're also replicating ground meat products
that can be made at a much larger scale-
and I got to taste them all.
But before we dived into the tasting, I had a bone to pick.
What kind of chicken meat were they cultivating?
As you well know, this is an issue
we take very seriously at "Hard Reset."
- What is your favorite part of the chicken?
- Thigh.
- It would be the thigh.
- Thigh is the way to go.
- Right.
- Why didn't they start with a thigh?
- Why chicken breast and not chicken thigh?
- Why chicken breast meat and not chicken thigh meat?
- Chicken thigh is by far the superior meat.
Fully agree with you.
- Okay.
- Western palates prefer chicken breast.
- Do they?
- Western palates, when they think chicken,
our research shows they want white meat,
they want breast meat.
It is also a lot of the meat
that's put into chicken nuggets.
That was just the familiar cut that people wanted.
However, our chicken breast meat has, intentionally,
some dark meat character added into it
on purpose in the form of connective tissue
that prevents it from overcooking.
And I think it sort of redeemed it.
The people wanted it, so we're giving it to them.
- Make better choices, America.
- Yeah, I mean the optimal preparation
for most chicken is fried.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- And breaded.
So, that's the breakfast sausage.
The ground product.
Is that correct?
- Yeah, the only animal product in there is chicken cells.
- Oh my gosh.
- Your breakfast sandwich.
- Thank you.
- All right.
- So this is my first bite of cell-cultivated chicken.
This was also apparently my first bite of solid food.
Oh my goodness.
There's at least three pounds of cheese in my beard.
I promise you I do know how to eat.
I am just not sure what happened this day.
That tastes really good.
How much that was in my mustache is what I want to know.
Quite a lot as it turns out.
How much does this cost compared
to an equivalent product at a restaurant?
- Our goal is to put it about 30%
or so price premium to start with.
- Okay.
- We have no doubt-
- No, please don't zoom in and off, please.
- Inevitably, it'll be cheaper.
- Ugh, finally.
I'm sorry, what were you saying, Uma?
- The cost of making this,
inevitably, it'll be cheaper than conventional,
but that's gonna take time as we scale.
- Right.
- And I think that sweet spot is gonna be hard
to exactly predict, but it's gonna be five years plus.
- So here we have our UPSIDE chicken pot stickers.
- Amazing. I'm gonna go ahead and cut into this guy.
It tastes really good.
Apparently, my vocabulary for describing food is
limited to "really good."
That's really good.
This is really good.
It's really good.
That's why I'm not the one handing out
Michelin stars, folks.
Watch out, Chick-fil-A.
That's really good.
I'm so very articulate.
Anyway, the food we ate was delicious,
but let's be honest, even a coffee mug
that has been breaded, deep fried
and served with a nice runny egg would be pretty tasty.
So I made a point
of trying the meat on its own without all the extra stuff,
and yeah, it tasted...really good.
You can definitely see the fibers in there.
It tastes exactly like you expect it to,
and in your mouth it chews apart the way
you expect the meat to.
It tastes really good.
I was really hung up on like,
"Why breast meat and not thigh meat,"
but this is really good breast meat.
So like, it's really tasty.
I can't stress enough that it tastes
and feels just like the meat I've known all my life.
It's somewhat weird
that this bleeding-edge food technology is all about trying
to replicate a familiar experience.
If they succeed, it'll be indistinguishable
from what you already know.
So, what would the future look like
with this technology at scale?
Picture a scenario
where we restart meat production from scratch.
Animal agriculture would probably still be right
at the center of this new system.
At the right level of density,
animal agriculture can be really good
for maintaining some ecosystems,
but we'd hopefully say goodbye to concentrated feedlots.
The cells from these animals could be harvested
and used to grow millions of pounds
of meat all while the animals themselves
are alive and kicking.
- We do not have to have the intense animal agriculture.
Our confined animal-feeding operations where we put millions
of animals in small areas,
we can have regenerative agriculture
where animals are roaming freely.
They don't have this intense confinements.
We can have cultivated meat be the industry
that can supply delicious high-quality meat
for the largest amount of population
with the lowest amount of impact.
- If we saw the end
of slaughterhouses without losing our access
to the meat they provide, I don't think
many people would feel bad about that.
- I have not met a single person to date that walked out
of a slaughterhouse and said, "I love this process."
Most people leave feeling somewhat scarred or conflicted.
- And the meat we make might be
healthier for us too,
where the proteins and fats are
all optimized for our health.
- The idea of customizing the product is the holy grail
of this whole industry.
Maybe one of these days we're making the nutritions
of like a salmon filet, but in a red meat product
or a type of meat we can't even imagine.
- Eric might not wanna say it out loud,
but I think we all know it's dinosaur meat
that people want.
Dinosaur thigh meat.
The production of meat could be done
at a much more manageable scale
where cultivators could operate in any neighborhood,
eliminating the need
to ship meat over long distances like we do now.
- If we continue to produce meat in the way we do now,
we will unfortunately have to make a choice between existing
as a species or giving up the choices we really love.
The answer is we need it right now.
We need it right now.
We needed it 50 years ago, but the technology did not exist.
The technology exists now and we need to get ahead.
- If you want to distill science at its core,
it's very empathetic position:
You acknowledge the reality that you are a product
of the time in which you are,
and you try to envision a world in which you want to be in.
Scientifically, how do you get there?
When you can't reach it, it just becomes sci-fi.
And when you can reach it, it becomes a place like this
that we're sitting right now,
becomes a meat-processing facility,
making meat without an animal.
I'm looking down the barrel
'cause I want you to listen to me.
Thigh meat is the superior meat.
All right, to your question.