(joyful music)
- [Interviewer] So Lizzy, what are we doing here?
- We're here with Bosco, the pig,
'cause you said I had to get over my fear of pigs.
But also because of this thing we read
about how, in theory, in the future, a pig like this
could feed an entire neighborhood for years.
Well, not this pig, but a pig.
We've been looking into the future of meat.
And what we've been finding is out there.
Animals raised for meat, but not slaughtered.
Live tissue grown cell by cell in vats.
And this one thought experiment
that really made us think about where animals
will fit into our needs and tastes as consumers.
Sit.
So a little background on cultured meat
or cultivated meat or lab-grown meat.
It goes by lots of names.
It's the process of taking cells from say a cow, a chicken,
or a pig, and getting them to multiply outside their body
in machine called a bioreactor.
It's a way to eat meat without actually eating animals.
For the record,
we're not talking about plant-based alternatives
like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Cell-based meat is actual animal tissue.
It's been almost a decade
since the first cultured meat burger
was taste tested on live TV.
- But there is quite some intense taste.
It's close to meat.
- But it's only in the past two or three years that research
and investment have really taken off.
The arguments for and against cultured meat
are all over the place.
Proponents say that it sidesteps
most of the livestock industry's worst problems
like it's land and water use,
pollution, greenhouse gas emissions,
and, of course, animal suffering.
Cultured meat could put a dent in those issues.
Critics point out that it's too early to know
how eco-friendly cultured meat will really be at scale.
And others argue
that instead of us spending billions of dollars
or more to invent meat that we feel better about eating,
we should just stop eating meat all together.
But there's a really specific question
tucked into that debate.
How might culture meat change the relationship
that meat consumers have with their food?
(techno music)
One answer to that question is here
at a company called Culture Biosciences.
They run a network of bioreactors for higher.
So say you're a lab,
and you need to grow protein or some engineered microbes,
you can send your raw materials to Culture
and they'll run the entire experiment for you.
Can you just tell us a little bit
about what we're looking at?
- Sure.
These are a lot of bioreactors.
They sort of look like blenders.
Blenders on life support, to some degree.
The metabolism here is really similar to ours.
It's like breathing in air, it's eating things,
it's growing more cells.
- [Lizzie] Are they always spinning?
- They're always spinning.
Yeah.
So it's like they always need to be mixed.
- [Lizzie] So say you wanna grow some pork in a bioreactor.
You start with a biopsy, a sampling of cells from a pig
taken via needle or a small incision.
You then use some of those cells to establish a cell bank,
your go-to reservoir of cells.
To start the culturing process,
you take a few cells from the bank
and add them to a flask
with all the nutrients needed to grow and divide.
And then you wait.
- At some point, you have enough density of cells
to go into a big bioreactor.
- [Lizzie] Then there's more waiting as the cells double
and double and double again
until you have enough cells to strain out
and turn into food.
This takes anywhere from two to eight weeks
depending on what you're growing and how you grow it.
- So at the end of that process,
you have this sort of slurry of cells, right?
That's what's coming out of a bioreactor.
It's not the most appetizing thing.
- The easiest food to make with that slurry
is something ground up like a sausage.
To mimic cuts of meat like a pork chop,
you'd need to train different types of cells
to grow onto a scaffold.
So that's all gonna take a lot more R&D.
But, honestly, it's just one hurdle of many.
This whole process needs to get more consistent, automated,
and way cheaper than it is now.
On top of that, it also needs to be safe.
- You have all these mammalian cells that are brewing
in like the perfect, literally the perfect environment
for a contaminant.
Like if you have any bacteria in there,
it's literally in a soup
that has all the food a bacteria would ever want.
- Another big hurdle, most animal cells
just don't like growing while suspended in a big vat.
So you need a lot of bioreactor space
to make just a little bit of meat.
- It's not a small difference.
And if you're an order of magnitude less productive,
that means you need an order of magnitude,
bigger facility, more food and materials.
- So if all those problems get solved,
what does the future look like?
And where do we, consumers, get our meat from?
This is where a few possible scenarios diverge.
(letters typing)
- [Will] If you think about a company like Anheuser-Busch,
they literally have billions of liters
of fermentation capacity for beer.
And, frankly,
I can see cultured meat going in that direction.
(letters typing)
- [Lizzie] One alternative to that future,
the craft brewery model.
- You can imagine there being more craft cultured meat
groups that are somehow specializing
the way that they're working with the brewing process
in order to make slightly different variations
that have different, you know, taste differently.
(letters typing)
- [Lizzie] And finally, there's the most extreme vision
for local meat production, home brewing.
You'd have a at-home bioreactor in your kitchen
ready to supply you
with fresh grown meat whenever you wanted it.
- It's hard to imagine, but it's plausible.
It would be a really challenging technical feat to pull off.
I believe there would have to be
some kind of fully automated system
that really takes the user
almost entirely out of the process
in order to make it so that sort of there's no user error
and there's no way that user can contaminate it.
(soft music)
- [Lizzie] But we wanted to offer
one other vision for the future.
It's a thought experiment
described by a Dutch researcher named Cor van der Weele.
About a decade ago,
Cor convened some focus groups in the Netherlands
to find out how consumers would grapple with cultured meat.
- They said, "Well, it's interesting,
but isn't it very unnatural?"
And then someone else inevitably said,
"Yeah, but how natural is our ordinary meat nowadays?"
And what you noticed was
there was a lot of ambivalence about both.
So normal meat becomes stranger
as cultured meat becomes more normal.
- Whether the meat was coming from butchers or bioreactors,
one thing was clear.
The group didn't want their meat
coming from one massive company.
And one group had a really creative workaround.
- [Cor] The pig in the backyard.
(soft music)
- I don't wanna be that close to you, but here you go.
I'm literally covered in dirt.
This is the local model of cultured meat,
except the starter cells are local, too.
Say you have a pig that lives in the neighborhood
and the community takes care of him.
When you wanted some ham,
you could go pay a visit to the pig.
Hi, buddy.
Take a biopsy,
and bring that home to your at-home bioreactor to grow meat.
Alternatively, there could be some sort of butcher
who runs a small farm and a bank of bioreactors.
Either way, the idea really struck a nerve.
- It seemed to give a glimpse for people into a world
in which they can combine the end of animal suffering,
having good relations with animals,
having food production close to our homes,
and having meat as well.
So this combination seemed almost too good to be true.
They suddenly did not find it alienating
or too technological anymore because it was so close.
- [Lizzie] Again, this is just a thought experiment.
It's completely imaginary
until the tech takes a huge leap forward.
- It's still the idea that is very risky,
it is very inefficient,
it will probably very expensive, etcetera.
Whether it's really doable, I don't know,
but it's certainly conceivable.
- That's one of those things
that's hard to predict about science
and technology is that like there could be these advances.
As a vegetarian who really likes to eat meat,
I would love to partake.
- While the technology develops,
we have this time to ask these big out-there questions
about the future of meat.
And Cor thinks that's crucial.
- This dualism of technology
versus changing our lifestyles is far too simplistic.
I think they're always interwoven.
But this changing of lifestyles
can be triggered by new technology.
And cultured meat could well be an example of this.
- Oh.
Hello.
In this scenario, there's... (pig chomping)
(Lizzie laughing)
I don't think he likes the idea
that we're talking about eating his kind.
Are you okay?
- [Man] Maybe he's just snobby.
- I think he just was trying to sniff things
and couldn't find food.
In this scenario, there would be.
(Lizzie laughing)