It's the annual eating of the herring in Finland.
For one week in October,
people come here to downtown Helsinki
to gorge on the freshest of fish,
and other delicious, smoky treats.
They jockey for position, prepare Instagram posts,
and enjoy some Tolkien-inspired folk.
As you may have heard, life is good for the Finns.
Their kids are smarter than yours.
Their health system is healthier than yours.
And my God, their parks are parkier than yours.
These Finns also eat really well.
On a square plate, there's some molt fed,
lightly smoked pork and wild garlic emulsion on top.
On our round plate, beetroot marshmallow.
Here I am at your run-of-the-mill fast, casual joint.
Popping some bubbly, and gobbling up a ham and cheese roll.
Followed by a NASA-inspired marshmallow made out of beets.
That is good.
That's crazy.
But the future of food for Finland
and the rest of the world may be here,
where protein is grown in a vat,
overseen by the Finnish version of Walter White.
This is Solar Foods, with its headquarters in Espoo
on the outskirts of Helsinki.
We make food out of thin air
using just electricity, water, CO2, and some minerals
as the main ingredients.
Have you ever seen Breaking Bad?
Yeah. Yeah?
Is there anything else we should know
that happens in here?
This is pretty legal.
Okay .
Until the pivot to full-blown meth lab is needed,
Solar Foods is focusing on making protein
and other nutrients with as little water
and other resources as possible.
No cows, no soy fields, just bacteria being fed in a tub
by nature, and harvested by lab coat-wearing laborers.
In a sense what we are making is an ingredient
for different food products.
So tofu, yogurts, breakfast bars,
or any meal that one could think of.
Solar Foods grabs CO2 from the fresh, Finnish air
and hydrogen, produced via solar panels,
and uses this fuel to feed a microorganism
discovered by scientists in Finnish soil.
The bacteria is then fed a cocktail of water
and a secret blend of elements
such as iron, sulfur, and calcium.
This slurry of goodness is then dried
to produce a powder that's 65% protein
with a few fatty acids and carbs making up the rest.
This is the end product, this yellowish powder.
Protein powder.
And then this is just the liquid form of that.
And how long does the drying process take?
It takes about a day to dry one kilo.
Solar Foods calls this stuff Solein powder.
Is it vetted by the FDA yet?
No.
Is it safe for consumption?
I'm told yes.
And since I'm the guinea pig for a technology show,
my gut is your gut.
This is my personal vegan pancake recipe.
It's like the regular ingredients
for pancakes, pretty much, except--
Yeah, yeah, except we're replacing
eggs with Solein powder.
That's the magic moment.
All right, here goes our batter.
Oh yeah, you're a pro.
Do you wanna try it first? I'll try it.
This is like the pancake of the future.
I've never eaten pancakes grown in a laboratory before.
It's a delicious pancake.
Those dudes may cook a mean protein powder,
but the true star of the Finnish healthier food movement
is this woman, Maija Itkonen,
the co-founder and CEO of Gold & Green.
Gold & Green makes a vegetable-based
meat replacement called Pulled Oats.
Everyone I met in Finland eats it.
It's in the grocery stores in a variety of flavors,
and you can even get it at Taco Bell
inside the vegan burrito.
It's a thing.
A brown, chunky thing.
Maija and I met in a former Nokia cable factory,
where else, to try out some Pulled Oats.
You're not trying to mimic meat necessarily at all, right?
You're just trying to make something
that's sort of delicious, that's made from oats.
That's exactly true,
and it might be that the final application is mimicking,
because when you make a burger,
it needs to be something that feels like a burger.
But what actually doesn't mimic
is the ingredient list.
The ingredient list, we actually want to make sure
that you have few things
and they're really healthy and really clean label,
and everything is based on that.
What are the big advantages of oats?
Because it's not meat, or, I mean, why oats?
It's nutritional.
It's like, marvelous.
It has so good health benefits for your heart
and digestion and blood sugar.
It's like medicine, you know.
Okay. Thanks so much.
It's like a curry?
It's delicious, I mean I would eat this
any day of the week.
So, when we got started,
we didn't even plan to sell in Finland.
This was like two years ago or?
This was 2016.
But we thought, let's just aim to test it
in couple of grocery stores.
Then it was so funny, because what happened
was that people got entirely crazy.
All the newspapers started to call us
and all the buyers started to call us,
so it was like, okay we're going to sell this in Finland.
And actually the market grew like 700% during that year.
Unlike just about every other company in Finland,
Gold & Green's headquarters
are not in a former Nokia building.
They're in a former bra factory.
And its elevator is real and spectacular.
This is where Pulled Oats come to life.
So these are the basic ingredients?
Yeah, so actually this is oat flour.
Then we have a fava bean flour.
Then we also have a yellow pea, pea protein,
but that's about it.
Okay, and then the magic,
the secret is how you blend this all together?
Absolutely, yes.
So we first make a dry material base of these ingredients.
Okay. Then we start moisturizing
and baking it, and it becomes something like this.
Like this, okay.
So this, so all this stuff-- You can taste it,
yes absolutely. This goes through
like a machine, and the machine and the process,
that's all top secret. Top Secret.
Nobody gets to see that.
But I am allowed to see this.
A brand new venture for Gold & Green.
And it's sizzling, salty, and porkish.
It's something that can be made to replace like chicken
or even like-- I know what we're doing,
we're doing bacon.
And this is not a bacon.
Maija refuses to call it bacon,
but it's pretty much bacon.
And it might even be good.
I mean, that's delicious.
It's got all the nice, salty, fatty kind of feel to it.
Yeah, yeah.
I like this a lot.
And now, thanks to a brave volunteer from Gold & Green,
a better living through Finland Interlude
that will come as quite the shock
to my American friends.
I present to you a baby,
a mother, and a baby box.
This is something that the government sends
to every mother.
Yes, or you can choose.
You maybe don't want this, and you can take the money.
So it's 170 euros.
The box, is this meant to be a crib?
Yes, it is like a safe and comfy place to sleep,
but also in this box there is 63 items.
Okay, you get a book. There is like,
the first baby book.
You get all these clothes? All the clothes.
In Finland, it is quite common that you leave the child
outside to take a nap. Okay.
So that's why we need a lot of clothes,
so the baby is warm.
They sleep outside? Yes.
That's all seasons, or just when it's warm?
Also the winter time.
Why do they sleep outside?
I think it's good for you.
How much maternity leave do you get in Finland?
Nine months.
In the box, there is also the hygiene things.
It is for the baby and also for adults.
You get like a thermometer,
a brush. There is the thermometer.
Oh I think, are these condoms?
Yes, yeah.
Man, you guys think of everything.
I think I know what that is .
One day the America dream
will also include state-provided lube, right?
Right?
By now, you're probably thinking,
these Finns are godless, vegan socialists
who have an unnatural amount of concern for nature
and general well-being.
This is probably even true.
They also have a thing for relaxing
in the glorious outdoors,
like this open-air oasis on Helsinki's waterfront.
I give to you, the Allas Pools.
Steamed to perfection.
And refreshed and frozen by the Baltic Sea.
I return to the main streets of Helsinki
to find out the other ways
in which the Finns are better than the rest of us.
Which brought me here to a startup and Suvi Haimi.
She is the co-founder and CEO of Sulapac.
And they wanna replace plastic with this.
What is important in our material,
it's microplastic free.
Eventually, plastic degrades into microplastic particles,
and they stay hundreds of years
or even permanently in the nature,
but we have created almost all the benefits of plastic
without the plastic waste problem.
The big idea here is to take waste wood,
mash it up with some plant matter,
and create a substance that can be molded
into all kinds of things
from straws to containers to coat hangers.
Then when you're done with the objects, you ditch them,
and they gracefully turn back into plant matter.
We make our materials out of wood and natural binders.
And these plant-based binders, they degrade,
so they can be eaten by naturally occurring microorganisms.
Okay. So no microplastic left.
Sulapac has pulled in some big-name investors,
including Chanel,
and has started making its products in factories
all over the world.
Here are their straws coming to life
in a factory in Saint Louis.
And unlike paper straws, these wooden things actually work.
So with the straw, how long would this last, compared,
like a paper straw, when I put it in a drink, I mean--
Exactly. It's usually melted
by the end of the drink.
Well, the criteria is that if you change the drink,
you have to be able to use this one straw.
So the whole evening you are able to drink mojitos,
for instance, which is my favorite drink,
with this one straw.
We need new initiatives
to make these microplastic-free materials
because there is so much plastic out there.
With one company with one material
you can't solve it all.
Of course, if experimental protein
and plastic-induced shame is all too much for you,
have no fear.
The Finns still have you covered.
Here at a traditional Finnish restaurant,
a very nice set of ladies
will set you up with Finnish gin,
scrumptious reindeer mousse, a ski loaded with shots,
and one hell of a bear pie.
But that's enough about Finns and their food.
Next time on Hello World,
some good old fashioned hard tech,
and a visit to a sauna with a movie star.
It's really hard to not be honest
when you're so exposed and so bare.