We've always defined meat by where it came from. This burger came from a cow,
so it's meat. But nature complicates our definitions. Take, for example,
this spider. Its legs have muscles, and you can absolutely eat this, but would you consider it
meat? And it's not just nature. Chemistry is increasingly allowing companies to create products
that challenge our traditional definition of meat. This plant-based burger, for example,
or a wooly mammoth meatball, or even human flesh. Relax, this is just chicken. Or is it?
The veggie burger. Now...
No. Are you out of your mind? Off, off.
Let's start with this. This, the veggie burger. Commercialized veggie burgers hit the market in
the 1980s. And the guy who invented these things, not this literal one, but the whole concept,
he had never eaten a meat burger before, so they don't taste very much like meat.
And honestly, they're not supposed to. Even J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who had a whole long recipe on
the internet for how to make the perfect veggie burger, says on his recipe, "They don't taste
anything like a beef burger, nor are they meant to." That is a very different approach than the
two largest players in the meatless meat market are taking: Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Now,
both of these companies are trying to save the planet by getting people to switch away
from resource-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting animal meat to alternative meat, plant-based meat,
meatless meat, whatever you wanna call it. The core idea is that this stuff should be
indistinguishable from animal meat. But color me a little bit skeptical,
because if J. Kenji Lopez-Alt can't do it, how are these companies doing it?
The answers lie here, in the intellectual property that these companies have paid
lots of money to protect, their patents. And look, we will dig into these, but before we do,
I should mention that the concept of plant-based foods replacing meat has been around way longer
than either of these two companies, much like this creepy basement has been around far longer than
the rest of this house. Vegetarian Buddhist monks have been cooking meatless meat for centuries,
but they're not trying to commercialize it like Beyond and Impossible are.
Okay, so here are two patents, one from each company, each of these filed
relatively early in the company's intellectual property, I don't know, odyssey, okay? Now,
the interesting thing here is that the companies have the same mission, but the patents seem to
indicate that they're going about it in completely different ways, which is very interesting on a
chemistry level, but also directly impacts the products that these companies produce.
So let's start with this patent, held by Beyond Meat, which is very focused
on the texture of meat. Now, Beyond claims that meat's meaty texture is
caused by a three-dimensional network of protein fibers that do two things.
First, it provides lots of chewiness, and it also traps other stuff like water and fat within it.
So when you cook meat, you get its seemingly diametrically opposed qualities. It is both chewy,
but also, if you don't overcook it, it's juicy. So what Beyond has done here is patented a
specific process that allows them to take a plant protein and transform it into what they call a
meat structured protein product. So let's look at that process. The first thing you need is a plant
protein. Let's say pea protein isolate. To that, you add some potassium bicarbonate, which is a
base that is very similar chemically to baking soda. Then you throw in some calcium sulfate,
cystine, and flavors, blend that all up, and then run it through what's called an extruder,
which is basically a giant corkscrew, while adding water, sorbitol, and more potassium bicarbonate.
Now, the extruder exerts a lot of shear forces on the mixture, and all that friction also heats it
all up. Incidentally, cheese puffs and a lot of other foods are also extruded like this. Anyway,
then you take the stuff that comes out of the extruder, and you add it to a boiling mixture
of water and some oils, let it simmer for 15 to 25 minutes, and there, you have meat. “Meat,” right?
Now, I had a couple of reactions when reading this patent and learning about this process. And the
first reaction I had was what they're describing here is fundamentally a chemical reaction. Now,
this is a very simplified version of that reaction. It is pretty wild to me that you
can take a powder made from peas, add a simple base, throw it in an extruder, and end up with
something that has the texture of ground beef. I mean, that's just wild. The second reaction
I had was that the patent says very little about the chemistry that drives this reaction. So being
curious about that, I went and did some digging and found out, not surprisingly, that there is
a 130-year-old subfield of chemistry devoted to, wait for it, the effects that specific ions can
have on solutions. Doesn't it just sometimes seem like everything happened in the 1800s
and that that was the golden age of chemistry? It's not, but it does sometimes feel that way.
Anyway, one of the first discoveries in this field was that specific ions are capable
of precipitating proteins out of solution. Both potassium and bicarbonate can do this,
so it stands to reason that potassium bicarbonate would also be able to do this
or something like this. And who knows, maybe something like this is happening inside the
extruder. I can't say. I wasn't there. I wasn't in the extruder. Fundamental rule is that you
should never go inside an extruder while it is running. Let's move on to the next scene.
Okay, now let's look at a patent held by Impossible Foods. Now,
Impossible's approach with this patent is to go after flavor. In fact, the very first
claim says that their product, when cooked, will produce at least two volatile compounds
which have a beef-associated aroma. How do you produce an aroma? With a chemical reaction.
So two reactants here: magic mix and hemoglobin. Magic mix is something I wish I had come up with,
but it's actually in the patent, and it is this. It's a list of molecules that you might find in
a hunk of beef. There's some amino acids, some nucleic acids, some salt, some sugars, and some
wild cards. The second reactant is hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is an iron-containing protein
whose main job is to transport oxygen. There's hemoglobin in blood and a closely related protein
called myoglobin in muscle. And interestingly, red meat is red, not because it's full of blood,
but because of the myoglobin in muscle juices. So when you cook a hunk of animal meat, what happens
is the myoglobin denatures, and that exposes the heme co-factor. Heme has, at its center, an iron
atom. And transition metals like iron tend to be really great catalysts. They're good at making
all kinds of chemical reactions go faster. So the naked heme reacts with all the stuff around it,
transforming it into other stuff. I know, that's very specific. But the point is that Impossible
is trying to mimic as closely as they can the chemical environment that you might find in a
piece of animal muscle. Hemoglobin mimics the muscle's myoglobin, and magic mix mimics the
muscle's many chemicals that are sitting around waiting to react with hemoglobin and myoglobin.
At this point, if you're thinking, "Wait a second, hemoglobin is in blood, and blood is
not vegetarian," you are absolutely right. But it turns out that some plants actually make their own
hemoglobin, among them legumes. So Impossible uses hemoglobin from soy. They call it leghemoglobin,
as in leg, legume, and hemoglobin, hemoglobin. Not hemoglobin from my leg.
That would not be vegetarian. So does it work? Well, according to Impossible's patent,
they ran a controlled experiment in which they compared a meatless meat patty with leghemoglobin
to an identical one without it. So they had a panel of tasters, and the tasters found that the
patty with leghemoglobin tasted beefier, bloodier, and more savory than the one without it. Now,
I can't replicate that experiment because, well, I couldn't buy food-grade hemoglobin, for some
reason. But what I can do is a blind taste test of Beyond versus Impossible Meat. So let's do it.
All right, so this is the first burger. I think this is a Beyond Burger. I'm not getting much,
if any meat flavor. I am getting some good meat texture. So on that basis, I'm gonna
go for Beyond. And this is the other one. Okay, now I'm confused. Hmm. That one tasted sweeter.
So actually, I'm thinking that's the Beyond Burger, and that this one was
the Impossible Burger. Honestly, neither one tasted particularly meaty. I mean,
we know how my taste buds are. Let me try these without bread. So this is the one I just tasted.
I think this is Beyond. Yeah, and this is impossible. All right, let's see. Yes.
Okay, so it was really hard to tell, and I'm not sure that I would've been able to
really tell the difference if I hadn't taken the bun off and actually tried the meat by
itself. The Beyond Burger really did have a more meat-like texture than the Impossible Burger,
and the Impossible Burger tasted less sweet. Like,
this tasted sweeter, right, which to me is less meaty. So this had a meatier taste,
even though I would never have placed it as like, oh, it tasted bloody or beefy.
Which one do you want?
So my takeaway from my highly unscientific taste test here is that we are a long way away from
having plant-based meats that are completely indistinguishable from animal-based meats.
But look, they're both good. They're not bad. We have arrived at the mammoth meatball.
Well, now some scientists have found a new source of meat that makes absolutely no sense.
The meatball was created by Australian cultured meat company Vow, which said it
wanted to get people talking about cultured meat.
They turned the wooly mammoth into a meatball.
Is this meatball actually made out of mammoth meat? Yeah?
Now, this meatball is a type of what's called cultured or cultivated meat. Cultured meat
is animal flesh. It is muscle, but it's grown independently from an animal. It is
not attached to a cow or a chicken or any other animal. In some ways,
cultured meat is actually the oldest of the commercialized meatless meat technologies.
It can trace its roots back to the early days of tissue and cell culture in, you guessed it,
the late 1800s. What'd I say about the 1800s, right? Is it not the golden age? No, it is not.
But a lot of cool stuff did happen, chemically speaking, in the 1800s.
Scientists wanted to grow cells outside of an animal, but not for food. What they were trying
to do was figure out what caused viral diseases. To study viruses, you need live cells because
viruses don't do anything without live cells to infect. And you can't infect a human because that
would be unethical. These days, tissue culture is used for vaccine development, drug testing,
cancer research, and all kinds of other stuff. As the technology matured, people started using cell
culture techniques to try and make meat for food. And the first lab-grown steak ever made
with the intention of being eaten was actually an art project out of Harvard. Yeah, Harvard.
These days, cells meant to be eaten are mostly grown in giant stainless steel fermenting tanks.
Really, the whole operation actually looks kind of like a brewery. Back to the wooly mammoth
meatball. To make it, scientists took wooly mammoth DNA that encodes for myoglobin. And since
that DNA was kind of in rough shape after many years of being extinct, they used African elephant
DNA to reconstruct part of the sequence. They then put that DNA into sheep cells and cultured those.
So the wooly mammoth meatball is really only some tiny percent wooly mammoth. Let's generously call
it 0.8%. It's 0.2% African elephant. And the rest, 99%, let's say, is sheep. It's 99% sheep.
Now, notice what I'm doing when I frame it like that. I'm defining the meatball culinarily. It's a
more sophisticated approach of what we did at the beginning of this video, defining this burger as
meat because it came from a cow. But meatless meat companies are defining meat chemically. And look,
despite humble beginnings, this is not indistinguishable from animal meat. I do
see a path forward towards successively better and better approximations of real meat. Like, okay,
we start to get better and better at approximating meat's texture. And we add one flavor molecule,
and then another, and then another, until we get very, very close to approximating meat's flavor.
And then one day, you'll be at the grocery store, and you'll be buying meatless meat, and you'll
take it home and cook it and realize that you will not be able to tell the difference between that
and animal meat. You just won't. Look, it's like chatbots, okay? Early AI was terrible.
[Chatbot] I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed. [Chatbot] It's true, I am unhappy.
But over the course of decades, it got better and better and better slowly, until the point where
ChatGPT was released. And it could probably pass the Turing test at this point, right?
And look, here's the crazy thing, it goes beyond imitating what already exists. Imagine a burger
that's half wooly mammoth, half spider meat. I don't know why anyone would want this, but
it's possible. Or, for example, let's say we start producing human flesh for human consumption. Now,
that is ethically and morally extremely dubious, but you see how this gets us into very uncharted
waters, right? At some point, the FDA and the USDA and other regulatory agencies around the
world will just decide what companies can and can't claim is meat. And in some cases, those
decisions will be arbitrary. Like, what's allowed to be called peanut butter versus peanut spread?
At the end of the day though, definitions tend to be socially constructed. And what that means
is that you, me, all of us, society, we will collectively decide what counts as meat. In
the meantime though, I am very much looking forward to the revitalization of ethical
cannibalism. You probably know about this case in Germany. If you haven't, just Google
Germany legal case cannibalism. Set aside an afternoon because it is a ride.