From Lab to Table: I Tasted the World's First Cultivated Meat
hey smart people Joe here I'm about to be one of the first people on Earth to eat real
chicken grown entirely in a lab that's right we're talking the most futuristic
nuggets ever through those doors you won't find any real chickens but you will find a
state-of-the-art facility for growing actual meat using biological engineering not actual
animals the researchers developing this technology think that food like this cultivated by science
is the way that we'll get many or most of the animal products that we eat in the future but
you're probably wondering one of two things why do we need this how does it taste [Music]
go way back as a food source it's been an essential part of our Evolution both
biologically and culturally but over the past Century thanks to massive population growth
and increased demand for meat worldwide the impacts of farming animals so that we can eat
them have become really devastating ethically air quality so bad for our health a highly contagious
avian flu there's a warning tonight from the U.S department of Agriculture about raw chicken linked
to a potential salmonella outbreak and especially for the environment [Music] but some Innovative
scientists think there's a way to make meat good for us and the planet instead of growing it on
the farm growing real meat here in the lab without the animal I'm Uma Valeri I am the co-founder and
CEO of upside Foods a cultivated Meat Company based out of California I was training to be
a cardiologist and during that time I was exposed to working with stem cells which are this magical
cells in our human body that can become anything so I was taking stem cells and injecting them in
the patient's Hearts to regrow the heart muscle when they had a heart attack out of cardiac
arrest and I started thinking what if we can do the same thing with meat if I take high quality
animal cells and give them high quality feed and food they can grow into wheat a relationship with
me is complicated but if you step back globally our relationship with meat has always been about
love for an enormously exquisitely tasty product and not wanting to know how it comes to the table
moving meat from the farm to your table uses a lot of resources especially compared to eating plants
more resource use equals more in environmental problems especially since we're raising five
times as much meat as we did 50 years ago and Americans are leading the charge there folks in
the US eat 149 kilograms of meat per person per year that's like eating 1200 Quarter Pounders
and while Americans love a juicy burger chicken is King making up nearly 40 of all the meat that
we eat there are pockets in which you can produce meat in a very sustainable way that is positive
for the environment and positive for climate but 99 of the mean that comes to our table is produced
according to fundamental first principles that do not scale when you try to raise an animal you have
to feed the animal so it has enough meat on the wall but the rest of the animal is just a vehicle
to get us that meat no animal was designed just to make meat an animal was designed to be an animal
love living its life have babies heel broken bones run around and live as long as it could by feeding
itself the food it can find one way to think about the environmental cost of raising meat is to
look at how efficient the process is in a perfect super efficient world it would take one calorie
of energy to grow one calorie of meat one calorie in one calorie out but we don't live in that world
for starters there's a lot of animal we don't eat consumers typically go for just a few Choice cuts
and depending on the animal it can take between 6 and 28 calories of energy in in the form of feed
to create one calorie of edible meat that's kind of like if you bought 28 hamburgers and only ate
one of them not a great return on investment especially since we could hypothetically take
the crops we grow for animals and use them to feed hungry people around the world when you
have to put in anywhere from 10 to 30 calories of food to make one calorie of food that is Extreme
non-conversion of energy so that's problem number one we also had to deal with the gas yeah that
kind of gas too there's greenhouse gas emissions coming from the animal whether it's through the
burps or the farts that's amount of that is intense and that's an enormous problem that's
very difficult to track a single cow will burp out about a hundred kilograms of methane every year
add in things like manure growing feed for livestock and changes to how we use Land
and Animal agriculture accounts for more than 13 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions if we
want to control climate change scientists agree that we have to get our carnivorous consumption
under control quick plant-based meat alternatives are having a big moment but while we're eating
slightly less red meat than our parents did and choosing lower impact Meats like chicken
more often the number of people eating plant-based diets hasn't changed much in the world's richest
countries are eating more meat overall they keep eating increasing amounts of meat every year every
decade every Century so that tells me the choice of eating meat is fundamental to who we are as
humans I don't fundamentally believe that we as humans will give up what we love that's a take
more and more people are beginning to acknowledge many believe our species connection to meat runs
too deep to Simply erase it from diets altogether meat has likely been a part of the human diet
since the beginning some anthropologists think that that our ability to eat calorie dense animal
protein is what let our brains grow so big meat is a valuable part of many cultures and traditions
too so getting rid of meat altogether might not happen soon these scientists think there's a
way to keep meat on the menu while making it more efficient and environmentally friendly
starts in the lab this is what makes it feel like we're in a brewery instead of a meat cultivation
facility that's right so do you just take a chunk of chicken breast and just drop it in then you get
meat I wish that would be a lot easier we have to go in and isolate the cells we want from a
chicken breast or a chicken thigh or what have you in a rice grain sized biopsy you're going to
get 10 million cells you know and they're going to be connective tissue muscle cells fat they're
going to be all kinds of cells stem cells even so we tease those apart and then we grow them
and then characterize which ones grow the fastest which ones produce the best meat we'd literally
do like a little competition in the best ones are the ones that end up out here the meat you
eat is of course predominantly muscle tissue but there are stem cells in there there's fat cells
there's connective tissue there's fascia there's the fibroblasts that glue everything together
there's collagen there's so many cell types interestingly under the law no blood can be
there and generally no bone unless you of course buy bonus so for us it was breaking that down to
figure out what makes meat tasty what makes meat meat and we had to ask that question because no
one has asked it really for 12 000 years since we domesticated the town this is where we take the
food powder that we have and turn it into the food liquid so we call this feed simple things we eat
every day sugars amino acids vitamins minerals the things you would find in your food we just
blend them in their purifying form with deionized water so there's no bacteria no viruses and then
this is what the cells both eat and live it is this in a way taking to the place of like what
blood would do it is kind of like that it's like blood in the sense that it has to carry
the oxygen but the oxygen is not being carried by red blood cells it's just literally dissolved and
pumped into the liquid so cells are not muscles and tissues though so where does it happen that
it goes from that mushy cell mix into what we would think of as chicken so we're going to
walk up the the catwalk but these are the tissue production cultivators we invented this sort of
technology in order to grow tissue this is one of the hardest things to do is to find ways to
make cells want to grow effectively as tissues this is where we rely on effectively what life
on Earth did for us for the last several million billion years we don't tell the cells what to do
at this point we we allow them by giving them a substrate attached to their evolutionary program
kicks on and they start forming tissues like they would inside of an animal so you're just telling
the cells you're just letting the cells do what they would normally do right the only thing we
had to do differently up to this point is show them how to swim they grow floating in a liquid
which is not something they normally do chickens don't swim I don't think they don't think I've
ever seen a chicken's foot uh yeah exactly well that's dogs of course running a facility like this
uses a lot of energy for cultivated meat to have any real potential it has to make meat in a less
energy intensive way than using animals remember that energy to meat ratio we talked about to make
cultivated chicken better than Farm chicken scientists have to get that way down and right
now these first generation factories are pretty energy intensive but one advantage they have over
farmed animals is how long it takes to grow the final product a commercial Broiler takes about six
weeks which is actually pretty incredible to get to Market weight that's through a lot of selective
breeding and great feeding practices for us to get to chicken tissue it's two weeks or less in some
cases we can be doing a chicken product every two days this facility is capable of doing about 400
000 pounds of cultivated meat at its maximum well growing chicken meat super fast is amazingly cool
it's Gotta taste good too and I'm here to put it to the test first one's actually going to be
a fried chicken sandwich that we're going to do a fried chicken sandwich is you know one of the
Pinnacle chicken items so I'm pretty excited to taste this one it looks totally normal here goes
like I want to give some incredibly scientific response to this being a scientist but
like it's a crunchy normal piece of chicken it's just striking me like how regular it is
got the crunch on the outside like it it has like the flavor and juiciness inside
it's just chicken it's really good
there's two halves here Eric but I don't know if you're gonna get the other one
you took the natural biology of how chicken cells have the programming to grow made them
do this so that when I bite into it I've got no idea that it's just right
I'm glad I didn't eat too big for breakfast I'm just going to sit here and enjoy this
this is just this is chicken So today we're going to make for you a pan seared chicken
breast it's going to be served with some charred scallions and tomatoes a little
white wine butter sauce and then we've got some fun garnishes on top for you as well
okay exactly like chicken again remind myself this is chicken if you eat chicken you know it
peels apart like there's texture to it and this is doing that and it's kind of blowing my mind
I'm just eating chicken I know I I like I said with the chicken sandwich they just want there
to be some this like profound thing but it's just normal like playing with my food tasting
is a magical moment because you're eating real meat you know real meat when you taste real meat
and it's almost literally like an explosion of taste buds and millions and billions of senses
that are coming together because as humans we know I think how to recognize meat it's hard
to quantify by science it's the art I'm kind of a foodie I like to think I have pretty well trained
taste buds so I went into this feeling well pretty skeptical that this would be anything like meat
and I was wrong this isn't plant products pretending to be chicken it really is chicken
just farmed in a totally different way than humans have ever tried but flavor and taste
aren't the only hurdles cultivated meat has to overcome and not everyone is convinced that it's
the solution to Meats environmental problems for instance while methane from animal farming
is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long so if
a cultivated meat factory gets its energy from fossil fuels it could have just as bad an impact
as the farm it's trying to replace growing cells this way also requires highly purified food and
nutrients which are currently much more expensive than what we feed animals so at least for now lab
grown meat is considerably more expensive it can cost between 21 and 236 dollars per
kilogram depending on the type of meat and how it's grown so the conventional products that are
on the market that are produced with animal agriculture have a definite role to play the
plant-based meat Alternatives have a definite role to play and cultivated meat which we are growing
as indefinite role to play and increasingly as we go into the next five to 15 to 20 to 50 years
I believe that cultivated meat will have a bigger and a bigger role to play but it's
going to take time for transformative change because if it was simple to do
we would have done it already but it's not simple to do because in the early stages because there's
no roadmap there's no blueprint you've got to figure out a lot of these things and bring it
together and if you're talking about the teacher I'd say kids grandkids great grandkids and let's
say if you're a person who believes in rebirth the future version of yourself will get really
annoyed for not pursuing these choices earlier than we did they'll be very happy we ultimately
meet the shift but I think they would watch for a period in history with horror of what we
as humans did for short-term gains that caused enormous downside that we had to dig ourselves
out of but ultimately I think they'll be grateful that we woke up that was an incredible experience
honestly I don't know if that is the answer to all of our problems but I feel like it represents the
kind of innovation that it's going to take to get out of this environmental mess that we've
created for ourselves even though it's something that felt like it sci-fi just a few years ago
it's right there on a plate in front of us I don't know if that is the answer to
all our problems but it feels real and that feels pretty good it just tastes like chicken
stay curious hey smart people I'm back here in the studio with a few more things for you first of all
thanks for coming on this curious and rather tasty science Adventure today and to let everyone know
that you stuck around to the end leave a comment with this emoji and let me know what would it take
for you to try meat that's cultivated in a lab instead of grown in an animal like is this the
future you've been waiting for are you skipping this meal since shooting this video and by the
time that you watch it upside has gotten the first ever approval from the USDA this government agency
that regulates products like this to start selling their chicken bit of coincidental timing and big
news which means there's a lot of people out there that are wanting to learn more about this like you
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