Cultivated Meat: Could It End Industrial Animal Farming?

Jeremy Gilbertson (00:00)
Disruptors and curious minds. You are thinking on paper. My name's Jeremy. This is Mark. We talk about things. We ask questions. We look at the future. We do a lot of things on this show. Today is going to be really, really interesting because it's it's an adjacent topic, but we're still talking about technology. We're still talking about infrastructure, just not the one that you might be thinking.

Mark Fielding (00:27)
Well, we go all over the place on thinking on paper, don't we, Jeremy? If it involves technology, if it involves society, then we speak about it. And this is a big one because we are talking about food today, not just any food. We're talking about meat and we are talking about antibiotic resistance. We're talking about plant-based meat. talking about, and this one is, I'm interested in this one, cultivated meat. So the agricultural landscape has a lot of

Impact on the Earth. Today we're speaking to somebody who has an idea that can reduce the amount of meat that we eat, in short. Today's guest is Bruce Frederick. He's the founder of the Good Food Institute and author of the book, Meat, How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favourite Food and Our Future. Bruce, welcome to Thinking on Paper. Thank you for thinking on paper with us today.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (01:21)
Thank you so.

Thank you so much, Mark. I'm delighted to be here.

Mark Fielding (01:27)
We're delighted to have you. I hope everyone is well fed. They've had their breakfast, their lunch or their dinner, wherever they are listening to this. Bruce.

Before we get into cultivated meat and plant-based meat, why have you decided to not try to change my mind about eating meat?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (01:50)
that has been the strategy of people who are concerned about the external costs of the way that meat is produced. So people who are concerned about the cruelty or the environmental impacts or the health impacts for at least 55 years have been essentially begging the public to eat less meat. And it's very similar to begging the public to consume less energy, to drive less, to buy fewer cars, etc.

⁓ it might be a a worthwhile endeavor, but if you track energy consumption, it has gone up inexorably since forever. And everybody expects, absent some sort of global catastrophe, it's going to keep going up. As long as population is going up, as long as GDP is going up, the world is going to consume more energy. So the entire solution to fossil fuels cannot be small as beautiful.

Basically the same thing with automobiles. There are more cars on the road, there are more people driving more miles. That has always been true. It's likely to continue. That's also true for me. It's a little less intuitive for a lot of people, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization started measuring in 1961 and every single year, a new global record. And all agricultural economists expect that's gonna be true again through so at through at least 2050.

As long as GDP is going up. So there could be some global catastrophe and it could take, you know, a dip or a serious global recession and it could take a dip. But absent that, meat consumption is going to keep going up, ⁓ which means all the harms of meat are going to keep going up. And what we're doing is saying, let's make meat in a new and better way, much the same way that somebody who's working on solar or electric vehicles or nuclear would say, let's make energy without the same fossil fuel obligations.

Mark Fielding (03:43)
I like data. Jeremy, you have any data on how many or how much meat is consumed? do you Bruce, do you have any data on how much meat we're eating? How many cows, how many sheep, how many pigs, how many chickens?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (03:56)
yes, ⁓ I think I could probably do all I think I could probably do all of that off the top of my head, but I will say for total volume of land animal meat, it's about 370 million metric tons, ⁓ which constitutes about 80 billion land animals. it's another, I think roughly 165, 170 billion tons of sea animals, which if you're including both fin fish.

Mark Fielding (03:57)
Hit us with it.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (04:23)
and things like crustaceans, it goes into the trillions of individual animals. ⁓ in the US, which is sort of toward the ⁓ upper limits in terms of per capita meat consumption, we're north of 200 pounds of meat per American every single year. And if you're looking for the five highest years in America for per capita meat consumption, ⁓ it's the most recent five, which a lot of people are surprised by.

Mark Fielding (04:50)
Is America winning the per head consumption of meat globally? Is it beating every other country?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (04:56)
I know I think there might be a couple of countries that are even higher. I think Brazil ⁓ is a little bit higher, although Brazil is gonna be disproportionately beef, so maybe we have more individual animals than Brazil does. There are I think some Eastern European and other countries that have even higher ⁓ per capita meat consumption than we do, but we're certainly we're certainly toward the top.

Jeremy Gilbertson (05:16)
So this is really interesting. Some people might be listening to this thinking, why the hell are we talking about meat? And the the the way we think about it, you mentioned energy, and energy is a parallel to this as well, because literally food is energy, right? Fuel full food is a fuel source for us, just as energy is a fuel source for infrastructure. So I think this is a really important thing to think about ⁓ within that context. I want to, before we get into

infrastructure and some great analogies that your book presents. I want to dive into the cultural side of this thing because in my show preparation, I did some research into some people that were that were looking at meat and its tie to culture. Specifically ⁓ there was a a a book called Meat a Natural Symbol. Nick Fiddess, I think Fiddis, I can't I'm probably not pronouncing that right. And Carol Adams is another author that tracks

How meat is kind of woven into the masculine identity. There's some deep stuff happening with our connection to eating meat and our eating meat as dominance over nature that a lot of these anthropologists talk about. How difficult is that? Is it going to be to kind of change culture? Because I think that's what we're trying to have a shift. We're trying to direct a culture shift a little bit with this.

Talk me through that a little bit.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (06:47)
Yeah, thanks ⁓ very much ⁓ Jeremy. I don't know if we are trying to direct a culture chef. I mean, the the point that I make in the book ⁓ is that yes, ⁓ meat is culture, ⁓ meat is a natural symbol, ⁓ kind of all of what you said. ⁓ but I think when you ask people what it is that they love about meat, ⁓ whether it has to do with tradition or culture or even masculinity, there aren't that many people who are pointing toward

The need for slaughterhouses. and the people who do are generally the sort of Joe Rogan RFK types, or some of my uncles and cousins who are hunters. They are not buying industrial animal meat. The people who are buying industrial animal meat, which is 99% plus of meat, certainly in developed economies. ⁓ those people, what they love about it is it's delicious, it's reasonably priced, it's a high, very high in protein, very high in some micronutrients like iron and B12.

so they're looking to it for nutrition, or they're looking to it for deliciousness. They want it to be affordable. ⁓ so in the same way that when we wanted electric vehicles to start to replace gas-powered cars, or we wanted ⁓ nuclear or solar or wind to replace ⁓ fossil fuels, what we had to do is we had to satisfy consumers. We had to bring down the price of solar or wind, we had to make sure that it the supply was not intermittent.

with electric vehicles, we needed to make sure it had a reasonable battery range, there was a charging infrastructure, the prices were reasonable. So, especially with cultivated meat, it's exactly the same product, but significantly cleaner, safer, healthier. And at the end of the day, as you know from reading the book, I walk through a bunch of the consumer research, and people who eat meat are largely enthusiastic about cultivated meat. And interestingly, it's the people who eat the most meat.

Who are most enthusiastic about cultivated meat. So, I mean, the hy the hypothesis of the book is we're not gonna change culture. We're not gonna convince people to eat less meat at the sort of scale that we would need to make a dent on the massive upward trajectory. But what we can do is we can make meat that doesn't require antibiotics, that doesn't contribute to pandemic risk, that requires a fraction of the land and water and pesticides and herbicides, that doesn't require slaughterhouses and the cruelty.

that's associated with that. So that's I mean, it's kind of the hypothesis of the book that we're unlikely at any scale to change how people think about meat. ⁓ so we should change the meat.

Mark Fielding (09:24)
That's so yeah, I eat meat because my parents ate meat. My kids eat meat because I eat meat that breaking that cultural chain is nigh on impossible. So

I think we're familiar with plant-based meat and we'll get to that first, but you have to speak to us about cultivated meat. So first of all, what is cultivated meat?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (09:52)
Yeah, and let me also just take a quick step back and and you know, just sort of point out that if you look at the the definition of technology, it's the practical application of scientific knowledge ⁓ in a particular area. So it is a technology that we learned in the first agricultural revolution that we could domesticate animals, we could grow crops to feed the to those animals so we wouldn't have to keep following them around, and we could make meat in that way. ⁓ and that's what we've been doing.

For about 12,000 years. That's how we've been making meat. That's the technology. It is shockingly inefficient. So the most efficient animal at turning those crops into meat is the chicken. And it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out, which means you've basically got 800% food waste. So nine times the land, nine times the water, nine times the pesticides and herbicides, and then also multiple extra stages of production. So it is just a shockingly inefficient way.

Of making meat, and it comes with a bunch of other harms that are obviously hugely problematic. So with cultivated meat, basically, just like you can take a seed or a cutting from a plant, bathe that seed or cutting in nutrients and grow a whole plant, you can take a small amount of animal muscle or animal fat, bathe that muscle or fat in nutrients, and grow essentially unlimited additional meat.

And you can concentrate that in one factory. Looks an awful lot like a brewery. So basically, you know, you can have everything from the small brew pub to the massive, you know, Anheuser-Busch ⁓ or whatever brewery, except that instead of brewing beer, ⁓ you'll be making meat. And it really does look an awful lot like a brewery. doesn't require antibiotics, doesn't contribute to pandemic risk, requires a fraction of the land and water and pesticides and herbicides and everything else.

requires far more land and inputs, so food prices can go down, ⁓ which will contribute to alleviating hunger and malnutrition. ⁓ and it takes animals largely or completely out of the equation, ⁓ which means animal cruelty goes away as well.

Jeremy Gilbertson (12:01)
Yeah, now that

Mark Fielding (12:01)
Jeremy,

can we stay on this because ⁓ I'm fascinated.

Jeremy Gilbertson (12:05)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I've got a yeah, I've got a quick follow-up on that, just to make sure I understand it. So the analogy with the seed to the plan is really cool, right? So the so if we look at like the the seed of the meat is actually the cells of existing

what we call meat and then that's used to create more of it. So once it goes through this process, you have meat pulled from an animal and meat cultivated in this process. How similarly, like biologically, do they look? And what are the differences, if so?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (12:38)
there's obviously there are obviously ⁓ quite a few differences to the process. You don't have a live animal, you don't have the need ⁓ to grow a live animal, which is what's required when you're feeding the animal currently. ⁓ but the end product is the same. It's just a different way of producing meat. ⁓ and again, it doesn't since it since there's no ⁓ digestive tract, you don't have the E. coli, the salmonella, the campylobacter.

⁓ since it's not a live animal, you don't have the in the US a hundred different veterinary drugs that the USDA and FDA have approved ⁓ at very low doses ⁓ in meat. They have a maximum daily amount that they can find of a hundred different drugs, including things like ivermectin and ractopamine. I think most meat eaters would r rather have no ractopamine and and ivermectin in their meat. if it's sea animals, you're not gonna have the microplastics, the dioxins, the mercury.

Which is the primary cause of mercury pro poisoning almost all of it ⁓ in human beings, all of that goes away. But the output ⁓ is identical. One thing that the two sort of fathers of cultivated meat point out, they're both medical doctors. ⁓ one is a guy named Mark Post in the Netherlands, the other is Uma Valletti, a Mayo clinic trained cardiologist, ⁓ Uma Valletti, who started Upside Foods, Mark started ⁓ Mosa Meat. they're both medical doctors, and they point out that we can isolate

Specific nutrients, and we could dial up or dial down ⁓ good fats, bad fats, car carcinogens, that sort of thing. ⁓ that's probably probably at least a couple of steps away. I mean, they could do it now, ⁓ but it presents some additional regulatory hurdles that I think we don't need in the short term, ⁓ and also some scientific hurdles that I think will keep be a a couple of steps down the line. ⁓ in the short term, you're looking at the exact same product.

Jeremy Gilbertson (14:32)
Mouthfield. Sorry, Mark, just

Mark Fielding (14:32)
Where are we? Where are

we? No, no, where are we today? Can I buy it?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (14:39)
In a very limited number of places ⁓ you can buy it. So ⁓ the first regulatory approval was in Singapore a little less than six years ago in December of 2020. the second and third regulatory approvals were in the US ⁓ in April of 2023, so just a little over three years ago. ⁓ there are now a dozen regulatory approvals across five countries and significant progresses and progresses, significant progress in places like sorry.

Mark Fielding (15:06)
Which meats?

Which meats?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (15:09)
⁓ so there's chicken available, beef available, salmon. There's a pork fat that is blended ⁓ with pea protein. ⁓ and then there's a company called Vow, an Australian company, ⁓ that's selling in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And they're making they're making a sort of foie gras-esque product. so it is actual meat, but it's kind of a duck foie gras blend thing.

and one of the things that they point out and that other people have pointed out as well, is the meats that we have now are not necessarily the meats that are most delicious. They're meats from the animals that are most ⁓ that were most able, that human beings have been most able to domesticate. ⁓ so they're saying, you know, let's not stop at the limits of what we can domesticate, let's stop at the limits of the human human imagination. and their first sort of

Mark Fielding (16:03)
Foie

gras for the French market, Bruce. How much for an eight ounce steak of cultivated beef?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (16:12)
So I'm not sure. There's only one company doing steak. It's called Olif Farms. It's in Israel. They actually sent some product up to the space station. They did a partnership with SpaceX ⁓ and sent some cultivated meat up to the up to the International Space Station. And I I don't know what their what their cost of production is. ⁓ I think the one company that has announced is Mosumat. They said that their price of production is down by a factor of a hundred thousand from the prototype 12 years ago, so 99.999%.

percent. ⁓ I crunched those numbers and I think it was about $10 a pound, which is still, I think, twice the cost of goods sold for beef. but in 12 years, that's a much quicker trajectory than what we've seen for solar, for EVs, for, you know, most ⁓ technologies. It's it's pretty good, although still too, too high.

Jeremy Gilbertson (17:04)
Could we taste the difference side by side?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (17:07)
No, you can't taste the difference. And actually I I just yesterday was looking at a Kara Swisher ⁓ has a like I Wanna Live Forever ⁓ special on CNN and she went and ate ⁓ cultivated salmon with ⁓ company Wild Type. ⁓ one of their co-founders is also a medical doctor. ⁓ that's pretty common in cultivated meat because it's basically, you know, medical doctors are trained in in tissue engineering oftentimes. ⁓ and this is basically tissue engineering, but focused on ⁓ focused on growing meat rather than growing human tissue.

and she tried it and said she was just completely blown away, absolutely could not tell the difference, which has also been our experience. I was ⁓ having ⁓ cultivated meat at one of Jose Andres's restaurant when it launched in 2023, ⁓ with the guy who was then CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. he's now a professor at Georgetown in the London School of Economics. ⁓ and his name is Andrew Steer. He previously ran the World Resources Institute, and he said it was like the best cut of chicken.

⁓ he had ever had. And that's a lot of people talk about the consistency of cultivated meat. So you've got a capacity where, you know, Kobe beef is gonna cost the same amount as chicken, because it's gonna be the same ⁓ difficulty of creation. Obviously, creating the steak is gonna be more expensive than creating like a burger. ⁓ but once you've got the burger, it's like the best burger you've ever had. Or once you've got the chicken, it's like the best burger, best chicken you've ever had, and that will be consistently so.

⁓ so oftentimes if people eat meat, you know you can get some gristle, you can get some veins, you can get some particularly tough meat. ⁓ this ⁓ this has a a much greater ⁓ tendency toward consistency, and it can be consistency ⁓ aligned to whatever your preferences are.

Mark Fielding (18:52)
Does it cook at the same speed as regular meat? part of cooking is the preparation and part of the culture of meat is the preparation. Does it cook in the same amount of time?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (19:04)
Yeah, I it it cooks in the same amount of time because it's the same thing. ⁓ the early iterations of a lot of this are likely to be blends. ⁓ so it's likely going a lot of the early iterations are probably gonna be like 10% cultivated meat ⁓ and then 90% ⁓ either mycoprotein or plant protein, just so that they can hit taste parity sooner. And because as I'm sure you've experienced, most of the plant-based meats are not very good. ⁓ so this will allow the plant-based meat.

to be indistinguishable from animal meat by having, you know, 10% actual animal meat, but produced in this new and better way. ⁓ and then I imagine the cooking experience could be somewhat different. although I I'm I'm guessing that culinary scientists ⁓ and plant biologists and others, they can probably get it to ⁓ identical cooking experience as well, I would think.

Jeremy Gilbertson (20:00)
So going back to the culture side of the fence a little bit, ⁓ are there any like well known chefs that are making waves in this world by using these ingredients and and kind of generating some interesting buzz?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (20:17)
⁓ I mean, as I as I mentioned a minute ago, Jose Andres has cooked with it a bunch of times ⁓ and has been a very positive and enthusiastic ⁓ spokesperson for it. ⁓ there's a woman, Tracy Desjardins, in San Francisco. she had a restaurant called Jardinaire. ⁓ she has been an enthusiastic proponent, ⁓ another San Francisco restaurateur and Michelin-starred chef.

who I th Dominique Cren ⁓ has been ⁓ an enthusiastic booster. there have been there have been a few others, ⁓ but those are the ones that that leap to mind.

Jeremy Gilbertson (20:58)
Have you ever heard of Mark? Have you ever heard of ⁓ Umaro before? Umaro, yeah. I've I first came across I'm kind of a Shark Tank junkie. I watched that show a lot. And Umaro was on ⁓ season 13 of Shark Tank and actually got a million bucks from Mark Cuban. ⁓ I've never tasted it, I've never seen it out anywhere. What do you know about ⁓ Umaro, Bruce?

Mark Fielding (21:03)
Umaro? No, what is that? Or who is that?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (21:25)
I mean Amaro actually came out of ⁓ so I think we haven't gotten to this yet, but I in addition to writing the book Meet, a decade ago I started an organization called the Good Food Institute. we're a completely nonprofit organization, and just like environmental defense or World Resources Institute ⁓ works on energy transition and creating the policies and the science and the innovation that will allow ⁓ solar and nuclear and EVs and other ⁓ technologies to be successful.

that's what GFI does, but focused on plant-based and cultivated meat. we have about 250 team members around the world. The plurality of our team members are scientists. And the number one thing we're doing is trying to help governments recognize that plant-based meat and cultivated meat can be a boon to their economies and also help their food security, food self-sufficiency, food systems resilience. So that's what we do.

but one of the other things we do is we grant three to five million dollars per year through a competitive grant program. ⁓ and it's focused on solving key technological challenges to getting to price and taste parity for these technologies. and Umero actually came out of a GFI ⁓ $250,000 grant to the two founders of the company.

⁓ and I believe I haven't looked into Umaro in a little while, but I believe it continues to be ⁓ on shelves and they continue to innovate. Beth Sodder and Amanda Styles are the two co-founders. And ⁓ yeah, it was a big moment for us when they were on Shark Tank and and got that ⁓ investment. And I think they have continued ⁓ to innovate and produce their product.

Mark Fielding (23:02)
How about any of the bigger famous companies in England, Linda McCartney, you've got these big industrial vegan vegetarian companies, they? Because like that, it's chicken feed really, a million dollars, it's not very much, it's not going to change. Yes, it's good for research, but you need a bigger splash here. Are any of the bigger companies doing anything?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (23:23)
Yeah, I mean the the exciting thing, and I I talk about this in the book as as one of the reasons that plant-based meat and cultivated meat have been able to stay out of the culture wars in a way that's obviously different from telling people what to eat. so your opening question was ⁓ why not tell people what to eat? Why do this? And I had a more utilitarian answer than this. ⁓ but it's also the case that if you're telling people what to eat, you're very quickly in the US, and I think probably just about everywhere, certainly also Brazil.

you're gonna get wrapped up in other people screaming, don't tell me what to eat. ⁓ so by focusing on innovation and consumer choice ⁓ and science and small business and all these sorts of things, we can stay above the culture wars. And one of the things that's allowed us to do that is that the largest meat and food companies in the world ⁓ are enthusiastic about these technologies. So JBS is the largest meat corporation in the world, ⁓ obviously also the largest meat corporation in Brazil.

⁓ GFI, ⁓ I mentioned what we do. We exist also. GFI is actually six organizations because we have GFI in the US, ⁓ but then we also have India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Europe. and we work with the meat industry everywhere that we operate. we go to meat industry conferences and talk to and table to talk to people in the meat industry about the fact that this is meat, just produced in a different way.

JBS of the three largest meat companies in the world is probably the one that has been most enthusiastic about both cultivated meat and plant-based meat. They actually own the vegetarian butcher in Europe, which I think is Europe's largest plant-based meat company. ⁓ and they're doing a bunch of stuff on their own, focused on commercializing and advancing innovation in cultivated meat. And then Tyson ⁓ and Cargill, the world's number two and three meat companies, the US is number one and number two.

⁓ meat companies are also ⁓ enthusiastic investing ⁓ in both plant based and cultivated meat.

Jeremy Gilbertson (25:26)
Yeah, there are so many parallels to to the technological discussion. Tech you know, meat and food as technology, as energy source. It's it's really interesting to to kind of think about this. ⁓ so I read, I mean, GFI's done amazing work, and this some of the things you're talking about are pretty incredible. And and yeah, I did some research on it as well. ⁓ let's talk about governments catalyzing innovation.

⁓ we talk about that a lot on the show. That you know, this the space tech industry has largely been helped out by governments.

⁓ the recent executive orders on quantum computing are helping the quantum industry out. ⁓ correct me if I'm wrong, you guys did GFI did a a needs assessment in in 2025 to kind of say this is the number that we need to basically jumpstart the industry. I think it was $10 billion. Can you ⁓ can you explain like how that needs assessment was put together and what the $10 billion would generate for?

The ecosystem.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (26:35)
Yeah, so that was a McKinsey needs assessment that we are leaning on. ⁓ I expect that we'll have a new one ⁓ circa January. We're definitely gonna have ⁓ a beta version of a technological readiness analysis in January. ⁓ up until maybe six or eight months ago, ⁓ our science team, their response to the idea that it would be useful to have a comprehensive analysis of what's gonna be required to get to price and taste parity, ⁓ is that there's just

Just

too much that we don't even know that we don't know to try to isolate every single step to get us to price and taste parity. They now feel like they can do a reasonable job of that. So in January, we're gonna have a we're we will have a sort of beta version, ⁓ and then we'll sort of do a wisdom of the crowds analysis. ⁓

To try to hone it into something ⁓ that can actually be peer review published, et cetera. And we'll have ⁓ in January our best understanding of literally everything that has to happen to get to price and taste parity for both plant-based meat and cultivated meat. ⁓ and there's gonna be a fair amount of RD on the front end. So that $10.1 billion number, ⁓ I believe that 4.7 of it was research and development. ⁓ and then

Five point, I think actually 4.4 of it was RD, and then 5.7 of it ⁓ was infrastructure and scale out. And the entire goal is basically to get ⁓ plant-based and cultivated meat to price and taste parity, at which point markets can take over. So very much if you're talking about advanced chips, ⁓ or you're talking about ⁓ incentives for things like solar ⁓ and nuclear energy, or you're talking about ⁓ incentives for

other sorts of biopharma or other innovations, ⁓ what does it look like to get them to price and taste parity? At which point the private sector can simply take over, produce and scale. and that's what those numbers were focused on. ⁓ they were done ⁓ now five years ago. ⁓ and what we know scientifically ⁓ now versus five years ago, it's probably at least 35 times as much, maybe quite a bit more than that. my expectation.

Is that the RD side of those numbers is going to go down and the infrastructure size ⁓ number will probably go up. But the thing to remember about the infrastructure number is you get all of that money back if you get to price and taste parity, which is the entire goal. So those would be investment, things like long term low interest loans and other things that can incentivize the industry and get it where it needs to go.

Mark Fielding (29:22)
Can I just ask you to clarify because you keep mentioning taste parity but earlier you said that I wouldn't be able to taste the difference and that that podcaster whose name we shall not mention said that she couldn't taste the difference.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (29:34)
yeah, indistinguishable. ⁓ so it's it's when I say taste parity, ⁓ I mean indistinguishable and then better. ⁓ but people who love the taste of meat ⁓ need to eat it and immediately say, Yes, this I would have thought this was conventional meat. and ideally I would have thought this was the best conventional meat I ever had. ⁓ and

Mark Fielding (29:59)
So

it hasn't passed the Jeremy's barbecue test yet. It's not the same. It doesn't taste exactly the same.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (30:03)
Cultivity has.

Jeremy Gilbertson (30:07)
Happy to sample if you wanna yeah, we can do some R and D at the Gilbertson household this summer, yeah.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (30:12)
cultivated meat has. ⁓ so cultivated meat is at taste parity. People who eat cultivated salmon, cultivated chicken, cultivated beef, ⁓ the vow product, ⁓ they think it's indistinguishable. And as I mentioned, Andrew Steer said it was like among the best ⁓ chicken meals he'd ever had. ⁓ so cultivated meat is is there. ⁓ plant-based meat is close. ⁓ I think there are like six products where people who love meat.

⁓ half or more of them say that it is indistinguishable, ⁓ but not everybody. ⁓ and I think four of those six products are by Impossible Foods. ⁓ so we have a little ways to go, and and all of those products cost at least twice as more, the beef but twice as much. the beef costs twice as much, the chicken costs like four times as much. ⁓ so we have a ways to go ⁓ on scaling so that we can get to price parity. We have a a few products that most meat eaters like as much.

Mark Fielding (30:58)
Yeah.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (31:11)
but with cultivated meat, we're there ⁓ on in distinguishability.

Mark Fielding (31:15)
Bruce, a few weeks ago, and this happens quite regularly, I spend my time between the UK and France and sometimes I need to go back to England from France or I need to go back to France from the UK. And on more than one occasion, I've been stopped from traveling because of French farmers. They are very protective. In the UK, the lobbies in America, I don't need to speak about the beef and the milk lobbies in America. Everyone's well aware of how powerful they are.

The numbers are blurry, but let's say ish, a billion people are reliant on animal agriculture in some way. Maybe the number is less than that. Maybe it's not that high. It's a lot of people.

What happens to those? We speak about collateral damage on this show a lot. The collateral damage of the progress for tech. What happens to these people? They can't, can they pivot into producing this meat?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (32:13)
Yeah, I mean I I spend some time on this in chapter 10 of the book. ⁓ and this is obviously not something that is automatically ⁓ solved by a shift to plant-based and cultivated meat. but because it requires so much less land, it's the sort of thing where if we brought the political will, ⁓ it could be solved. So I start from the observation that farming is already and ranching is already really, really hard. ⁓ a big part of that.

Is the ethos of get big or get out. ⁓ everywhere in the world, ⁓ the number of farmers, the number of ranchers is going down. In most places in the world, that's happening even as volume of production is going up. ⁓ and none of that has to do with plant-based or cultivated meat. So French farmers are pissed, Indian farmers are pissed, American farmers are pissed, and none of that has to do with plant-based or cultivated meat. ⁓ so it would not be self-executing.

But we could

Mark Fielding (33:11)
No,

it's to do with their livelihood being taken away and this would do the same thing.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (33:14)
Exactly.

Well, ⁓ the and and but the observation in the book is that ⁓ it is already incredibly hard. So let's start there. They're already incredibly angry. Let's start there. What would it look like to create policies that leaned in on prioritizing the needs of farming families in France, in the US, in Brazil, everywhere? if we are going to need, like right now, we use about three billion hectares of land.

for animal agriculture. It's about 80% of agricultural land. The World Resources Institute says if meat consumption keeps going up at the level it's expected to be going up, we're gonna need to double that. And they say there will be no wild spaces left, no forests, no savannas, no wild spaces. Three billion hectares is about how much we've got left globally. ⁓ it's hard to imagine how we turn back the clock on get big or get out.

And change the policies that farmers are angry about now if that kind of need just continues. So, my hypothesis in the book, and my hypothesis generally, is that if we can require vastly less land, that will open up opportunities to increase regenerative ranching, which has higher price points for farmers and ranchers, to increase organic and foods for human consumption instead of having to grow the vast majority of crops for.

Chickens and pigs and farmed fish, we could incorporate ecosystem services ⁓ into how we think about land stewardship. It's not just let's ranch animals and grow crops, let's put some of this ⁓ into carbon nature-based carbon sequestration ⁓ and biodiversity preservation. Those sorts of things, and there's a group called Green Alliance in the UK that actually modeled this in Europe. They looked at 10 European countries.

⁓ and analyzed if we shifted meat production, meat consumption in these ten countries to two-thirds ⁓ alternative meats, and we used a third of that land ⁓ for domestic consumption, a third of that land for ⁓ ecosystem services, and a third of that land ⁓ to increase the amount of organic and regenerative animal farming, what would happen? and it allowed for four times as much, ⁓ just on a third of the freed up land, allowed for

four times as much agroecology and regenerative ranching. Now, again, that doesn't happen automatically. ⁓ what you do with that land is going to be, you know, up to markets, but we could have government policies that incentivize that kind of farming, ⁓ which would be very good for farming and ranching families. and if we need more and more and more land, it's really hard to imagine what the solution for farmers and ranchers is going to be.

⁓ so it's not self-executing. The, you know, the the the alternative meats don't naturally solve ⁓ agricultural consolidation, but they certainly open up room to solve agricultural consolidation. And that's why we would love to see alliances across alternative proteins, agroecology, regenerative, ranching, ⁓ farmer cooperatives and and all that sort of thing as well.

Jeremy Gilbertson (36:30)
So the you mentioned farming is is hard number one, yeah, right off the bat. I and I don't I don't I don't I'm not very well versed in agriculture and that sort of thing, but I've heard things that that puzzle me a little bit with that. I I wanna throw this out. So like there are certain farms that get paid not to farm.

Right. Is is there some truth in that? And what is that? What is that? If we could just look at the the legacy agricultural ecosystem, like what is that doing? And is there a is there a place to to kind of write that ship with with the new way of doing things?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (37:11)
I mean it's certainly true that agricultural subsidies ⁓ incentivize the wrong things. ⁓ I know there was payment not to farm. Well, I mean there's there's some degree of of payment not to farm ⁓ in the US, but it's like a sort of perverse

Ostensibly it's it's ecosystem preservation, but it ends up being like on the outskirts of ranches in ways where wildlife services is still killing all the wildlife. ⁓ so it ends up not doing what it was supposed to be doing. I think mostly what people who criticize current farm subsidies, there's something called the true cost of food. And it says that the true cost of our current agricultural system, once you incorporate the external costs of environmental harm and the external costs.

Of things like heart disease and cancer and obesity to the current incentives, the true cost of food ends up being like $10 trillion more. and they claim conservatively than the actual cost. So the external costs add up to about $10 trillion. ⁓ and that has, I think, a lot to do with what you're describing. people have been trying to change the current system for a really long time.

And the thing about the current system is that it does incentivize massive amounts of production. And in a world that wants to eat more and more meat and all of the inefficiency involved in that, again, nine calories in to get one calorie out of chicken, 40 calories in to get one calorie out of beef, something like 11 calories in to get one calorie back out from farmed salmon, ⁓ that ends up being a system where the current incentive structure ⁓ actually does maximize the number of calories.

but it's a huge expense to ecosystems, climate change, clean water, clean air, ⁓ and human health, even before you get to, they don't even factor in things like antimicrobial resistance in those numbers, or pandemic risk in those numbers. So, yes, ⁓ if you didn't need to produce the number of calories that we need to produce, because the vast majority of of those calories are being fed to farm animals, that would open up ⁓ the opportunity to think about those subsidies.

in a different and better way.

Mark Fielding (39:26)
I'm going to pick up the baton here, Jeremy, and defend the farmers and defend UK agricultural subsidies. I've got one word for you. Supermarkets. I've got a few words for you. The death of the high streets. I've got another word for you. Small farms. Subsidies were brought in to make agriculture, to keep agriculture going.

With the rise of the big farm, the little farm instead cannot operate. They cannot survive when everyone's selling all their food to the supermarkets. Impossible. So I can't speak about America, but in the UK as part of the European farming subsidy, subsidies to protect the small farm. The way that you asked the question will have annoyed a lot of farmers because you said, farmers get paid not to farm. ⁓ that's really bad. Well,

We should definitely do it. Get some farmers on the show.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (40:28)
Yeah, and and I would also get ⁓ people who are actually, you know, the people who are doing the true cost of food, because my recollection, so I just Googled this, so take it for what it's worth, but ⁓ this says and I'm you're learning it as I am, ⁓ approximately six percent of the UA EU's direct farming subsidies go to very small farms because the common agricultural practice allocates funds primarily

primarily by land area, the vast majority of payments, about 80%, go to the 20%, the the largest 20% of farms. that's obviously not answer answering UK, but ⁓ certainly in the US, ⁓ since the early 70s when ⁓ the ⁓ Secretary of Agriculture ⁓ first came up with the idea of get big or get out. ⁓

Farm subsidies have been have not been going to small farmers, which is why small farms and small ranch ranches continue to go out of business, go out of business, go out of business. And I do put some numbers on this in the book. The size of farms, the size of ranches gets bigger and bigger and bigger. ⁓ and then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing. The larger they are, the larger their subsidies and the small farms ⁓ are adversely impacted. Based on this, it looks like that's true ⁓ of the EU as well, but but maybe it's not true of the UK. ⁓ I'm I'm not an expert.

Jeremy Gilbertson (41:43)
Yeah, I think the the the not farm paid not farm thing, I start thinking about the idea of just controlling a mark controlling something that's un that's emergent, that's uncontrollable, it's a market, right? And you're trying to influence supply and demand and pricing and all of that stuff on the market. But good perspective from your side, Mark, too. Let's talk about where the money is coming in and where it's going from an investment perspective. We always like to

Always like to look at that. I I don't know if this is accurate, but according to my research, I found that seventy that seventy-five cents out of every dollar that comes into this alternative protein market goes to fermentation. Is that correct? And if so, what the heck is fermentation related to all of this as an alternative protein source?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (42:37)
I'm not sure if that number is correct. That might be the correct number for the last couple of years. It wouldn't surprise me. ⁓ and there are two forms of fermentation. in the introduction to the book, I point out that the company corn, Q-U-O-R-N, ⁓ you can actually like find them ⁓ this year self-identifying as a plant-based meat company. but they're actually not. they use mycoprotein. So

⁓ for the vast majority of people, they're not going to know that Q U O R N is not a plant-based meat because mycoprotein, fungi, ⁓ most people I think assume is a plant, unless they're like asked. Maybe most people could get the answer right. but the main thing is ⁓ fungi, mycoprotein has to be fed, they don't have photosynthesis, they don't make their own food. ⁓ and that's part of that fermentation number. ⁓ actual companies like Corn, the Better Meat Company, Nature's Find.

other companies that are basically making whole products designed to replicate meat ⁓ but using mycoprotein, much like Impossible uses soy or Beyond Meat uses peas. And then the other half of that, and I think probably the bulk of the investment money, is something called precision fermentation. And precision fermentation involves basically taking yeast and programming the DNA of something like casein ⁓ into the yeast. You could also program the DNA.

Of a meat protein or an egg protein or whatever into the yeast. And then just like you can use yeast to spit out alcohol, you can use yeast to spit out animal proteins. And that is actually how the heme and the impossible burger is made, is using precision fermentation. It's how something like 99% of the rennet in cheese is made and has been since the mid-1990s.

it's how insulin now is made. Insulin used to come from ⁓ I think pig intestines. ⁓ rennet used to come from calf stomachs, ⁓ and now they're using synthetic biology, which is also called precision fermentation.

Jeremy Gilbertson (44:43)
Interesting. So when I read that fermentation, I'm thinking about ⁓ I'm thinking about kimchi and like, you know, that that sort of thing. But this is a entirely different in in the the the precision nature of actually reprogramming the biology of things to to yield a different result. Super interesting.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (45:00)
Yeah, in the in the intro ⁓ sorry.

Mark Fielding (45:00)
I was thinking about wine and beer.

I was thinking about wine and beer, not kimchi.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (45:07)
Yeah, or or sauerkraut or ⁓ fame famously over here, RFK Jr. ⁓ talked about how he eats a lot of meat and he eats a lot of fermented foods. so he actually travels with sauerkraut, ⁓ which is kind of interesting. But in any event, yes, this is in the intro to the book, I say most people if you're thinking about ⁓ if you're thinking about fermentation, you're thinking about kimchi or beer or sauerkraut or something like that. So it's unhelpful. ⁓ so I I fold

mycoprotein ⁓ biomass fermentation into plant-based in the discussion of the book. And then I fold precision fermentation, which is going to be used either for ingredients in plant-based meat, ⁓ or it's going to be used to create ⁓ the feed for cultivated meat. So I just fold it into those two discussions. But we do have that it is one third ⁓ of the alternative protein equation. And we have significantly more than probably any of your

⁓ viewers and listeners ⁓ would want to know ⁓ on the GFI website ⁓ into the science of both forms of per of fermentation. So that's just GFI dot or G.

Mark Fielding (46:19)
Let's get scary. Scare us a little bit, Bruce. Let's talk about antibiotic resistance. I know on your TED talk, that was the button. So scare us.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (46:30)
Yeah, I mean it is a little terrifying, antibiotic resistance. So, if people really want to scare, you could Google the end of working antibiotics. ⁓ an even bigger scare, add the word China to your Google search for the end of working antibiotics.

Mark Fielding (46:43)
Doesn't that add

to anything that makes it scarier if you're led to believe?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (46:47)
I mean, at least it

yeah, I mean, at least in the in this case it's real. I mean, the the the world has not banned a lot of human relevant antibiotics from use in farm animals. ⁓ and this is chapter three of the book. ⁓ 70% of the medically relevant, so 70% of human prescribed antibiotics are currently fed to farm animals. ⁓ not because those animals are sick, but because if you're gonna cram 50,000 chickens in a shed, a hundred thousand.

⁓ salmon in a tank, your death losses are going to be astronomical. And the industry realized actually they won't be ⁓ if we just drug these animals up. They can live through these conditions until we slaughter them. And that is one of the top two, probably the top cause of antimicrobial resistance, which is leading us toward the end of working antibiotics. And both of the top causes, over-prescription in humans.

And use in animals get worse every single year and have been getting worse every single year for decades. ⁓ we are very unlikely to make progress on overuse in humans because that's actually an equity issue. We have underuse in humans in developing economies, ⁓ but we can eliminate the use in animals, which would go a long way toward preserving working antibiotics if we just phase them out in animals, which plant-based and cultivated meat allow us to do.

And the end of working antibiotics is the end of modern medicine. ⁓ you cut your knee, you could, you know, the the antibiotics that the doctor would prescribe ⁓ don't work. You get a tooth infection, ⁓ the antibiotics are not gonna work. So dental surgery becomes impossible. Things like cesarean sections, ⁓ death losses from infection, from C-sections, would skyrocket ⁓ every kind of medical procedure.

that benefits from antibiotics. Like all of those death losses just skyrocket. ⁓ so it is it's pretty scary. The UK government said

Mark Fielding (48:50)
How's it measured?

How do we measure the effectiveness of antibiotics? How do we measure the resistance?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (48:58)
⁓ so they can figure out, and they do figure out ⁓ when antibiotics stop working. ⁓ so there's a journal of the American, no, the Lancet ⁓ published a review a couple of years ago, and it said that right now, 1.3 million people per year are dying from antibiotic resistant superbugs. Their prediction is that it's gonna be 10 million people per year by 2050.

⁓ and in addition to the 1.3, which are a direct result, there are another three or four million where antibiotic resistance superbugs were a contributing factor to ⁓ people's death. ⁓ and that number is going up every single year. ⁓ and in each of the sort of opening chapters, the first chapter is about hunger and malnutrition, second is environment, third is antimicrobial resistance, fourth is pandemic risk. In addition to the link between the way that we produce meet right now.

and those harms. I also dive into what's being done outside the realm of the meat industry to address those harms. And the only one where we're making any progress on anything is hunger and malnutrition. Across the environmental issues, across antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk, ⁓ none of the other potential interventions are making any progress either. But plant-based and cultivated meat ⁓ could just simply remove the top cause of pandemic risk.

and one of the top two causes of antimicrobial resistance, which could spell the end of modern medicine.

Jeremy Gilbertson (50:29)
So

Mark Fielding (50:31)
I feel like

I'm on diary of a CEO. That we should put that as the trailer. That is a mic drop.

Jeremy Gilbertson (50:38)
Well, it's it's it's a common thread I think that we find a lot on this show is, you know, another another, you know, analogy maybe, if we want to entertain it, is like when we are on our phones using an app or we're on our computers using Claude or Chat GPT, the extensions and repercussions of pushing a button on your laptop are not completely visible.

to the user. W Bruce, would you say that's a right? Yeah, mostly in I mean that's that's a how do we quantify that as something acros that happens across these systems? Because it it's similar, is it not?

Mark Fielding (51:07)
They're invisible.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (51:18)
I mean, it it's it's you know it's it's so similar that it has a name, ⁓ external cost. and I don't think anybody in economics has figured out how you incorporate external costs into the price of things ⁓ beyond regulations. And once you have an industry as powerful as the tech industry, or an industry as powerful as the meat industry, as well as like consumers that are not gonna want higher prices either, ⁓ something as omnipresent, especially ⁓ as meat consumption.

The implications of internalizing the external costs are higher prices, which most people are not enthusiastic about. ⁓ and from a energy consumption standpoint, we do have ⁓ gas taxes, ⁓ and we do have for the external costs of tobacco, tobacco taxes, their alcohol to excise taxes, that sort of thing. ⁓ but really they don't go that far. ⁓

Tobacco industry is doing great. ⁓ The oil and coal mining industries are still making massive profits, et cetera. ⁓ But if you can do renewable energy, if you can do electric vehicles, if you can actually make the product in a different way, that can be part of the solution. ⁓ I don't know what the solution is on the tech front, although I agree with you that the analogy is apt ⁓ and the external costs of tech use are obviously significant.

Obviously, countries like Australia ⁓ and the UK are attempting to address it. I don't know how I don't know how likely that is in the US.

Mark Fielding (52:50)
Not very.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (52:52)
Yeah, that's that's that's my assessment too, unf unfortunately. And that's my assessment here too. I mean, if you if you look at sort of the history of attempting ⁓ to make any progress on any of these environmental or health ⁓ regulations that might in some way ⁓ increase the price of meat, they've never gone anywhere or changing subsidies, never gone anywhere. ⁓ but if we can make meat from plants, if we can cultivate meat from cells, ⁓ that can have the same effect solving those problems or

markedly ameliorating them ⁓ without meeting with opposition from from incumbent industry, ⁓ which I think makes makes the th makes the intervention tractable.

Mark Fielding (53:33)
Has the action to your book fueled your optimism or dampened your optimism?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (53:41)
⁓ I mean it was interesting writing it, ⁓ and it's interesting to me how many people read it ⁓ and take ⁓ kind of an exclusively optimistic message from it. ⁓ because it's not, you know, it it sort of has two competing messages. One of the messages is we can do this. the science looks good for both plant-based ⁓ and cultivated meat. there don't seem to be any ⁓

science or engineering challenges that are insurmountable. And not only that, it's probably a lot easier than something like getting where we are on solar and electric vehicles and probably multiple other technologies. But at the same time, the fact that the science and engineering works doesn't mean that it's going to happen. So I really liked in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's book Abundance, they have a line that's something like the world is filled with innovations that are waiting to be discovered, or something like that.

⁓ so it's not self executing, and I walk through a bunch of examples.

Of things like mRNA ⁓ and penicillin, how long it took for electric vehicles and solar to catch on, that sort of thing. ⁓ and it's really, I mean, it's taken decades longer than it could have if the world had brought the will. I think the same sort of thing could be true here. ⁓ so it's kind of a a call to action. ⁓ we can do this, but it's still very possible that we won't if we don't bring the will. ⁓ so the conclusion of the book is sort of if you agree with me that this is critically important.

Here are some ways that you can pitch in and try to make it happen as fast as possible.

Mark Fielding (55:13)
How are you thinking about this, Jeremy? Are you going to cancel your barbecue for the weekend?

Jeremy Gilbertson (55:14)
What?

No, I I so I man, I've I've tried the plant-based meats and and they just they're just funky, man. And ⁓ they but I do have a bigger picture look at this with the with the cultivated meat. Sounds really interesting. And once the once the price parity comes

Together. I think it's super compelling and and the reasons to rewrite that system are are tremendous. So I want to do a quick comparison, ⁓ Mark. This is where my head's going with all of this. So we talk about this is a technology, food is an energy source, food is energy, right? ⁓ and we're talking about infrastructure. So ⁓ Bruce, we unpacked ⁓ something in the space tech industry that NASA put out, basically a user's guide to the moon. And it it basically cast out

Hey, here's what we need from the industry to make a permanent presence on the moon happen. If we did an analogy to this ecosystem, to this infrastructure, and you could put out, ⁓ you know, ⁓ our guide to embracing cultivated meat, what what would be like four key pillars that that you know the private industry could take action on and potentially benefit from the investment into?

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (56:34)
Yeah, I mean the private industry is doing that, right? Like JBS is working on cultivated meat, they're building out infrastructure, they're putting money into RD. Tyson and Cargill are investing in cultivated meat companies as well as plant-based meat companies on both ⁓ on both sides of that equation. ⁓ I mean, one of the things I point out in the book is that because the way we produce meat right now, it's not just that it needs nine times the calories for chicken and even more for everything else. That's nine times the land, the water, the pesticides, the herbicides.

But you also have the feed mill, you have the farm, you have the slaughterhouse. ⁓ for every unit of shift in the direction of plant-based meat or cultivated meat, you actually require significantly less inputs, significantly less land, etc. So your net infrastructure cost.

⁓ if you were not factoring in the sunk costs of the current system, your net infrastructure costs over time go down significantly. So, in terms of long-term planning, your net infrastructure costs go down significantly. ⁓ but it's a significant cap X cost on the front end. ⁓ and I do start to model some of that. I look at what the steel needs are gonna be for 100% cultivated meat globally to replace all land animal meat, 370 million metric tons.

Would require something like 2% of the annual global steel production. So it's pretty inconsequential. It just feels eminently doable. And in the book, I offer, I think, three ways that it could happen fairly quickly. On our current trajectory, you know, I think I think I say in the book that I think the transition is inevitable eventually, but eventually is doing a ton of work in that sentence. It could be decades.

But I think if a major company like JBS or Tyson or Nestle or ADM decided to go all in, ⁓ they have really bad profit margins. So that might be not possible, but that would be one option. Another option would be a country like South Korea, which has the lowest food self-sufficiency ratio in the OEC OECD, ⁓ and is probably ⁓ the standout leader in Asia after China. But as a per capita investor, it's the standout leader. They could probably do it all by themselves.

⁓ and then a company like Anthropic or Microsoft or Google, Google's Deep Mind, ⁓ if they decided we are going to solve this, they could probably solve it pretty quickly. ⁓ and it would not be, especially if they were using the sort of AI capacity that they have to solve the RD questions, the AI capacity that they have to solve the sort of infrastructure biomanufacturing questions. ⁓ it could probably happen pretty quickly. ⁓

I think Elon Musk could add it to, you know, he's gonna do Starlink and he's gonna do electric vehicles and he's gonna do, you know, these other things, and he'll do this too. one of the one of the people who I quote in the book and also who has endorsed the book as a SpaceX board member, ⁓ named Steve Jervison, and his line in the book is we're not gonna have slaughterhouses on Mars. ⁓ so it could you could even imagine Elon deciding, okay, we've been making meat meat in the same way for twelve thousand years. Now I'm gonna solve this. ⁓ but ⁓ I I think it I think the science and engineering challenges just are not

Anywhere near insurmountable, but they do require more will than we've brought so far. Although, as I walk through in the book, we are like the amount of government funding every year is going up, the number of scientific papers every year is going up, the number of patents every year is going up. So we're certainly trending in the right direction, but we do still have scientific challenges and we have even bigger ⁓ infrastructure and scaling challenges, both for plant-based meat and for cultivated meat.

Mark Fielding (1:00:19)
Korean food, though, some of the best in the world. Love it. As we approach the landing of the plane, what you've painted a very, very, very good picture of what this could look like.

10 years ago, I believe we were all going to be in grasshoppers and insects and we're not. What makes this different? Why wouldn't the same thing happen to cultivated meat that happened to we're all going to eat insects.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (1:00:54)
I mean, grasshoppers and insects is a diet change intervention. We have to convince people if they want to eat grasshoppers and insects. with plant-based meat and even more so with cultivated meat, it's just a different way of producing the exact same thing. ⁓ if you're polling people ten years ago about eating grasshoppers and insects, there was just overwhelming revulsion in developed economies. there's still

Overwhelming revulsion in developed economies. But even if there weren't, there's not overwhelming revulsion to eating more beans, and yet the world is not eating more beans. ⁓ There is something distinct about meat. In the book, I talk about people who say, well, look at how much plant-based milk people are consuming. And I point out that plant-based milk has been winning taste tests for more than 25 years, whereas plant-based meat has never won a taste test so far. It's come close, but it hasn't gotten there yet.

and then cultivated meat, it's just it's literally the exact same thing. So ⁓ it's certainly possible that in 10 years we will not have made ⁓ a lot of progress. We do need to get to price and taste parity. ⁓ we're moving in the right direction, but moving in in the right direction is not the same as getting there. ⁓ and we do have to get there. ⁓ and until we get there, ⁓ gains in terms of say so I I think we will have made a lot of progress in 10 years, but we may might not have.

a lot of sales in 10 years. It's very similar to if you look at the trajectory of solar or the trajectory of EVs. with EVs, General Motors launches the EV1 in 1996. They spend a billion dollars on it, they end up crushing all of the cars by about 2001, and most of the world just wrote off EVs. Tesla wasn't even founded until 2003, and we didn't get to 1% EV sales until 2016.

but now EV sales are are shooting up the S curve of adoption. In China, they've they passed ⁓ 50% in nine years. And that's because of bringing down costs, improving battery range, and setting up a charging infrastructure. the same thing can happen for cultivated meat for sure. ⁓ maybe for plant-based meat. I think it's likely that it could be like many times what it is now for plant-based meat. but they do need to get to price and taste parity. ⁓ that is an eminently solvable problem.

Can we do it in 10 years on our current trajectory? Maybe not. Could we do it in five to ten years if we really brought the will? ⁓ I think almost certainly.

Mark Fielding (1:03:23)
Awesome. I'm kind of hungry, Jeremy.

Jeremy Gilbertson (1:03:24)
Yeah, forget it, forget about the forget

about the utility grid to support data center infrastructure and technology. Figure out the utility grid to support humans. I love this conversation. Bruce, very amazing answers, well detailed, great information for our guys and and and me and and Mark. This was fantastic. I'd love to have a follow-up to kind of see how this industry is progressing and the things you're tracking. And ⁓ really appreciate you joining us today.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (1:03:54)
thank you very much, Jeremy. I appreciate that. and I am at your disposal. and people who want to check out the book, it's just meetbook.org. you can find out ⁓ much more depth about everything we've just been discussing.

Mark Fielding (1:04:07)
Thank you very much. And since we're on websites, www.thinkingonpaper.xyz for this episode and every other episode in the Thinking on Paper canon. If you're listening to this and you have eaten plant-based food, if you eat plant-based meat regularly, please let us know in the comments why you like it, what you think about it. If you've tried cultivated meat, please tell us if it passes your taste test and what you'd like to see happening in the future.

of meat. Until next time, stay disruptive, be curious.

Jeremy Gilbertson (1:04:45)
Keep thinking on paper. All right. Bruce, we are we are out. One last favor, if you are open to it. ⁓ we use this kind of for ⁓ you know for promos and marketing and stuff. But ⁓ if you would say if you yeah, one day we've got a bunch of these. ⁓ if you say your name, kind of ⁓ talk about your however you want to explain who you're with and what your project is, and just say, I think on paper with Mark and Jeremy.

Mark Fielding (1:04:50)
Thank you, Bruce.

one day.

Jeremy Gilbertson (1:05:15)
If you're open to that, that would be wonderful.

Bruce Friedrich, MeatBook.org (1:05:16)
Sure.

My name is Bruce Friedrich. I am founder and president of the Good Food Institute. And I wrote a book called Meat. Here it is. And I think on paper with Mark and Jeremy.

Jeremy Gilbertson (1:05:36)
Outstanding. All right. I'm gonna hit stop here and Bruce, what's gonna happen

Mark Fielding (1:05:37)
Okay.