Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  In the final half of the video, Post explains how the beef is actually grown. He makes it sound like a doddle. ‘We take a few cells from a cow, muscle-specific stem cells that can only become muscle,’ he explains. ‘There is very little that we have to do to make these cells do the right thing. A few cells that we take from this cow can turn into ten tonnes of meat.’ Piece of cake.

  The reality is a little more complicated. A biopsy of stem cells is taken from an adult animal – they are called ‘starter cells’ because they have the ability to grow, divide and become fat and muscle (if you were to cut yourself, these cells would be the ones that allow the wound to regenerate). Only a very small number of starter cells are needed for the process to begin; a biopsy the size of a sesame seed is fine, and it can be taken from a live animal, under anaesthetic, if you so choose. The starter cells are put into a seed tray, bathed in a medium of nutrients and growth factors, and placed in a bioreactor to encourage them to proliferate. One cell becomes two, two four, four eight and so on, until there are trillions of cells. These are then organized into a gel scaffold that helps them form the shape of muscle fibres, which are eventually layered. It takes about ten weeks to grow enough cells to make a burger, but, because the growth is exponential, it only takes twelve weeks to produce enough for 100,000 burgers. (According to Mark Post, you’d get about 2,000 burgers from a single cow, who’d have to have lived at least eighteen months before slaughter.) Burgers, croquettes and sausage meat don’t have much structure and are relatively straightforward to produce; a sirloin steak would require a serious amount of work to get the fat, cartilage and muscle into the correct texture and configuration. Just as advances in AI will accelerate because of the market created by sex robots, tissue culture technology will advance because of the potential to grow cuts of meat.

  Unlike animal meat, clean meat can be fully dominated and controlled down to the last cell. The possibilities are potentially endless: meat with extra omega-3 fatty acids to counteract the heart disease caused by animal fats; meat without the risk of E. coli or salmonella, as no animal intestines are grown and no animal will shit itself with fear when it’s being slaughtered (which happens on even the most friendly of farms); new textures and flavours and shapes of meat that would be impossible to create inside an animal; foie gras without force feeding; pigless, kosher bacon.

  But none of this has been put on the market yet, even though there has been an explosion of start-ups around the world racing to be first. They’ve given themselves bucolic, wholesome names, like Mission Barns, Modern Meadow, Memphis Meats and Fork and Goode. It’s the California entrepreneurs who are making the broadest strides, fuelled by the kind of investment that can only come from Silicon Valley venture capital. The meat and poultry industry in the US alone is worth over $1 trillion. Whoever can make a dent in that – even if it’s only cornering 1 per cent of the market – is set to make billions.

  * * *

  I know all this because two weeks before I came to California I had a coffee on a drizzly day in London with a man called Bruce, who is neither scientist nor entrepreneur but is more responsible than anyone else on earth for the new clean meat industry. For two hours, Bruce leaned forward, his forearms on the table, and told me earnestly, intensely, unblinkingly, with a torrent of numbers, names and facts that he very much wanted me to write down, about how he has seen and tasted the salvation of the planet, and is on a mission to bring it to as many people as possible.

  Bruce Friedrich is the executive director of the Good Food Institute, an American ‘think tank accelerator’ for the clean and plant-based meat market sectors. We met in a Mayfair cafe with loud monochrome floor tiles and overpriced flat whites because Bruce had just had a meeting round the corner with a British private-equity billionaire who is one of the GFI’s most significant donors. Energetic and trim in a mint-green shirt, Bruce has piercing blue eyes that demand to be met. It was a week after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had issued its latest warning that animal agriculture was the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and there were stories all over the British press about how we have to stop eating so much meat. I was expecting Bruce to be happy about the headlines. He wasn’t.

  ‘Check back in eighteen months,’ he said. ‘Back in 2015, Chatham House argued that unless meat consumption goes down countries will not be able to keep climate change under two degrees by 2050. They got headlines then, but nobody paid attention. When the head of the IPCC, R. K. Pachauri, got the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore in 2007, he went, “Meat meat meat meat meat meat meat,” and the UK media covered it extensively, and then, now, however many years later, people are like, “Oh my God, we’ve never heard of this.”’

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Because people don’t want to hear it?’

  ‘The implications for people are beans and rice. People don’t want to eat beans and rice. The fact that it happened last week doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be having exactly this same conversation in two or three years.’

  ‘So there are cycles of selective amnesia?’

  Bruce smiled. ‘People are busy,’ he said, generously. ‘The entire thesis of GFI is, for decades we’ve been educating people about the harms of industrial agriculture, but education has not worked; 98 to 99 per cent of people are not going to meaningfully change their diets on the basis of environmental harm or global health harm or animal protection harm. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So give people what they want but produce it in a different way. Let’s change food. Let’s create meat directly from cells, without the inefficiencies and the antibiotic need and the cruelty of industrial meat consumption. Give people what they want, but remove the harm.’

  It all sounded very free market and American. I thought of another Nobel Prize winner: Richard Thaler, who won the prize in 2017 for his theory of behavioural economics, of how to influence human behaviour by ‘nudging’ people towards the ‘correct’ choices.

  But Bruce batted that idea away. ‘It’s even a little more elementary than nudge theory. This is the theory of the car replacing the horse and cart. If what people like about meat is the taste, the texture, the aroma – fairly fundamental things – if we can give them those things but in a better way, they will shift. If it’s a better product and less expensive, people will shift.’

  When the GFI was formed in 2015, there was just Bruce and one other staff member. Three years on, he was head of an organization that employed seventy people, in India, Brazil, Israel, China and Europe, as well as in the US. There was a single clean meat start-up, Memphis Meats, when the GFI launched; there were at least twenty-five, three years later. This is largely down to how easy Bruce and his team are making it for entrepreneurs to start companies. The GFI has a science and technology department to publish peer-reviewed papers on clean meat research and development, an innovation department to help start-ups, a corporate engagement department to get huge food companies on board, and a policy department that lobbies governments to ‘roll out the regulatory red carpet for clean meat’, so that it can be labelled and sold alongside and eventually instead of meat grown in animals. Like the first ever lab-grown hamburger, the GFI is funded by tech entrepreneurs. Its biggest donor is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife.

  Bruce goes into business schools and graduate science programmes to spread the word about clean meat to the next generation of entrepreneurs and researchers. The GFI publishes a ninety-eight-page manual, ‘an all-you-can-read buffet on planning, launching, and growing a good food business’, as it says on its cover – a kind of step-by-step idiot’s guide to growing and selling meat from cells, with everything from how to hire a lawyer and get funding to search engine optimization and logo and packaging design that practically anyone could follow, free to download.

  ‘Your start-up manual is quite something,’ I told him. ‘It’s very comprehensive.’

  ‘
Oh, thanks. We want everybody doing this. We would love to see environmental groups taking this up as a key aspect of their mandate.’

  ‘But the environment doesn’t really come into the manual. It’s very slick, very Silicon Valley. It looks more like you’re saying this is a fantastic business opportunity.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. People are investing because they want to make a lot of money and they see a global trillion-dollar meat industry and the possibility to produce meat less expensively.’ He gives the same message at universities. ‘We want everybody who’s going to be the next titan of industry to be aware of clean meat as an outlet for their considerable talents. We want to find people who are tissue engineers, biochemical engineers or whatever and say, “Hey, you can be a part of saving the world and you can raise a family very well going into this space. You can simultaneously make money and self-actualize by doing something that can save the world from global catastrophe.”’

  There’s that joke: How do you know if someone’s vegan? Because they’ll tell you. But it’s not true in the world of clean meat. Throughout our conversation, Bruce only mentioned the ‘v’ word when I brought it up. He kept his former roles as director of vegan campaigns and then vice president of PETA quiet – he was open when I asked about it, but I doubt he would have mentioned it had I not. The Silicon Valley clean meat start-ups are run by vegans, and the people funding them are largely vegans too. The GFI itself depends on vegan money for its existence: Dustin Moskovitz and his wife happen to be vegan, and so is the British billionaire that Bruce was in Mayfair to meet. But Bruce didn’t volunteer that either. For someone so forthcoming with facts and information, it was one of the few things I had to ask about. Clean meat was beginning to look like a vegan movement in disguise, one that knows the ‘v’ word is loaded with an attitude of moral rectitude that is toxic for those who love eating meat. But the future Bruce and the clean meat entrepreneurs are working towards is a world where the meat industry is owned and controlled by vegans. Clean meat is vegan meat.

  When you’re trying to wean human beings off animals without anyone noticing, language matters. After Mark Post first lifted the cloche on his burger in 2013, no one quite knew what to call his creation. Cultured meat? Lab-grown meat? In vitro meat? It was the GFI who did some serious market research and came up with the industry standard nomenclature. ‘We coined “clean meat”. We found that it had 20 to 25 per cent greater consumer acceptance than “cultured meat”. I think people heard “cultured”, and it meant Petri dishes.’ The GFI advised start-ups to change their names for fear of alienating customers – like the Israeli start-up, now called Aleph Farms, which used to be called Meat the Future. ‘People don’t want futurism with their food,’ Bruce declared.

  The GFI wants consumers to focus on the end product rather than the process it takes to produce it. The meat industry does the same: after all, beef isn’t called cow, and pork isn’t called pig. Bruce said ‘clean’ meat invites parallels with clean energy and quickly conveys the idea that this meat is, by definition, free from antibiotics and pathogens. But if we all agree to call it clean meat, meat grown inside the bodies of animals becomes unclean, dirty. If we use the term Bruce wants us to use, we are quietly accepting the political position of veganism.

  ‘People are going to know that this meat hasn’t grown on its own,’ I said. ‘Surely that’s going to turn a lot of people off?’

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to have aaaaaany trouble with consumer acceptance. People eat meat right now despite not because of how it’s produced. Show people an abattoir and ask them, “Do you want to eat this?” No. I think once it’s produced in factories and it’s streamed live on the internet, everybody will be down with it.’

  ‘Production is going to be live-streamed on the internet?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Absolutely. Transparency is critically important. A fully transparent process will put regulators’ minds at ease, and the media’s job is to be pessimistic and to play devil’s advocate, so the coverage of it will be good if the companies are transparent, and dubious if the companies are not. But also, the people who are doing this are doing this for the right reasons. Transparency is baked into the cake.’

  They are also doing it for the money, of course. ‘If you capture only a tiny part of the global meat market, that’s potentially a lot of money,’ I said.

  ‘But we’re going to get all of that market,’ he replied immediately.

  Money is actually the last thing Bruce cares about. This became clear ninety minutes into our expensive coffees, when I asked him why he originally became vegan. It was 1987, he explained, he was a student, volunteering at a soup kitchen and organizing fasts in aid of Oxfam International (rather than getting drunk and eating kebabs, like most students I knew at university). Then he read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, a groundbreaking book from 1971, which argues that world hunger is caused by the inefficiencies of meat production.

  ‘I thought, holy shit. I am basically living my life to try to eliminate global poverty and I’m eating meat, dairy and eggs; I’m eating foods that require way more calories than foods I could be eating. They’re not particularly healthy, and they are leading to global starvation.’

  ‘So you became a vegan because of human rights?’

  ‘That was the reason I first went vegan. Then I went to work in a homeless shelter in inner city Washington DC for six years and I read Christianity and the Rights of Animals by Andrew Linzey. He’s an Anglican priest.’ Bruce fixed me again with his unwavering blue eyes. ‘All of this is based in my faith. My faith is all of this. The advocacy against global poverty was a recognition from Matthew 25 that salvation means you cast your lot with the poor and try to alleviate their suffering. Linzey’s argument is that what’s happening to other animals on factory farms mocks God. God designed animals to breathe fresh air and produce their young and give glory to God, and the way they are being treated on farms denies them everything God created them to be and to do, and inflicts pain on them for something so inconsequential as a palate preference. We’re told that the earth is on loan to us – it tramples over that; that our bodies are on loan to us – we’re dying of diseases of overconsumption. From a faith standpoint, it’s wrong in every conceivable way.’

  When he finally stopped for breath, Bruce had a serene, definitive smile on his face. The two things he had kept quiet during our conversation – his faith and his veganism – are clearly the motor that drives him and the centre of his universe. Given licence to talk about them, he switched mode and was suddenly evangelical, on a mission – a religious mission, an animal rights mission, a human rights mission – to save the planet, like some kind of vegan Christian superhero.

  ‘Is this a calling for you?’ I eventually asked.

  ‘It is an absolute calling,’ he replied, resolutely. ‘It is a religious calling.’ And there was something about his unapologetic earnestness, his sincere and intense conviction, that made me feel very cynical and English and carnivorous and small.

  I wondered whether clean meat was vegan enough that you could eat it and still be vegan. ‘You’ve tasted it,’ I said. ‘Do you still consider yourself vegan?’

  ‘Yes. I think the fact that somebody eats meat three times doesn’t mean that they’re not a vegan. I don’t think you can routinely eat clean meat and be a vegan, because clean meat is meat, and what a vegan does is not eat animal products, so once clean meat is widely available, I would stop being vegan, because I would eat clean meat.’

  ‘What was it like to eat it, having not eaten meat for thirty years? It must have been weird.’

  ‘I’ve now had chicken and duck. The first thing I thought was, Holy shit, this is good.’

  Really? I thought. From everything I’ve heard from my vegan and vegetarian friends, if you haven’t eaten flesh for decades and then suddenly try it, intentionally or not, the taste and texture are revolting, and it leaves you with horrible digestive problems.

  ‘So
you liked it?’ I asked again.

  ‘Oh yeah! I don’t have an objection to the taste or the smell or the texture of meat. I have an objection to the external costs. But yeah, I loved it.’

  Surely that’s the thing. If our appetite for meat is killing us all, isn’t the problem that needs addressing our desire for it, rather than the means by which the meat is produced?

  ‘Isn’t clean meat going to perpetuate the taste for meat among people who might one day go over to a plant-based diet, if we find a way to make the other arguments convincing?’ I asked.

  As ever, Bruce already had the answers. ‘Three things,’ he shot back. ‘Thing one: that’s about the biggest “if” in the world. We’ve tried before, and failed.’

  ‘But aren’t more people becoming vegan than ever?’

  ‘When I first started advocating veganism professionally in 1996 I thought we were on the cusp of global veganism. There was this buzz. We had Alicia Silverstone, we had Alec Baldwin, we had Pamela Anderson, who were just huge in 1996. The numbers really haven’t shifted much in all that time since.’

  That’s not what I had read about the growth of veganism in Great Britain, where the number of vegans is supposed to have quadrupled between 2014 and 2019, but global figures are impossible to come by, and surely Bruce’s mastery of facts and numbers on this issue was bound to beat mine.