Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  He was in his stride now. ‘Thing two is just a colossal “So what?” Who cares? If you can produce meat from plants and directly from cells, then what’s the objection to perpetuating the taste for meat?’

  ‘Wouldn’t there be some kind of black market for real meat – meat really from an animal?’

  ‘It will be a tiny fraction of what it is now, and the animals will have lives that are worth living. If 100 per cent of the animals who were bred for food led good lives before they were slaughtered – which is what would happen in this eventual scenario – it would be well less than 1 per cent of the number of animals slaughtered now, and they would all be treated well.’

  Before I could ask how he could possibly know this, he was already on his next point, the most important and the one that feels like the true reason for all his efforts. ‘And then, thing three is – that probably goes away. In a world in which 98, 99 per cent of meat is plant-based meat and clean meat, that is a world in which the vast majority of people are not participating in the exploitation of animals on a daily basis. A big part of why animal rights has not caught on is that 98, 99 per cent of people are participating in cruelty that would be jailable cruelty, every single day –’ he jabbed his index finger at the table with each word – ‘if these animals had legal protection. If people are no longer participating in the cruelty on a daily basis, that makes moving towards a world in which animals are treated well, and their rights and interests are protected, a heck of a lot easier.’

  So this is how the animal rights revolution is finally going to be won: not through horrific undercover animal testing videos, not through firebombing department stores that sell fur coats, but by giving us carnivores something in place of our meat that makes us re-evaluate the right we think we have to live at the expense of animals. To accept Bruce’s position is to believe that the animal rights movement has failed, and that technology will lead to the changes that ethical vegan arguments have failed to convince us to make.

  Bruce had a busy schedule: his next appointment was a meeting with KFC to discuss a chickenless future. I apologized for taking up so much of his time.

  ‘There’s really nothing I enjoy talking about more,’ he said.

  ‘I can tell,’ I said.

  When I’d set off to meet him that wet afternoon in London, I wasn’t expecting to feel sold on clean meat by the end of it. But Bruce’s confidence was contagious. There was no question I had to word carefully, no criticism I couldn’t bring up, no problem to which clean meat wasn’t already the solution. In his company, clean meat felt inevitable, a question of when, not if. At the end of it all, I felt as if I might have just had two hours with someone who is genuinely making history.

  Two weeks later, as I check out of the Cowschwitz hotel and head north on the I-5 to San Francisco, I am still feeling Bruce’s optimism. The Harris Ranch feedlot swings into my rear view mirror and disappears behind me, and ten minutes later the stench of it has faded away too.

  CHAPTER SIX The Vegans Who Love Meat

  Tarpaulins flap in the breeze in San Francisco’s Mission District. Tent camps nestle like moss, dark and unnoticed, against chain link fences. On Folsom Street, a homeless man is asleep, face down and sprawled across the pavement. A few paces away from his nose there is a golden door, polished so it shimmers in the midday sunlight. At its centre there is a glass panel bearing the word ‘JUST’. This is the headquarters of the $1.1 billion food start-up that has announced it’s about to become the first to sell clean meat to the public. It’s ‘JUST’ as in ‘guided by reason, justice and fairness’, according to the strapline on its labels. There is nothing reasonable, just or fair about how venture capital billions can pour into a city alongside such manifest desperation, but the people who work around here don’t seem to see it.

  I am buzzed through the gold door, taken up some grey stairs and into a vast open plan office with a concrete floor. Swoosh – someone swerves around a bank of desks on a skateboard. Speakers play smooth jazz from somewhere up among the exposed steel beams and snaking pipes. Around a hundred people work here, but there are also two golden retrievers bounding around with wagging tails and lolloping tongues. A couple of kids are kneeling beside a low table, doing some colouring. Two enormous black and white photographs are framed and mounted side by side on one of the white walls. On the left, there’s Bill Gates stuffing something into his mouth next to JUST CEO Josh Tetrick, with ‘LEAP’ superimposed in giant red letters in the bottom right-hand corner. On the right, there’s Tony Blair also cramming something into his mouth as Josh looks on. This one is emblazoned with the word ‘DARE’.

  I’m here to taste the clean meat JUST is about to launch, and to meet Josh himself. But first I must have the JUST tour. ‘The building was once a chocolate factory, and then for a while Disney Pixar were here,’ communications manager Alex Dallago tells me, conjuring up the sense that dreams have long been confected in this space. Perhaps Josh is a kind of Willy Wonka who can make fantastical foods a reality. Alex won’t tell me what I’m going to be eating today, though – it’s going to be a surprise. I have to wait and see.

  At least JUST is prepared to let me in the building. Despite all of Bruce’s promises of total transparency and live-streamed production, it turns out the clean meat industry isn’t very open to scrutiny at all – for the moment, at least. Memphis Meats – the first and biggest clean meat start-up – claims to have been producing beef since 2016, and chicken and duck since 2017. At the GFI’s annual conference in 2018, Memphis Meats’ CEO Uma Valeti said anyone who wanted to taste their meat was welcome to swing by their HQ and give it a try. But no journalist has tasted it yet, and all the images of their gently browned meatballs in a nest of fettuccine have been taken and distributed by Memphis Meats themselves. I’m sure they are culturing meat successfully – meat giants Tyson and Cargill, as well as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, have made significant investments in the company – but despite Uma’s invitation they didn’t want to share their creations with me. Their press officer kept giving me different reasons why it wasn’t quite the right time: Uma was out of town, all the meat they had to taste was currently earmarked for potential investors to try, they were renovating their premises and had no idea when the work would be finished – could be six months, could be longer.

  JUST has had its own issues with transparency. When Josh founded the company in 2011 it was called Hampton Creek; its flagship product was a plant-based, eggless mayonnaise called JUST Mayo that became a commercial hit, outselling all the other mayonnaises, vegan and non-vegan, in Whole Foods. Hampton Creek’s USP was that it scoured the world for plants that would yield proteins that could seamlessly replicate the properties of egg, using lab work and computational analysis to identify the perfect specimens. By claiming to be able to unlock the molecular secrets of plants – and to have hacked eggs, so they no longer have to come from chickens – Hampton Creek positioned itself as a tech company rather than just a vegan food producer, making it attractive to a raft of venture capitalists who would never invest in bean burgers. But in 2015, several former employees told journalists at Business Insider that ‘the company used shoddy science, or ignored science completely’ and that it ‘stretched the truth’ in order to attract those investors. And in 2016, an investigation by Bloomberg suggested the booming sales figures of JUST Mayo needed to be taken with a pinch of salt; it found evidence that Hampton Creek employees and contractors had been instructed to buy up huge quantities of JUST Mayo from Whole Foods, massively inflating the numbers.

  In 2017 Hampton Creek was renamed JUST after its bestselling-or-not brand, and Josh decided they should branch out into clean meat, a completely different and even more high-tech area of both science and business. A new video went up on their website to explain the process. I watched it just before I arrived.

  ‘We came up with the idea to use one feather from the single best chicken we could find,’ says Josh’s unmistakable, deep Southern voice, as
the shot fades in on a lone chicken with fluffy white feathers, bathed in golden sunlight, on a broad pasture. A caption comes up over the bird, saying Ian, Chicken. A man in sandals stoops into the frame. He picks up one of Ian’s discarded feathers from the grass and holds it up to the sunlight, twirling it in his fingers with an air of wonder as if he’s just isolated the Higgs boson, and he deposits it in a transparent sample pot. Then there’s a bit with some robots in a lab and some handwritten equations on one of those transparent boards you only ever see in sci-fi movies and forensic detective dramas. Science. At the end of the video there’s a kind of outdoor cookout involving a deep-fat fryer, where a chef sprinkles sea salt with an exaggerated, slow-motion flourish over a tray of freshly fried Ian nuggets. Seven people sit around a picnic table, smiling with mouthfuls of Ian, while Ian himself struts around at their feet.

  ‘It was an out-of-body experience to sit there and eat a chicken but have the chicken that you’re eating running around in front of you,’ Josh’s voiceover says, even though he isn’t one of the people eating Ian in the video. ‘We’ve figured out how life really works, and now we don’t need to cause death in order to create food.’

  It’s all unintentionally funny to my eyes, but Bruce’s earnest sincerity has brought me here, so I resolve to park my cynicism and take this seriously. If even a part of what’s being promised is correct, then our relationship with animals, the planet and our diets is about to change forever. And I could be among the first to experience it.

  Before that, I have to learn about plants. Alex introduces me to Udi Lazimi, JUST’s global plant sourcing lead, who will begin my tour. There is something in his scruffy beard and striking blue eyes that’s strangely familiar, and it takes a few minutes of small talk before I register that Udi is the sandalled guy who held up the feather in the chicken video. But Udi’s work has nothing to do with chickens.

  ‘My job is to source plants from all over the world for our research,’ he explains as he leads Alex and me downstairs and opens the door to the Plant Library, a huge, chilly room lined with floor-to-ceiling metal shelves containing huge plastic tubs. In the middle of the space, there is a table covered with a black cloth, on which someone has placed seven little white crucibles containing different seeds, for my benefit. ‘There are over 2,000 varieties of plants in this collection,’ Udi says proudly. ‘The tour will take you through our Discovery Programme, starting here with the Plant Library, which is the first step, the upstream, where we bring in thousands of different materials and we feed it through the Discovery Pipeline to research the characteristics of these plant materials.’ I am clearly not the first person Udi has taken upstream.

  He tells me he’s been to over sixty-five countries looking for ‘protein-rich’ seeds (‘we’re talking the Amazon, we’re talking South-East Asia, East and West Africa, the Andean foothills…’), and while at first this conjures up images of Udi in a khaki pith helmet hacking away at the jungle with a machete it turns out he finds seeds by visiting markets. And while the samples on the table include Maya nuts gathered by indigenous people from the Guatemalan forest floor and seeds from a fruit grown only in the Colombian Amazon, there are also oats, ground flax seeds and powdered hemp seeds, which you can buy in the grocery store a block away from the JUST office.

  ‘We require the seeds to be in powdered form to go through the robots that you’ll see next, downstream,’ he tells me. Downstream is back upstairs, where Chingyao Yang, JUST’s associate director of automation, hands me a pair of goggles. ‘Just for your safety,’ he explains. ‘When we step inside the Discovery Platform, the machines will be running experiments.’

  The Discovery Platform is filled with banks and banks of devices. There’s something called a Microlab Star, all blue lights and whirring pipettes. There are dispensing units enclosed in glass pyramids, with rows of little bottles bearing the JUST logo. There are two impressive white robotic arms in glass cases that remind me of the exhibits I saw in the Science Museum with Kathleen, except they aren’t moving. ‘We call them Randy and Heidi,’ Chingyao smiles. ‘They can show us the nuances of the protein isolates in terms of their functionality, in terms of gelation or emulsification.’

  I can just about work out what’s supposed to be going on behind the jargon: this is where they analyse the seeds’ proteins, looking for properties like melting temperature and viscosity, which they send on to the product developers and chefs who make JUST mayo, cookie dough, salad dressing and so on. There are supposedly a dozen scientists and engineers on the Discovery team, but I can see only one person working, and she is doing something manually with a single pipette. Do they really need all this technology?

  ‘How often do you use these machines?’

  ‘Most of them are running twenty-four seven,’ he replies.

  ‘So is this running at the moment?’ I ask, pointing to the nearest giant gadget, which looks complicated and expensive, but is still and silent, like almost everything else in this space.

  ‘Right now, no. They just went to a meeting so there’s no sample, but typically there’s always samples here. Right now, it’s on standby.’

  Alex leads me back downstairs, where Vitor Santo, the senior scientist of what JUST are calling their ‘Cellular Agriculture Platform’, is waiting for us in a corridor. Vitor is a tissue engineer; he spent five years working in cancer research before he moved from Portugal to San Francisco a year ago to work for JUST. He extends his long, slim arm to shake my hand, and then immediately launches into his part of the tour. This is the bit of JUST I really want to learn about, but, like Udi and Chingyao, Vitor has prepared what he is going to say to me, and he wants to deliver his lines regardless of what my questions might be, or whatever I might already know.

  ‘You start with a small isolation from cells from the animal, like a biopsy. You take this to the lab and you culture the cells with nutrients, a liquid medium that contains all the things the cells typically need,’ he begins.

  ‘How much can you tell me about all of that?’ I ask. ‘How do you get your biopsies? What’s your medium?’

  ‘I can tell you that we are working with different species. Our most advanced product is chicken, but we are also working with beef, pork, other avian species. In terms of the media, we are following in the footsteps of general pharmaceutical and medical research that typically uses a lot of these media recipes, let’s say. But we’re making modifications in the composition of the media in order to make it, erm, more affordable.’

  Vitor is choosing his words carefully, because the medium in which the cells are grown is a very big deal. Pharmaceutical and medical researchers like to use foetal bovine serum (FBS), which, as the name implies, is made from unborn baby cows. Serum is blood without cells, platelets or clotting factors, but it has nutrients, hormones and growth factors that cause cells to proliferate. FBS is extracted by plunging a needle into the beating heart of a living calf foetus that has just been sliced from its mother’s uterus in an abattoir. Blood is drained from its heart for about five minutes until the foetus dies, and the serum is then extracted. It is difficult to imagine a less vegan substance than FBS.

  But serum is really good for growing cells. Serum from calf foetuses is particularly rich in growth factors, and FBS is a universal growth medium, meaning you can chuck practically any kind of cell in it and it will flourish and proliferate. Other media exist, but they tend to work for only one or two specific cell types, whereas you can use FBS to grow whatever you like. It’s been an important part of medical studies, used to develop vaccines, and in cancer and HIV research, and it was the juice Mark Post used to grow his famous hamburger. It’s also a major reason why his burger was so absurdly expensive: FBS costs anything from £300 to £700 a litre, and it takes fifty litres of the stuff to produce a single burger.

  ‘If we used the conventionally used formulas we’d never be able to release an affordable product,’ Vitor continues. ‘Our strategy here at JUST is to use our Discovery Plat
form to test different plant-based proteins and check which ones promote cell growth. We are actually going to feed the animal cells we’ve isolated with plant-based protein. If you think about it, that’s actually what happens in nature: the animals feed themselves with plants.’ This is oversimplified, of course – the medium is more than just food – but if JUST have managed to do this it will be quite a selling point. As well as being the first to put clean meat on the market, they will be doing it in the most vegan-friendly way possible.

  ‘Have you actually found a plant-based medium that works?’ I ask.

  ‘So. I would say there is still work in progress; we still are screening a lot of the plants,’ he replies. ‘We have some formulations that work pretty well, but I wouldn’t call it our final recipe. What I would say is that we have an animal serum-free medium.’

  Even if JUST manage to grow meat on an industrial scale without animal serum, they will still need animals for the starter cells. I wonder how realistic a business model based on Ian feathers can be.

  ‘Which cells do you use?’ I ask.

  ‘You can get them from a piece of muscle, you can get it from blood – it really depends on the animal. I can’t give you a lot of detail on that. That’s part of the IP.’

  ‘Can you get it from a feather?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, with a slight shrug.

  ‘Of course. Because it’s in your video.’

  Vitor hands me my second pair of goggles of the tour and we step into another lab. In the far corner there are three metal extractor hoods over seed trays, little plastic matrices with tiny wells of bright red fluid containing meat cells in each space, and a woman is pipetting something into them. Vitor tells me she’s changing the medium; it needs to be constantly refreshed because the cells consume nutrients from it and leave waste materials in it that would inhibit growth if they weren’t removed. He says this all in a breezy way, as if the process were just gardening in lab coats.