Everything in this room is here to trick the cells into thinking they are growing inside an animal so they reproduce. The regularly refreshed medium takes the place of the nutrients and waste removal they would get from blood pumped by the heart. The four grey incubators keep them at a body temperature of thirty-seven degrees. There’s even an agitator, a moving platform, which gyrates the liquid suspension of cells to mimic what they would experience if they were growing inside a moving body. The swirling conical flasks of medium and meat juice look like something straight out of science fiction, but Vitor is keen to dispel that idea. ‘It’s very common, actually. It’s used a lot for bacteria fermentation processes. If you think about beer, this is the same,’ he says firmly.
They identify the most promising-looking cells in this lab, which then get taken upstairs to be produced on a larger scale in bioreactors and are finally sent to the JUST chefs for product development. ‘From one chicken like Ian, we might have enough cells for the whole thing. We create this cell bank, thousands of little vials, and every time we start the production line we just take one vial and start from there.’ Vitor smiles proudly. The idea that the thousands of crammed animals in the stench and filth of the Harris Ranch feedlot can be replaced with shelves of sterile vials is a remarkable one.
Alex, the communications manager, is a constant presence, nodding along to our conversation while checking her phone. She wants us to move on, to go back upstairs to see the bioprocess and production lab. I just want to taste the meat now. I wish they’d tell me what I’m going to eat.
‘How far off are we from growing cuts of meat?’ I ask.
‘We could grow a steak in a week, if we wanted to,’ Vitor replies airily.
This stops me dead. ‘Really?’
‘It’s a matter of doing it in a scalable way. We could do a lot of prototyping and show the potential of the technology, but we don’t. We know how to do it, it will just take a while to integrate into this workflow.’
If growing tissues is so easy, why do burn victims need painful skin grafts? Why are so many people on dialysis? Why aren’t we just growing the kidneys and livers and corneas we need in labs, instead of waiting for people to die and donate them? Like so much of what I’ve heard today, it raises so many more questions than it answers.
The upstairs lab is bright and sparse. The two metal bioreactors are each the size and shape of a hotel minibar, and neither of them is running today. JUST have promised to release their clean meat on the market this year, but it’s November; there is no way they could be mass-producing it from this room, from these machines. This looks like a research project, not the beginning of a commercial production line.
‘When you are in full production, you’ll need much bigger bioreactors, won’t you?’ I ask.
‘That is correct. In order to reach the scales we need, we will need to build the bioreactors from scratch. It’s a challenge. That’s why it’s important that we release the product and people can really taste and see its potential. Because once we get their support and finance from meat companies or other investors, then we can work on it.’
And then I realize that JUST has no intention of selling clean meat in shops any time soon. The launch will be a publicity stunt that means they can claim the title of being first and attract more venture capital. Clean meat is still at the proof of concept stage, although the concept being proven this time is not that meat can be grown in a lab, but that people are prepared to pay for it.
‘How much is it going to cost?’ I ask.
‘Right now, I don’t have an answer. It’s going to be available in a few high-end restaurants; a limited release, this year.’
‘Definitely this year?’
‘Yeah. In one month or so, everyone will know about this.’ He beams with confidence, and pride. ‘It’s incredible. It’s been one of the reasons why I shifted from medical research to this project, because I felt that whatever I was going to be doing was going to have such a tremendous impact and would happen really fast. In medical research it takes, like, fifteen years to actually get a drug out to market. The way this industry operates is faster, and I got into it at the right time, when the right support was there.’
If you are eager, idealistic, ambitious and impatient, JUST is just the right place for you.
* * *
Alex leads me back to the open-plan office. ‘Take a seat,’ she says, gesturing towards a long black table where customer service manager Josh Hyman is waiting for me in front of a camping stove, wearing a grey cap and a black JUST apron, as if he were on the set of a home shopping channel or cookery show. Two hours into the tour, the time has finally come to taste the future. I’m absolutely psyched.
‘Any allergies, sensitivities, things you do not eat?’ he asks me as he fires up the stove. He should know this already; I had to email Alex my dietary requirements before I arrived. Of course, I don’t have any. I’ll eat pretty much anything, which is why I’m here. I’m trying not to be cynical, but it feels like they want to suss out my veganess in advance, to see how familiar I am with what I’m about to taste.
It turns out I’m still not getting to eat the meat yet. Not just yet. First, I have to try JUST Egg – which is eggless, of course – one of their plant-based creations from the Discovery Platform.
Josh scoops something out of a jar and it sizzles in the pan.
‘Is that real butter?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he replies, casual as anything. ‘I figure that 95 per cent of the people that eat scrambled eggs do this. So, why not be like them? It doesn’t hurt. Makes it taste good.’
‘What? This is a vegan company, a food company built on the promise that it doesn’t exploit animals, and you’re telling me butter doesn’t hurt and makes things taste good?’ I want to say. But I don’t.
‘It’s fat,’ he continues, breezily. ‘I could use oil, but I don’t want to. That’s why I asked if you were allergic to anything. Are you ready? Here it goes. Mung bean egg.’
He pours out the JUST Egg from a 12 fl oz plastic bottle into the hot pan. It’s pale yellow and shiny, just like a freshly whisked egg. It bubbles and sizzles, like an egg would. It begins to brown around the edges, puckering and curling a little, just like an egg would. It’s kind of incredible that this isn’t egg.
‘You can even flip it, no problems.’ He turns it over with a spatula. ‘I’m going to use two things to season it with.’ He takes a pinch of something from a grey crucible. ‘The first is something called black salt. It’s not 100 per cent necessary, but it has a naturally occurring sulphur compound to it, so it just gives you a little bit of that eggy smell and that eggy flavour. Just a liiittle bit. And, because it’s eggs, I’m going to do a little bit of cracked pepper too. And that’s really it. Looks done to me.’ He serves it out into a bowl and hands it to me.
This looks like egg. It sounds like egg, it cooks like egg. It feels like egg on my fork and in my mouth – fluffy and spongy and hot. But it is totally bland. Without butter and pepper and special sulphurous salt, it would taste of nothing at all.
‘It’s pretty good,’ I say.
‘Right? It has a little bit of a snap, a little bit of sponginess, not too much.’
I don’t know what else to say. ‘It’s good… It’s different.’
‘Yes. And, while it doesn’t taste exaaaactly like an egg…’
‘The texture is the same,’ I say, trying to be constructive.
‘The texture is really good. So if you think about it in a system, if you think about it sautéed with vegetables, or if you add cheese to make an omelette, or put it in a breakfast burrito…’
In other words, it’s fine so long as you completely mask what it is, or what it isn’t. If this is the cutting edge, the apex of plant-based food technology, I can see why there’s a need for clean meat. Despite all JUST’s exotic seeds and clever robots, they still can’t turn plants into animal proteins.
‘Now for what you really came for,’ Josh
declares, producing a black dish out of nowhere. ‘There’s our little nugget.’
And I look down to see a small, lone, beige-crusted rectangle nesting in an envelope of greaseproof paper with red, white and blue stripes. An all-American chicken nugget.
‘You can dip it in a little bit of the sauce, if you like,’ he says, pointing to a small metal bowl of something pinky-yellow that sits on the plate beside it.
‘So it’s already cooked and done?’ I thought he was going to fry something up on the stove for me. This feels weird.
‘It’s cooked and done,’ he nods.
‘And what’s the sauce?’
‘I believe it might be a little of our chipotle ranch.’
‘I’m going to have it without the sauce first,’ I say.
‘You do your thing.’
‘OK. Here we go.’
I bite through the batter. It’s warm, crispy, deep-fried, heavily seasoned. Then there is the meat. And, yes, it is chicken. It tastes like a chicken nugget: there is the flavour, the aroma of chicken on my tongue and in my nose. But it’s so mushy. So very, very mushy. Yet – chicken.
‘Tastes like chicken?’ Josh asks immediately.
‘Tastes like a chicken nugget,’ I reply.
‘Yup!’ says Alex, triumphantly, and they both beam.
As I continue to chew, I gradually realize that it is disgusting. At first, the meat is familiar – it has the juiciness, the unmistakable tackiness of animal flesh on my teeth – but it has the texture of the most low-grade processed food I could ever imagine. The consistency is so wrong, the meat is so far removed from animal tissue, that my brain is telling me this is very bad meat indeed and I should spit it out. There are no discernible pieces of meat in this nugget. It is chickeny mash, bulked with filler, inside a crunchy crust.
Josh fills the silence. ‘Be critical, if you want to. We take any and all feedback.’
‘The inside is a little bit… It’s a bit mushy.’
He nods. ‘OK.’
‘What else is in here to make the nugget?’
‘We combine, like, a few plant products, and then we add the cells to them. Other than the cells, it’s a completely plant-based nugget.’
‘How much of it is the actual meat?’
‘Er… that I do not know.’
‘So you didn’t make this nugget?’
‘I didn’t, but Nicholas, who is just behind me, did.’ He gestures to some people working with their heads down at some benches several metres away. I can’t see which person he means. Nicholas is not on today’s tour itinerary.
The nugget is small. There’s only enough for three bites, and I have to nibble to make it last. I have no idea what I’m eating. This is an even more unsettling experience than meeting Harmony; at least I got to see how Harmony was made, but I’ve had a two-hour tour here, and I haven’t seen any raw meat. The nugget arrived warm, but I didn’t see it being cooked. I so wanted this to be a chicken nugget, but it doesn’t seem to be at all.
Then again, I haven’t had nuggets since I was a teenager. What do I know? Maybe they are all this processed and mushy. Maybe this tastes exactly like it should. But perhaps Josh has no idea how a chicken nugget should taste either.
‘Are you a vegan?’ I ask.
‘Er… yes,’ Josh says, and he goes truly red with embarrassment, as if I’ve just discovered he’s a secret nudist.
‘Would you eat clean meat? As a vegan?’ I ask.
‘I’ve tried it, so obviously the answer so far has been yes.’
‘Have you been vegan a long time?’
‘Ten years. But I’m not super sensitive about it. This might be a way that I can jump back in the meat-eating game and not feel guilty. I’m not friends with a lot of vegan people. My wife isn’t vegan. It was a choice I made myself, for me, not for anybody else. No offence to anybody, but I don’t really care what anybody else does.’ He’s almost contrite when he says this, desperate for me to know that he’s not part of a cult, that he’s not judging me.
‘Is it easy to cook with, if you’re a chef?’
‘Luckily, I’m not a chef. I’m front of house. That’s why I’m here, talking to you.’
When I was in the RealBotix workshop, I saw a demonstration. At JUST, I’m getting a performance. I was given my first taste of clean meat by the front of house guy. The tour was choreographed and carefully stage-managed by Alex. So much has been simplified, romanticized and sidestepped to gloss over how far clean meat is from being ready for human consumption. I have no idea if what I just ate was grown in baby calf blood or magic plant juice. I don’t even know which part of the chicken it originally came from – blood? Bone? Feathers? This has been an exercise in spin, an entertaining one, and one that I know will go far; the story of JUST’s adventures in meat is a story journalists will want to tell, and investors will want to hear. But it’s a story.
I thank Josh and Alex. ‘This is a really big deal,’ I say, ‘because, if you get this right, the potential is so enormous.’
‘I know. That’s why we’re doing this,’ he smiles. ‘We don’t do little things around here. Josh Tetrick isn’t into doing things that have minimal impact. It’s either worldwide impact or nothing.’
I take a big gulp of water. I need to rinse my mouth.
* * *
One final act of the show remains, of course: Josh Tetrick himself, the founder, CEO and undisputed boss of JUST. Three Hampton Creek executives were fired last year amid rumours they were plotting to take control away from Josh and hand it to investors. A few weeks later, everyone on the board resigned, apart from Josh. Josh rules, and it seems like anyone who doubts it is out the door.
He’s in his late thirties, as broad-shouldered as an American football player, with big hands and thick eyebrows. As I take a seat next to him at the meeting table I’m desperate for some genuine spontaneity, some unvarnished straightforwardness. If anyone can give me definitive answers around here, it should be this man. But Josh, too, has lines to deliver. When I ask him why he chose to go from making plant-based egg to clean meat, he has paragraphs at the ready.
‘We’re not a plant-based company or an animal-based company, we just want to be an effective company,’ he says, in that deep Southern accent. ‘It turns out that the mung bean is really effective in helping us make the egg, but if we really want to make beef, if we really want to make pork, if we really want to make chicken, we think it’s more effective to start from a cell from a cow, from a chicken, from a pig, from a taste perspective, a texture perspective, and also a naming perspective.’
Josh knows all about the importance of naming things properly. Unilever, which owns the Hellmann’s brand, brought a lawsuit against Hampton Creek in 2014 claiming the JUST Mayo name was false advertising: instead of being ‘just’ mayonnaise, it was ‘not’ mayonnaise; it couldn’t meet the definition of mayonnaise given by the US Food and Drug Administration, because it didn’t contain eggs. The FDA agreed, and Hampton Creek changed their labels in 2015 to clarify what the product was, adding the ‘guided by reason, justice, and fairness’ strapline to show the specific way they were defining the word ‘just’. Hampton Creek still got to call it mayonnaise, and people could buy it without thinking they were getting something alternative and strange.
‘My parents shop for meat at Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie in Birmingham, Alabama. How do I increase the probability that my mom’s friends buy the kind of beef and the kind of pork I think they should buy, the kinds that didn’t require killing an animal or using the land and the water? If it’s not called meat, you’re not going to create a system in the future where the majority of pounds of meat produced in a given day does not require an animal. That’s the day I want.’ His face is as fervent as a pastor preaching about the Promised Land. ‘How do we accelerate the day when fifty plus one per cent of the meat produced was created without needing to kill a single animal? Because, when that day happens, the next day will be fifty-five, and then sixty. Th
is is the only way to get to that day.’
For clean meat to work, it has to have mass appeal. There’s no point being the bestseller at Whole Foods or Waitrose if the vast majority of people shop at Walmart and Tesco. This has to be about basic food – staples, not indulgences.
‘Our end point is to change a system and along the way help our investors make a lot of money. Because I want them to invest more in us,’ he tells me. He has eye-catching ideas about how to make this happen: as well as being the first on the market, JUST is going to turn the most expensive gourmet delicacies into basic food for everyone.
‘We want to focus on the Kobes, the Wagyus, the bluefin tunas. I imagine my dad or mom walking into that Piggly Wiggly, and I imagine them looking at two kinds of hamburgers: one kind just says, Ground chuck, $2.99 per pound – that’s what they’ve always been buying; another one says, Kobe A5 burger, Wagyu A5 burger, $2.49 a pound. One was made by killing the animal, the other was made by, you know, this different approach. I want my dad and my mom to say, “Well, this is obvious; of course I will choose a hamburger that is richer, more delicate, that hits you in the face with flavour, rather than the ground chuck.” To me, that is what is required to create the different system.’
He flips open his laptop. ‘Our plan is to have this out before the end of next year.’ There’s an image of two burgers on a white polystyrene tray with a red label saying, 2 Kobe A5 Beef Patties, 100% Japanese Wagyu. The burgers are made up of chunky pieces of meat, heavily dappled with fat.
‘A proper bit of marbled Kobe beef?’ I ask.
‘It will be Wagyu. Kobe is a form of Wagyu.’
I am taking lessons in beef from a vegan.
There are more concept pictures: two plump chicken breasts, some shimmering slices of deep pink bluefin tuna (‘finest grade Otoro’), and then some drawings of the JUST clean meat factory of the future, complete with forty-eight separate 200,000-litre bioreactors, each the size of a power plant cooling tower, greenhouses for growing the plants they will use to make the medium, and a viewing platform where members of the public can watch the tuna steaks and chicken breasts being assembled on conveyor belts.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 12