Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  For this farm of the future to become reality, Josh says they will have to work with the meat industry, which already has the refrigeration and distribution networks JUST will need to bring clean meat to the masses. ‘They don’t want the chickens. Who wants to deal with 400,000 fucking chickens in a giant facility, shitting and pissing all over the place? If there’s a better way to convert things into dollars, of course they’ll do it.’ Clean meat will become the only thing on the menu if it’s cheaper and better for consumers, and easier and more profitable for producers. Market forces will save the planet. And then JUST will take over the meat industry.

  ‘Are you aiming to be the biggest meat company in the world?’

  He looks me dead in the eye, and nods slowly. ‘Definitely.’

  But first there is the matter of the launch. It’s going to be a very small launch, before the end of the year – chicken nuggets in a couple of restaurants outside the US, he tells me. ‘We’re talking to a handful of different countries about the right place to launch it. The regulatory is not ready in the US,’ he sighs. ‘Politics, politics.’

  That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that he’s trying to find a country with more flexible public health standards in which to experiment with his mushy nuggets.

  ‘Will that be an ongoing thing or a one-off event?’

  ‘It will be ongoing.’

  ‘How much is it going to cost?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s still uncertain.’

  ‘Do you know how much it cost to make the nugget that I just ate?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘A lot of money?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I just ate something very expensive?’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘In the hundreds of dollars or the thousands of dollars?’

  ‘Somewhere in the hundreds, but I’m not sure exactly. Part of our unknowing is that it doesn’t even make sense for us to calculate the economics of it right now, because we still need to scale it up.’

  Josh is suddenly unforthcoming. The paragraphs are gone, and I’m having to draw answers out of him sentence by sentence. So I change tack. Perhaps he’ll feel more comfortable talking about himself.

  He tells me he grew up in Alabama thinking he was going to play linebacker in the NFL, but realized he wasn’t good enough when he got to college. He spent some time working with the UN Development Programme in Kenya, and got a fellowship to work with the investment ministry in Liberia, where he saw desperate poverty first-hand. ‘I just got frustrated with governments and non-profits. For me, everything was just taking too long. So I got back to the US and I was like, “How do we increase the percentage of people who are eating well?”’ He’s back in preacher mode. ‘Eating well, to me, means eating in a way that doesn’t require killing an animal. Eating well means eating in a way that’s more restorative to the environment. Eating well means not fucking up your body. Eating well means it’s got to taste fucking good. Eating well means I can afford it. How can we increase the number of human beings who are eating well tomorrow? That’s really the mission of the company.’ A very broad mission indeed.

  Josh went vegan ten years ago, but he doesn’t go into detail about it. ‘I would prefer to cause less harm in my meals. That’s all,’ he says, simply.

  ‘Where does your sense of morality come from?’ I ask, with Bruce on my mind. ‘Is it from an animal rights perspective? A human rights perspective? Is it a religious thing?’

  ‘Yeah, no. To me, the more we can create a system where living things are flourishing, the better. That’s my morality.’

  ‘But where does that come from in your background? That’s a very San Francisco way of looking at things.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, honestly.’

  ‘I’m just trying to work out where you’re coming from. When you were growing up, you didn’t think you were going to one day grow meat in laboratories, obviously.’

  ‘I do have to say, when this scales up, it won’t be grown in laboratories. Yoghurt started up in a lab until Danone or whatever started producing a gajillion tons of it.’

  This is total bullshit, of course. Humans have been making yoghurt for thousands of years. In caves. But I don’t want to say so, because Josh is starting to get fed up with me, and I have one more question.

  ‘Shouldn’t we all just be eating less meat, rather than going to all these great lengths to make it?’

  ‘Yeah, in the same way that we should all be walking to work instead of taking cars, in the same way that we should all be swimming across the Atlantic Ocean instead of using a jumbo jet. In the same way that we should all be growing our own crops instead of going to the grocery store. Yes, we should, but we have to live in a reality-based world.’

  Josh doesn’t live in a reality-based world. He lives in San Francisco, in the fake-it-till-you-make-it start-up culture where problems are obscured and outlandish claims are made with unshakable confidence so that all-important venture capital can be secured. When I look at the JUST concept images, I see a shiny idea to attract investment instead of a workable solution to the crises caused by the human appetite for meat. If this is what the rest of the clean meat industry is like, a few people may make some money in the short term, but all of us – our planet as well as our bodies – will pay the price of allowing business as usual to continue.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Fish Out of Water

  On the day when the San Francisco Bay Area has the worst air quality in the entire world, I am in Emeryville, on the other side of the water from JUST. California wildfires that even the most stubborn climate change denialists accept are linked to a change in the climate have already claimed the lives of more than a hundred people, and the ash fog is so thick I can barely see across the street.

  I haven’t been able to eat meat since I ate the JUST nugget four days ago. The thought of it makes me nauseous. Perhaps clean meat is going to make me vegan after all, for all the wrong reasons.

  My mind is as unsettled as my stomach. Have I come all the way over here just to see a Silicon Valley bubble, a stunt with no viable product to sell? Is the JUST chicken nugget the Roxxxy True Companion of clean meat? I’m still hungry for the authenticity and transparency Bruce had promised me.

  So I’m pleasantly surprised when I ring the bell of Finless Foods and the company’s CEO answers the door. Mike Selden has close-set eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. He’s tall – six foot three – and humbly hunches over to shake my hand. I immediately know I’m in the company of an unassuming nerd.

  He pulls his CSO and co-founder Brian Wyrwas out of the tiny boardroom so he can meet me too. They are East Coast natives who moved here from New York two years ago to grow fish. Brian is twenty-six and Mike is twenty-seven. ‘We’re the two youngest people in the company,’ Mike declares. ‘We share a company, we share a house, we share a car and pretty much the entirety of our friendship group. People assume that we’re married. We don’t do much to dispel that myth.’

  Founded in 2017, not long after Mike and Brian had finished their biochemistry degrees, Finless Foods was the first clean meat start-up to specialize in seafood. They are focusing on bluefin tuna and sea bass; whatever they sell is going to be expensive at first, so it needs to fit the bill. Brian is friendly, but keen to get back to his meeting; they are deciding which of Finless’s seven staff members are going to fly out to Asia to fetch some bluefin starter cells.

  Mike is the ‘front of house’ in this start-up, but I am not going to see any kind of performance here. There will be no tasting. ‘We did a bunch of prototyping and tastings earlier on, but a lot of that was just to… You need to play the investment game,’ he says, with a knowing smile. ‘Investors need to see something physical, which I think makes sense. Business is about feelings. There’s plenty of brilliant scientists out there making companies who can’t get any funding because they can’t play the game.’ But the foods made by Finless are not yet ready for market,
and Mike isn’t going to pretend otherwise; he is a scientist first and an entrepreneur second, with an academic’s unwillingness to overplay his hand, in case he gets slapped in the face.

  There are only three clean meat companies that focus exclusively on fish at the moment, which is surprising, given that the fish problem is more pressing than the meat problem. If meat is murder, fish is genocide. Decades of commercial fishing, using ever more voracious methods of catch, have led to an ecological catastrophe in our oceans. A third of all fish stocks are being depleted faster than they can ever replenish; that means they are so overfished that the population can’t recover and the food chain has been destroyed. Another 60 per cent are already being exploited to their fullest extent – we cannot get any more fish out of them than we already do. That leaves only 7 per cent that are underfished, and these are often in areas that are too far from land to make it financially viable, or they’re in politically contested areas (where you risk starting a war if you sail into them). In other words, we’ve pretty much taken all the fish we can get from the sea.

  Fishing fleets are having to sail further out to catch fewer and smaller fish, burning more fuel. And yet 40 per cent of what commercial fishermen catch is thrown away – it is ‘bycatch’, the unintended, unwanted fish, turtles, birds and marine mammals caught in nets, killed and then discarded. We eat more fish than any other kind of animal protein and a billion people rely on it as their protein source. Poor coastal communities that depend on subsistence fishing are feeling the effects of this ecological catastrophe more than any of the rest of us.

  Fish farming might sound like a solution to the destruction of ocean ecosystems, but it runs into the same problems as intensive animal agriculture. Large numbers of fish enclosed in a small area means a huge tank full of shit, and it requires pesticides, fungicides and insecticides to kill the sea lice that thrive in these conditions. And many fish just won’t survive in a tank. Bluefin tuna need to move about a lot; being packed together like sardines in a tin will kill them.

  So it feels a little naive to ask Mike why he chose to make fish rather than animal meat, but that’s where I begin.

  ‘There’s a million reasons,’ he enthuses, delighted to be asked. First, our consumption of fish is ‘the largest source of suffering on the planet. If you kill a cow, it can feed, like, 300 people, but if one person is eating fish, if you’re eating sardines, you’re eating, like, ten animals. It’s suffering and killing on a much more massive scale.’ Then there are the health reasons. ‘With bluefin tuna, there’s mercury and plastic. The EPA-FDA [the US’s Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration] recommend that women of childbearing age – which they have decided is between the ages of sixteen and forty-nine, their numbers, not mine – shouldn’t eat any large carnivorous fish at all because of the mercury. Other people should only eat it once a week. Plastic – we still haven’t quite studied its effects. We do know the effects of microplastics on fish, and it’s terrifying.’ He is blinking in horror. ‘They have altered brain chemistry, altered metabolism, altered social behaviour. We’re set to have more plastics in the ocean by weight than fish by 2050. Fish are going to be like the cigarettes of our generation: doctors used to recommend them, but now we’re like, “Holy shit, it’s lung cancer!” Fish will go the same way when we actually study the effect of bioaccumulated plastic on human physiology.’

  And then there’s how you make clean fish. ‘Fish cells are very robust – they grow very easily, they don’t require a lot, they can deal with very wide temperature fluctuations. Land animals’ cells grow at thirty-seven Celsius, whereas fish cells can do anything from twenty-two to twenty-six, which is way better – that’s the temperature here,’ he tells me, gesturing towards a window where ash fog has blotted out the California sunshine. ‘The structure is a bit easier – a steak has complex, swirling marbling, whereas salmon sashimi is just layers of muscle-fat-muscle-fat, so it’s easier to build. It seemed like an easier scientific project.’

  Mike grew up in Boston, surrounded by seafood. ‘I got all the Jewish stuff, like the lox, and then I got all the Boston stuff because my family was not very religious so I also had lobster and clams and crab and everything else that Jews are not supposed to have.’ He went vegan after he read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation at fifteen, and then he met Brian, who he says is ‘a genius’ biochemist, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After a year teaching English in China, Mike went out for an Impossible Burger with Brian in New York. They had ‘a few too many’ beers, and decided to write a business plan.

  In March 2017, they got their first investment – seed funding, a lab and co-working space from life science start-ups accelerator IndieBio – which meant they had to move to San Francisco. (‘That’s literally the reason why we moved to California. We had no desire to be here at all.’) Now they have investors from across the globe. Among them is the venture capitalist Tim Draper, one of the first to sink money into Elizabeth Holmes’s notorious blood-testing start-up Theranos, and one of the very few who stood by her even after she was charged with fraudulently deceiving investors by massively exaggerating what her technology could do.

  But there doesn’t seem to be any exaggeration in the Finless Foods labs. On my tour here Mike talks me through the entire process, without any jargon or dazzling theatrics, and I properly understand it this time. They get their biopsies from fish famers, university labs, sport fishermen and even San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay. They separate the starter cells and suspend them in a solution in their ‘main workhorse lab’, then they filter out the cell type that is capable of expanding and dividing, and these cells are plated up into seed trays and incubated. It takes around a day for the cells to divide. ‘Our European sea bass cells proliferate like crazy,’ Mike says, like a proud dad. And once the cells have reached a critical mass, they go into one of the three different kinds of bioreactor they are experimenting with at the moment.

  We go into Finless Foods’ second lab, their ‘molecular biology lab’, where they grow their medium. Like JUST, they’ve found an animal-serum formula, but they didn’t need a Discovery Platform to discover it. ‘It’s salts, sugars and proteins,’ Mike says, simply. ‘The salts and sugars are food-grade stuff that we buy from food suppliers – nothing that people aren’t already eating – and then the proteins are made from yeast. We look inside a fish and see what proteins are useful for cell growth, and we find what DNA makes those proteins. We put that DNA into a microbe system – it could be yeast, it could be something else.’

  ‘Isn’t that genetic engineering?’

  ‘It’s the same thing we do to produce rennet, which is how we curdle cheese. If people are like, “Oh my God, this is GMO technology!” it’s like, “If you eat cheese, you already eat this.” We’re just using it to create a different protein, which is already found in fish.’

  We settle into the now-empty boardroom, which has two ‘Tuna of the World’ charts framed on the exterior walls, but is bare and brilliant white inside.

  ‘If you were to produce something now, it would be a kind of paste, wouldn’t it?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, that’s true. We do want to find a way to use the paste as an ingredient, because it still tastes like fish. We’re focusing on a spicy tuna roll, but instead of a spicy tuna roll it’s a spicy bluefin tuna roll,’ Mike effuses. ‘Is that popular in the UK? Everyone eats it here. We were trying to find the hamburger of fish for Americans, and it seems to be the spicy tuna roll.’

  But their big ambition is to make fillets, and they could use food science or tissue engineering to do it. ‘There are a lot of different technologies that are very promising, in terms of making this look 3D,’ Mike tells me, whipping out his iPhone and showing me a YouTube video made by a Dutch company called Vegan Seastar, in which bearded twenty-somethings eat slivers of perfectly layered, glistening pink non-fish – ‘zalmon sashimi’ – garnished with sesame, from black crucibles. ‘We are thinking o
f building something like this using food science, material science, to create a texture using plant-based proteins, or plant-based anything, or mushrooms, and then you seed it with the cells that we make as a flavouring agent.’

  It sounds great if they can get it right, and I can imagine it all going horribly wrong. As I learned at JUST, food needs to look, taste, smell and feel right for your brain to accept it. And Mike has a greater challenge than Josh; consumers don’t know what raw, unseasoned chicken is supposed to taste and feel like, but sashimi has given us very specific ideas about raw fish. Mike can’t use the smoke and mirrors of cooking his product in butter or covering it with breadcrumbs. If he’s making a fillet, it has to work straight out of the fridge.

  Perhaps tissue engineering would be a safer bet. Finless already has a tissue engineer on staff, and Mike talks about 3D organ printing as if it’s happening on every street corner in the Bay Area. ‘The machinery is expensive, but what’s appealing about this technology is that it’s fast. You can print an organ in thirty seconds. We like it. We’re looking into it. But at the moment, it’s still kind of early for us.’

  When Finless tuna first goes on sale, it will cost the same as an equivalent amount of conventional bluefin: around $7 for a piece of sashimi. Mike says it will be ‘years, not decades’ before that happens, and the critical factor is not science but regulation. I’m expecting him to launch into a well-worn diatribe about red tape getting in the way of progress, but instead he says, ‘We really want to go through a regulatory system that isn’t seen as skirting it. We’re not a scooter company. You can’t just make the technology, throw it on the street and hope for the best, because people don’t forgive, in terms of food. Food is very personal. If we’re seen trying to get around regulation, that’s really going to bite us in the ass.’ And if the first clean meat ever sold is on the market in a country chosen for its amenable standards on food safety, that will bite the entire industry in the ass. But I’m trying to forget about the JUST nugget.