Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  This is a potentially enormous concern, no matter how tempered Neil’s answer might be. We can’t control the direction of the market. We can’t control who will run the clean meat industry of the future, and it might not be well-meaning vegans, it might not be Mike the nerd or Bruce the evangelist. It might be someone with very different priorities indeed.

  ‘If it works, you could imagine having a commercially successful sector, companies that make money that don’t have anything like the significant social and environmental impact that is suggested if it remained small scale,’ Neil continues.

  I think about all those big investments from giant meat companies that the start-ups are so eager to secure, corporations that are notorious for putting profit above the welfare of animals, people and the planet.

  ‘Would it be the companies that already have access to the infrastructure and logistics clean meat needs that would be taking it over?’ I ask.

  ‘That seems a quite possible, maybe even likely scenario,’ he replies.

  For all Bruce’s idealism and Mike’s communism, they might be helping existing meat companies get richer, and doing the groundwork for an industry that makes us all reliant on ever more remote multinational corporations. In the future the clean meat industry is fighting for – where humans still eat meat, but no longer kill animals – we will have surrendered our self-sufficiency to companies with specialized technology. No one can guarantee that these companies would be a force for good, or run for the benefit of anyone other than themselves.

  * * *

  To understand where something is going to end up, sometimes you need to return to the beginning. After months of emails, I’m finally sitting opposite Mark Post. And he is telling me how often he eats sausages.

  ‘Every day, to be honest, because I put slices of sausage in my sandwich in the afternoon,’ he says, every inch the Dutchman despite his American-tinged accent. ‘And in the evening we sometimes eat meat too. I eat meat as much as anyone.’

  I’ve come to see Mark at the University of Maastricht, where his crumpled brown shirt and dark green trousers clash beautifully with his office’s orange carpet and yellow walls. He is even taller than Mike Selden, with a small paunch, receding grey hair and a hearty chuckle that peppers our conversation – ‘a ha ha ha ha’ – like machine gun fire. Mark is Professor of Physiology here, but he’s also a cardiovascular surgeon, the chief scientific officer of Europe’s biggest clean meat start-up, Mosa Meat, and a very busy man. I’m lucky to be here. But Mark is lucky too, because, the way he tells it, the entire cultured meat industry only exists because of a series of accidents, absences, coincidences and unintended events.

  It began because of the passion and determination of an eighty-one-year-old man, Mark explains. Willem Van Eelen was a Dutch entrepreneur who had dreamed of the idea of victimless meat cultured from cells ever since he experienced brutality and starvation as a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. Van Eelen knew he had to hustle to make his dream a reality. ‘He coerced scientists from three universities, Utrecht, Amsterdam and Eindhoven, to submit a grant to the Dutch government to make this happen,’ Mark tells me. The Dutch government agreed to stump up enough money to fund a cultured meat project for five years, starting in 2004.

  But there was limited enthusiasm for it. ‘None of the scientists initially involved were actually interested in making cultured meat. They were all using this as an umbrella to do their thing.’ They worked on the project in as far as it could advance their existing research interests. Eindhoven, for example, were much more dedicated to making a model system for bedsores than anything edible. Mark came on board two years into the project, after the project leader in Eindhoven fell ill. ‘I just thought it was a great idea. The more I learned about it, the more excited I became.’

  Mark’s eyes sparkle when he talks about his work. His contagious enthusiasm has been crucial to the success of clean meat, but his communication skills were only revealed because of another set of coincidences, in 2009. ‘I was on the train recovering from a boring meeting in The Hague one rainy Thursday (most meetings in The Hague are very boring, a ha ha ha ha), and I got a call from a journalist from the Sunday Times. I actually didn’t quite realize what the Sunday Times was.’ Neither of the academics who dealt with press enquiries about the project were available, the journalist said – could Mark answer a few questions? ‘I had nothing else useful to do, so I said OK. And that was the beginning of a media frenzy, because she put it on the front page, and AP and Reuters sent it all over the world. All of a sudden, I was the point person.’

  After the money from the government ran out that year (the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs didn’t see any commercial potential in what was being produced – ‘I know they regret that now,’ Mark chuckles), he was well versed in the power of media coverage, and the momentum it might be able to give the project’s funding. And he had seen from Oron that you could turn making meat into an entertaining show. ‘I thought, Why don’t we make a sausage, present it to the public, and have the pig that donated the cells for the sausage honk around on the stage,’ Mark says. The pig would be a living advert for the research they were pioneering.

  But even that sausage would take €300,000 of ingredients and labour to make. Mark was plodding on with limited funds when he got a call out of the blue from what later turned out to be Sergey Brin’s office. ‘They wanted to talk to me about what I was doing, and I said, “Sure.” At that time I talked to everybody about this project, so why not.’ One of Brin’s right-hand men flew over to Maastricht on a Dutch public holiday, and Mark told him about his plans for the pig/sausage performance.

  ‘And then he said, “Well, Sergey wants to fund this.” I had no idea who Sergey was. He said it as if everybody should know him, so I thought I should pretend that I did. A ha ha ha ha.’

  Mark had two weeks to write a two-page proposal. ‘I said, “How much money should I think about asking for?” He said, “Oh, a couple of million.” I said, “We can do that.” And he said, “By the way, it cannot be a sausage, it has to be a hamburger.” Having no clue that it would be much more difficult to make, I said, “Yeah, OK.”’

  ‘Why did it have to be a hamburger?’ I ask.

  ‘Because it’s America.’

  ‘Why is a hamburger more difficult?’

  ‘Because it actually has to look like meat. A sausage can be anything. You can get away with anything in a sausage. In a hamburger, you cannot: you have to make fibres that appear like meat. But in the end we made it happen.’

  It’s impossible not to like Mark. Of all the people in the strange world of clean meat, he has the greatest claim to be taken seriously, yet he is also the most humble and self-effacing, the only person prepared to really laugh at himself. Perhaps it’s because he sees how contingent his success has been. Perhaps it’s because he’s been an academic for nearly forty years and doesn’t need anyone else’s validation. Or perhaps it’s because he’s not in a Silicon Valley start-up.

  The launch itself was at the TV studio in West London where TFI Friday used to be filmed. Brin’s office hired the PR company Ogilvy to manage it. ‘I never got the bill for that and I’m sure it was even more expensive than the entire hamburger,’ Mark says. ‘We actually thought of having Ferran Adrià cook the hamburger, and getting Leonardo Di Caprio and Natalie Portman to taste it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’ In the end, they went for something only slightly less glamorous, to keep the focus on the science. But it was still a show, and a huge hit, while Oron’s pioneering performance, which was so much more entertaining but happened without the support of a PR company, sank without a trace.

  ‘Were you surprised by how much news it made?’ I ask.

  ‘I was, yes. I was aware of the power of the story, but I was sitting there with curled toes thinking, I hope they’re not going to trash this.’ He lowers his voice, conspiratorially. ‘To give you an idea of how naive we all were at that time, literally on the Sunday morning before the sho
w, Ogilvy had us all in the room and asked me, “Why are you doing this?” and I was like, “What?” I really had not thought about the message. I had to actually think, Why am I doing this? We came up with two reasons: one is that we wanted to show the public this was actually doable, the technology is there, and the second message was that we need to think about how we are going to produce meat in the future, that current meat production is not sustainable. The big third thing was that we wanted to have money, but that was not part of the message. A ha ha ha.’

  So the potential of lab-grown meat to save the planet was a bolt-on, an afterthought dreamed up the day before the launch at the behest of a PR company.

  It was coincidence that they launched the burger on a slow news day in August, when there was no Gulf War to compete with for airtime. But the location was a strategic choice; they couldn’t get the burger into America because of import restrictions. ‘The only way we could have done it in the US was to do it in the Dutch Embassy, ha ha ha ha, which is of course not a good location. We either had to do it in the Netherlands or in a country where we could smuggle it in. Since there’s a train connection with London, we could do that.’

  The impact of the launch still surprises Mark to this day. ‘I meet people who tell me, “We have this investment fund and it basically exists because of it.” “We started this company.” Or students who started studying bioengineering because of it. In retrospect, this was a very, very lucky choice.’

  Mark’s company, Mosa Meat, was founded in 2015 (Mosa is the Latin name for the river than runs through Maastricht). The Mosa burger will be manufactured in a Dutch factory and is expected to go on sale by 2021, initially costing nine euros.

  ‘Do you have a plan to move to cuts of meat?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘How far off will that be?’

  ‘Ooooh.’ He takes a little Dutch speculaas biscuit from the saucer of his coffee cup. ‘That’s very difficult to answer, to be honest. We’re starting to work gradually on that now.’ He crunches the biscuit slowly. ‘The theoretical framework is there. We know what we all have to do to make that happen. When it will be, to the eye and to the mouth and to the nose, a ribeye that you cannot distinguish from a ribeye that you get from a cow, that’s difficult to guess. So I’m not going there.’

  I think back to how nonchalant Vitor had been when he told me JUST could ‘grow a steak in a week if we wanted to’. It reminds me of something else I’ve been wanting to check. ‘Can you really take a biopsy from a feather and make meat out of it?’

  ‘Oh, God. Theoretically, you can. It’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, to be honest. If you’re going to do chicken or fish, the obvious cell source is a fertilized egg; it’s the ideal source for these cells. Unfortunately, with cows, we can’t do that.’ But piercing an egg and syringing cells out of it wouldn’t look as good in a promotional video as plucking a feather from a green pasture. ‘It’s possible, but it’s the worst idea ever, because it’s contaminated, it’s been on the floor. So you have to throw a lot of antibiotics at it. And to use it internally you’ll have to genetically modify the cells,’ he continues. ‘Actually I talked to scientists at JUST at my conference a year ago, and I asked them, “Really? What were you guys thinking?” and they said, “Well, it’s not our idea. It’s from marketing.” A ha ha ha ha.’ Mark laughs so much at this that I can see all his teeth.

  But Mark says he is ‘exceptionally glad’ he is no longer the only scientist trying to grow meat from cells, whatever cells they might be. He is grateful for the community the industry provides. At one point he was eager to share information on things that didn’t work so that others didn’t have to repeat his mistakes, but his investors weren’t keen, so collaboration between companies is limited to regulatory things, he says. His long-term plan is to develop the IP and then license it out, so his investors are happy but his technique can be a widespread, global method. And, of course, that would mean that anyone could use it, so long as they paid for it.

  ‘There’s a race to be the first to put this to market. Is that useful?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s useful. It also has downsides because my fear is that people will come up with inferior products just to be the first. That will harm the reputation of the technology. Some companies seem to be willing to sacrifice quality for commercial success. That, I’m worried about.’

  It’s easy to imagine clean meat will be in safe hands if there are people like Mark driving it. (He prefers ‘cultured’ meat to ‘clean’ or ‘cell-based’ meat.) Like my first conversation with Bruce, it feels like there is no criticism of the industry I can bring up that he can’t intelligently and eloquently address.

  When I ask if all of this is a bubble, he says if it is, it doesn’t matter. ‘I’m older than most people in this field. I have a slightly more grey perspective,’ he says. ‘This might be one of those technologies that goes through a hype cycle, where there will be a trough of disappointment and private investors start to back out. That’s the time to start a big campaign for public investment.’ Mark would much prefer to be working with public money. ‘This is going to be a scientific programme for the next thirty years. Even if there’s a product on the market three years from now, it still requires a lot of research and tweaking. You need scientific breadth to do that, and that comes from public funding.’

  When I ask if his work will encourage overconsumption, he waves the suggestion away. ‘Every ageing person has increasing problems with digesting meat. It’s just not physiologically possible to eat more meat than feels comfortable; there’s an upper limit to it. Meat consumption in heavily industrialized countries is actually going down.’

  But when I put Matthew Cole’s point to him, about perpetuating the taste for meat when it might be cultural rather than natural, Mark says something I wasn’t expecting.

  ‘Meat is a cultural thing. Part of the appeal of meat – I’m now saying something extremely controversial, but I think there’s an element to it – part of the appeal of eating meat is that you actually have to kill animals for it.’

  ‘In what way? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s supremacy over other species. Meat has always been associated with power, with masculinity, with fire, with all those things.’

  And he tells me about an ad for Remia barbecue sauce that ran recently on Dutch TV: Sylvester Stallone knocks a vegetable kebab out of a skinny actor’s hands, before firing a bazooka from a helicopter. ‘If you want to fight like a tiger, don’t eat like a rabbit,’ Sly shouts in the actor’s face. Then he smears a huge steak with sauce and slams it down on a table in front of him. ‘You want to act like a man? Eat like a man,’ he growls.

  ‘If you’re going to make meat in a lab or in a factory, with no risk involved, with no killing involved, it becomes a very wimpy version of meat,’ Mark goes on. ‘It becomes much more like broccoli than like a hamburger. Being a transitional product might actually help moving towards a plant-based diet.’

  And I suddenly understand why meat matters so much, why it’s so hard for us to let it go: meat is an intrinsic part of what makes men men and what makes us human, agents that dominate the world around us, top carnivores that have unequivocal power over and control of the environment.

  ‘This is all bound up with what it means to be human, isn’t it?’ I say.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Being human means dominating the world. And we’ve dominated it so well that we are destroying it now.’

  ‘Right.’

  Clean meat is going to change what it means to be human: human beings will no longer live at the expense of animals. But if meat is cultural rather than natural, it’s within our power to change our culture without relying on technology. Our culture has already changed: masculinity is no longer defined in terms of the ability to make fire and kill. Yes, clean meat could be the transitional product that weans us off killing animals in the same way that sex robots might be methadone for sex offenders.
But it could also prolong our addiction, and leave us dependent on faceless multinationals for basic food. Instead of relinquishing our power to dominate animals by giving up meat, we are giving remote corporations more power to dominate us.

  ‘Couldn’t this be driving us towards a world where we are relying on very specialized technology and corporations to produce our food where we were once self-sufficient? If you are a farmer in Vietnam, you can raise your own pigs for food. In a future where killing animals is forbidden but eating them is still normal, we’ll be disempowering ourselves by depending on technology.’

  ‘Yes. And I fully agree,’ he replies immediately. ‘I talk about microbreweries or “microcarneries” to illustrate that you don’t necessarily need to associate this technology with multinationals doing this in low-wage countries somewhere far away.’

  ‘But it’s not going to happen like that, is it.’

  ‘It… You know… we do have microbreweries.’

  ‘But people drink Heineken and Budweiser. We have microbreweries, but they are for something like 0.5 per cent of the global market.’

  ‘Yes, but they still are there. They are now 0.5 per cent of the market, but we don’t know what they are going to evolve into. But I completely agree with you, the fact of the matter is people would rather pay £4.99 than £5 for a kilo of beef, and if you want to go to £4.99 instead of £5, you need to scale up to a very large scale. And then you need to accept that it comes from very, very far away. This is consumer driven, I guess.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a dark, troubling idea?’

  ‘It is, but that’s to accept the dark side of the human species. I’m not a big believer that we are victim to large multinationals. We give them the power to be those large multinationals. I tend to be very liberal about these things – if this is what’s going to happen, it’s presumably the will of the people. I would prefer to see microbreweries, but that’s not in my hands. If Unilever wants to start culturing sausages, I cannot stop them.’