00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: So I went to California at your behest? 00:00:24 Speaker 3: Did I wish? Because first of all. 00:00:28 Speaker 2: I know you wish that you had been there yourself, because this is your favorite place. 00:00:31 Speaker 3: This is one really hurt and I'm. 00:00:35 Speaker 2: We should just say where we're talking about, Okay. 00:00:38 Speaker 3: So I sent you Ben on a mission because I couldn't go because my wife would leave me if I took one more trip, basically, and so with a heavy heart, I handed the reins to one of my favorite places in America, which is the food lab at Matson Madson is like Madison's like the R and D. If you if you were a food company in America and you want to do something new or cool, you maybe tried in your own lab, but mostly what you do is you pick up the phone and you call Matson out of the Bay Area and you say, can you make me and fill in the blanks the most delicious potato chip that also prices you know, is priced under X. 00:01:25 Speaker 2: Or got Like the walls, the walls are lined with like a pantry shelf of just like every product you've ever had and enjoyed, and like they're like Phrensias on there. It's just like all the hits, things that I can't even mention because they're nbaight are on the walls. 00:01:40 Speaker 3: Oh my god. It's like if you walk through a grocery store after going to Matson, you're like, Oh, that's Matson. Oh, that's Matson. Oh, and you realize my diet is basically Matson. 00:01:51 Speaker 2: I interviewed two people out there who you know, of course from other Revisionist history episodes. Steve Gundrum, their chief AI officer, who was at the time of our first mistake the CEO and knows everything about why we like what we do. 00:02:04 Speaker 4: And carro Cake became a phenomenon at first because of the air. 00:02:09 Speaker 2: And Barbara Stuckey, their chief New Product strategy officer, who's an old hand on revisionist and is just a font of amazing tales from the Matson archives. 00:02:18 Speaker 5: In the case of this, the challenge was if you've ever opened a pomegranate, it's not exactly you can't squeeze the pomegranate. 00:02:29 Speaker 3: Like I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work everyone, did you get that sensor? 00:02:35 Speaker 2: She's she was so pumped it was I found it so delightful. She's so excited and like a in a true believer in this amazing sense in what they do. 00:02:45 Speaker 3: I want. I wanted to take my when they're old enough, take my two daughters out to the Bay Area, and I want Barbed to do a version of take your daughter to work day, only we take my daughter's to work day. I'm I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job. So I said, you out there now, Now, why ben you tell us what was? Why did I send you bout there? 00:03:13 Speaker 2: So you sent me out there because you had reached out to Barb about a mistake that has loomed very large over the entire food industry that she wanted to tell us about. And so the story is basically, Barb, who's more excited than anyone you've ever met to go to work every day, is going to work in twenty eighteen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen area and is at a conference where she comes face to face with the future of the food industry and then realizes that the food industry is about to commit Harry Carey on a much broader scale than even McDonald's, and she has to try and stop it and So it is the story of two mistakes. The first one a mistake that we made in the nineties, and the second one a mistake that Barb is trying to stop us from making. Today. Welcome to revisionist History. I'm Ben Mattapaffrey, and in this our final episode of the Mistake series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pantheon of food science, the Hallot Halls of Matson. It's a place you may remember from way back in season two, episode nine, McDonald's broke my heart, all about McDonald's French fries. But my mission wasn't as greasy. I was sent to Mattson for a more cultivated reason. Okay, so our story begins in twenty eighteen. Barb's at this conference for an amazing new technology that everyone's calling lab grown meat, and she starts to get this hit in her stomach. 00:05:04 Speaker 5: It was really the year where this technology was starting to happen and companies were figuring out how they were going to isolate the cells that they wanted to use to make the type of meat that they wanted to use, and it was just mind blowing. So the idea here is very simple. It is to be able to make meat by using cells of meat to make more meat, and that idea just to me, it was just brilliance. 00:05:43 Speaker 2: And also, know no animals will suffer, and there's not factory farming things like this, you won't have so. 00:05:48 Speaker 5: Many things that we don't have to worry about anymore. It can be done inside. So it just seemed it seemed like magic. It just felt like something's happening here. 00:05:59 Speaker 2: This would be like huge for me because my wife is an ethical vegetarian and if I could tell her that there was nothing killed in producing meat that we were eating, I would say, suddenly be eating meat again at home, which would be thrilling. 00:06:13 Speaker 3: Steak would return. 00:06:16 Speaker 2: And not just when Julia's out. But there's like there are all sorts of there are all sorts of potential upsides to this technology, and Barb's just sitting there thinking about them. 00:06:26 Speaker 3: There's like ten different environmental reasons why we would want to Cattle farming is one of the single greatest contributors to global warming. It sucks up enormous amounts. 00:06:35 Speaker 6: Of water, methane emission, methane emissions, but you could you could make a case that we're replacing the cattle industry with something that comes out of a lab would be one of the single biggest things we could do in favor of of of the environment. 00:06:48 Speaker 2: I mean is no. See, there's like there's obviously there's like runoff to runoff from cattle farms, fertilizer any so there's there are all these like huge upsides and barb, who's you know, the person who's most excited to go to work is just thrilled about this. However, there was a problem. 00:07:05 Speaker 5: It started with an image, and I'm going to show you the image. 00:07:12 Speaker 2: So we're looking at a Petrie dish of what looks like a perfectly round patty of raw ground beef. 00:07:22 Speaker 5: Yes, And to me, having it in a Petrie dish. 00:07:27 Speaker 2: Not good, not at. 00:07:29 Speaker 5: All appealing, delicious or anything I want to put in my body. 00:07:33 Speaker 2: And already like raw meat is not something I see and think not super repeated. 00:07:37 Speaker 7: It's so sexy. 00:07:38 Speaker 5: So I sat through the conference and it was probably three or four days, and I kept hearing these terms cell based meat, lab grown meat, and it just I was so horrified by the language that I grabbed the executive director and I just you know, pulled on his jacket and I said, can we talk. 00:08:00 Speaker 7: I think that we need to. 00:08:03 Speaker 5: Work on the naming and the communication around this technology. That if we don't do it now, and we don't explain it right, and we don't bring the consumer along from the beginning, we're going to end up like GMOs. And nobody's going to want to use GMOs and their formulations, and consumers are not going to want to eat it, and we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world. I have tasted meat made this way and I was shocked at how much it tastes like real meat. 00:08:37 Speaker 2: But it's not No one's going to get there if it's called lab grown meat, exactly going to end up like GMOs, which is our first mistake. That's after the break. So the first mistake. We had to talk to Steve who was the CEO at the time, And it starts in the nineteen nineties, eight nineties, early two thousands when a company called Zenica now known as Astrozenica, so of the COVID vaccine fame, approaches Mattson and says we have created a genetically modified tomato and we need your help. We're here to talk about the story of the tomato. I mean, what what why did the why did this GMO tomato exist? What problem? What problem was it solving? 00:09:34 Speaker 4: It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing. So tomatoes by their very nature are delicate. So the most optimum tomatoes for the hedonics and the organ eleptics and how it tastes and you know all those criteria. They were very difficult to harvest economically. 00:10:01 Speaker 2: Because you had if you let it ripen on the vine, you had too long, it was a very short window in which you could ship it, or if it was easier to puncture. 00:10:10 Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, they became delicate, they were harder to harvest. 00:10:15 Speaker 2: Basically, it's like tomatoes are a really difficult crop because if you pick them ripe, then they're very soft. You have lower yields because they're using these huge combines to harvest them, and so you're likely to lose a lot of tomatoes, which then drives up the price of the tomatoes that you do ship. And then you're shipping these ripen tomatoes, which means they have a very short time to get to wherever they're going to be sold and then used. So the way they would handle this, there are a few ways people handle this, but one way was that you would literally pick a tomato green, ship it green because it was firmer and not yet ripe, and then gas it with that ethylene gas before it hit the market shelves, which gave it the sort of red look that you expect from a tomato. So it was like, overall a suboptimal situation for tomato lovers and GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin, and then in nineteen ninety four it's applied to foodstuffs and the first thing that gets approved by the FDA is a tomato. It's called the Flavor Saverer tomato, which is basically trying to solve this basic problem of how you like pick and ship tomatoes. So there's an This is one of those first GMO products that Zenica brings to Matson, and what they're asking Matson to do is not develop the tomato, which they've designed basically with the end use of pures, soups things like that, but basically solve this crucial problem of GMOs, which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to buy into this thing. 00:11:50 Speaker 3: It's funny because I was in the early nineties covering the FDA for an nih for the Washington Post. So I was writing about all these early things in that period, and I feel like it was there was predictable. It was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of of genetic modification on all levels, right because it was so new back then. I mean, you twer sent now where we've you know, we've had thirty years of this, but in ninety four it was like science fiction. That's the sort of problem the grappling with that. I mean, people don't even can even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something, and so that I feel like the backlash has shifted over time, but the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystification. 00:12:50 Speaker 2: Well, so I was thinking about the favor say, the Tomato is nineteen ninety four, Jurassic Park comes out in nineteen ninety three, So it's like, if you have a cultural reference point for what the scientists are doing, it's like dinosaurs, We're going to eat you alive. You're kind of like, that's we're not supposed to be doing that right. 00:13:07 Speaker 3: Yes, it fits in with you know, there's a there's a kind of moral element which we don't see as much today, that we should not be disrupting God's creation in this way. 00:13:20 Speaker 2: So Steve talks about this. Actually they begin to bring people in to actually encounter the tomato and the zenka tomato and study how they respond to it in these focus groups when people try the tomato. So do you recall how people would react when they tasted it? 00:13:42 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this is a great tomato. And I remember, especially cutting them open. There was one thing, you know, people handle them. 00:13:50 Speaker 2: And so you put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say, one of these is genetically modified. No, not that. 00:13:56 Speaker 4: When you just start talking about how are they grown, where are they grown? Are they good for you? What makes a bad tomato? What makes a good tomato? You kind of build up to the aha moment. You do a slow reveal. You know what if the pasta sauce you ever had was made with a high bread tomato that had never been grown before. You kind of start off with baby steps and this is a this is a news, this is a new high bread tomato. Then we just kept going deeper and deeper into the story until we finally found the point where they pushed back that Okay, now now you've crossed the line where was where you've got scientists who are not just breeding. These aren't agronomous and agricultural specialists. This is like stuff in the lab where you're modifying the seed genetically. I mean, these were words that were not Genetics was not a common word back then. The word modified organism sounded like I remember consumers selling sounded like bugs, you know, or bacteria. 00:15:18 Speaker 2: Or you know. 00:15:19 Speaker 4: They were all kinds. 00:15:20 Speaker 2: Of three words modified. 00:15:25 Speaker 4: And you have a nuclear franken food, right. It came from professor at Boston College and then got picked up by the New York Times and ended up in an up ed and off it went. 00:15:38 Speaker 2: Lewis wrote, quote, if they want to sell us franken food, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches, and head to the castle. Steve basically finds that everybody has already been freaked out by the name genatically modified organisms, and they call it franken food, and so like what they try to do at Mattson has come up with a story that says like this is not really that different than what we've already done for centuries, Like think about the way we make apples by grafting parts of one apple tree onto another apple tree. And they come up with these analogies, and the thing is like it just it doesn't really stick because they've got this name GMOs that hangs over everything. And he even talks about how people just shortened the acronym, like pronounced it by the acronym, like they call them GMOs. And it was this, it was like this banner that nobody could really get past. And what the banner meant to people is science is involved in this. There's like some sort of like hubris, we're treading in a place where we shouldn't tread. Like what they were eating may look and taste like a tomato, but it's it's just like in some fundamental way, it's not. 00:16:48 Speaker 4: There was some kind of line. What they wanted to be sure was that what they were still eating was truly a tomato, that it somehow was not so synthetically bred that it kind of crossed the line that it was no longer truly a tomato, but some kind of red, delicious fruit. 00:17:16 Speaker 3: It's a zombies. 00:17:17 Speaker 2: It's a zombie tomato. 00:17:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. 00:17:19 Speaker 1: It is. 00:17:21 Speaker 3: They have attached one of the most kind of elemental dystopian human fantasies. 00:17:30 Speaker 2: Right right, this thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually. 00:17:34 Speaker 3: Yes, it has the appearance of nomalacy, but inside there is something foreign. And I mean every you know, there's a huge category of sci fi movies that are just about this thing. 00:17:44 Speaker 2: Yes, everyone's worried that they made the zombie tomato, and I think basically it's like, however good The analogy is, it's Xenica's tomato loses out, Like at one point it has a sixty something percent it sells way better than like the average tomato pure in UK supermarkets, and then after some of the backlash to the flavorsaverer tomato, Zenica like vastly loses market share at plummets. So now you can't get a Zeneca GMO tomato on the market. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons, but like a big one is that there's this huge resistance to GMO's frank and food GMOs. 00:18:20 Speaker 3: Wait, so when I buy tomatoes in them in the supermarket today, none of them GMO. 00:18:27 Speaker 2: I don't think that none of them are GMO, but I suspect that the vast majority are not GMO, which honestly I get. I think if you gave me a choice, I would prefer a naturally occurring tomato, which is not something I'm proud of. But there is something about the intensity of the anti GMO thing that I relate less to. This morning, I open up my morning yogurt and when I opened the lid. On the lid, it says made from milk from non GMO cows. It's like and it's sort of like screaming this thing at me that I like, it was a question I wasn't even asking. It's just like, oh, or had I had? Like I made my friend Mutter Pinier the other night and I use this these like this chili spice I had and it says like non GMO chili, and I was like, That's what didn't even occur to me that this might be Emotionally, It's become this rallying cry where whatever Matson wanted to happen, whatever Zeneca wanted to happen with the way people would respond to GMOs, the exact opposite happened. And it's because I think like they never could change the name. 00:19:28 Speaker 4: The first time I heard franken food, I was like, Okay, this is bad. Words are very powerful, and for whatever reason, I think that was a hard stop. 00:19:42 Speaker 2: So all of this brings us to our second mistake, the one that we are that Barb is trying to stop us from making again, which is it's twenty eighteen. She goes to this conference and it's all about this thing called lab grown meat, and she's sitting there getting all excited about this technology and then hearing this word thrown around and she's just like, oh no, we're about to do it again. Whiplash, whiplash. Maybe this is a this is a good time for a commercial break. 00:20:18 Speaker 1: Okay, we'll be right back. 00:20:49 Speaker 2: All right. So back with Barb at the lab grown meat conference, and she keeps hearing these names for it, lab grown meat, cell based meat, and she's like, it's happening again. So how did you go about trying to solve this problem because you basically, let's not make the GMO mistake twice. That's right. 00:21:09 Speaker 5: It was really a rallying cry for everyone on the team. 00:21:12 Speaker 2: Imagine if it were lab grown organisms. 00:21:16 Speaker 5: It that makes my stomach lip not so happy. 00:21:21 Speaker 2: So she starts doing the mats and things. She gets a bunch of people together in a room. She starts testing, how do you feel about this? What do you think? How does it look to you? 00:21:30 Speaker 5: It was one of my friends that I was trying to explain the technology to her, and she said, oh, no, I don't think God wants us to eat that interesting, Yes, one of my friends. I don't even know how to explain it. But it did occur to me that there could be some very different opinions. And turns out that even to this day, there is a very political skew for whether or not you're interested in this kind of a product. 00:22:03 Speaker 2: Florida, in fact, has banned this product, and Alabama and. 00:22:08 Speaker 5: Yes, so yeah, but it's now become a political issue. So it was like a like a religious thing that something could. 00:22:13 Speaker 2: Come political somehow in a weird way. It's like it plays in the cluster of neurons that has something to do with abortion. Also, like there's like in vitro is a word that applies to both of these, to the gray areas of both of these universes. 00:22:28 Speaker 5: I would say, you know, the ven diagram of people who are anti abortion are going to be anti cultivated meat too. 00:22:38 Speaker 2: It's really interesting, anti lab road meat. 00:22:42 Speaker 3: So what does she does? She have a tone that she wants to use. 00:22:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, she gets these people together to start thinking about the story and what name can emerge from the story somewhere better than others. 00:22:55 Speaker 5: Okay, well here's I'm sorry. 00:22:59 Speaker 2: Nano pastured meat got five votes? 00:23:03 Speaker 5: What unbounded meat, slaughter free, propagated, minimalist agriculture. I don't remember these celebration No, definitely not. 00:23:22 Speaker 2: You know, we went through this huge list of names. I think she has something like one hundred, and it is a really hard problem to solve, like what to name this thing? Because the whole challenges you have to come up with a new name for a thing that doesn't foreground the fact that this is a new thing and it's just this that paradox inherent in the project. Right, So then the question is meat, like what is how do you package it such that it's not like they're lying to me this was grown in a lab. You're like, this is slightly different. But they do land on this one name that splits the difference. I think pretty well, do you remember when you hit on the one that you landed on. 00:23:59 Speaker 5: We had a short list, and I think once we got to the short list, it seemed like a no brainer. 00:24:06 Speaker 2: And what was it? 00:24:07 Speaker 5: And that was cultivated meat? 00:24:10 Speaker 2: How does how does that name strike through? Well? 00:24:12 Speaker 3: On the list of names that she was considering, the one I liked the most was minimalist meat. 00:24:19 Speaker 2: Because it's it's it's the it's the claim about it's more about it's foregrounding the benefits. 00:24:27 Speaker 3: And also it's capturing the kind of virtue of this, which is this is meat that's leaving a much smaller footprint on everything. It's it's and minimalists suggests a kind of clarity and elegance and simplicity in the way it's produced. I mean a bit about cattle farming is this is insanely messy and convoluted. 00:24:49 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:24:49 Speaker 3: I like that, but I'm not, you know, I would be. I'm not. I'm not the typical consumer here. I'm I was already pro this before I even needed a new name. 00:24:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think like minimalists. I would I like minimalists. 00:25:02 Speaker 3: I like cultivated, You like cultivated? 00:25:05 Speaker 2: I like cultivated? 00:25:06 Speaker 3: Yeah, I like it. Well, there is a lovely pl lay on a cultivated person as a sophisticated, you know, as a kind of person of elegance. 00:25:14 Speaker 2: Well, and I think also like there's there's the old truism about lawmaking and food. You know, how the sausage gets made, the lesson of which is that nobody nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made. That the sausage becomes less appetizing if you know how it gets made. And so there's something it like genetically modified organism really spells out how the sausage gets made. Lab grown meat spells out how the sausage gets made. Cultivated meat, I think is obscuring that in an you know, it signals that it's different. It's not misrepresenting, but it's also not like throwing the peach redish in your face, which I think is kind of crucial because at the end of the day, people basically don't want to know a lot about how their food gets to them. But that is why she's trying to change the name, because it's like, can you obscure? Is there a way to like hide the words that make it clear that this is an innovation and not just she's the way things should be. She's absolutely right and I agree. I remember being really excited and being like, I can't wait to try that. And so, obviously, because Mattson has unnecessary connections, I went to try it. 00:26:29 Speaker 1: Oh, I tried it. 00:26:30 Speaker 2: I tried it. 00:26:31 Speaker 3: Oh my god, I didn't know that. And now I feel even more bummed about letting you go. 00:26:43 Speaker 2: So I did. I had to try. I had to try like grim meat, sorry, cultivated meat, ben cultivated meat. So I would say the cultivated meat industry is uh somewhat downtrodden these days, but there are still people doing this and figuring out how to scale it. And and the big one is a place called Upside Foods. So they are conveniently located in Emeryville, so also in the Bay Area. And I went there and they had these like huge tanks, and I think they're like stainless steel tanks basically on an industrial floor. And in these tanks they are using cells taken from a chicken egg years ago to brew cultivate this meat at scale chicken and chicken in this case. And so I met with a woman there named Aaron Santi, vice president of PR and Communications at Upside Foods. 00:27:44 Speaker 8: Honestly, I think the number one thing to me, is tasting is bleeving? 00:27:48 Speaker 2: Right? 00:27:50 Speaker 8: People ask us all the time what does it taste like? And the most common thing someone says after they try it, We'll see I'm preempting this before you try. 00:27:57 Speaker 2: It, like chicken. 00:27:58 Speaker 8: Taste like chicken, And we say, funny thing that because it is chicken, right, And I think that's a big part of it. 00:28:05 Speaker 7: I mean, at the end of the day, what we do. 00:28:07 Speaker 8: And the innovation that has led to us being able to do this has tons of science and technology at its core, but. 00:28:14 Speaker 7: Ultimately, we make food. 00:28:16 Speaker 8: It's something you eat, and so what better way to have you connect with that than have the opportunity to try it. 00:28:21 Speaker 3: So you go in there and they prepare in front of you. They take their meat and it looks just like chicken. 00:28:28 Speaker 2: Tell me what I'm looking at? 00:28:30 Speaker 7: Yes, okay. 00:28:31 Speaker 8: So we have a little appetizer which is a buttered chicken samosa and then this is a butter milk fried chicken sandwich. 00:28:40 Speaker 2: Both look like the normal version of the product. 00:28:45 Speaker 7: And it's got a little mint chutney on top. 00:29:00 Speaker 2: Okay, that is delicious? 00:29:01 Speaker 7: Did I call it? Does it taste like chicken? 00:29:03 Speaker 2: That is seriously delicious? That's a really good one. Credible, it tasted exactly like normal chicken. Granted they have a very excellent chef on staff. But if you had not told me, if I were not in this pristine, futuristic place where they're making this thing, if I didn't know the whole story, I would have had no questions. I would not have wondered was this chicken produced differently than the chicken I get at a fast food place that comes from god knows where. 00:29:36 Speaker 3: What did the people at Upside say about the name in question? What do they call it? 00:29:42 Speaker 2: They call it cultivated meat. 00:29:43 Speaker 3: So Barb one as one of the day Barb. 00:29:45 Speaker 2: Was able to basically get like a coalition of people together through the people who are hosting that conference and like get a lot of buy in from the people in this space to like use this term cultivated meat. And so we'll see what happens in the future if that can actually that plus the storytelling around it, can actually overcome people's anxieties. But to me, I think like what Upside seem committed to is the idea that like tasting is believing that where they want to start here is not in packaged goods that you get off the shelf. But basically like with restaurants, So you will go to a restaurant, you'll try this, you'll know you're trying something different, and you'll have the experience that I had, which is like, Okay, this is like it's it's quite good and and like in no way doesn't taste different to me. 00:30:35 Speaker 3: Do they think they'll be safer? Do you get do you get salmonella outbreaks? And there's no any biotic. 00:30:41 Speaker 2: You don't get salmonella outbreaks from from from cultivated meat. And in fact, they're like in the future, you could imagine things like low cholesterol beef. So if you like, for if your doctor says like cut down your cholesterol, that you want to keep eating beef, like, there are ways to handle this process such that you make a healthier piece of meat. So they're now doing this at scale, a greater scale than they've ever done before. And then it'll be a question of can we get the story right, can we get the communication right? Yeah, and I think cultivated meat we'll see, but at least it's an attempt to not make the same mistake twice. 00:31:19 Speaker 3: I am so down for this. I wish Barb every good luck in her campaign, and I, for one will be lining up to have my cultivated steak. 00:31:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, let's just hope bad when that steak hits the market. There's a name in this story that makes you want to eat it. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Chakerji, fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, original music by Luis Skara, Sound design and mastering by Marcelo di' OLIVERA special thanks to Justin Shimmick. I'm Ben Mattahaffrey.