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