 I really appreciate everybody joining us today. I'm really excited about this conversation. Obviously, as you know today, we're talking about an important new book by a really great food journalist who's been way ahead on one of the most important issues in the meat industry, in agribusiness and in the food system today. And of course, that's Chase Purdy. Chase has a long history of reporting on the business, politics and technology of food. He's worked at Quartz and Politico, as well as newsrooms across the American South, including The Roanoke Times, The Ledger, and The News, Virginia. He was a 2019 National Fellow at New America, which is where our paths crossed. I was a Fellow at New America in 2014. I also write about big corporations and food. My first book was about the meat industry called The Meat Racket. And then I published a book about coke industries called Coke Land. So I'm really grateful to be part of this discussion today because Chase's book hasn't just been fascinating for me, but it's had a really big impact on how I think about the food system. So before we get into it, Chase, I wanted to say hello and give you a chance to say hi to everybody. How are you doing in this quarantine era? I'm doing well. I'm coming at you from my humid Williamsburg apartment up in Brooklyn, but happy to be chatting today. Yeah, it's good to see you. I wish we were at New America's offices. Maybe when all this passes, we'll be able to do that. For sure. Because yeah, this will be an important issue. So let's just jump right in. Let's talk about this book, The Billion Dollar Burger, Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food. And that's sort of a big subtitle that I think actually captures the enormity of what you're writing about in this book. And as a little bit of background, as I said, I've written about the traditional meat industry. I mean, what we think about is meat, cows, chickens, pigs that are slaughtered, processed, distributed to eat. You're writing about something totally different. And we could call it cultured meat, cell-based meat. I'll let you define it. But before you do, the one thing I wanna say is when I first heard about this technology, I think about four years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, it really seemed almost like the realm of speculative science fiction to me. I thought, okay, this is really interesting, but this is something that might impact us five years, 10 years down the road. But your book really changed my thinking about this and showed how important this is for us to be talking about today. So why don't we start at the beginning? What are we talking about here in this discussion when we're talking about meat? Right, so I mean, to your point about learning through this that we're maybe closer to cell-cultured meat than maybe what you once thought. It's the same case for me. You know, the last time really that I feel like the world was talking about cell-cultured meat was really back in 2013 when a Dutch professor sort of unveiled the first sort of cell-cultured beef patty to the world on a stage in London. And basically every major outlet was writing about it at that point. And then sort of the sort of public noise about it kind of died down for a while. And in that downtime meat alternatives particularly in the plant-based sector, like impossible foods and beyond meat kind of rose up and captured a lot of public imagination. And I think now we're reaching sort of this point where cell-cultured meat, which is an entirely different kind of meat alternatives in the plant-based variety is starting to gain a lot of steam. And it is fundamentally different than like the impossible foods or beyond meat burgers and products that you're gonna find out there. And just as a basic overview, it's a complex science, but the basic overview is that, you essentially like extract like a stem cell from, you name it, like a chicken, a pig, a cow, lamb. And you basically need three ingredients to make cell-cultured meat. You need that animal cell. You need something for that cell to feed on. And our bodies and an animal body's blood delivers lots of nutrients to cells that can then replicate and build themselves up. And the tissue, it's not much different when it comes to feeding these cells. The cells feed on this liquid medium that has, it's filled with amino acids and proteins and all the things that a cell needs to replicate itself over and over again. And then the third ingredient is basically like where that all happens. You think about a cow's body has like a certain temperature. It has the right oxygen levels throughout it to promote sort of tissue growth. All that happens in what's called a bioreactor in the cell-cultured meat world, which is essentially, you know, it sounds super fancy and it is in some level, but it's essentially just a big beer vat or a tank where all this happens. It's like sort of temperature controlled and super sterile. And inside this tank is where the cell that you have collected replicates over and over and over again. And it grows into fat tissue and into muscle tissue. And on a sort of really simple level, when you put those two things together, you have on a molecular level and a nutritional level what is real meat. And so that's kind of what it is. And I would say that since 2013, this field in the seven years since 2013, this field has grown to like more than 30 startups around the world, has gotten investment dollars, not only from, you know, single investors in certain funds, but also from people like as high-profile as Lika Xing in Hong Kong, Bill Gates, Richard Branson. And the case that I make in this book is that even if you are really unfamiliar or really squeamish or really excited about self-cultured meat, that you're not gonna be able to like ignore it. There's enough willpower and science and money and interest pushing this technology, this food to the forefront and we're kind of at that point now. And that's what really blew me away is just how advanced and far down the road this is. I really had no idea. And to that point, to talk about this, first of all, you've eaten some. I mean, you've eaten some of this meat. I seriously tell us about this. I mean, is this a totally fake, weird test tube kind of rubbery meat? Is it a familiar, if I bought this in the supermarket, would I identify it as meat? So my experience eating this started and I remember, so the book centers, the book involves a lot of the companies in this space, but it really centers around, you know, one kind of is the vehicle for the story and that company is Just, which is based out in San Francisco. And I remember the first time I went to Just and I tried self-cultured meat and the first dish that they put in front of me was foie gras, which is not something that like I grew up with. It's not something I eat ever. It just kind of looked like this meat paste. I mean, it is just pâté. And I remember the taste was very rich and kind of meat-like, but I didn't really have a lot to go on. And then the second thing that they brought out, and I wasn't expecting them to bring out a second dish, was a duck chorizo taco. And that really sparked my interest in this and got me much more excited about trying other products, which would include meatball, chicken tenders, chicken salad, fried chicken. And as the reporting sort of went on into like year, you know, one year, two years in and I started eating the products as, you know, as I was doing my reporting, it got to be really cool. I mean, like the taste is there. Often what I would do before I would taste these things though is I'm really interested in sort of like kind of tearing into it and seeing what it looks like on the inside. And I remember I was at another company that's based in Silicon Valley and was given sort of this chicken tender that had been very simply seasoned, just a little bit of salt and pepper and the way I sort of describe this is if you, any of the sort of the listeners right now or even you, if you slice into like a chicken breast that's been cooked, you'll notice it's kind of like stringy. It's actually really hard to get cells to grow in that linear fashion. And I remember pulling apart this chicken tender and seeing it be just that and thinking like, wow, like we've reached this point to where not only does this taste and have the mouth feel of meat, but it actually is growing just like meat as well. It was super fascinating. And it all, I mean, it all tasted really, it tasted like you would expect it to. That's the other funny thing about meat is everyone's like, did it taste good? And it's like, well, meat on its own is kind of just a basic flavor. It's really how you season it and serve it that makes it interesting. But on a fundamental level, it all tasted how it should have tasted. Understood, totally. Yeah, tasted like chicken, right? So, okay, so instead of a slaughterhouse, this meat is created in almost, it sounds like a giant brewery really is what it might look like to the outsider with these big tanks. It tastes like meat as much as frankly, probably your industrial chicken tastes like chicken anymore. It feels like meat, it has that experience. One of the things you really point out though, for this industry to become mainstream to where I can go to the grocery store and make a choice between traditional meat and silk cultured meat is cost. And you were talking about when some of these first products were revealed in 2013, let's talk about the cost per pound and where it was a matter of years ago, where it is now and where it needs to be for this thing to become mainstream. Right, so the cost now really depends on kind of what company, what species is being grown, but to hit rewind and go back, because I think that's really where you can see just how dramatic some of these changes have been. When that Dutch professor that I talked about introduced the first silk cultured beef patty on a stage in London back in 2013, that ended up being about $330,000 per patty or about $1.2 million per pound, which is slightly out of most people's price ranges. But now, depending on what you're making, this can really range between, I think whenever I was last at Just, they were talking about being about $50 per nugget or $100 for like a $200 per pound of chicken meat. Some companies that I think it was Memphis Meats had mentioned they've gotten theirs down to about a $1,200-ish. And that's a significant drop. That's very, very expensive still. It's a significant drop and those were all prices that were laid out before any of these companies had made sort of or built any kind of facility that was an official like production facility, which once those are being built and there are about five companies now that are building them or have one already, once those are built, that's when you're gonna start seeing like serious declines in price because they'll have the equipment and the scalability to kind of like take it to its next step. And another way that prices dropped too is that second ingredient that I mentioned earlier, which is the sales feed on this nutrient-dense liquid medium. For a long time, at the earlier stages of this industry, the companies were using what's called fetal bovine serum, which is what it sounds like. It was basically cow fetus blood, which is super rich in all these nutrients. It's often, I mean, this is a product that's used in pharmaceuticals a lot. The people who are in this industry don't want to use that. And so they basically went off and they've created their own plant-based and synthetic nutrient-dense mediums. And we saw the price drop basically from $1,200 per liter for fetal bovine serum to what at least one company has said they have it down to about $1 to $5 per liter now, which is, again, like a significant drop in cost to what was one of the biggest hurdles that the industry happened. So, I mean, you've covered a lot of businesses, you've covered these businesses. I hate to ask you to speculate, but when you look out on the horizon, when do you see this technology getting to the point that it could be in grocery stores and kind of breaking that cost barrier? Do you think it's possible? Is it 10 years away? I mean, I don't have a crystal ball or like I don't know how to read these of this. So it's difficult to say grocery stores. That's a good question. I mean, if you ask me, when would this be out in a restaurant somewhere in the world? I could easily envision that being in the next like six to eight months even. It really kind of depends on, it's less about when is the technology or the science that going to be there? It's more about when a regulatory body, sort of one of the FDAs or USDAs somewhere in the world are going to like, say give this sort of a regulatory stamp of approval to build a framework by which these companies can operate and be overseen by inspection, inspector, government inspectors for food safety and things like that. That's really what's holding it back. But I bet a restaurant wouldn't surprise me if it was out somewhere, probably Singapore in the next six to eight months. Grocery stores probably still several years out. Okay. And this whole monstrosity that we call like a food regulatory system, let's kind of maybe revisit that in a second because it's such an important topic as a barrier for something like this hitting the market. But okay, I kind of want to shift gears here to talk about what's behind this, okay? We've talked about the technology itself and the cost. But I want to come at this in two ways. First of all, what was so fascinating about your book were the people behind this, the people behind this industry because a lot of them aren't just doing it to make a buck. I mean, there's this real idea here that changing the nature of meat is a fundamentally important thing to do for our health, for the environment, for all these issues that surround modern industrial meat production, okay? So I'd like to talk about that, but in the background, and we'll get to this, we can't ignore the fact your book is coming out in the middle of an absolute crisis in the meat industry that we're seeing right now. The traditional bread and butter, slaughtered animals meat industry is undergoing a crisis, which really I think adds a lot of fuel to this discussion about what's gonna happen on the horizon and what's gonna happen next. But so to that point, could you please talk a little bit about the people driving this technology and why they think it's so important that we shift from killing animals to raising meat in a vat? Right. So the whole kind of reason I stumbled on this topic that would become this book was that I kind of over a period of time reporting in this space figured out that the people who were behind self-propelled meat companies were often like former vegan advocates, not all of them are activists, not all of them but a lot of them were. And I kind of started figuring out how they were connected to other people in the animal welfare movement and realized that for some of these people, they were really kind of, a lot of them were friends in Washington DC in the early 2000s and all feeling kind of frustrated about how this kind of like, their vegan activism that they've been brought up with that they've worked within this like activist system wasn't really achieving as much as they wanted it to. And so I think the way that I phrased it and a story that I wrote for Quartz was the vegan movement finally broke out of its heart and started using its brain. And what we've basically seen is when it comes to these self-propelled meat companies is that the entrepreneurs behind them essentially decided to use sort of this capitalist system that perpetuates all this animal death, insert themselves into it and sort of attack the system from the inside. And that's kind of what we see. We see like this very, they're using this very compelling science and technology to sort of subvert this bigger system by creating real meat without the elements of the meat system that they detest. And that's kind of like where I saw like this industry really kind of virgin up. And like that activism has definitely stuck with a lot of them. Now, there are also people in this space that are not vegans like Mark Post, that Dutch scientist in the very beginning. But the guy at the center of the book, Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Just is definitely sort of one of those people who still remains like really mission driven. If you like kind of chart back to how his sort of career began and sort of the trials and tribulations that he faced, he still very much kind of is that like being an activist type. And I think in the book at one point, he even, he had gotten over a sort of a funding round challenge and was basically like, finally like this company is run by like an activist and not by sort of like these investors. And so he even sees the company kind of in that respect. So that kind of is at least for some of these people that kind of strikes at what their motivations are. And then to like your point about the COVID thing, I mean, not only is this a way for them to sort of tackle the animal welfare issue of the meat system, but more and more whenever you hear cell culture meat being talked about in a public forum, it's often as like this very promising new tool to like go after the 14, 5% of the globe's greenhouse gas emissions that can be, which is just enormous, which can be tied back to the animal agriculture system and that cell culture meat would use way less land, way less water, way less energy and would be a way to kind of combat all of that sort of the greenhouse gas emissions issue. But what's interesting is that like now as we've sort of gone through this global pandemic, it almost offers like a real sense of urgency and extra sense of urgency behind an issue that's less abstract than even climate change, which is sort of like the impacts of COVID-19 on like our meat system. Whether you are a consumer who's worried about meat shortages and meat prices in the grocery store or whether you're somebody who is disturbed by the number of animals that are being cold because meat packing plants had to close down or because you're someone who's concerned about labor rights issues as we've seen like workers in meat packing plants being asked to return to work, even if they're afraid of like contracting the virus. Suddenly like this opens a whole big door for like culture meat companies to basically again push their sort of narrative of why they're important because I mean the meat system has been absolutely hobbled by this virus because of the way that it's set up, this sort of hyper consolidated, more centralized system that just a handful of meat packing plants are responsible for a vast majority of the meat that's produced in this country. I ran the numbers back in April, which these are old now, but there was at a point in April and several plants had been shut down and I looked over at the USDA numbers and just a handful of plants being shut down decreased pork and beef production by around 36 to 37% each, which is just like a colossal amount of meat that just wasn't being made anymore because of this sort of surprise global event that like, you know, they weren't prepared for. Yes, and I think this has brought home the real risks and the fragilities in our meat system that people have been kind of talking about worried about for a long time, but the COVID crisis has made it real in a way that it never has been in modern times. So what I mean to say is you go to the grocery store and stuff isn't there or it's really, really expensive. And, you know, as you're talking, I do want to say that, you know, the meat industry has been working for decades to just push production into as few giant slaughterhouses as possible, which creates that scenario you just talked about where when one slaughterhouse goes down because workers are sick, it knocks out a huge part of production. But each of those slaughterhouses also has a really enormous footprint of these industrialized factory farms that are tied to them. And I mean, we're talking acres and acres of land with these enormous sophisticated warehouses on them that hold animals, maybe 75,000 birds at a time, 20,000 hogs at a time. I mean, some of these hog farms are like small cities without a sewage system, you know, really large animals, hundreds of thousands with no way to really clean the waste before it's put out into the environment. And so I don't want us to forget that just the enormous footprint that goes along with meat that's really kind of, you know, most people don't see it because it's way out there in rural America. And it seems to me the system you're describing, I mean, what would a cell culture meat system look like? Would we have a meat factory in a small town with powdered soybean coming in one side or what would it look like? You know, I think that, I mean, the annoying answer to that is that so much of this is to be determined, but I think that this event right now has even sort of forced cell culture meat companies to think about what does the distribution model actually look like? Because if, you know, what if you do build like a large, and you can imagine kind of like, yeah, I mean, I really, a large brewery which I think is kind of like an oversimplification of what this would be, because this would be kind of a massive brewery, but, you know, I think that some of these companies could envision like a large facility that is able to supply a region of multiple states with a lot of meat. And I think that that's been called into question now because we see what happens when something unexpected sort of can befall onto like the meat system. And I think that some of these companies are maybe not questioning, well, maybe this needs to be a more local agricultural economy, more slightly more regional or city-based. You know, I talked to one of the CEOs in this space, Mike Selden at Thinlist Foods, and he sort of had made the observation in the past that when it comes to fish, cell culture fish is not much different than fresh cut fish, which is that the sooner you eat it, the better it's going to taste, the more fish-like it's going to taste. And so that kind of almost dictates that if you want to service the city of Chicago with cell-cultured fish, it's gonna make sense that you have like a facility that services Chicago, that you have one that services, or two that services New York. And that's like, you know, obviously less susceptible to some of these like larger problems. I do think that, you know, one of the things, it's easy to criticize the meat system and to look at this and be like, this is a massive problem. And I'd almost be interested in what you, some of your thoughts are on, you know, how do you kind of balance too? Like, if one, you know, the consolidation has obviously created like a big problem in a circumstance like now, but also I think a lot of people in the meat system would say, but look how efficiently we are, look how cheap meat is, look how widely available we can make this product. And I think that that's sort of, you know, something that has to be thought about as well as we think about, you know, will cell-cultured meat be able to step in and sort of provide the same thing. Chase, I don't know if I'm the guy to ask about this anymore. I feel so jaded about the whole thing. And I mean, having reported on it for a long time, you know, we, the industry is so consolidated and top heavy right now. And this was not like a group of agronomists sat down and said, what is the best way we can raise meat and deliver it to people as efficiently as possible? It really was like Tyson and Smithfield and JBS saying, hey, if we can raise money on Wall Street, buy out our competitors and shut down their slaughterhouses and then consolidate the slaughter into these big mega slaughterhouses, our profits are gonna skyrocket. And that's exactly what happened. So, you know, the system in my mind was designed through total neglect on the public policy front driven by the business plan of a few companies. And, you know, I think my view has been further darkened by a lot of the law enforcement stuff that's been coming out lately. The Department of Justice just indicted the head of the second biggest poultry company in the country for rigging prices in a complete audacious, like, fearless manner. I mean, sending text messages like, hey, good morning, should we rig the market today, basically? And so when you've got behavior like that, it's really hard for me to sympathize with their view. And the view you just laid out, you know, with more fresh delivery, regionally based, new competitors in the market, you know, new companies, new technology, more choices for consumers, I mean, that feels really different to me. And it feels like something that could shake up this existing status quo. Right. So all this being said, what I can see that you can't see is like, I don't know, dozens of questions are piling up here. Everybody really wants to ask you a lot of questions. So if it's okay, I might start getting to those. Yeah. Yeah, I want to make this a conversation and this stuff is piling up. I don't want to monopolize your time. Okay, question number one. You mentioned in interviews that Tyson Foods is an investor in this new industry. This perfectly segues what we're just talking about. Do you see a possible union between these two industries that would seem to be naturally at odds? Yes, absolutely I do. I think that, you know, one of the things that I get into with this book is kind of like some of the food fights in American history that have taken place. You know, whether you're talking about back in the 1800s when the idea of margarine was imported over from France and freaked out the butter industry, which led to the creation of the dairy lobby and the intense fight between those two interests. Whether you're talking about how the dairy industry has been completely spooked by the ascendance of plant-based milks or the meat industry's reaction to plant-based meats, um, self-cultured meat is slightly different because, yes, there is an element of, like, the meat world that hates this idea. The ranchers, in particular, really detest it. But what makes it strange in the wrinkle in this is that both Cargill and Tyson Foods have sprinkled investment dollars onto a few of these companies, which sort of just shows that they are interested. And what really struck me was when former Tyson CEO Tom Hayes appeared on Fox Business a year or so ago, and he sort of described Tyson Foods as not as a meat company. He basically called it a protein company and indicated that consumers out there are very interested in plant protein, conventional animal protein, and maybe one day in the self-cultured meat protein that there is, if that's what you are interested in serving people what they want, then Tyson could be a part of that game, which kind of indicates to me that the most powerful players, the people who are making big decisions about how meat is made in this country and how protein is produced in this country, if the former CEO of Tyson is saying that, then I think there's a huge chance that they could be very much part of this business. But my question, let me ask you as the self-described cynic here. I mean, what if these big companies just use their money to buy out a competitor, the way Facebook bought out all these upstart communications platforms? I mean, what if Tyson just absorbs this and we're still left with the top heavy consolidated meat industry? I mean, do you see that as a risk or what do you think about that? You know, I think that to be determined is, like certainly what we just talked about with, I mean, just think about it, even if Tyson doesn't use that tool, there aren't a hell of a lot of players in this space. So you can imagine that you kind of still have a version of what exists today, which is a few players control the majority of the meat, but maybe the distribution model is different. So we don't totally solve this kind of like monopolized idea. And in fact, like one of the CEOs, again, Mike Selden of Thinlist Foods said, you know, this might be the case. It may be this like sort of landscape where there are a few players that are making most of this and maybe that's bad, maybe it's not to be determined, but like, yeah, Tyson could absorb a few of these. I mean, that's all like, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I think we have to be really thoughtful about culture of meat. It doesn't get some pass. You don't, they don't have to, they don't get to avoid questions about transparency or about business model. They should be grilled, so to speak, but it's a great question. How have I never used that meat pun in all these years that we need to grill these companies? That actually leads right into this next question, which I think is a great one that a lot of people care about, which is that traditional, oh yeah, let me, before we go, I've got a bully pulpit advertised, anti-trust law, competition policy. It's a great thing. Google, we should look into that more. And so as this new industry emerges, I think, as you said, we do need to keep an eye on competition law. It matters. Okay, enough. Question, traditional meat production and processing is troubled by serious food safety issues that really became apparent through the Jack in the Box incident, that food poisoning. And boy, there are a ton of examples of that. So how will self-cultured meat compare in that regard? Great question. And the former food safety reporter in me loves it. And it's definitely something that I asked the scientists in this space. And what they will tell you is that you can really trace back things like E. coli and salmonella and these like horrible problems basically back to one thing, which is animal maneuver. These slaughtering facilities and meat packing plants aren't like super clean places. In fact, we basically accept the fact that the chicken we buy is going to have a certain amount of salmonella on it. And we basically just trust that people are cooking their meat at a temperature and at the length of time that they're supposed to, enough to kill off these bacteria. And make it safe for us to eat. Well, the self-cultured meat process happens inside sort of these very sterile bioreactors that have to be cleaned. And there is obviously no manure involved because there's not an animal involved. And so we aren't going to have these pathogens sort of like lurking on the surfaces of the meat that you buy. And so it kind of does eliminate that. One of the weirder things, and it was that just when I was talking to one of their scientists, and I think we were at this moment we were both standing over kind of a bioreactor and I was looking inside at what had sort of grown in there. And I was basically like, so could you just eat this raw if you wanted to because you don't have to worry about these pathogens, which is absolutely disgusting. I wouldn't do it just because it's just, I've been conditioned to not ever want to do that. But his answer was basically like, I mean, theoretically, yeah, you could just eat this. It's not going to be covered in the stuff that's super harmful to your health. And so there's that. And then also I would just add that, the scientists also say that because you are monitoring what's happening in these bioreactors, if there is sort of a contamination, you can tell. You can see things look different than what they should, things smell different than what they should. And so especially when you have like government oversight also as an extra layer of protection over this, I think it's pretty safe to say that it's very likely this will be a lot safer, at least from that pathogens point of view. And as you know in the slaughterhouses, it's like this escalating war against pathogens. I mean, the parasitic acid chemical they're spraying on chicken, chlorine based products that they're spraying is this constant fight against that. Right. And that just seems like a huge point that there's no manure involved. That would change the entire equation. Yeah, totally. Okay, this is an interesting question. When you ate the cell cultured meat, do you know what percentage was actually cell cultured? This listener's understanding is that most journalists are actually given a mix of cell-based meat with plant-based products. Yep. So, you know, a few of them were definitely a combination of the two. And I think that's a really great point. I'm so glad someone brought that up because I bet that some of the earlier, I don't know if this is too much to get into, but when you think about how meat is structured, it's kind of the muscle that offers a lot of the texture and the fat that offers a lot of the flavor. And one of the things that we can really use this sort of plant protein for is to help with the structure and sort of that like the mouth feel of things. And so I think the earlier products that we're all going to see probably will be a hybrid product. That said, I have tasted, it was a chicken tender that I tasted that was, I mean, you have to guess, I have to take this at the company's word. I asked, like, is this, how much of this is plant-based versus cultured? And they said, this is a 100% cultured meat item that you're eating. Interesting. And it tasted good, but I also have tasted hybrids as well. And they did taste fine. And I mean, I couldn't tell the difference personally, but I do think that that's like a really interesting topic. And that's very true. Like most of the, these early products that are being tried are a combination of the two. And I don't see that being necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that as this industry gets even more and more able to like produce its scale, you're gonna be seeing more and more of like where it's either entirely cell-cultured or, you know, 90% cell culture. Yeah. And we can't ignore that alongside this. There really has been, it seems to me, I'd call it a major breakthrough in the plant-based meat, which God, forgive me, what's the deal? Burger King released the miracle burger or something like that? Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know what I'm talking about? The possible burger, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting that these two things are kind of coming along at the same time. And I didn't know that they could be fused together like that. Okay, this is a really interesting question and I'm scared we're gonna fall down a rabbit hole and never come out. But we've got to address this issue with the regulatory agencies because it is such a big deal here. So here's the question. Regulators move slowly and the conventional meat industry may have an interest in not moving this forward. Which US regulatory agency or agencies are gonna own cultured meat in terms of regulating it, I assume. And what are the potential regulatory barriers from the conventional meat producers? Right. So there was a pretty big public fight about this a year, year and a half ago where the USDA and the FDA were basically duking it out with each other over who would get to regulate this. Many of the cell-cultured meat companies wanted the FDA because just the process they were using, culturing of cells is far more akin to the pharma world that the FDA already oversees. Then the USDA's work had been up until that point which the USDA does oversee a majority of meat. But the process by which that meat is made obviously involved animals and slaughter and line speeds and things like that. So there wasn't like a very clear owner of this space and there was a fight over it. And essentially like a truce was drawn that was led in part by one of these companies, Memphis Meats and the national sort of the NAMI which is like a major meat lobbying group. They kind of came together, wrote a joint letter, sent it off to the Trump administration and what sort of wound up being hashed out was that the FDA and the USDA would share responsibility for overseeing this kind of cell-cultured meat regime and that they would both work together to create the regulatory pathway. The FDA would be looking and overseeing a lot of the cell collection and sort of this like culturing aspect. And then on the other side of that, the USDA would concern itself with like the food safety element and the labeling. So they're sharing duties. And I think that in terms of the part of the question about where the meat industry could kind of like really get in and like disturb this process if they want to is that labeling element. What do you call cell-cultured meat? Can you call it meat? How do you label it? Like that is something that I think could really be a headache in the future but it's too soon to tell. And who knows if a company the size of Tyson gets in this business and really, wants to start selling this stuff, maybe that kind of eliminates a lot of that lobbying power that could sort of go into really screwing things up for cell-cultured meat companies. All that said, yes, the regulatory process is generally slow and red tape is tough to work through but right now as of this moment what the USDA and the FDA are really relying on is for cell-cultured meat companies themselves to basically deliver to them documents that basically lay out. Like here's what our process is going to be. Here are all the potential risks and hazards. Here's how those will be addressed. That's obviously gonna be a long, complicated technical document that basically dots all their eyes and crosses all their T's and it's once the FDA and USDA have like all of that paperwork and all of that documentation and you're able to then go through it that we'll be able to really move forward with this sort of regulatory pathway that can be imagined and actually made into a real thing. So yeah, totally and quickly before we move on I mean this like FDA, USDA partnership, how concrete is that? I mean have they actually started building some kind of agency or group or is it just sort of this agreement and principle where are we? Yeah, I know so the two of them basically created like three working groups that then like go in, they tackle different elements of this and it wasn't that it was I think back in April that the OMB, I believe, or one of the, or GAO released like a report that basically said like these two agencies can be working a little more closely together to get this thing done in an expeditious manner but like things are happening. Okay and that actually was the next question so I feel like we addressed that. Okay, this is really interesting. Switching gears here a little bit to look at the economy of rural America where raising animals and raising meat is still an economic pillar of many rural communities in the Midwest, the Southeast, the ranch lands of the West. So here's the question, do you think the enormous number of small cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other small meat businesses are aware of the coming existential crisis that's coming their way? It seems to me that they're mostly unaware that these new meat technologies are likely to destroy their business model over the coming few decades. So do they know that this tidal wave is coming? You know, yes, I think that every single rancher that I've spoken to whether they're a small operation or a larger one, every single one that I've spoken with has been aware of this. A lot of them don't really take it very seriously yet but I mean, I think it is on most of their radar, I think they have heard of it. I think that they, and they talk about it and they usually use the term fake meat when they do talk about it. In terms of them sort of seeing this oncoming storm coming their way, you know, I think that it's easy to talk about this in a really dramatic way as if like cell-cultured meat comes on the scene and like the flip of a light switch, you know, it just sort of zaps, you know, all these farming families out of business which I don't think is really a realistic way of thinking about how this might unfold. There was a lot of work by some people in the cultured meat space to really go out and try to woo ranchers to incorporate cell-cultured meat technology into their existing operations to like try to convince them that you can do both. Whether that's like long-term sustainable, I don't know but I know that there is an effort to like try to like get ranchers to like buy into the idea and to start their own operations and create locally grown meat. And I think that like if you look at this in its most sort of blunt way, this is gonna be phased in over time. It's not like all the cattle herds are gonna disappear overnight. It's not like every ranchers when we put out a business overnight. This is something that I think will ease its way into like the public imagination, ease its way into like the economy. And yeah, I just, I don't see it as being something that's gonna be sort of like ravaged the community, the farming communities right away. And I think that different cell-cultured meat companies, CEOs have different levels of being blunt about this. Mark Post and the Dutch scientists from 2013 who unveiled the first beef patty is pretty forward when he's on stage and says, in the long term, there's probably just no future for you which definitely is like shocking and angers a lot of people. Other people in this space definitely take it a softer tone whenever they talk about how this will ultimately be integrated into our food systems. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the tension and debate around, for example, autonomous vehicles. I mean, it's not like in the year 2023, all of a sudden there will be no truck drivers or any drivers. You know, things like this do tend to roll out over time. That kind of makes sense to me. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, do you think, here's the next question. Do you think that the animal dairy industry will be the first to give way to cell-based dairy? I don't know what first to give way means, be an embrace it or have to deal with it. I do know. Maybe be crushed under the heel of. No, I'm kidding, I'm sorry. No, I don't know. I know there's a lot of angst in dairy world around a lot of food technology and it's hard to like, it's hard to begrudge any dairy community. They face a lot of really challenging economic issues and have for years. And so I do think that they are very anxious about these kinds of things. I do think that there are companies in Silicon Valley, you know, perfect day comes to mind. That have basically trained yeast to create the same sort of like, casein or whey protein that you find in milk to make sort of a totally cow-free cow milk. And, I mean, that, I think that they have established relationships with multinational, like at least one massive multinational company already. So, will they be kind of like, have to confront this? Yes, they will have to confront this kind of like food technology that relies on fermentation to like create a product very similar to theirs. And they're probably going to, if time has taught us any lesson in terms of how they've responded to plant-based milks, I think they'll probably be dragged along, kicking and screaming with this technology too. I was about to say, I mean, they've still got oat milk and almond milk and all this other stuff to deal with. And they're absolutely, they can to like, you know, fight those. I mean, they're going state house to state house and trying to limit how plant-based milks can label their products in grocery stores. Yes, yes. So, hey, here's a really interesting question. It's a two-parter. First of all, where does this stuff stand in religious terms? Is it halal? Is it kosher? And then along with that, is there any partnership between religious movements or vegan movements and this technology? I think we've described the vegan connection, which is very strong. But what about kind of the religious element? Is this stuff halal and kosher? So that depends on who you ask. Okay. The rabbinical community has done, I think a lot more, and my reporting experiences may have changed since the last time I reported in the story, but at the time, it was sort of the kosher authorities had done a lot more thinking on this than the halal community had. And it really depends on who you ask. I mean, there is a pretty high-up rabbi in Israel who has been so bold as to say that self-cultured pork would be okay to eat. They're the sort of massive organization here in the U.S., the Orthodox Union, the president of their kosher division, Rabbi Menekam Ghanak, is super, super excited about self-cultured meat, mostly because it really falls in line with this kind of Jewish prepare-the-world mentality. I mean, there are so many, the amount of animal death, the amount of pollution and climate change impact from animal agriculture, he's really optimistic about this as a potential tool to address those issues. And he does not think that self-cultured pork would be okay to eat, but he does, you know, one of the conversations I had with him, he could envision a self-cultured cheeseburger being totally fine, one of the things, and that kind of gets into this like really interesting topic, sort of cultural topic of what is, what, if what happens to a cell during this process fundamentally changes its nature. That's kind of the idea. If you put a beef cell through the self-cultured process, does some element of its nature sort of fundamentally transform making it into an entirely different type of food altogether? I don't think that they would argue that this food is kosher necessarily, but they would argue that it's par, which would mean it's like a neutral food and that you can eat it. And they do have sort of some precedent, you know, one of them being the, it was an ingredient called L-cysteine, which is used in bread making that can come from the feathers of certain birds. And they sort of argued that L-cysteine, I mean, this gets in way too deep in this and so I won't go too far into it, but basically there is precedent to their whole idea that like a cell transforms its fundamental nature as it goes through this process, making it okay to eat this meat with like cheese for instance. So, you know, there's a really rich dialogue happening in sort of the whole on kosher communities over like, what does this mean for like our religious sort of culture? And this does touch on one of the questions, how do they get the cells? How do they get it out of an animal? Where do they get it? Yeah, it's, you know, when you talk to the scientists behind it, they talk about it being sort of a pretty harmless biopsy. You do essentially just sort of scraping cells off the animal. Okay. And, you know, I think this is also tied to this question about the religious questions and the deeper philosophical. Is there a risk here that this thing gets associated with veganism in the following sense that the idea is no more meat, no more animals and that that could be maybe a controversial, a controversial cultural sticking point. I think that's the question here. Is there a risk that this is the face of the end of meat as we know it? I think that it's very possible that there will be people out there who just never really buy into the idea or feel curious about trying self-cultured meat. And I think that it is that kind of an idea and that sort of a mindset that will always mean that animal agriculture in some form will exist, whether it's in like a premium product or to like service, you know, a segment of the population. I mean, this isn't the most optimistic, you know, worldview for self-cultured meat companies that they just suddenly take over most of the market over a long period of time and that animal agriculture gets whittled down to, it probably won't be nothing, but there will be like, you know, a very select market for that kind of product. And that's super likely. I don't think that the vegan aspect of this is ultimately going to like be what people, I don't think when you buy this in the store, you're going to be like, this is the vegan option. I think it's going to be, you know, whenever I, whenever anyone, and I do buy oat milk, but like when I buy oat milk, I don't think like this is the vegan option. I think this is the, for me, I'm just like, this is the lactose free option that like it's going to be better for me and it's easier for me to eat. I think that like self-cultured meat could be something similar to that. So I want to wrap, you know, since we're getting a little close on time, let me please wrap two questions into one, what this future might look like. So one question is, you know, Impossible Foods says they're basically going to make a plant-based version of everything all the way to the sirloin steak. What do you think of that? Do you think that plant-based meat can replace meat or do you think that the cell-cultured meat is going to be part of the mix going forward and then related? Could you please talk a little bit about the breweries where this stuff would be made and about those bioreactors? You know, one questioner's wondering how many people would work at a bioreactor plant? Do you have a sense of their environmental impact? Would they be super polluted? Do they have a high carbon footprint? So those two questions, what would this look like in the future if this becomes really common? And then reminding you again the first part, sorry. Well, the first one is like, do you think impossible meat in these plant-based things would be the total replacement? So I don't, you know, plant-based imitation meat products are super interesting. I think there's a lot of very, very cool science and technology that goes into making them feel and seem as much like the real thing to sort of mimic all the functionality of meat. That is a fascinating space. And I think that the issue of prioritizing or really leaning into that functionality element of food is an interesting topic for another day. Yeah. One thing that I do think plant-based meats will not be able to do is, at least right now, they don't taste like meat. They taste fine. I think they, to a lot of people, especially the mouth feel, whenever you pile it onto a burger and add tomatoes and condiments and mask the flavor, I think that it does a really good analog for meat. But I think that the taste just isn't there yet. And I think that the other element of this is the nutritional element. Self-cultured meat is basically saying, this is real meat. On a molecular level, on a nutritional level, this is the same thing. Plant-based meats cannot say that. They can't say it's the same thing. And I think that that's an interesting differentiation between the two products. So impossible foods and beyond meat can certainly develop and carve out their own space in this, but they will never be the real thing. Self-cultured meat is the real thing. And at least on a molecular and nutritional level, and that's a big selling point for them. As to what the sort of plants would look like, I think the answer to that is that, no, they will not require the same sort of labor force. You don't need thousands of people operating a massive room full of bioreactors. Does that have labor implications? Absolutely. As to what these look like, they're building their first pilot production facilities now. So it's kind of tough to say what they'll look like in the future. Whenever you talk to one Israeli company that's super interesting, future meat technologies, their first bioreactors, I think are these 600 liter ones. They're basically the size of a refrigerator. And the way it was described to me is that in a several weeks time, they can basically grow the equivalent in one of these refrigerator-sized bioreactors, the equivalent of about 1,000 to 1,200 chickens. So that's a lot of meat and one single 600 liter bioreactor. Once you get bigger than that, and some of their schematics and illustrations that they've created, certainly illustrate these, what these future plants might look like. They're even bigger bioreactors. So all that to be determined, all of it will be super interesting and I can't wait to be able to tour one and actually ask lots of really important questions around how this works. How does the food safety element sort of figure into the way these places are set up? What kinds of bioreactors are you using? I mean, this can be as nerdy or as broad as you want it to be. Yeah. Well, on that note, I'm getting the digital hook around my neck here that I think it's time for us to wrap. And I want to thank everybody for joining us today and I really want to recommend. I loved this book and you've got to get it from solid state books before this is over. It's great reading right now because it is in the middle of a really important issue but it's also not super depressing and cataclysmic. It's a really interesting story about an idealistic technological movement. So check it out. And Chase, thanks for the reporting on this and thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. So thank you, Chase. Thank you and thank you everyone for joining.