Tech to Table

25 Innovators Reimagining Food

Richard Munson

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642831917
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Imagine eating a burger grown in a laboratory, a strawberry picked by a robot, or a pastry created with a 3-D printer. You would never taste the difference, but these technologies might just save your health and the planet's. Today, landmark advances in computing, engineering, and medicine are driving solutions to the biggest problems created by industrialized food. Tech to Table introduces readers to twenty-five of the most creative entrepreneurs advancing these solutions. They come from various places and professions, identities and backgrounds. But they share an outsider's perspective and an idealistic, sometimes aggressive, ambition to rethink the food system. Reinvention is desperately needed. Under Big Ag, pollution, climate change, animal cruelty, hunger, and obesity have festered, and despite decades of effort, organic farming accounts for less than one percent of US croplands. Entrepreneurs represent a new path, one where disruptive technology helps people and the environment. These innovations include supplements to lower the methane in cattle belches, drones that monitor irrigation levels in crops, urban warehouses that grow produce year-round, and more.The pace and breadth of change is astonishing, as investors pump billions of dollars into ag-innovation. Startups are attracting capital and building markets, with the potential to upend conventional agribusiness's stranglehold on the food system. Not every invention will prosper long-term, but each marks a fundamental change in our approach to feeding a growing population—sustainably.A revolution in how we grow and eat food is brewing. Munson's deftly crafted profiles offer a fascinating preview of the coming future of food.

PART I

DELIVER PROTEINS

As early as 1932, Winston Churchill wrote an essay about future trends, predicting, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately in a suitable medium.”¹ Thirty-eight years later, National Geographic magazine imagined “meatless dishes tasting like chicken, beef, or ham.”² And in the early 2000s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and New York’s Touro College extracted and grew goldfish cells to produce self-replenishing proteins for astronauts on lengthy expeditions.³

In the past decade, meat not derived from the slaughter of animals has gone from a flight of fancy to real products as consumers have demanded, and innovators have developed, alternative ways to obtain dietary proteins, which are crucial for building and maintaining healthy tissues and bones. Marcus Johannes “Mark” Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University, could arguably be called the father of one portion of this emerging field, having obtained funding from the Dutch government and Google cofounder Sergey Brin to fashion the first laboratory-cultured meat. The Netherlands-based researcher in 2013 biopsied from a cow a few high-quality cells that renewed themselves when fed a mixture of essential ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, sugars, and oxygen. That initial burger cost almost $325,000 and took three lab technicians three months to grow the twenty thousand muscle fibers within the five-ounce patty;⁴ two years later, entrepreneurs dropped that cost to less than $12. At the burger’s rollout, Post asserted, “The few cells that we take from this cow can turn into 10 tons of meat.”⁵ Despite technological and marketing hurdles, investors are optimistic and more innovators are joining this fast-growing field each year, with about sixty companies worldwide.⁶

Less futuristic than lab-grown meat, but perhaps more palatable to eaters wary of the idea of cultured cells, plant-based protein is also on the rise, with sales totaling $5 billion in 2019 and climbing by 158 percent in 2020.⁷ The financial firm UBS predicts that the US market will grow to $85 billion by 2030, and Entrepreneur magazine suggests that plant-based meat “has officially reached ‘global phenomenon’ status.”⁸ In 2019, Impossible Foods began selling its plant-based burgers at Burger King, QDOBA, and dozens of other restaurants, while Beyond Meat in March 2020 formed three-year partnerships with McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, which includes the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell chains. In just one year, according to a 2020 report, “plant-based meat went from something very few Americans had heard of to something that 40 percent of us have tried.”⁹

Some of the buzz for alternative meat results from Big Meat’s problems. COVID-19 highlighted the conventional supply chain’s vulnerabilities as outbreaks among workers closed slaughterhouses, dairy farmers dumped thousands of gallons of milk, and pork production fell by 50 percent. Farmworkers, who already faced low wages and lax safety requirements, suffered disproportionately high rates of coronavirus cases; according to a special report in the Washington Post, “small farmers, new farmers and farmers of color, struggling in the shadow of Big Ag, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and are often not eligible for federal relief.”¹⁰ The virus revealed industrial agriculture’s lack of resilience and the unsustainability of its growing corporate concentration; the closure of a single facility often disrupted the entire food chain and led to higher prices and reduced availabilities.

The pandemic, conversely, opened opportunities for innovators, as evidenced by the Impossible Burger’s expanded distribution in 2020 to 1,700 Kroger grocery stores. Seth Bannon of Fifty Years, a San Francisco–based seed-capital fund, believes the virus “will cause way more capital to flow into the [alternative protein] space, as the world wakes up to the very real threat of zoonotic diseases.”¹¹ Barclays analysts in 2019 forecast that this market would grow by 1,000 percent over the next ten years, reaching $140 billion.¹²

Disease risk is of course just the latest in a long line of reasons we need alternatives to industrialized meat. Since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published in 1905, journalists have well documented the poor working conditions and animal abuses in the meat industry. Slaughterhouses have an injury rate exceeding 27 percent annually, the highest of any business,¹³ while wages have fallen from $24 per hour in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1982 to less than $14 per hour in 2020.¹⁴ No doubt the animals fare even worse: factory farms confine breeding pigs in gestation crates, inseminate dairy cows to keep them giving milk—killing male offspring for veal—and raise turkeys with breasts so large they topple over. Slaughterhouses in the United States kill about three hundred birds every single second of every day, and they grind to death the male baby chicks because they cannot lay eggs. Philosopher Yuval Noah Harari observes, “Judged by the amount of suffering it causes, industrial farming of animals is arguably one of the worst crimes in history.”¹⁵

Even leaving aside animal cruelty, meat production is not an efficient use of natural resources. For each animal fed 100 calories of grain, we obtain only 3 calories from beef, 40 calories from cow’s milk, 12 calories from chicken, 22 calories from eggs, and 10 from pork.¹⁶ According to EarthSave, a California-based nonprofit, “it takes 2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef.”¹⁷

Livestock account for a large share of greenhouse-gas emissions, with independent calculations ranging from 14.5 percent to as high as 51 percent.¹⁸ Most such emissions result from the ruminating of beef and dairy cattle (as well as sheep and goats), whose bathtub-size stomachs churn together microbes that lead to the animals burping up methane, a gas eighty-four times more potent than carbon dioxide in causing climate change.¹⁹ If cattle were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse-gas-emitting nation, and their numbers are expected to double to 40 billion animals by 2050.

Meanwhile, feeding and medicating livestock presents its own crisis. Growing food for cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens requires almost one-third of the planet’s arable land. And the overuse of antibiotics in factory farming, both to treat animals for disease and to fatten them up, is leading to the rise of superbugs. Meat and poultry production accounts for about 80 percent of US antibiotic use, while roughly 1.5 million people die each year from drug-resistant illnesses.²⁰

The United Nations has called the raising of livestock “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. . . . [Animal agriculture] should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.”²¹ Comedian Bill Maher adds, “When it comes to bad for the environment, nothing—literally—compares with eating meat. . . . If you care about the planet, it’s actually better to eat a salad in a Hummer than a cheeseburger in a Prius.”²²

Environmental problems only worsen as industrializing countries amass wealth and demand diets with more protein-rich meats. The average Chinese consumer boosted meat intake from 9 pounds in 1961 to 137 pounds in 2013,²³ and larger increases occurred in Thailand, Brazil, and Morocco. Researchers estimate meat consumption will double as the world’s population approaches ten billion. Increased meat eating requires increased production of animal feed; soybean exports from North and South America, for instance, nearly doubled from 2008 to 2018, from 73 million tons to 143 million tons.²⁴

In the United States, meat has long been the star of every meal. While adherents of the Paleo diet claim our ancestors kept themselves trim on the animals and fish they hunted, the science presents a much more complex picture. Not surprisingly, how meat affects health is both widely examined and hotly contested. A Finnish study conducted over a twenty-two-year period found that participants who ate meat regularly faced a 23 percent higher risk of dying, particularly from cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer.²⁵ Yet several articles in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggest such hazards are so small that they have little impact on most eaters and that meat provides valuable nutrients and proteins.²⁶ What is clear is that the average American devours about twice the recommended intake of beef, and nutritionists link excessive consumption of animal proteins to kidney stones, osteoporosis, and cancers.

Eating meat poses other health dangers. University of Minnesota researchers found fecal matter in 69 percent of pork packages and 92 percent of poultry; other studies discovered poop in every sample of ground beef.²⁷ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that “more [foodborne] deaths were attributed to poultry than to any other commodity.”²⁸

For years, chefs, dietitians, and scientists have pleaded with consumers to reduce their meat and egg intake, for both health and environmental reasons. Yet only 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarian or vegan, and 84 percent of those eaters eventually go back to meat.²⁹ Per capita meat consumption remains near its all-time high.

If there is to be an overhaul of the American diet, history suggests it will not come from the humble lentil or the soy meat alternatives that have long graced the aisles of health food stores.

Vegans and vegetarians for the past twenty to thirty years have enjoyed access to plant-based alternatives such as Boca Burger and Tofurkey. Yet sales of such “meat analogues” remain limited, and meat eaters complain about their flavor. Today’s innovators, in contrast, use science to develop meat and egg alternatives that appeal to broader audiences, who judge them to possess improved texture and to taste more like animal-based beef, chicken, and pork.

Some critics of Big Meat call for a return to preindustrial days, when animals roamed freely on the range and ate grasses rather than being packed into crowded feedlots and fattened with grains and antibiotics. These reformers want livestock to move regularly to new pastures, where they eat the tips of grass but allow roots to expand, thereby preserving erosion-curtailing ground cover. Herded to fresh grasslands, farm animals enhance the soil with their organic wastes,³⁰ and grass-fed creatures reduce the need for the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides used to grow corn and other grains for Big Meat’s stockyards.

Yet, as often happens with agriculture, environmental trade-offs balance these benefits. Since grass-fed cattle belch up more methane—and since they spend more months burping because they take longer to reach their slaughter weight—they emit about 20 percent more greenhouse gases than do their grain-fed counterparts. Such criticisms are not meant to reject free-range practices, but they should encourage an openness to innovative approaches being advanced by high-tech entrepreneurs.

Big Meat, worried about competition and criticism, hires doctors to exhort animal-based meat’s health benefits, scientists to extol how advanced feeds and antibiotics increase average cattle weight, and sustainability officers to suggest cattle provide manure that nourishes the soil. Feeling misunderstood, the industry pays public relations consultants to promise ambitious reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. While those image makers admit that killing animals in massive slaughterhouses is not pretty, they try to paint a quaint image of small farmers feeding and caring for free-roaming cattle, pigs, and chickens.

Big Ag also employs high-priced lobbyists to maintain (or expand) its own government subsidies as well as to advance legislation and regulations that discourage sales of plant- and cell-based meats, labeling these modern alternatives “fake meat” or “imitation meat.” (One alternative-meat innovator retorts that cattlemen should label their products as “Processed in a slaughterhouse” and “Contains aerosolized fecal bacteria!”)³¹

As explained in this part’s six chapters, alternative-protein entrepreneurs are overcoming numerous challenges, not the least of which is to demonstrate their progress toward sustainability and equity. With significant transparency, they must devise and continuously refine products that solve environmental and health problems. They must convince profit-seeking funders to invest. They must grow their demand, scale their operations to meet it, and outmaneuver their competition.

To appreciate how innovators can feed the world, cut pollution, and avoid animal slaughter, meet six disruptors who are successfully making tasty proteins from stem cells, plants, insects, and algae.

CHAPTER 1

Josh Tetrick, Eat Just—Rethinking the Chicken and the Egg

Josh Tetrick’s early life did not hint that he would become hell-bent on destroying the conventional chicken and cattle industries. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he claims to have enjoyed “a meat-and-potatoes childhood,” and at other times he asserts he “was pretty much fed on a steady diet of cinnamon rolls out of vending machines, nachos and cheese from 7-Eleven, Burger King chicken sandwiches, and pretty crappy cafeteria food.” He says he grew up like most Americans, eating “in a way that is not the best for your body, certainly not the best for the planet.”¹

Tetrick played linebacker on West Virginia University’s football team before heading to Cornell University and then to the University of Michigan Law School. It was there that doctors diagnosed Tetrick with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that prompted him to abandon sports and become a vegetarian; more importantly, it gave him an appreciation for “life’s fragility” and sparked a full-speed-ahead cockiness. Two years after graduating, in 2010, that health defect caused a near-death experience, prompting Tetrick to ask more fervently, “What would I do with my life if I knew I only had five year...