Food Tour of the Future

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Amy Scott: One of the perks of my job is that sometimes I wind up in delicious places. 

Steve Stearns: We do have some chocolates, if you guys are interested in tasting them.

Amy Scott: Oh, no, thanks. I'll pass.

Steve Stearns: All right, well, let's get out of here.

Amy Scott: Have you not seen my mouth watering over here? 

I'm visiting a company called California cultured. They make chocolate and coffee. I'm at their headquarters in Sacramento, California, in a small kitchen. Steve Stearns, a former chef at high-end restaurants, has three different chocolates lined up for me to try, little thumb print size morsels laid out on a platter. I'll try to spare you the chewing sounds, but the first two samples taste a little sour.

It's not my favorite. I'm gonna be honest. 

Steve Stearns: Okay. 

Amy Scott: Steve says I'm picking up on the fruity, more acidic notes, a flavor profile that is apparently trendy, but not my thing. The third one is a nice, toasty, dark chocolate. 

I think that's my favorite of the three.

Steve Stearns: It's got a little bit more bitterness to it, but it still has those fruity notes.

Amy Scott: For the record, my producer, Haley, prefers the more fruity chocolate. 

Haley Hershman: Oh yeah, it is kind of sour. That's nice. I like that.

Amy Scott: She's a hipster. 

Steve Stearns: So how do you guys feel like now having, for the first time, tasted chocolate from cells?

 Amy Scott: You know, I didn't even think about the fact that it came from cells.

Right. This is not like other chocolate.This is the chocolate of the future. It didn't come from a cacao plant grown in the ground. It was made here in a lab, created from cells in a petri dish. And why would anyone do that? Climate change, of course. 

Alan Perlstein: About 85% of all the land that's currently used for chocolate just will not be suitable for it. It's going to either be too hot, too cold, too wet. 

Amy Scott: That's Alan Perlstein, CEO of California Cultured. He says, between climate change, deforestation, geopolitics and ever-growing demand, 

Alan Perlstein: The price of cocoa and coffee and many of the things that we love and need throughout our day are just going to become more and more expensive.

 Amy Scott: It's already happening. Cocoa prices have risen to record highs in recent years due to extreme rainfall, drought, and heat. Droughts in Brazil and Vietnam have driven up coffee prices without new technologies. Alan says those might become luxuries for the super wealthy. He says in a couple decades, you might still be able to buy chocolate grown the old fashioned way,

 Alan Perlstein: Sure, for 80 bucks per bar, maybe.

Amy Scott: I'm Amy Scott, welcome to How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace about the messy business of climate solutions. Chocolate is one of those things that maybe feels like an indulgence, though, one I'm not ready to part with. But as our planet heats up, we can expect to pay more for all kinds of food. 

CBS news clip: The frequency of extreme weather events has increased this summer. Now, climate experts are warning these events could have a devastating effect on the global food supply. 

PBS news clip: Beef prices have soared to all time highs, with many families feeling the squeeze. 

MSNBC news clip: Researchers are tracing price jumps, including an 80% spike in the cost of us vegetables to extreme weather linked to climate change. 

Amy Scott: The hotter planet is hurting our food systems, and our food systems are hurting the planet. So this season, we're taking a closer look at what's on our plates. We'll explore the ways we'll have to adapt to feed a growing population, while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And we're going to start in Northern California, where tech entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make some of our most delicious foods, like that lab grown chocolate. Climate change will force us to change what we eat. But can we stomach the alternatives? This is episode one, a food tour of the future. 

Safety glasses. We don't need them.

 Alan Perlstein: Yes, we actually do, good call.

 Amy Scott: That's Alan Perlstein, again. 

Do my regular glasses do the trick? It's always fun to wear safety glasses on top of regular glasses.

 Alan Perlstein: Yes, exactly. 

Amy Scott: Equipped with my two pairs of glasses, I follow Alan through California Cultured office space in the front and into what looks like a quintessential lab, all white, sterile feeling, with beakers and various pieces of equipment on stainless steel table tops, except for these little rubber ducks hidden throughout the place. 

I noticed this little duck up here.

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, they're sort of our mascot over here.

Amy Scott: The ducks are dressed up like other animals, a chicken, an Easter bunny.

Oh, so they're all like mutant ducks. Is it because you're, you're experimenting with nature, you're messing with nature?

Alan Perlstein: Not necessarily that.

Amy Scott: Alan says they're considered good luck. You know, lucky duck. Our first stop is the C lab, short for the cell culture lab, where he opens a retrofitted pizza fridge with racks for stacking pans of pizza. Only, instead of pizza, there are trays of petri dishes filled with tiny brown blobs. 

They look like little, like, boogers, basically. I don't know how else to describe this.

Alan Perlstein: It's basically little clumps of brown cells. So that's what they look like when they're growing inside of the cocoa pods.

Amy Scott: Each little blob, Alan says, contains thousands of cocoa cells.

Alan Perlstein: We sort of wrangle the cells and make them do what we want in this part of the lab.

Amy Scott: By wrangle, Alan means they're actually sort of tricking the cells to only grow the tissues they want, targeting certain compounds, flavors and fats, and part of how they do that is by feeding the cells certain mixtures of food.

Alan Perlstein: Mostly sugar, plant extracts.

Amy Scott: From here, Alan says it's a bit like repotting plants. The bigger the cells grow, the bigger the container they need to keep growing, eventually the cells mature enough to be moved here. Alan unzips these tall black grow tents. Inside sit several glass containers with tubes coming out of them filled with the cocoa cells and more sugar water. The tubes are pumping air into the containers to keep oxygen flowing to the cells. At this stage, the liquid looks dense, kind of like chocolate milk. 

Looks like a Slurpee machine, kind of. 

Alan Perlstein: Exactly. It almost looks like a Slurpee machine, just all with air driven and they like it room temperature in the dark.

Amy Scott: That's why they're zipped in these tents?

Alan Perlstein: Yes, so we are basically growing plant cells. The potential of every single one of these cells is to potentially grow into its own plant itself. So we've seen that we could actually take cells and literally turn them into a brand new cocoa plant, basically from our process over here.

Amy Scott: So you want to keep them in the dark so they're not reacting to light?

Alan Perlstein: Yes, so they won't turn into a planting material, and it also affects the flavor and and other attributes as well.

Amy Scott: Wow.

There are now hundreds of billions of cells in these mini reactors, and they continue moving into bigger containers from here until they're ready to be harvested to make chocolate. The cells get fermented, roasted and ground into a powder or liquid. You and I can't buy California Cultured chocolate yet, but the plan is to sell the ingredients they make here and also lease the technology to large scale producers. Although Alan's a little shy about saying which companies they're talking to.

 Alan Perlstein 

Probably some of the big guys out there, of the companies who would require millions of tons of chocolate per year, and have unfortunately been hit hard with the current chocolate tariffs and price increases. We're going to be launching our first product, most likely with the current sixth largest chocolate company in the world, and we're also in discussions with number 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 18, yeah. 

Amy Scott: Wow. All ones we've heard of, I'm sure.

Alan Perlstein: Yes.

Amy Scott: We were finally able to get him to say a name. Next year, they're releasing a chocolate product with Magi, the company that makes those little chocolate pandas, and they're hopeful that people are ready to embrace this type of food. I have to say, tasting it earlier, it didn't weird me out the way I thought it might. It smelled and tasted just like any other chocolate. But, you know, maybe I've just become desensitized. 

I've been trying a lot of weird stuff lately. There are a ton of wild food innovations in the works to adapt to the climate crisis, and no wonder, a lot of them are happening in and around the San Francisco Bay area, known for both its food. Culture and, of course, its tech industry. On our food tour of the future, we also stuffed our faces with croissants baked with a butter alternative from a company called Savor. 

Hayley Hershman: That was a really big piece. 

Amy Scott: Savor is trying to disrupt the destructive and land-intensive way we produce fats from dairy cows to the palm oil industry. The company makes its fats out of carbon. 

I mean, it was really good. Yeah, I noticed a lack of butter, but I don't miss it.

We ate bacon made from seaweed. 

Whoa, it's salty. 

That's from a company called Umaro. It's one of many ways they're hoping to use the untapped potential of seaweed protein and then, maybe most controversially, there's lab grown meat and seafood. Though, for obvious reasons, the industry prefers the term cell-cultivated.

Aryé Elfenbein: So yeah, everything that we create today came from one little fish seven years ago. 

Amy Scott: Salmon made from cells? Sure, we'll try some of that. Coming up after the break.

Most startups have some kind of romanticized origin story, but I've got to say Justin Kolbeck's might take the cake for me. In 2015 he was visiting his friend, Aryé Elfenbein, who had trained as a cardiologist.

Justin Kolbeck: We went and visited his lab, and he was culturing cardiomyocytes, so heart muscle cells for humans, and these incredible cells in the dish will beat, like they have this pacemaking ability down to the cell, you know, Aryé is like, ‘See, I made meat.’ I mean, obviously not the kind of meat that we would eat, but that is the essence of, essentially what meat is, right? It's, it's muscle. And so that began a lot of conversations about what would eventually become Wildtype.

Amy Scott: Wildtype is the company Justin and Aryé founded to make cell-cultivated salmon. In May of this year, it became the first cultivated seafood company in the United States to earn FDA approval.

Why did you decide to switch from growing hearts to growing salmon?

Aryé Elfenbein: I moved to California at a time where I think you could really feel the drought in in a much more real way.

Amy Scott: Aryé says, as he became more aware of the climate crisis, he started thinking about all the ways his medical training could be applied to other systemic problems.

Aryé Elfenbein: Why is this only being used for the Biomedical Sciences? Why can't this maybe be used to address a lot of the issues that we're seeing in our food system and also, you know, more broadly, our climate. I just felt like this was the most impactful use of what I would be able to bring to the science.

Amy Scott: For Justin, his path could hardly be more different. He got interested in food after serving in the Foreign Service in Afghanistan.

Justin Kolbeck: I think some of the experience I got out of my time in the Foreign Service was a deep appreciation for the impact of food insecurity, which was actually, if you actually sat down and talked to people who are in the Taliban, that was the main reason. It's like, I need a job to be able to feed my family.

Amy Scott: Later, he went to business school, and when he and Aryé began talking about starting a company.

Justin Kolbeck: The big question for me, that was rattling around in my head was, okay, we're going to be 3 billion more people on this planet, roughly, before things start to level off. Everybody wants to eat more, like Americans, meaning like a lot more meat and seafood and things that have a bigger climate impact. So perhaps what we can do is just give them the same food that they like to eat, but completely reinvent how we do it and potentially make it much cheaper.

Amy Scott: We're standing in the Wildtype headquarters. They call it the fishery. It's in a converted brewery in San Francisco's industrial Dog Patch neighborhood. It's got tall ceilings and a few co-working tables in the front, which are right next to an elegant looking sushi bar with a wood sculpture above it that looks like an abstract wave. And opposite the sushi bar is a big floor to ceiling glass window looking into the production process, you can see stainless steel tanks where they're growing salmon out of salmon cells.

Justin Kolbeck: The basic idea was to create as little space between where you can enjoy the product and where it was made. And if you know anything about seafood, sometimes there's a very long and very circuitous route by which the fish comes out of the ocean before it reaches your plate. And so the idea here was at this little sushi bar, you can see, look turn right behind you and see where it came from.

Amy Scott: To get back there and see how the sausage gets made, so to speak,

Aryé Elfenbein: You need a few things, starting with shoe covers.

Amy Scott: We step into a sanitation room where we thoroughly wash our hands, suit up with shoe covers and again, safety glasses and a hair net.

Oh, lab coat too, okay.

Along with my headphones and equipment, I feel fully armed and ridiculous. 

Do I need to button this up? No, okay, good. All right. I can't see, I can't hear.

Justin Kolbeck: Off to a good start. 

Amy Scott: We walked past a crew steam cleaning some of the tanks. It's something they have to do in between each batch, and each batch has something in common.

Aryé Elfenbein: Yeah, everything that we create today came from one little fish seven years ago, and that was a moment where I think we were able to understand well enough what the you know, the base nutrients are to enable the cells to thrive, as though they would within the fish. And it was that kind of magical moment that we could then select for cells that were able to self-renew and ultimately grow to the kinds of volumes that we see here. But since that time, we haven't had the need to go back to the animal, and so there haven't been any other fish that we've needed to sacrifice for that purpose. So it all came from, from that one one little fish.

Amy Scott: Tell us about that fish. What kind was it?

Aryé Elfenbein: So it was a Coho salmon.

Amy Scott: Silver salmon, the most delicious, in my opinion.

Aryé Elfenbein: Oh, wow. 

Amy Scott: We head towards a room in the back. 

Aryé Elfenbein: So this is where the process begins. 

Amy Scott: The salmon cells are kept in a cryo-freezer where they're kept alive, just slumbering. To start the process, the cells come out of the freezer.

 Justin Kolbeck: We take a few of those, we put them in, into these, you know, shaking, shaking glass vessels. 

Amy Scott: What do you call this machine that's gently shaking these containers? 

Aryé Elfenbein: It's a shaker.  

Amy Scott: It’s kind of mesmerizing. 

Aryé Elfenbein: There’s something meditative about it, too.  

Amy Scott: The process works a lot like what we saw at California Cultured to grow the cells, they have to feed them. 

So what are you feeding them? Secret? 

Justin Kolbeck: No, well, the exact formula is, but what I can tell you is it's all the amino acids, vitamins, quite a few vitamins, a few salts, a couple sugars, a couple proteins and some fat. 

Amy Scott: And what they're not ingesting are PCBs, micro plastics and other pollutants that end up in our fish. Once the salmon cells have grown enough they get moved to bigger bio reactor tanks. 

Aryé Elfenbein: As you can see, though, cells in an environment like this don't know how to just get together and become sashimi, and so the next step from here is kind of providing the structure. 

Amy Scott: They cart the matured cells into a kitchen equipped with a kettle mixer, a couple fridges, a cooling rack, an oven. In the mixer, the salmon cells are combined with a plant based mixture that gives it some structure, plus some paprika for coloring and natural flavoring. 

Justin Kolbeck: And then we kind of pour it into the molds that you see in the in the oven right there to help, kind of give it that shape. 

Amy Scott: The heat of the oven pasteurizes the concoction, and when it comes out of the mold, it's ready to be sliced into sashimi or smoked and prepared into something you might find at your local bagel shop, which is what I'm about to taste. 

Justin Kolbeck: So I’m going to make a little everything cracker with just a touch of cream cheese, Wildtype salmon, one little pickled onion and a bit of dill. Just very simple. 

Amy Scott: Back at the sushi bar, Justin is preparing a sample for me of their smoked salmon, not something they're offering widely yet. 

All right, here we go. Should I just put the whole thing in my mouth? Okay. Tt's good. Tastes like salmon. 

Aryé Elfenbein: It's the greatest compliment we could receive. 

Amy Scott: This is a taste test even Hayley and I agree on.

Hayley Hershman: Tastes great, really good. Would love to have this in my refrigerator. 

Justin Kolbeck: So, because this guy's a cardiologist, our smoked salmon has quite a bit less salt than you'd usually find in most smoked salmon.

Amy Scott: I like that, though. Yeah, that's wild. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't know the difference. 

And I've eaten a fair bit of salmon. My first radio job was in Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to one of the world's largest wild salmon fisheries, one that, in the long run, is threatened by climate change. Justin says, if we want to keep enjoying seafood in general, we're going to need more. sustainable alternatives. 

Justin Kolbeck: The ocean stores like 93 or 94% of the planet's carbon. There have been some studies done recently showing that deep sea trawling releases as much carbon into the atmosphere as the entire aviation sector combined. I think we all if you watch any of David Attenborough's more recent movies, he talks a little bit about the important balance that exists below the waves, and the importance of keeping that in balance and not having oceans that just have jellyfish in them. A, jellyfish don't taste good, and B, will our ocean still continue to function as our planet's refrigerator if we've removed all of the wildlife out of them, and I, I don't know, I don't know if anybody knows, but better not to find out, I think is kind of the answer, that it's our view. And so it's not so much about like, is the carbon footprint of what you just had lower than farm salmon, or lower than wild salmon. We have data on that. We can talk about it. It's more, can we create a new source of seafood that allows wild stocks of fish to begin to go up for the first time in 50 years. That's that's the vision. 

Amy Scott: Which is why Justin says the wild fishermen he's talked to don't seem all that bothered by what they're up to. 

Justin Kolbeck: You know, they're the first ones to tell you, like, hey, if we pull too many fish out of the waters this year, it's just less next year. 

Amy Scott: Plus, it's gonna be a while before Wildtype can scale up enough to really compete with the commercial salmon industry. So far, just a few high end restaurants are serving its salmon in Seattle, Aspen, Portland and San Francisco, and not everybody is ready for lab grown meat. 

KVUE news clip: Turning now to a new Texas law impacting food. 

Amy Scott: This summer, Wildtype partnered with a restaurant in Austin. Shortly after, Texas passed a law banning cultivated meat. 

KVUE news clip: Governor Greg Abbott has signed Senate Bill 261 into law, which bans lab-grown meat statewide. 

Justin Kolbeck: Texas decided they didn't want cultivated foods in their state for reasons having nothing to do with seafood. So we're getting kicked out of there. 

Amy Scott: And last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a similar bill.

NBC news clip: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is saying he's against lab grown meat, and Florida should be as well. 

Aryé Elfenbein: We weren't selling in Florida at the time, so essentially, that precluded us from going to Florida to launch in restaurants there. 

Amy Scott: What's their beef with? With… with beef. They're trying to protect the beef industry. 

Justin Kolbeck: If you look at the signing ceremony that the governor did, he's surrounded by cowboys and cowboy hats.  

Aryé Elfenbein: There’s a sign that says ‘Save our beef,’ and that's it. 

Fox 13 news clip, Ron DeSantis: Take your fake lab grown meat elsewhere. We're not doing that in the state of Florida. 

Justin Kolbeck: And I get it, like Arye and I both went down to Florida several times to kind of tell our side of the story, you know? And I remember talking to the bill sponsor, and I said, Look, I get it. You're trying to do what you can to protect cattle ranchers in Florida. Same, same thing is true in Texas. I don't blame you for doing that, but does it make sense to also ban a product that you are not making in your state? But basically one state, maybe two in this country, make, but the vast majority of it is imported from Norway or Chile or someplace like that. He didn't have a good answer. And I think we just kind of got caught in the turmoil of an industry that's kind of adapting, right? I think there's like, let's just compete. Like, if you're proud of your product, great, you label it what you've always labeled it. We'll label ours differently. We're self cultivated. We're proud of that. We're not trying to convince anybody that this is wild-caught salmon or farmed salmon. Let's just let the products compete on their own merit. Right now, they have a cost advantage over us. So what are you so afraid of? I think is kind of our point of view. It's a free market. 

Amy Scott: So I understand you don't like lab grown as a term. What's the problem with that? I mean, parts of that operation look like a lab to me. 

Aryé Elfenbein: I mean, many, many of our foods start in a lab, you know, I'd say that potato chips and, you know, right? I mean, these are and so did the yeast that is the starter culture for both breads and beers, right? And so I think that term in particular has been used in a denigrating way to make people view this as distasteful. And I think that the image of people in white coats and a lot of secrecy and mystery and, you know, scientific just kind of strangeness is a lot of what's driven the you know, the rhetoric behind why, like lab grown is something that you wouldn't want to try. 

Amy Scott: As a climate solution. Cultivated meat isn't there yet, right now, it's. Expensive to scale up. And unlike other climate solutions like clean energy, there just hasn't been the same level of investment. 

Michael Grunwald: The idea of growing heart muscle or, you know, a new organ in a lab, people will pay just about anything for that. They're not going to pay just about anything for lunch. 

Amy Scott: Michael Grunwald is a journalist who just published a whole book on the food and agriculture crisis called We are Eating the Earth. He says the industry is just a decade old, and in that time, it has dramatically reduced costs. 

Michael Grunwald: But they still haven't reduced it to be as cheap as meat.

Amy Scott: Michael spent five years diving deep into food and agriculture when it comes to meat alternatives. He's seen a lot of hype before. 

Michael Grunwald: There was that moment in 2019 where Beyond Meat had the biggest popping IPO of the 21st Century, and its stock went to $250 a share, and it was worth a third as much as Tyson Foods. 

Amy Scott: People were so sure that these meat alternatives might upend the whole industry. But then came the bust. 

Michael Grunwald: Beyond went from $250 a share to $2, and all of the investment dried up, and now people have decided that was just a fad, dumb idea. How could we even think of taking on this trillion-dollar industry? And I do think there's some discomfort with the idea that food and agriculture should be somehow tied to technology. Ultimately, I think these things go in cycles, and venture capitalists tend to follow the herd. 

Amy Scott: Still, Michael says there's reason to feel optimistic about cultivated meat.

Michael Grunwald: People are saying that cultivated meat will never make it, but in its entire history, there's been $3 billion of investment.

Amy Scott: Compare that, Michael says, to the solar industry, which brought in $500 billion just last year.

Michael Grunwald: So it took, like solar, like 50 years to get any traction, and we don't have that kind of time on the food side, but I'm pretty confident that the worm will turn

Amy Scott: Climate change doesn't just threaten the foods we love and need to survive. The way we produce and consume food is making climate change worse.

Michael Grunwald: The world's going to need 50% more food by 2050, and it can't keep tearing down forests to provide it.

Amy Scott: Throughout this season, we'll look at solutions from rethinking how we produce some foods Americans can't get enough of, like beef.

Steve Gabel: I think everybody in the industry is aware that there's days we wear a target on our back.

Amy Scott: To breeding new varieties of staple crops like rice, wheat and corn, crops that provide the world with more than half of its calories and support the livelihoods of farmers.

Paul Penner: I've seen yields drop because of drought, and believe me, boy, have I seen them drop. 

Amy Scott: And we'll dive deep, deeper than I ever wanted to, into the texture and flavor of meat. Turns out, we humans are very good at picking up on what makes meat meaty. 

Jonathan Blutinger: So as soon as they try something that's trying to mimic that, they're extra cautious and kind of you're almost like your fight or flight system kind of engages. 

Amy Scott: We're exploring the uncanny valley of meat, next time on How We Survive. Thanks for listening. 

We want to know what questions you have about food and the climate crisis. Send us a note, or better yet, a voice memo to survive@marketplace.org and we'll try to answer as many of your questions as we can in an upcoming episode. I'm Amy Scott. Hayley Hershman produced this episode and is our senior producer. Production support by our intern, Emma Condon. Caitlin Esch is Deputy Managing Editor. She also edited this episode. Scoring, sound design, and mixing by Brian Allison. Special. Thanks this week to Marissa Cabrera, Brian Wood from Starter Bakery, and Beth Zotter from Umaro. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts. Kelly Silvera is news director. Joanne Griffith is Chief Content Officer, and Neil Scarbrough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.