In 2015, Justin Kolbeck was visiting his friend Aryé Elfenbein at his lab, where Elfenbein was growing human hearts, “and these incredible cells in the dish will beat, like they have this pacemaking ability down to the cell. And [Elfenbein] is like, ‘see, I made meat.’” Kolbeck said that experience sparked an idea, “so that began a lot of conversations about what would eventually become Wildtype.”

Wildtype makes cell-cultivated salmon, and this year they became the first cultivated seafood company in the United States to earn FDA approval. “Everything that we create today came from one little fish seven years ago,” said Elfenbein. In a converted brewery in San Francisco, Elfenbein and Kolbeck take salmon cells and turn them into sashimi, all without the fish. 

“The ocean stores like 93 or 94% of the planet's carbon. There have been some studies done showing that deep sea trawling releases as much carbon into the atmosphere as the entire aviation sector combined,” Kolbeck said. If we want to keep enjoying seafood, he argues we need to find sustainable alternatives: “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.”

It’s not just salmon that is being reinvented. At California Cultured, they make chocolate and coffee in petri dishes. “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,” said CEO Alan Perlstein. Without new technologies, Perlstein says it will still be possible to get traditionally made chocolate in a couple decades, “sure, for $80 per bar? Maybe.” 

Climate change is changing what we eat. As the planet heats up, foods like salmon, chocolate and coffee might be harder to come by and more expensive to buy. In this episode, the “How We Survive” team goes on a food tour around Northern California to find out how tech entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make all sorts of foods that are under threat from the impacts of the climate crisis.