Is grass-fed beef more nutritious? How can I waste less food? Is insect protein tasty?

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Amy Scott: Hey, How We Survive listeners. Amy Scott here. It has been such a fun and illuminating season exploring food, at least for me. You know, we've been asking you to send in questions that popped up for you over the course of the season—well, you did not disappoint and some of you have some strong feelings about food. So for our last episode of the season, as promised, we're answering your questions: from how nutrition has changed with modern farming practices to where cultivated meat falls on the processed food spectrum, plus we'll do a cricket taste test. You heard that right! Let's get into it. 

Throughout this episode, we'll be talking with some different experts to help answer your questions. First up, in light of our episode looking at factory and regenerative operations, we got this thoughtful question from Laurie.

Laurie: Factory farms are feeding more people, but I've read in multiple places that, for example, the broccoli that my grandmother ate 100 years ago was significantly more nutritious than the broccoli that I get to eat now. Presumably, this holds true for meat products as well. I'd be interested in a comparison of the nutrition provided by the various meat products that you've covered.

Amy Scott: To help answer this one, I called up Stephan van Vliet, nutrition scientist and assistant professor at Utah State University. Stephan researches the nutritional quality of foods grown with regenerative practices.

First of all, have you heard this before that the vegetables or crops of the past were more nutritious?

Stephan van Vliet: Yes, I've heard that before. There actually a couple of studies on that. So both the US and the UK have been keeping nutritional databases, or nutrients reference databases, for quite a while, so usually since the since the 50s and 60s. So that data, you can go back into that data and find that maybe a carrot or broccoli, in this case, if we're talking about broccoli, contains x milligrams of zinc. Now that value might be 50% lower. For instance, it's mainly derived from mineral data.

Amy Scott: That's so interesting. So what about this idea that meat might also have some differences today versus in the past. Would that hold based on what they're consuming, what cattle are consuming?

Stephan van Vliet: Yeah, I think we have to infer a little bit more there, probably prior to maybe feed lots that obviously are now very prevalent in the US, most people would consume grass fed beef back and this was maybe 100 years ago already. We do know that grass fed beef, not always, but if the animals are raised on very biodiverse pastures, it does incorporate more health-promoting nutrients such as fat soluble vitamins, omega three fatty acids, as well as antioxidants. So we can infer from that and assuming that in the past, our pastures and rangelands were very biodiverse, that likely resulted in nutrient-dense meat, we do know that over the past probably 100 years or so, there has been historic overgrazing, but we do know when you graze more of a monoculture, so a less diverse pasture kind of picture, it is like—if we walk into a salad bar and there's only iceberg lettuce, or we can select from 50 types of greens, right, we'd be able better to nourish ourselves. So if a cow can do that too, that would result in typically, more nutrient-dense meat. So we can infer from that. And if we go way back, there are some interesting studies on animals that were preserved in the tundra in Siberia. Granted, it wasn't cattle, but other animals that maybe people hunted. And people have looked at the omega three fatty acids in there, and we've also looked at the omega three fatty acids in wild animals today, so things like venison and white tailed deer and antelope, and what you can see is, is that grass fed beef, in terms of that, can get close or as good in omega three fatty acids. So it depends. I'm sure there's beef out there today that is still as nutritious as it was 100 years ago.

Amy Scott: Well, talking about present-day beef, though, is there a nutritional difference between beef you might find at a factory feedlot versus, you know, quote, unquote, regenerative beef?

Stephan van Vliet: Yeah, there's definitely a difference and regenerative beef, people usually picture it as grass-fed beef. You do really find differences in fat soluble nutrients. So these are vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin K, as well as various other carotenoids that you might find and also in antioxidants. So what the animal does, the grass-fed animals, they are grazing fresh grasses and plants, and they take a lot of—within the plant kingdom, there's probably hundreds of thousands of compounds found in those plants. The animal actually takes that, transforms that into antioxidants within their body, as well as flavor compounds. So this is also why grass-fed beef tastes different, because you're literally tasting what we appreciate in the wine industry, right? You taste the terroir, you taste the territory. Well, with grass-fed beef, that is very similar in the sense that you taste the land or the compounds that the animals ate that are then transformed within its body. So if an animal is eating a lot of sage, you might find a hint of sage. When it's eating wild onions, you might find some wild onion flavor in there. But in grain fed beef, it would be very similar, actually, in the sense that if you're providing grains, there's different compounds in grains than there are in grass, so you also have a little bit more reflectance of that flavor, so they're actually quite different.

Amy Scott: Wow, with grass fed being, for the most part, healthier or more nutritious.

Stephan van Vliet: Yeah, I cannot know if I can say healthier, because we don't have a lot of human, randomized, controlled trials on that. But what I can say that on paper, it gets enriched in more potentially health-promoting compounds.

Amy Scott: Keeping on the theme of meat, we got a question about cell-cultivated foods from Andrea. She asks, it seems like cell-cultured food items would be considered highly processed foods. Highly processed foods are not good for you. Where do the novel cell cultured foods fall on the processed versus nutritious spectrum?

Elliot Swartz: This is a good question that comes up a bit with something that's new.

Amy Scott: Elliot Swartz is principal scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think-tank that's funded by donations from foundations and individuals. Their mission is to accelerate alternative protein innovation. So definitely in the pro-cell-cultured food camp.

Elliot Swartz: When we talk about ultra-processed, generally speaking, what that means is that some sort of additive is being added to the product. So it could be something like a preservative or emulsifier, etc. And so there's a spectrum of sort of processing that has been created. And it's important also to understand that it is an area of active debate, and so we may see it evolve over time, because it has been questioned in terms of its utility for public health. But nevertheless, to answer the question more directly, there's nothing about cultivated meat that inherently makes it an ultra-processed food. So the way to think about it, is just as you can create a conventional meat product that is like a steak or filet that is less processed, or you can create a jerky or bacon product that might be more processed and have things like preservatives in it, the same is true for cultivated meat.

Amy Scott: Well, let's talk about the process, because one thing we learned from our reporting is that to get these cells together into something that you can slice or, you know, put on a sandwich, it does involve adding some ingredients to give it some structure. So what can you tell us about what some of the products available in the market have in terms of added ingredients, and are they any less nutritious?

Elliot Swartz: So the inputs that go into the process can sort of be classified as two separate things. There's the actual feed that you're feeding to the cells. Those are things like vitamins, amino acids, sugars that the cells consume, and then that forms the sort of nutritional content of the cells themselves. As you alluded to, some companies might use what is called a scaffolding structure, and that can be made of other food ingredients. So for instance, wild types product, if you look into the safety information that was submitted to the FDA, they actually use a mixture of eight different ingredients in that scaffold that are derived from plants that are commonly consumed. And so there's a variety of different scaffolds that could be used for cultivated meat, but suffice to say that ingredients that are used, if you're using a scaffold, will be common food ingredients.

Amy Scott: In terms of processed I mean, as you said, that that word can mean a lot of things. What do we know about the nutrition of something that you know is processed versus just a hunk of untreated meat?

Elliot Swartz: Yeah, so generally speaking, you know, the goal of the cultivated meat manufacturer is to match the nutritional composition of, you know, the conventional counterpart that you're trying to replicate. At a high level, the cultivated meat and seafood products that have been approved have very similar nutritional content. So think the protein, fat and carbohydrate content of the sort of conventional counterpart and that similarity also. Applies to, you know, the individual amino acid profiles, the fatty acid profiles, and the micronutrient profiles. So things like iron or zinc or the vitamins that are contained within the meat product are also very similar. It's important to note that they're not the exact same. Some there's variants here, and there's also variants in conventional meat products. And so actually, you know, some cases the levels of certain vitamins are lower in the cultivated meat product. In some cases, they're actually higher. So just like in an animal, you know, the composition of the muscle or the cells that you're consuming is influenced by what that animal has been eating. The same thing is true when you're just growing the animal cells. And so it's been shown that, you know, you can actually tune the nutritional profile based on the feed in a cultivated meat process, you know, to a fairly high degree that you can't really achieve with conventional meat. And so I think that what is interesting from a nutritional perspective, with cultivated meat, is it does present an opportunity for these companies to develop products that are nutritionally improved or enhanced, and so they might have lower levels of saturated fat or cholesterol, or you might increase the Omega three content, for instance, or the vitamins of a certain product. So this has not really been the focus of the first generation of products on the market, but it is something that I think more and more companies will aim to achieve in the coming years.

Amy Scott: Coming up after the break, one listener wanted to know about another form of protein we haven't tried yet.

Amy’s kid: I’m scared.

Amy Scott: I'm a little scared too. 

Amy Scott: Insects. Yum.

This next question comes from Randy.

Randy: Hi. What's the latest on eating insect protein? Since raising insects is reportedly much more resource efficient than livestock, less space, water feed for more protein. I'm wondering if the show would look into it. Thank you very much.

Amy Scott: Well, Randy, we did look into it. We got Cheryl Preyer on the line. She's with the Center for insect bio manufacturing and innovation. It's an industry-university partnership backed by the National Science Foundation to research insect agriculture.

Cheryl Preyer: I will say, when you look at greenhouse gasses, you can look at insects and say, Oh, raising insects may produce less greenhouse gasses. Growing insects, if you're raising insects and you can feed them by products from other other types of production. That is a great way to approach a zero waste sort of system. So from a sustainability standpoint, that's a really great approach.

Amy Scott: So if someone wanted to eat insects here in the states, where it's less common, you know, what are the benefits? Why would someone want to do that?

Cheryl Preyer: Well, you can get a great amount of protein from insects. There is some interesting research being done on potential benefits of chitin in the human diet, and what that can do for health.

Amy Scott: What is chitin?

Cheryl Preyer: Chitin is an exoskeleton of insects. This is why, if you're going to go out and eat some crickets, you're going to see a warning that if you have a shellfish allergy, maybe you don't want to eat those crickets. Another term for crickets is land shrimp. So the seafood that we eat has chitin that's in their shells. Same thing with insects.

Amy Scott: Interesting. And when we talk about insects, edible insects, what are we talking about?

Cheryl Preyer: Right now, In the US, we would say edible insects are probably most likely crickets or mealworms for people. When we talk about for animals, I'd say we'd also include black soldier fly. We're not looking at that for people yet, but definitely for animals, it's got a an amino acid profile very similar to fish meal. So it's really great in animal diets to replace fish meal. In other parts of the world, there are a lot of other options: mopane worms, ants. Ants are really cool. They have formic acid, which is a little bit like citrus. So there's a great company called entomarket, or Entosense, and if you order from them, you can get a bunch of different insects. There is another great company based in France that makes a dried mealworm that's flavored with cumin and sesame. And I think they're just as delightful as handing somebody a dish full of potato chips.

Amy Scott: All that talk of insects made me curious to try some. Eating insects is pretty common in other parts of the world, but here they're still relatively hard to find. So I ordered a bag of cricket snacks online.

Okay, what have we got here? We've got Tricky Cricky chili lime gourmet roasted crickets.

Amy’s kid: I’m scared. 

Amy Scott: I'm a little scared too. 

I convinced my kids to sit down and try some with me.

So you can close your eyes while you eat it. You don't have to look at it. Do you want to see it? 

Amy’s kid: I don’t know if I can see it.

Amy Scott: Ah! 

I was totally fine, until I looked inside the bag and saw a bunch of crispy, roly-poly cricket bodies, no legs in there.

Okay, I'm gonna just take a bite. Hmm, not bad. 

Amy’s kid: They don't taste like cricket … Actually, yeah, they do. 

Amy Scott: How do you know? 

Amy’s kid: They're like, sour.

Amy Scott: Oh yeah, there's kind of a … I don't know what the aftertaste is.

Amy’s kid: A bad one. It tastes like they forgot to take up the poop from the cricket before they roasted it.

Amy Scott: That might be a little hyperbolic. To me, it tasted kind of earthy, a little bland.

Amy’s kid: I don’t know. I feel like, they're not like bad, they're just not a snack that I would ever like crave.

Amy’s kid: Wait, listen to the crunch they make. The crunch is probably the best part.

Amy’s kid: Whoa. 

Amy Scott: And honestly, they do kind of grow on you.

Amy’s kid: Give me more. These are good.

Amy Scott: All right, this is a success, but don't ruin your appetite. Dad's making dinner.

If you're not convinced, Cheryl Preyer recommends starting small.

Cheryl Preyer: A great way to try them, is get some dried crickets. Get a bag of popcorn, like a really light kettle corn, and you can throw in a little other flavoring, like just a little essence of chili lime. Mix them all together, and if you eat it without looking at it, you're going to have a hard time telling what's popcorn and what's cricket.

Amy Scott: This season, we've tried a lot of things I never would have imagined eating, from lab-grown chocolate and chicken to bacon made from seaweed, to those chili lime crickets. But I keep thinking about what Somini Sengupta said about food waste in episode four, that if we could just stop throwing away 30% of what we produce, we could go a long way towards shrinking the emissions from our food systems. It's honestly something I've struggled with. I'm lucky to live in a city with weekly compost collection for no extra charge, but I'm still pulling soggy lettuce out of the crisper and scraping uneaten dinner off my kids plates. Turns out we have our own in-house expert on this topic.

Okay, Caitlin, so I understand you are really good at not wasting food. 

My boss. Caitlin Esch.

First of all, how did you get so good at this?

Caitlin Esch: Well, I don't want to brag, but I do a lot of cooking, and I'm cheap, like, I don't want to buy stuff and throw it away. I mean, I grew up in a house where food was not wasted. Back then, my dad would eat all the leftovers. So we just had, we call them the human garbage disposal, which I think is a title he's proud of, so I can probably say that. But, you know, I don't have anyone like that in my house anymore. It's just me and my partner. So planning is a big part of it, and I do the grocery shopping, and I do the cooking, so I control the planning.

Amy Scott: So you also live in Los Angeles, where there's an abundance of good food and produce. Do you have like a market in your neighborhood where you can just run out when you need something and buy exactly as much as you need? Or do you, are you like a Costco prepper-shopper.

Caitlin Esch: I'm a little bit of both. I mean, I go to Costco, like once a month or once every six weeks and stock up, and then I go to my local grocery store, which is like a couple blocks away every week, like every weekend.

Amy Scott: That’s nice. 

Caitlin Esch: And I will show you my little booklet of meals. 

Amy Scott: Oh, my goodness.

Caitlin Esch: I have—each week, I do plan out what I'm gonna make, and at the bottom I have a use section. So this is all my, like, old stuff that I need to, like, work into the next week's recipes. So I have, like, tomatoes, potatoes, pearl onions, mint, sage, rosemary, beets. Like, there's just stuff that's in the fridge that I need to work into the next week's menu.

Amy Scott: That is so impressive, and it's no wonder you're such a good producer. You're producing your meals the way you produce How We Survive. Okay, so first of all, you've got this list of kind of interesting, random ingredients. How do you figure out how you can best use them? And do you ever come up, like, I have no idea what I'm going to do with all these beets? 

Caitlin Esch: Yeah, I mean, well, I just search recipes online, and if I know I need to use my beets, I'll, like, search and pick a beet recipe. I mean, every week I try to do, you know, I've been trying to eat more climate-friendly. So I'll have one tofu meal, one bean meal—one chicken meal per week, as opposed to, like, four, which is maybe what I would do in years past, and then, like, just a vegetable meal. And, yeah, there's, you know, with vegetables that are wilting, you can always throw them in, you know? If you have some wilting spinach, you can throw it into your curry. It doesn't matter if it calls for it or not. So I add a lot of things that are about to go into soups and stews and salads, or I freeze them.

Amy Scott: And, okay, so there are some things you really can't freeze, like, so one of the things I struggle with is lettuce, right? I like to eat salads. I'm kind of a spontaneous cooker: I get off work, I'm like, what do we have in the fridge? What can I make? This is clearly one of my problems with not wasting food, but, but things go bad and, you know, what do you do with like, wilted lettuce? Is there anything you can do other than throw it in the compost?

Caitlin Esch: Like, bring it back to life by putting it in a bowl of cold water with ice, if it's like, too far gone for that. 

Amy Scott: Oh, does that work? 

Caitlin Esch: Yeah, you can reconstitute wilted lettuce and, like, floppy carrots by just sticking them in cold water.

Amy Scott: How did I not know that. So any other tips for not wasting so much food?

Caitlin Esch: My top three tips to waste less food. Okay, for vegetables, you know, like the wilty carrots or celery or onions that are starting to go for that kind of stuff, you can chop it up, or not even chop it up and just throw it in the freezer, and use it later for a soup or a stock. For fruit, berries, strawberries, most fruit you can cut it up or not, cut it up and freeze it and use it for crisps, crumbles, pies, baking or smoothies. And then the third tip would be herbs, like herbs that are going bad or that you just have too many of, you can either dry them, just by leaving them out in your house, you know, if it's like thyme, rosemary, oregano, that kind of herb, you can just dry it. Or Hayley, a tip I got from our producer Hayley, is to throw it into a salsa fresca, and just, you know, put all your cilantro, parsley, chives in with, like, some salt and lemon. And if you really want to level up, you can invest in a food dehydrator and dry pretty much anything, and that's a way to preserve it.

Amy Scott: I'm very impressed.  

Caitlin Esch: Or you could, like, have a life and not spend all of your time grocery shopping and planning dinner. 

Amy Scott: Caitlin also shared some apps that can help cut down on food waste. Like Too Good To Go, a marketplace for surplus foods. There are also apps that connect you with free food or discounted vegetables. I'm inspired, and I'm going to work on it.

As you've heard throughout this season, the climate impacts of what's on our plate are complicated, and while our individual actions aren't going to completely solve this, I always feel more empowered and hopeful when there are things I can do. Curbing our own food waste, and yes, eating less meat, beef and lamb in particular, really does matter. And the team has actually compiled some climavore recipes for you all. We've got some climate-friendly options from Francis Lam, a divine sounding curried carrot coconut soup from Samin Nosrat. And I even share a few recipes: You gotta check out my famous veggie chili. It's a real crowd pleaser. You can head over to our website, marketplace.org, to check them out.

Thanks so much for listening this season and sending in your questions. We love hearing from you. I'm Amy Scott. Hayley Hershman produced this episode with help from C. C. Lucas. Caitlin Esch is Deputy Managing Editor. She also edited this episode. Scoring, sound design, and mixing by Brian Allison. 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.