You’ve probably heard of “lab-grown meat,” the sci-fi-sounding idea of 100% real meat made without animals. Yet few people understand how close this vision is to becoming reality—and how much it could change the world. A healthier, more efficient meat source could soon rewire global supply chains and help catalyze a new bioeconomy.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Bruce Friedrich: You know what I mean? It takes nine calories of crops to get one calorie of chicken. If you can condense that, you can just feed a lot more people a lot, more efficiently.
Jon Bateman: We have both actually eaten real animal muscle that never lived inside any animal, but was created in a bioreactor or cultivator. It seems often the future.
Bruce Friedrich: The costs are down 99.999%. We predict way too much progress early, but don't anticipate how quickly you can shoot up the S-Burb. China is the country.
Jon Bateman: To beat at this point would people want to eat something that to them is so unusual unfamiliar maybe perceived as unnatural
Bruce Friedrich: so he like takes a bite of the just chicken and he goes, fuck me. This is amazing. This is better than chicken.
Jon Bateman: Bruce Friedrich, welcome to The World Unpacked.
Bruce Friedrich: I am delighted to be here, Jon. Thanks for having me.
Jon Bateman: Bruce, you have just come out with a kaleidoscopic new book on the future of meat. You take a big picture analysis of the structural forces driving the current meat system that we have, and you also tell a very personal story about the innovators, the scientists, the philanthropists, the capitalists who are trying to create wholly new kinds of that maybe people watching this will have in the future. But before we get into all of that, I just wanna ask you a more personal reflection. You and I are part of, I think, a very, very small group. We have both actually eaten what you call cultivated meat. That is chicken. Salmon tissue, real animal muscle that never lived inside any animal but was created in a bioreactor or cultivator. Tell me about the first time you had cultivated.
Bruce Friedrich: Um, well, the first time I had cultivated meat, um, was in the fall of 2016, uh, and the founder and CEO of upside foods, which was then called Memphis meats, um Uma Velletti. He came to New York city, uh. And in Susie and Jack Welch's kitchen, uh Uma, uh basically had Susie, and I split about two thirds of a nugget, so we each got roughly, you know, we each got roughly a sixth of a nugget or something like that. And we were both just completely amazed. Remember, I mean, this is before there was a Beyond Burger. The fall of 2016, there was no Beyond Burger, well, the Beyond Burger was like in a couple of Whole Foods in Colorado. There was no Impossible Burger. There were certainly no plant-based chickens that tasted anything like animal-based chicken, even the nugget form. And Susie and I were just bowled over. And I think it really does, like for me at least, that underlines that tasting is believing.
Jon Bateman: Aspect of this. How much do you think a sixth of a chicken nugget grown in a bioreactor costs in 2016?
Bruce Friedrich: Well, I mean, I can tell you that the first quarter pound burger, which was paid for by Sergey Brin, which was cooked up in August of 2013. And that first burger cost about $300,000. It cost 250,000 euros. So that's a quarter pound burger, which means $1.2 million a pound. And not far off that would be my guess. Yeah. OK. I don't know how much a sixth of a nugget is, but, you know, only a few thousand.
Jon Bateman: You know, $5,000. More expensive than any chicken nugget I've had, I'll say that. For sure. What you're calling cultivated meat is often more popularly known as lab-grown meat, a term I know you take issue with. I think there's kind of two popular stories that you hear about this. One is what I think most people have heard, which is they've kind of heard the term. They're vaguely aware of the concept. It seems off in the future. It seems like a kind of distant curiosity that Maybe somebody in a university is dabbling in somewhere. The other story that we hear, often from the kind of populist right-wing forces that have cultural distaste for this product and see it as unnatural, is it's portrayed as an imminent threat. And it's something that Bill Gates wants you to eat now and Florida and Alabama and Italy are all racing to ban. What's the truth? How far off are we from a world in which people will actually be eating what you and I have tasted?
Bruce Friedrich: When is it gonna be cost competitive? It's really, I mean, the answer to that question is going to be a function of whether we can generate the kinds of government enthusiasm and understanding of the role of alternative proteins in bioeconomy and biotechnology priorities that it warrants. And I will say all signs are positive in that regard. And the total funding... Into this, you know, into cultivated beet in all of time is about $3 billion. That's across about 150 companies that have raised money spread over 10 years. So you think about if you've already got a massive biotechnology company, you've got your Merck or your Moderna, it's gonna cost you about $2 billion to develop a drug. And that's not including all of the overhead costs and rent and that kind of thing. So this is $3 billion for literally everything over about 10 years. That's just not very much money. Last year, EVs got more than $500 billion of investment in just one year. But we're moving, things are trending in the right direction. Six years ago, no government was funding in this space. Last year there were hundreds of millions of dollars across every government. That puts any significant amount of money into biotechnology or agricultural research.
Jon Bateman: I want to talk about the economics of this field, the public policy dimensions, the geopolitics of all of this, but I also want to just start by giving the audience a very clear and concrete picture of what cultivated meat is. So paint a picture for us. You walk inside a facility in which this meat is being manufactured. There's a big steel vat. What goes into that vat? What happens inside that vat? And what comes out of it.
Bruce Friedrich: Yeah, I mean, let me take just a small step back and say, one way to think about what cultivated meat entails is to think how you can take a seed or a cutting from a plant and grow a whole plant. You bathe the seed or the cutting of nutrients in a greenhouse, you give the warmth, and from a seed to a cutting, you grow a plant. You can do the same thing with approximately a sesame seeds worth of animal fat or animal muscle. You bathe that fat or that muscle in nutrients. You do it in, you know, you referred to it as a bioreactor or a cultivator. It looks like a beer brewery, quite honestly. And it comes with a lot of benefits. I mean, the main benefits to get talked about. Are things like it requires a fraction of the land, it causes a fraction of the climate emissions. Because it requires so many fewer inputs, it can be a part of addressing hunger and malnutrition. Because it doesn't require antibiotics, it can a part of keeping antibiotics working, the worries around antimicrobial resistance, around pandemic risk. But it does also come with an awful lot of benefits for consumers. In terms of the same contamination rate as anything else that's made in a factory. So it's not zero, but it's way lower than chicken, beef, pork, all of which have just sky high contamination rates. And for the same reason, it doesn't require antibiotics. So you're not gonna get any antibiotic residues. It's not live animals. So if it's fish, it's gonna have mercury contamination, it's going to have dioxin. Contamination, it's not gonna have any of the hundred drugs that the USDA and FDA consider if they're at low enough levels to be safe and neat. So it's a cleaner, safer product in addition to the things that get talked about a little bit more.
Jon Bateman: You've just given us a very succinct tour of some of the promise of cultivated meat. And I think the flip side of that is what problems is it emerging to solve? I think most people, whether they eat meat or not, have just some gut intuition or hazy sense that there is something deeply wrong with the meat system. They may not precisely know what it is. They may know the details. They may don't know chapter and verse. To me. Avoid thinking about it too much, and the agricultural industry has done yeoman's work in hiding some of these issues from people. But when you get in a room with a policymaker, an investor, or just a friend or an acquaintance, what do you say to them is the problem that you're trying to solve.
Bruce Friedrich: But our pitch with policymakers is the economic opportunity and the food security opportunity. So governments recognize every government is prioritizing their gross domestic product and every government cares a lot about making sure that all of their citizens are fed. This is a $2 trillion industry, just the meat industry. About $500 billion of that is seafood. And then with everybody. Food security, food self-sufficiency, food systems resilience. We just have a shockingly inefficient and fragile food system. Early on, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian wheat supply was put in jeopardy. And the fragility of that system, as well as possibilities of starvation in developing economies. Was on front pages of newspapers around the world. It's worth thinking about the fact that that was about 50 million metric tons of grain. That's how much grain the Ukraine was producing on an annual basis at that point. We feed literally 30 times that much grain to chickens and pigs and farmed fish. We feed about 1.4 billion metric tons to chickens, pigs and farm fish. So you have to grow all of those crops. You have to ship them to a feed mill. You have operate the feed mill, you have ship the feed to a farm, you have operate a farm. You have ship animals to a slaughterhouse, you have the operate the slaughterhouse. Like that is a lot of fragility into the system. It's a lot extra stages of production. If you can condense that, you can just feed a lot more people a lot efficiently and you can remove from the system a whole bunch of like extra points of vulnerability.
Jon Bateman: There's a paradox at the center of the modern meat industry, which is that it portrays itself and has sought to become this kind of hyper-efficient global machine. And there's an interesting history about how people who used to be smallholders and farmers raising cattle and pigs on their farms actually needed to kind of be educated into a different mindset around animals, understanding them more. As cogs in a machine rather than kind of sensitive, sentient beings. And yet, this machine itself, at a very, very base fundamental level, is extraordinarily inefficient. Because as you say, the calories that go into the animal, the land required to produce those animals, the energy required to reduce those animals. The forests that need to be clear cut in order to make way for cattle ranges. The inputs versus the outputs, there's just, they don't balance. It's extraordinarily wasteful in many ways. Everything.
Bruce Friedrich: Is leads to one of the, I think more counterintuitive things in the book. One of the things that people find surprising is just how interested the main food and meat companies are in these technologies. So John Randall Tyson, the son of the CEO and board chair of Tyson Foods, and he's on the board. And he called Alternator Printing the next frontier a couple of years ago at Climate Week in New York City. And Tyson has invested in multiple plant-based and cultivated meat companies. So has Cargill, the number two US-based meat company. So has JBS, the largest meat company in the world has invested $100 million in cultivated meat and has a robust and really quite excellent plant- based meat company, they also bought the vegetarian butcher in Europe, which is one of that. Better brands over there. I could go on and on, ADM, Nestle, and others, CB Foods in Thailand. And a big part of that is that their goal is to sell high quality protein profitably. And if they can take something that requires nine times the resources of something else, and that's the caloric multiplier for chicken, which has the best caloric multiplier, and they can create plant-based meat or cultivated meat, that requires fewer stages of production, fewer factories, less inputs, they see dollar signs. And that is also the big part of why so many politicians are also on both sides of the aisle. And it's true all over the world. People like Prime Minister Modi, obviously conservative, Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously conservative, Bolsonaro in Brazil, both Senero and Lula. Have great policies around alternator proteins.
Jon Bateman: It's a beautiful and powerful vision that in the future we could have the same kind of meat that we eat today, authentic animal tissue without the environmental costs, without the inefficiency, without the lack of resilience, with a greater amount of food security and on and on, and on health benefits. But there's lots of critiques and challenges and you know them all. I wanna acknowledge them and bring them into the conversation. One of the things that people might be thinking is, okay, this all sounds great, but will it really work? Can we pull it off? There's been a kind of hype cycle around cultivated meat, just like there is around a lot of emerging technologies. And we kind of hit a peak a few years ago, and we're down from that peak now. There are now companies that are folding, closing shop, or saying that their timelines are longer than they thought. Once we move beyond the laboratory into a kind of pilot demonstration facility, new technical challenges emerge and the costs are still really, really high. What's your response to that set of critiques?
Bruce Friedrich: We don't know for sure that plant-based or cultivated meat at price and taste parity is possible. But one thing that I did for the book is I reached out to all of the top scientists in the field, both in academe and at companies, both plant- based and cultivated meat. And the introductory question was, can this work? Can we get to price and tastes competitive plant-based chicken. They get more enthusiastic year over year after year. One of the things that Professor Kaplan pointed out to me is that as recently as like six or seven years ago, we really had no idea whether this would work. And so far as we've moved forward, signs consistently indicate that it will be possible. So on the one hand, costs are down 99.999%. That would put the cogs of a burger. At twice the cogs of a cultivated burger would still be two X the cobs of a conventional burger. And chicken is even less expensive than burgers. But I will say that is a pretty remarkable trajectory for about nine or 10 years. So, I mean, just thinking about how recent the science is, as we're sitting here 10 years ago, There had been four peer review papers in the history of the world, written about the science of cultivated meat. Two years ago, there were 160 in that year alone. There were 10 patents through the end of 2016. So, through the of this year, 10 years ago. There have been a thousand in the nine years since. You can go kind of on and on and on with these kinds of observations. When no company has ever raised more than $600 million. And that is for all of their operations, not just R&D. With the caveat, we still don't know, right? But the signs are pretty good. So, you know, we get more and more optimistic. But one of the things I say in the book is it's not self-executing. It could absolutely not work out, but it could really not work out because we don't bring the will, not because the science doesn't work. And there are just sort of countless examples. All of chapter eight of the book is basically all of the stuff that the experts thought would never happen. Said, no, no no, cars, no way, Woodrow Wilson, always just be a plaything of the idle rich, as one of the examples, the CEO of Apple in 1985, saying home computers will never have a use case in people's homes, and just on and on and one.
Jon Bateman: One of my favorite stories you tell in the book is about the advent of artificial ice, that when people first started creating ice in a refrigerator, that was seen as novel, impure, disturbing. And it's interesting because as a modern person, I really didn't even understand how ice was created and moved around prior to the advent of artificialice. I went to a historic plantation in South Carolina a couple of years ago and was shown this facility where ice gotten from New England and put on a ship down to South Carolina where nothing freezes would be kept in a kind of crude underground bunker. And it really opened my eyes. I'm now looking back and realizing I didn't even know how things used to be. So, you know, best case scenario, we're all living in a world decades ago. We look back and we marvel at the fact that meat used to come from animals. I do want to pin you down on one point, if I could. Are you saying that at the modest scale that cultivated meat can now be produced, if they chose to commercialize it and put it in a grocery store, for example, they could do that for 2X the cost of conventional meat? Is that where we are now?
Bruce Friedrich: I think some people would say we're in better shape than that. Um, but yes, I mean, certainly, you know, beef, um, I mean, there would still be like, you know, it's going to be, it it's gonna hit the law of supply and demand. Um, that is what they are producing for now. Um, at that volume, they can only produce, um. A fair, you know, uh, not very much of it, uh at that volume, so
Jon Bateman: and scaling the volume would potentially unlock lower costs and better economies of scale. It also would create new types of engineering and scientific challenges that people are working hard on. You know, I share your optimism. I think sometimes it's a little tricky someone hearing, oh, all these great scientists are working on this. They really believe in it. They're publishing all these papers. You know there's other sectors where people try very hard and believe in that don't seem to produce measurable outcomes or benefits for society. You know, crypto would be an example of a kind of tech craze where billions of dollars were invested. There's an extraordinary community of people who are believers in this. Doesn't seem to have accomplished very much. There's other examples of kind of failed projects. Are there signs that you use and that the audience here can use to differentiate the kinds of enthusiasms and, you know, confidence and activity that we're seeing now as compared to things that haven't worked out in the past.
Bruce Friedrich: Look at the nature of the scientific papers that are coming out. Look at the advancement of the scientific papers in a year by year basis, the fact that they really do represent progress. And I'm not aware of scientists in the field, experts in the filed who are saying, no, the science doesn't work. So as one example, there have been a couple of barely. Robust obituaries in the mainstream media for plant-based meat and cultivated meat. The two that are best known didn't bother to talk to a scientist, which is kind of remarkable. And that's not quite true. The New York Times obituary for cultivated meat talked to a couple of scientists who are not involved. Anybody who takes a disinterested look at the science comes away worst case equivocal, wondering whether we're going to be able to marshal the resources, especially to scale. But I don't think there are people who are saying the science is impossible, who are actually working in the field or who have worked in the fields. The most famous example is a paper by a guy named Dave Humbert where he said getting cell culture media down to, it's gonna have to get down to at least a max, to a dollar per liter for this to have any possibility of success. It's already less than 50 cents a liter. He didn't think it could, he didn't it could scientifically get below $6. And he's a brilliant guy, but he.
Jon Bateman: Not working in this space. And when we think about it working, I think what you mean by that, what a lot of people mean by is reaching parity in terms of the same cost and taste as conventionally produced meat. Exactly. So maybe another challenge or critique would be, is that enough? Would people want to eat something that to them is so unusual, unfamiliar, maybe perceived as unnatural? Couple different pieces of this. I've had people tell me that This feels like a Franken food. We've got the Maha movement, which maybe they might be interested in something that doesn't have mercury contaminants, hormones, but at the same time, very suspicious of technology. And that includes pharmaceuticals, that includes new food technology. Is it enough to just create the equivalent or will there still be a basic? Cultural reaction that people have to say this goes against everything that I've known and I just don't like it the worst
Bruce Friedrich: polling for cultivated meat. When you call it lab-grown meat or in vitro meat and you include very science-looking pictures, the worst polling, you still correct 20% of people who are enthusiastic about it.
Jon Bateman [00:25:15] That's interesting.
Bruce Friedrich: Which I think goes back to your observation that people have just sort of this general feeling that something about meat is not great. If we have 20% of people eating cultivated meat, that gets you to familiarity, that gets to other people seeing. I mean, it makes sense that we would be, we're biologically programmed to be wary of new foods for obvious reasons. But if you have 20 percent of people eating something and it has much lower likelihoods to make you sick from food poisoning, doesn't have the other contaminants, doesn't contribute to all the external costs. I think familiarity at that point, and just the meat industry, like they can make more money this way. Of course, they're going to be bringing the weight of their PR machine to make sure that people understand the benefits and are enthusiastic about it.
Jon Bateman: Just add to the hopper here that give me some hope. One is that as dug in as the current meat system is and has traditional meat feels to many people, the way we produce meat today, maybe it's just two, maybe three generations old in terms of this kind of factory farming ecosystem, everything that goes into creating a modern chicken or cow from than genetics and the breeding, to the way a slaughterhouse functions, how they're raised. That's all incredibly new. It's not actually deeply familiar to modern culture. And so presumably something new that came along even after that could perhaps unsettle these patterns. That's one idea that gives me hope. I think another idea, and I'd love to get your reaction to this is, can we aim higher than parity? Can we envision a world where, you know, We've kind of squeezed the last efficiencies. That we can out of a factory farm, but that's not true for cultivated meat. Maybe it could be even cheaper than conventional meat. And at the same time, maybe it could either taste better or have some kind of new features that we've never even had before. I'll tell you one eye-opening moment for me was I had protein coffee that was basically coffee infused with a tasteless flavorless, isolated, cultivated protein from an egg. And so it kind of was mind blowing of like, wow, we could use this technology to create new food features that don't currently exist. And it doesn't have to be a competitive or complimentary thing. It could be a whole new product category.
Bruce Friedrich: Yeah, the every company out in the Bay Area, they're doing egg proteins using precision fermentation and they have the egg protein coffee that just tastes like iced coffee. It's totally amazing. I agree. Yeah, no, I mean, it's absolutely the case. Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, talks about how we didn't domesticate cows and pigs and chickens and turkeys and sheep because they're the tastiest meat. We turned them into meat, we domesticated them because they were the species that seemed easiest to domesticate. So even just in terms of the variety of meats that we eat in a world of plant-based and cultivated meat, we can almost certainly beat taste parity. And then similarly, if you look at first principles, plant-base meat is roughly nine times as efficient as chicken production in terms that the raw inputs. And it's gonna be challenging to do things like scale up whatever the plant saturated fat is gonna be. We might actually need precision fermentation for that. Some of the flavorings to mimic the umami flavor are gonna be challenged, et cetera. But it is always going to be true that you're gonna need a ninth, the inputs relative to chicken and something like a 50th of the inputs relative to beef. And then just divide that by three for where we're at right now on cultivated meat, three times as efficient. As chicken, something like 13, 15 times as efficient as beef. There's every reason to believe that we'll be able to just, once we're coming down the cost curve, you plateau at some point, but there's every to believe that we're not gonna slow down at price parity, which I agree should absolutely be the goal. But in a world where we're this early in the endeavor and we haven't hit price and taste parity yet. It seems like that's a pretty reasonable milestone.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I mean, just to get people's intuitions flowing here, right? I mean you could use this technology, and people are already starting in on this, to create a turkey meat that's like in between light meat and dark meat. Or you could it to produce in a factory at scale a volume of meat that otherwise isn't available at scale, like meat that is hunted or fished. And we know overfishing is such a huge problem increasingly. The fish that people have a taste for just simply might not be available at scale or at an affordable price in the future. Yeah. But the technology that we're describing here is somewhat agnostic to that, right? As long as we can isolate the stem cells, create the necessary substrator or scaffolding inside the cultivator, we can produce an arbitrary amount of that meat if we can solve these technical and scientific challenges.
Bruce Friedrich: Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely true. There's a company in Australia that I talk about in the book. They are producing a meat that is loosely based on quail or foie gras, but it's not a meat anybody's ever consumed before. And people who are eating it in Australia and Singapore so far, love it. And it's, we're not saying, do you like this as much as this other specific meat, but do you this as animal meat? And people are both A, are really enthusiastic about it. And then be also enthusiastic about the novelty of a meat that, you know, until Vow started producing it, nobody in the history of the planet had ever had it.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, it's essentially the equivalent of like a unicorn meat or a phoenix meat. I mean, just opening up the culinary possibilities here beyond what we've had before. We're starting to touch on the geography of this industry and therefore the politics, the power politics, the geoeconomics. Let's dive a little bit into that. Let's just start with who is leading this industry today. We've got... The scientific aspects of it that are at universities, companies are also doing intense R&D. We've also got the commercialization aspects where people are attempting to experiment with production processes to scale cultivated meat. We've got governments that are looking to invest their resources in this and private sources of capital and expertise. Where is all of activity happening in the world today.
Bruce Friedrich: I mean, it's really nice to see that it's happening in all of the countries that put significant amounts of money into either biotechnology, life sciences research, or into agricultural research. Israel and Singapore were the two real leaders in the space for food security reasons primarily. So two countries that are very advanced technologically and also two countries that are tiny. And would like to produce a lot more of their food in country. So those were the early leaders. But now you're seeing probably China is the country to beat at this point. If you look at the 20 most active patent applications over the last six years, eight of them are in China, three in the US, three in Korea, three Israel. So China has almost as many granted patents in the last six years, as numbers two, three, and four combined. And President Xi is explicitly talking about solving their food self-sufficiency issues on the wings of food technology. That's his example. They're prioritizing plant-based meat, they're prioritizing cultivated meat, they're prioritizing bioreactor design as a response across everything, but it's certainly applicable here. And that's because when they joined the WTO, they were food self-sufficient, and every year since they've gone in the other direction, such that they're at something like 75% food self sufficiency and less than 70% protein self suficiency. They're the world's largest importer by far of meat and the world largest importers by far of crops to be fed to chickens and pigs and farmed fish. And their meat consumption just keeps going up. And their chicken, pig, and farmed fish production just keeps coming up, which creates a growing demand for soy and other feed crops, which sends them in the wrong direction on food self-sufficiency. One of Xi's top lines is the rice bowls of Chinese farmers, I mean, the rice bowl of the Chinese should be filled by Chinese farmers. Now here's the meatballs, or the plates of meat. And he's taking that very seriously. So much like China put electric vehicles and solar and wind onto the map and helped to drive down prices, they may well be the country that does that here as well.
Jon Bateman: I think it's a good bet that food security as a topic will become of greater and greater importance in the 21st century. This may be a little unfamiliar to many Americans because we are the breadbasket of the world. That's how we've defined ourselves for many years. And for the entirety of my lifetime, we've been a net food exporter. That started to change a couple years ago for the first time we became net food importers. And There are some important exceptions, including seafood, like you mentioned, which is almost entirely imported from abroad. But still, the US is doing OK in food security, and I think we forget how vulnerable other countries are. Not just China, as you mentioned. 75% food self-reliance rate. But many of our allies in the Pacific, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, none of them are food self sufficient. They all are significant net importers. Then you've got the small states like Singapore and Israel, very minimal arable land, very vulnerable to shipping disruptions, and just are in regional hot spots. These are countries that need to plan for a future in which food might be threatened. And when food is threatened, governments can fall very, very quickly. Can cultivated meat or plant-based meat be a solution to these problems. Is it realistic to imagine in the future that the different countries that we're talking about will could have a more self-contained supply chain where they're getting the key inputs from within rather than without.
Bruce Friedrich: Yeah, I mean that is probably 90% of the reason that China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Israel are funding research in this area is precisely what you just said. And it's just absolutely the case that, you know what I mean, it takes nine calories of crops to get one calorie of chicken. It takes 10 or 11 calories of crops to get one calorie from pork or farmed fish. 40 to 100, depending on your system, calories of crop to get a calorie from a lamb or a cow. And similarly, I mean, that means you need nine times the land, nine times water, nine times, the other resources. And none of these countries have that. I mean I talked about China being the number one importer of feed crops and meat. Korea, Japan, Singapore, Israel, their proportions are worse than China's as a proportion of imports. And all of them recognize that as a problem. All of them want to move toward food self-sufficiency. With the group Systemic, we did some modeling in Europe across 10 European countries. What would a one-third shift or a two-third shift to alternator proteins look like? And one of the interesting things was they could forex the amount of regenerative agriculture. On a third of the land. They got to food self-sufficiency and they were much better able to meet climate and biodiversity goals. They put a third of the lands into additional production, a third to the land into climate and bio-diversity and a third the land into organic or regenerative and they get 3X. But in response to your question, the main take home is they got to across the 10 countries. They got the food self sufficiency.
Jon Bateman: This industry, it has some interesting attributes that I think could be compelling to national security policymakers in Washington. The whole schtick of Washington right now is to try to re-industrialize the United States around higher value ad production, where we can own the intellectual property, sell to the world, and continue to stay at the top of value chains. That I think is a good description in many ways of what we've been talking about here. This is advanced manufacturing, which is a buzzword in DC. It could become a hub or centerpiece of a future bioeconomy, which lots of people in the national security field are excited about, but it's still a little bit over the horizon. And requires a kind of patience and farsightedness and imagination that frankly sometimes we lack here. And that is part of the explanation of why photovoltaic cells and solar panels largely left the United States behind. China had those cognitive and political attributes that allowed that country to look around the bend, as they say in Beijing. And see that some patient capital and strategic investment could allow them to catch up and leap ahead in a strategic way.
Bruce Friedrich: The Bipartisan Commission on Biotechnology, which had Senator Todd Young from Indiana and Representative Stephanie Bice from Oklahoma, my home state, where I grew up, and then Alex Padilla and Ro Khanna on the Democratic side as the sponsors of that work. And when they launched it and in the supporting documents, it has a lot of foresight and it includes alternative proteins within scope. For the sorts of biotechnologies that the US wants to lean in on. So we're cautiously optimistic and 11 Republicans, members of Congress, wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, talking about China's advancements on plant-based and cultivated meat and asking that the U.S. Track that and make sure that we are prioritizing. On our industries as well, pointing out that so far we're in the lead on these technologies. But that's not saying much because they're so nascent. And as you just said, we were the country to beat on both EVs and solar production. And we stopped prioritizing them and trying to lap us. So I think people like Senator Young and Representative Bice and a lot of other, like the Republicans who were enthusiastic about the Chipsack. These are the sorts of things that they are paying close attention to.
Jon Bateman: We opened with a story about the first time that you ate cultivated meat. I wanna close with a storey, and this is my favorite story from the book. I'm gonna ask our legions of child listeners to close their ears for a moment. What is fuck me chicken?
Bruce Friedrich: Yeah, so GFI is working. So the Bezos Earth Fund is definitely the philanthropy that has really gone all in on alternative proteins as a nature and climate mitigation intervention. And we are their implementation partner. Their global director of food, the future of food. Director of the future food, Andy Jarvis. When he first started investigating this, he was like many other people, the people I talked about earlier, he just didn't think cultivated meat would taste very good. He didn't thinks science could do it. And so he was really enthusiastic about making plant-based meat better and less expensive. That was what he thought they were gonna do. And I think it was 2021. He ate cultivated chicken for the first time. He ate just chicken in Singapore. So we did sort of immersion experiences in Singapore, Thailand, and Brazil. And in Singapore it was, so he like takes a bite of the just chicken and he goes, fuck me. And so, and he was like, and I started taping like right after he said, fuck me, he's like, this is amazing. This is better than chicken. Chicken is mostly chicken. It all tastes like chicken, but you can still get sort of varying degrees of juiciness. This is the best chicken you ever ate every single time. So, Fuck Me Chicken both is, oh my God, Cultivated Chicken is amazing. And that was certainly Susie Welch's and my experience of it as well. But it's also the revelation that this is the chicken that you knew and loved. This sort of what was in the tasting.
Jon Bateman: I think that's exactly right. I've had my own stunning and surreal experiences eating cultivated chicken, pork, eggs, and it's a mixture of the verisimilitude, the realism of the food, and the sense that I'm glimpsing a future that very, very few have seen. Gun to your head, this podcast is being listened by tens of thousands of people out there. What proportion of them are going to have this experience of eating cultivated meat, maybe as a regular part of their diet in their lifetimes.
Bruce Friedrich: Oh, I think in their lifetimes, assuming most of your listenership is under 50, I'm very optimistic. I mean, really in a decade, we brought prices down 99.999%. So there's the quintessential, we predict way too much progress early, but don't anticipate how quickly you can shoot up the s-verb once you get. Basically work the kinks out. For us, that's taste and price parity. I think once we get to price and taste parity, we're gonna shoot up the S-curve, and I will be very surprised. I think certainly that happens. I mean, even if there were no more funding, that probably happens in the next 30 years. I think with government support and looking at what China's doing, it could happen a heck of a lot quicker than that. Would be my prediction. And that's what I address in the book. I mean, in the books I say, it's not self-executing, we don't know for sure, signs are good, the progress we're making is good, but the entire conclusion of the book is, here's how you can get involved.
Jon Bateman: If you're right, people listening to this right now will be eating something in the future that barely exists today, and that could change the world. I hope you are right, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Bruce.
Bruce Friedrich: We all have a cell phone within reach probably. 30 years ago, a sum total of none of us would have had a cell-phone within reach. Many things happen very, very quickly and that's as you know what chapter eight is dedicated to. I do hope people will check out the book. We have a website. It's meetbook.org where you can find out more in order.
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