The Future of Cultivated Products

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And so with a heavy heart, I handed the reins to one of my favorite places in America , which is the food lab at Matsen. Matson is like Matson's like the R and D . If you if you're a food company in America and you want to do something new or cool , you maybe you tried in your own lab but most,ly what you you do is pick up the phone and you call Matson out in the Bay Area and you say, can you make me and fill in the blanks? The most delicious potato chip that also pr ice, you know pr,ic ised under X or like the walls, the walls are lined with like a pantry shelf of just like every product you've ever had and enjoyed. And like I think Franzias on there. It's just like all the hits . Things that I can't even mention because they're NBA are on the walls. Oh my god, it's like if you walk through a grocery store after going to Madsen, you're like, oh, that's Matson. Oh, that's Madsen. Oh, and you realize my diet is basically Matson . I interviewed two people out there who you know, of course, from other revisionist history episodes. Steve Gundrum, their chief AI officer, who was at the time of our first mistake, the CEO and knows everything about why we like what we do. And Care Cake became a phenomenon at first because of the airlines . And Barbara Stucky, their chief new product strategy officer, who's an old hand on revisionist, and is just a font of amazing tales from the Matson archives. In the case of this, the challenge was if you've ever opened a pomegranate , it's not exactly you can't squeeze a pomegranate . Like I've really I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work everyone. Did you get that sense or? She was so pumped. It was I found it so delightful. She's so excited and like a and true believer in this amazing sense in what they do. I wanted to take my old enough, take my two daughters out to the Bay Area. And I want Barb to do a version of Take your Daughter to Work Day. Only take my daughters to work day. And I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job. So I sent you out there. Now why Ben, you tell us what was why did I send you out there? So you sent me out there because had reached out to Barb about a mistake that has loomed very large over the entire food industry that she wanted to tell us about . And so the story is basically Barb, who's more excited than anyone you've ever met to go to work every day , is going to work in twenty eighteen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen area , and is at a conference where she comes face to face with the future of the food industry and then realizes that the food industry is about to commit Harry Carey on a much broader scale than even McDonald's , and she has to try and stop it and so it is the story of two mistakes . The first one, a mistake that we made in the nineties, and the second one, a mistake that Barb is trying to stop us from making today . Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Natafaffrey, and in this our final episode of the Mistakes series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pan theon of Food Science, the Hallowed Halls of Madsen. It's a place you may remember from way back in season two episode nine, McDonald's broke my heart, all about McDonald's French fries , but my mission wasn't as greasy. I was sent to Madsen for a more cultivated reason. , so our story begins in twenty eighteen. Barb's at this conference for an amazing new technology that everyone's calling lab grown meat . And she starts to get this pit in her st omach . It was really the year where this technology was starting to happen and companies were figuring out how they were going to isolate the cell s that they wanted to use to make the type of meat that they wanted to use . And it was just mind blowing. So the idea here is very simple it is to be able to make meat by using cells of meat to make more meat . And that idea just to me to me was just brilliance. And also no animals will suffer. And there's not factory farming, things like this. You won't have so many things that we don't have to worry about anymore. It can be done inside. So it just seemed it seemed like magic . It just felt like something's happening here. This would be like huge for me because my wife is an ethical vegetarian and if I could tell her that there was nothing killed in producing meat that we were eating. I would suddenly be eating meat again at home, which would be thrilling . Steak would return. Not just when Julia's out . But there's like there are all sorts of there are all sorts of potential upsides to this technology and Barb's just sitting there thinking about them . There's like ten different environmental reasons why we would want to cattle farming is one of the single greatest contributors to global warming, it sucks up enormous amounts of water . Methane emissions. Methane emissions. You could make a case that replacing the cattle industry with something that comes out of a lab would be one of the single biggest things we could do in favor of of the environment. I mean, there's no there's like there's obviously there's like runoff to run off from cattle farms like fertilizer. I mean yeah . So there's like there are all these like huge upsides and Barb who's, you know, the person who's most excited to go to work is just thrilled about this. However , there was a problem. It started with an image . And I'm going to show you the image . So we're looking at a petry dish of what looks like a perfectly round patty of raw ground beef. Yes . And to me , having it in a petri dish? Not good. Not at all appealing, delicious, or anything I want to put in my body. And already like raw meat is not something I see and think, not super appealing. That's so sexy. So I sat through the conference and it was probably three or four days and I kept hearing these terms cell based meat , lab grown meat. And it just I was so horrified by the language that I grabbed the executive director and I just, you know, pulled on his jacket and I said, Can we talk ? I think that we need to work on the naming and the communication around this technology . That if we don't do it now and we don't explain it right and we don't bring the consumer along from the beginning we're going to end up like GMOs and nobody's going to want to use GMO's in their formulations and consumers are not going to want to eat it and we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world . I have tasted meat made this way and I was shocked at how much it tastes like real meat. But it's not no one's gonna get there if it's called lab grown meat. Exactly. Going to end up like GMO's , which is our first mistake . That's after the break Join us for another season of Untold Stories Life with a Severe Autoimmune condition, a production of Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenics . We're sharing even more inspiring stories from people living with conditions like MG and CIDP and also opening the conversation to voices from other rare diseases like myositis and eigen. Through these journeys, we'll explore what it's like to participate in clinical trials seeking new treatments , how connection fuels hope , and how shared experiences help move research, awareness, and care forward . Because living with a rare disease isn't just about getting through it. It's about moving forward together . Listen to Untold Stories on America's number one podcast network, IHart. Follow untold stories and start listening on the free IHA radio app today . If your business runs on five different apps, twelve browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch, it's probably time for Odu. Odu is an all in one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy to use platform. So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems, your entire business works together in real time. Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate, and you can actually focus on growing your business. Let one unified system run your entire business . From the first opportunity to the final payment, everything works together in one place. Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation, Odu gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you. Try for free today at Odu. com slash iHartradio. That's odo . com slash i heart radio We all do it. You have a night for yourself but don't like the sound of the silence , so you turn on the TV just for the ambiance. It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone. And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone. But when you switch to GICO, you've got claims reps available around the clock, so whenever you need, you'll have people around to help . And let's turn on the washing machine just for good measure . Isn't that soothing? It feels good to have support. It feels good to geico . So the first mistake , we had to talk to Steve, who was the CEO at the time . And it starts in the nineteen nineties , late nineties, early two thousands, when a company called Zeneca , now known as Astro Zeneca , so of the COVID vaccine fame , approaches Matson and says, we have created a genetically modified tomato and we need your help. We're here to talk about the story of the tomato . I mean, what did the why did this GMO tomato exist what problem was it solving? It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing . So tomatoes by their very nature are delicate . So the most optimum tomatoes the hedonics and the organoleptics and how it tastes and you know, all those criteria were very difficult to har vest economically . Because you had if you let it ripen on the vine you had too long. It was a very short window in which you could ship it or if and it was easier to punctuate. Yes, exactly. They became delicate. They were harder to harvest . Basically, it's like tomatoes are a really difficult crop because if you pick them ripe , then they're very soft. You have lower yields because you're using these huge combines to harvest them. And so you're likely to lose a lot of tomatoes, which then drives up the price of the tomatoes that you do ship. And then you're shipping these ripened tomatoes, which means they have a very short time to get to where ver they're going to be sold and then used . So the way they would handle this, there are a few ways people handle this, but one way was that you would literally pick a tomato green, ship it green because it was firmer and not yet ripe, and then gas it with ethylene gas before it hit the market shelves, which gave it the sort of red look that you expect from a tomato. So it was like overall a suboptimal situation for tomato lovers . And GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin . And then in nineteen ninety four, it's applied to foodstuffs and the first thing that gets approved by the FDA is a tomato. It's called the flavor saver tomato , which is basically trying to solve this basic problem of how you like pick and ship tomatoes. So there's this is one of those first GMO product s that Zeneca brings to Matson. And what they're asking Matson to do is not develop the tomato, which they've designed basically with the end use of pure es , soups, things like that , but basically solve this crucial problem of GMOs, which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to like buy into this thing? It's funny because I was in the early nineties covering the FDA for an NIH for the Washington Post. So I was writing out all these early things in that period. And I feel like it was predictable it was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of genetic modification on all levels, right? Because it was so new back then. I mean, you're sent , we've had thirty years of this . But in ' ninety four, it was like science fiction. That's the sort of problem they're grappling with. that I mean, people don't even can even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something . And so I feel like the backlash has shifted over time , but the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystific ation . Well, it's also I was thinking about the flavor savor of tomato was nineteen ninety four. Jurassic Park comes out in nineteen ninety three. So it's like , if you have a cultural reference point for what the scientists are doing, it's like dinosaurs were going to eat you alive. You're kind of like that's we're not supposed to be doing that, right? It fits in with, you know, there's a there's a kind of moral element , which we don't see as much today, that we should not be disrupting God's creation in this way. So Steve talks about this actually . They begin to bring people in to actually encounter the tomato , the Zeneka tomato and study how they respond to it. In these focus groups would people try the tomato? do you recall how people would react when they tasted it? Yeah , yeah. This is a great tomato . I remember especially cutting them open . There was one thing, you know, people handle 'em. you put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say, one of these is genetically modified? No, not that way. You just start talking about how are they grown? Where are they grown? Are they good for you? What makes a bad tomato? What makes a good tomato? You kind of build up the aha moment . You do a slow reveal. You know, what if the pasta sauce you ever had was made with a hybrid tomato that had never been grown before. You kind of start off with baby steps and then you're like this is this is a is a new , this is a new hybrid tomato . Then we just kept going deeper and deeper into the story until we found the point where they pushed back , okay , now you've crossed a line where was that you've got scientists who are not just breeding these aren't agronomists and agricultural specialists. This is like stuff in the lab where you're modifying the seed genetically. I mean, these were words that were not genetics was not a common word back then . The word modified organism sounded like I remember consumers sounded like bugs , you know, or bacteria or mole, you know, they're all kinds of three words. Oh, shouldn't have it? Modified organisms had a nuclear franken food. Right. It came from a professor at Boston College and then got picked up by the New York Tim es and ended up in an update and off it went . Lewis wrote, quote, If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, lights some torches, and head to the castle . Steve basically finds that everybody has already been freaked out by the name genetically modified organisms and they call it frankenfood . And so what they try to do at Madston is come up with a story that says like this is not really that different what we've already done for centuries. Like think about the way we make apples by grafting parts of one apple tree onto another apple tree. And they come up with these analogies and the thing is like it just it doesn't really stick because they've got this name GMO's that hangs over everything. And he even talks about how people just shorten the acronym, like pronounced it by the acrony m, like they called them Gimmos . And it was like this banner that nobody could really get past . And what the banner meant to people is science is involved in this . There's like some sort of like hubris. We're treading in a place where we shouldn't tread. Like what they were eating may look and taste like a tomato, but it's just like in some fundamental way it's not. There was some kind of line , what they wanted to be sure that what they were still eating was truly a tomato , that it somehow was not so so synthetically bred that it kind of crossed the line that it was no longer truly a tomato but some kind of red delicious fruit. It's a zombie. It's a zombie tomato. Yeah, it's it is it is they have attached one of the most kind of elemental dystopian human fantasies . Right, right. This thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually , yes, it has the appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign. And I mean every, you know, there's a huge category of sci fi movies that are just about this thing. Yes, they're everyone's worried that they made the zombie tomato. And I think basically it's like however good the analogy is, it's like Zeneka's tomato loses out. Like at one point it has a sixty something percent , it sells way better than the average tomato puree in UK supermarkets . And then after some of the backlash to the flavor saver tomato, Zeneca vastly loses market share. It plummets. And now you can't get Zeneka GMO tomato on the market. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons, but like a big one is that there's this huge resistance to GMO's Frankenfood GMOs. So when I buy tomatoes in the in the supermarket today, are none of them GMO I don't think that none of them are GMO, but I suspect that the vast majority are not GMO , which honestly, I get. I think if you gave me a choice I would prefer a naturally occurring tomato, which is not something I'm proud of, but there is something about the intensity of the anti GMO thing that I relate less to. This morning I open up my morning yogurt . when And I open the lid on the lid, it says made from milk from non GMO cows. And it's sort of like screaming this thing at me that I like it was a question I wasn't even asking. And I was just like, oh , or I had like I made my friend Mudder Pener the other night and I used these like this chili spice I had and it says like non GMO chili and I was like that's it didn't even occur to me that this might be GMO chili . Like it's become this rallying cry where whatever Matson wanted to happen, whatever Zeneca wanted to happen, with the way people would respond to GMOs, the exact opposite happened. And it's because I think like they never could change the name. The first time I heard Frankenfood , I was like, okay, this is bad. Words are very powerful and for whatever reason, I think it was a hard stop . So all of this brings us to our second mistake, the one that we are that Barb is trying to stop us from making again , which is it's twenty eighteen , she goes to this conference and it's all about this thing called lab grown meat . And she's sitting there getting all excited about this technology and then hearing this word thrown around and she's just like, oh no, we're about to do it again . Whiplash Whiplash . Maybe this is a good time for a commercial break . Okay , we'll be right back Join us for another season of Untold Stories Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production of Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenics. We're sharing even more inspiring stories from people living with conditions like MG and CIDP , and also opening the conversation to voices from other rare diseases like myositis and IGN . Through these journeys, we'll explore what it's like to participate in clinical trials seeking new treatments , how connection fuels hope , and how shared experiences help move research, awareness, and care forward . Because living with a rare disease isn't just about getting through it . It's about moving forward together . Listen to untold stories on America's number one podcast network I heart . Follow untold stories and start listening on the free Iheart radio app today If your business runs on five different apps, twelve browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch, it's probably time for Odu. Odu is an all in one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy to use platform. So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems, your entire business works together in real time. Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate, and you can actually focus on growing your business. Let one unified system run your entire business . From the first opportunity to the final payment, everything works together in one place. Whether you're a small business or manag ing a large operation, Odoo gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you. Try for free today at Odoo. com slash iHartradio that's oddo . com slash iHarte radi o When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account. Like if Vatuin won the lottery . I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're born. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick b,ro . I'm thinking the floor is gonna be all trampoline, bro. With a helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound, but they're just being babies. But switching to Geico save me hundreds, so my bank account is safe. It feels good to say some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico . All right, so back with Barb at the Labgrown Meat Conference . She keeps hearing these names for it. Lab grown me at, cell based meat. And she's like, It's happening again. So how did you go about trying to solve this problem? Because basically, let's not make the GMO mistake twice. That's right. It was really a rallying cry for everyone on the team . Imagine if it were lab grown organisms . Even that makes my stomach clip not so happy. So she starts doing the Matson thing. She gets a bunch of people together in a room. She starts testing, how do you feel about this? What do you think? How does it look to you? It was one of my friends that I was trying to explain the technology to her, and she said oh no , I don't think God wants us to eat that interesting. Yes, one of my friends. I don't even know how to explain it, but it did occur to me that there could be some very different opinions . And it turns out that even to this day , there is a very political skew for whether or not you're interested in this kind of a product. Florida, in fact, has banned this product in Alabama and Yes. So yeah, but it's now become a political issue. So it was like a religious thing to come political. Somehow in a weird way it's like it plays in the cluster of neurons that has something to do with abortion also. Like there's like Invitro is a word that applies to both of these to the gray are as of both of these universes. I would say, you know, the Venn diagram of people who are anti abortion are going to be anti cultivated meat too. That's really interest ing. Anti lab node meat . So what is she ? Does she have a term that she wants to use? She gets these people together to start thinking about the story and what name can emerge from the story? And some were better than others . Okay , well, here's I'm sorry, nano pastured meat got five votes . what Unbounded meat, slaughter free , propagated , minimalist agriculture . I don't remember these celebration. No, no, definitely not. You know, we went through this huge list of names. I think she had something like a hundred. And it is a really hard problem to solve, like what to name this thing because the whole challenge is you have to come up with a new name for a thing that doesn't foreground the fact that this is a new thing . And and there's just this that paradox inherent in the project. Right. So then so then the question is meet like, what, is how do you package it such that it's not like they're lying to me, this was grown in a lab. You're like, this is slightly different . But they do land on this one name that splits the difference, I think pretty well. Do you remember when you hit on the one that you landed on? We had a short list , and I think once we got to the short list , it seemed like a no brainer. And what was it? And that was cultivated meat. How does that name strike you? Well, on the list of names that she was considering, the one I liked the most was minimalist meat . Because it's the claim about it's more about it's foregrounding the benefits . And also it's capturing the kind of virtue of this , which is this is me that's leaving a much smaller footprint on everything And minimalists suggest a kind of clarity and elegance and simplicity in the way it's produced. The bit about cattle farming is insanely messy and convoluted. I don't know. I like that, but I'm not, you know , I would be not I'm not the typical consumer here. I was already pro this before I even needed a new name. Same. Yeah, yeah. But I think like minimalist I like minimalists. I like cultivated. You like cultivated? I like cultivated. Yeah . I like it. Well, there is a lovely play on a cultivated person as a sophisticated, you know, as a kind of person of elegance. Well, and I think also like there's there's the old truism lawmaking and food , you know, how the sausage gets made . The lesson of which is that nobody nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made, that the sausage becomes less appetizing if you know how it gets made. Yeah. And so there's some like genetically modified organism really spells out how the sausage gets made. Lab grown meat spells out how the sausage gets made. Cultivated meat, I think, is obscuring that