Pod Insights Revisionist History Frankenfood | The Mistakes Series About this episode Would a tomato by any other name taste as sweet? What about a steak? Malcolm sends Ben on a mission to investigate the cutting edge of food technology and two mistakes: one from the 1990s and one that’s unfolding as we speak.
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1:34 Speaker 00 Bushkin.
1:39 Speaker 00 So I went to California at your behest.
1:43 Malcolm Gladwell? Did. I wish, first of all.
1:47 Speaker 00 I know you wish that you had been there yourself, because this is your favorite place.
1:51 Malcolm Gladwell? This is one really hurt, and I'm.
1:55 Speaker 00 We should just say what we're talking about.
1:57 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay, so I sent you, Ben, on a mission, because I couldn't go, because my wife would leave me if I took one more trip. And so with a heavy heart, I handed the reins to one of my favorite places in America, which is the food lab at Mattson. Mattson is like...
2:20 Malcolm Gladwell? Mattson's like the R and D. 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 mostly what you do is you pick up the phone and you call Mattson out in the Bay Area and you say, can you make me? And fill in the blanks. The most delicious potato chip that also prices, you know, is priced under X or-
2:44 Speaker 00 They've got 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 they're like Franzia's on there. It's just like all the hits, things that I can't even mention because they're NDA'd are on the walls.
2:59 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh my God. It's like if you walk through a grocery store after going to Mattson, you're like, oh, that's Mattson, oh, that's Mattson. Oh, and you realize my diet is basically Mattson.
3:10 Speaker 00 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.
3:23 Speaker 01 And carrot cake became a phenomenon at first because of the airlines.
3:29 Speaker 00 And Barbara Stuckey, their chief new product strategy officer, who's an old hand on Revisionist and is just a font of amazing tales from the Mattson archives.
3:38 Speaker 05 In the case of this, the challenge was if you've ever opened a pomegranate, it's not exactly, you can't squeeze the pomegranate.
3:48 Malcolm Gladwell? Like I've really, I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work every morning. Do you get that sense of her?
3:54 Speaker 00 She was so pumped. It was, I found it so delightful. She's so excited and like a, and a true believer in this amazing sense in what they do.
4:04 Malcolm Gladwell? I want, I wanted to take my, when they're 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 we take my daughters to work day. And I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job.
4:26 Malcolm Gladwell? So I sent you out there. Now, why, Ben, you tell us. What was, why did I send you out there?
4:32 Speaker 00 So you sent me out there because you 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 2018, 2018, 2019 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,
5:17 Speaker 00 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 90s, and the second one, a mistake that Barb is trying to stop us from making today.
5:34 Speaker 00 Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Natafafri. And in this, our final episode of the Mistake Series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pantheon of food science, the hallowed halls of Matson. 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 Matson for a more cultivated reason.
6:10 Speaker 00 Okay, so our story begins in 2018. 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 stomach.
6:23 Speaker 05 It was really the year where this technology was starting to happen. And companies were figuring out how they were going to isolate the cells 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-
6:51 Speaker 05 Meat by using cells of meat to make more meat. And that idea just, to me, was just brilliance.
7:02 Speaker 00 And also, no, no animals will suffer. And there's not, you know, factory farming, things like this, you won't have.
7:07 Speaker 05 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, it just felt like something's happening here.
7:19 Speaker 00 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.
7:32 Malcolm Gladwell? Steak would return to the African household.
7:35 Speaker 00 And not just when Julia's out.
7:38 Speaker 00 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.
7:45 Malcolm Gladwell? There's like 10 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.
7:55 Speaker 00 Methane emissions.
7:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Methane emissions. But you could, 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, of the environment. I mean, there's no, it's huge.
8:09 Speaker 00 There's like, there's obviously, there's like runoff to runoff from cattle farms.
8:13 Malcolm Gladwell? Fertilizer, I mean.
8:15 Speaker 00 So there's, 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.
8:25 Speaker 05 It started with an image. And I'm going to show you the image.
8:32 Speaker 00 So we're looking at a, a Petri dish of what looks like a perfectly round patty of raw ground beef.
8:41 Speaker 05 Yes. And to me, having it in a Petri dish.
8:46 Speaker 00 Not good.
8:47 Speaker 05 Not at all appealing, delicious, or anything I want to put in my body.
8:52 Speaker 00 And already like raw meat is not something I see and think not super appealing.
8:56 Speaker 05 Not 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.
9:06 Speaker 05 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 GMOs in their formulations and consumers are not going to want to eat it. And, and we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world.
9:50 Speaker 05 I have tasted meat made this way, and, and I was shocked at how much it tastes like real meat.
9:56 Speaker 00 But it's not, no one's going to get there if it's called lab grown meat.
10:00 Speaker 05 Exactly.
10:02 Speaker 00 Going to end up like GMOs, which is our first mistake. That's after the break.
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12:22 Speaker 00 So the first mistake, we had to talk to Steve, who was the CEO at the time. And it starts in the 1990s, late 90s, early 2000s, when a company called Zeneca, now known as AstraZeneca, so of the COVID vaccine fame, approaches Mattson 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, why did this GMO tomato exist? What problem was it solving? It was all
13:00 Speaker 01 About harvesting and transportation and processing. So tomatoes by their very nature are delicate. So the most optimum tomatoes for the hedonics and the organoleptics and how it tastes. And, you know, all those criteria.
13:23 Speaker 01 They were very difficult to harvest economically.
13:26 Speaker 00 Because you had, if you let it ripen on the vine, you had
13:30 Speaker 01 Too long.
13:31 Speaker 00 It was a very short window in which you could ship it or if, and it was easier to puncture.
13:36 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. They became delicate. They were harder to harvest.
13:41 Speaker 00 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 wherever 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.
14:26 Speaker 00 And GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin. And then in 1994, 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 an, this is one of those first GMO products that Zenica brings to Mattson. And what they're asking Mattson to do is not develop the tomato, which they've designed basically with the end use of purees, soups, things like that, but basically solve this crucial problem of GMO.
15:10 Speaker 00 Which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to like buy into this thing?
15:16 Malcolm Gladwell? It's funny because I was in the early 90s covering the FDA for the NIH for the Washington Post. So I was writing about all these early things in that period. And I feel like that it was predictable. It was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of of genetic modification on all levels, right? Because it was so new back then. I mean, you're saying it's now we're we've, you know, we've had 30 years of this. But in 94, it was like science fiction. That's the sort of problem they're grappling with that.
15:58 Malcolm Gladwell? I mean, people don't even can't even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something.
16:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:05 Malcolm Gladwell? And so that I feel like the backlash has shifted over time. But the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystification.
16:15 Speaker 00 Well, there's also, I was, I was thinking about the Flavor Save the Tomato is 1994. Jurassic Park comes out in 1993. 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?
16:33 Malcolm Gladwell? Yes, 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.
16:46 Speaker 00 So Steve talks about this, actually. They begin to bring people in to actually encounter the tomato, the Zenica tomato, and study how they respond to it. In these focus groups, would people try the tomato? So do you, do you recall how people would react when they tasted it? Yeah, yeah, this is a.
17:09 Speaker 01 Great tomato. I remember especially cutting them open. There was one thing, you know, people handle them and
17:16 Speaker 00 So you you put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say, one of these is genetically modified?
17:21 Speaker 01 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 to the aha moment. You do a slow reveal, you know, what if the best 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.
17:51 Speaker 00 And then you're like, this was made in a lab.
17:53 Speaker 01 This 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. That, okay, now now you've crossed the line.
18:10 Speaker 00 Where was that?
18:11 Speaker 01 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,
18:30 Speaker 01 genetics was not a common word back then. The word modified organism sounded like, I remember, consumer size sounded like bugs, you know, or bacteria or mole, you know, there were all kinds of.
18:46 Speaker 00 Three words.
18:47 Speaker 01 Oh.
18:48 Speaker 00 Genetically modified organism. It's just like a nuclear.
18:51 Speaker 01 Frankenfood.
18:52 Speaker 00 Right.
18:53 Speaker 01 Came from professor at Boston College and then got picked up by the New York Times and ended up in an op ed and off it went.
19:03 Speaker 00 Louis wrote, quote, "If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light 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 like, what they tried to do at Matson is come up with a story that says like, "This is not really that different than 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, GMOs, that hangs over everything.
19:46 Speaker 00 And he even talks about how people just shortened the acronym, like, pronounced it by the acronym, like, they called them GMOs. And it was this, 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, it just like, in some fundamental way, it's not.
20:14 Speaker 01 There was some kind of line. What they wanted to be sure was that what they were still eating was truly a tomato. That it somehow was not 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.
20:42 Malcolm Gladwell? It's a zombie.
20:43 Speaker 00 It's a zombie tomato.
20:44 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, it is, it is, they have attached one of the most kind of elemental dystopian human fantasies.
20:55 Speaker 00 Right, right. This thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually.
20:59 Malcolm Gladwell? Yes, it has the appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign. And I mean, every, you know, the, there's a huge category of sci fi movies that are just about this thing.
21:09 Speaker 00 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 Zenica's tomato loses out. Like at one point, it has a 60 something percent. It sells way better than like the average tomato puree in UK supermarkets. And then after some of the backlash to the flavor saver tomato, Zenica vastly loses market share. It plummets and now you can't get a Zenica 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 GMOs, Frankenfood GMOs.
21:46 Malcolm Gladwell? Wait, so when I buy tomatoes in the, in the supermarket today, are none of them GMO?
21:52 Speaker 00 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 opened up my morning yogurt and when I opened the lid, on the lid, it says, "Made from milk from non-GMO cows." It's like, 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. Where I had, like, I made my friend mutter Panier the other night and I used this, these, like, this chili spice I had. And it says like, "Non-GMO chili."
22:34 Speaker 00 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 Mattson wanted to happen, whatever Zenica 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.
22:54 Speaker 01 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.
23:08 Speaker 00 So all of this brings us to our second mistake, the one that Barb is trying to stop us from making again, which is it's 2018, 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.
23:35 Malcolm Gladwell? Whiplash.
23:37 Speaker 00 Whiplash.
23:40 Speaker 00 Maybe this is a good time for a commercial break.
23:43 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay. We'll be right back.
24:13 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.
24:51 Malcolm Gladwell? This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly.
25:08 Malcolm Gladwell? You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval,
25:48 Malcolm Gladwell? variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.
26:20 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. What still makes you just sit down at the piano? If you sat down at 9:00 AM and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio, you've just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators
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27:29 Speaker 00 All right. So back with Barb at the lab grown meat conference. And she keeps hearing these names for it. Lab grown meat, cell based meat. And she's like, it's happening again. So how did you go about trying to solve this problem? Because usually, basically, let's not make the GMO mistake twice.
27:47 Speaker 05 That's right. It was really a rallying cry for everyone on the team.
27:52 Speaker 00 Imagine if it were lab grown organisms.
27:54 Speaker 05 That makes my stomach click. Not so happy.
28:00 Speaker 00 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?
28:09 Speaker 05 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.
28:19 Speaker 00 Interesting.
28:20 Speaker 05 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 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.
28:43 Speaker 00 Florida, in fact, has banned this product and Alabama and.
28:47 Speaker 05 Yes. So yeah, but it's now become a political issue. So it was like a religious thing that has become political.
28:54 Speaker 00 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, in vitro is a word that applies to both of these, to the gray areas of both of these universes.
29:08 Speaker 05 I would say, you know, the Venn diagram of people who are anti-abortion are going to be anti-cultivated meat, too.
29:18 Speaker 00 That's really interesting. Anti lab grown meat.
29:21 Malcolm Gladwell? So what is she, does she have a term that she wants to use?
29:25 Speaker 00 Uh, she gets these people together to start thinking about the story and what name can emerge from the story. Some were better than others.
29:35 Speaker 05 Okay. Well, here's-
29:38 Speaker 00 I'm sorry, Nano Pastured Meat got five votes? What?
29:45 Speaker 05 Unbounded meat, slaughter-free, propagated, minimalist agriculture?
29:56 Speaker 05 I don't remember these.
29:57 Speaker 00 Celebration? No.
29:59 Speaker 05 No, definitely not.
30:01 Speaker 00 You know, we went through this huge list of names. I think she had something like 100. 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.
30:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
30:16 Speaker 00 And, and, and, and there's just this, that paradox inherent in the project, right? So then, so then the question is meat, 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?
30:39 Speaker 05 We had a shortlist. And I think, once we got to the shortlist, it seemed like a no-brainer.
30:46 Speaker 00 And what was it?
30:47 Speaker 05 And that was cultivated meat.
30:50 Speaker 00 How does, how does that name strike you?
30:52 Malcolm Gladwell? Well, on the list of names that she was considering, the one I liked the most was minimalist meat.
30:59 Speaker 00 Because it's, it's, it's, it's the, it's the claim about, it's more about, it's foregrounding the benefits.
31:07 Malcolm Gladwell? And also, it's capturing the kind of virtue of this, which is, this is meat that's leaving a much smaller footprint on everything. It's, it's, and minimalist suggests a kind of clarity and elegance and simplicity in the way it's produced. I mean, the bit about cattle farming is, this is insanely messy and convoluted. I don't know, I like that. But I'm not, you know, I would be, I'm not, I'm not the typical consumer here. I'm, I was already pro this before I even needed a new name.
31:37 Speaker 00 Same. Yeah. But I think like minimalist, I would, I like minimalist, I like cultivated.
31:43 Malcolm Gladwell? You like cultivated.
31:45 Speaker 00 I like cultivated.
31:46 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
31:54 Speaker 00 Well, and I think also like there's, there's the old truism about 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.
32:11 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
32:11 Speaker 00 And so there's something 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 in an, you know, it signals that it's different. It's not misrepresenting, but it's also not like throwing the Petri dish in your face, which I think is kind of crucial because at the end of the day, people basically don't want to know a lot about how their food gets to them.
32:43 Speaker 00 But that is why she's trying to change the name.
32:45 Malcolm Gladwell? Exactly.
32:45 Speaker 00 Because it's, it's like, can you obscure, is there a way to like hide the words that make it clear that this is an innovation and not just like the way things should be?
32:56 Malcolm Gladwell? She's absolutely right.
32:57 Speaker 00 And I agree. I remember being really excited and being like, I can't wait to try that. And so obviously because Mattson has the necessary connections, I went to try it.
33:09 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, you tried it?
33:10 Speaker 00 I tried it.
33:11 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, my God. I didn't know that. And now I feel even more bummed about letting you go.
33:22 Speaker 00 So I did, I, I, I had to try, I had to try lab grown meat. Sorry.
33:28 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, my God. Ben, cultivated meat.
33:30 Speaker 00 So the, I would say the cultivated meat industry is somewhat downtrodden these days, but there are still people doing this and figuring out how to scale it. And, and the big one is a place called Upside Foods. So they are conveniently located in Emeryville.
33:50 Speaker 00 So also in the Bay Area. And I went there and they have these like huge tanks. And I think they're like stainless steel tanks, basically, on, on an industrial floor. And in these tanks, they are using cells taken from a chicken egg years ago to brew, cultivate this meat at scale.
34:13 Malcolm Gladwell? Chicken.
34:14 Speaker 00 And chicken, in this case.
34:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Hmm.
34:17 Speaker 00 And so I met with a woman there named Erin Santi, Vice President of PR and Communications at Upside Foods.
34:24 Speaker 05 Honestly, I think the number one thing to me is tasting is believing. Right? Um, people ask us all the time, what does it taste like? And the most common thing someone says after they try it, we'll, we'll see. I'm preempting this before you try it.
34:37 Speaker 00 It tastes like chicken.
34:38 Speaker 05 Tastes like chicken. And we say, funny thing that, because it is chicken, right? Um, and I think that's a big part of it. I mean, at the end of the day, what we do and the, the innovation that has led to us being able to do this has tons of science and technology at its core. But ultimately, we make food. It's something you eat. And so what better way to have you connect with that than have the opportunity to try it?
35:01 Malcolm Gladwell? So you go in there and they prepare in front of you. They take their meat and it looks just like chicken.
35:08 Speaker 00 Tell me, tell me what I'm looking at.
35:10 Speaker 05 Yes. Okay, so we have a little appetizer, which is a butter chicken samosa. And then this is a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich.
35:20 Speaker 00 Both look like the normal version of the product.
35:24 Speaker 05 And it's got a little, um, mint chutney on top.
35:40 Speaker 00 Okay, that is delicious.
35:41 Speaker 05 Did I call it, does it taste like chicken?
35:43 Speaker 00 That, that is seriously delicious. It's really good.
35:48 Speaker 00 It was incredible. It tasted exactly like normal chicken. Granted, they have a very excellent chef on staff. But if you had not told me, if I were not in this pristine futuristic place where they're making this thing, if I didn't know the whole story, I would have had no questions. I would not have wondered, was this chicken produced differently than the chicken I get at a fast food place that comes from god knows where?
36:16 Malcolm Gladwell? What did the people at Upside say about the name in question? What do they call it?
36:22 Speaker 00 They call it cultivated meat.
36:23 Malcolm Gladwell? So Barb has won the day?
36:25 Speaker 00 Barb was able to basically get like a coalition of people together through the people who are hosting that conference and like get a lot of buy-in from the people in this space to like use this term cultivated meat. And so we'll see what happens in the future if that can actually, that plus the storytelling around it, can actually overcome people's anxieties.
36:49 Speaker 00 But to me, I think like what Upside seem committed to is the idea that like tasting is believing, that where they want to start here is not in packaged goods that you get off the shelf, but basically like with restaurants. So you will go to a restaurant, you'll try this, you'll know you're trying something different and you'll have the experience that I had, which is like, okay, this is like, it's quite good and like in no way does it taste different to me.
37:15 Malcolm Gladwell? Do they think they'll be safer? Do you get salmonella outbreaks and there's no antibiotics, obviously?
37:21 Speaker 00 You don't get salmonella outbreaks from cultivated meat. And in fact, there are like, in the future, you could imagine things like low cholesterol beef. So if you like, if your doctor says like, cut down your cholesterol, that you want to keep eating beef, like there are ways to handle this process such that you make a healthier piece of meat.
37:42 Speaker 00 So they're now doing this at scale, a greater scale than they've ever done before. And then it'll be a question of, can we get the story right? Can we get the communication right?
37:54 Speaker 00 And I think cultivated meat, we'll see, but at least it's an attempt to not make the same mistake twice.
37:59 Malcolm Gladwell? I am so down for this. I wish Barb every good luck in her campaign.
38:04 Speaker 00 I do, too.
38:05 Malcolm Gladwell? I, for one, will be lining up to have my cultivated steak.
38:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, let's just hope that when that steak hits the market, there's a name in the story that makes you want to eat it.
38:24 Speaker 00 Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Angeli Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. Special thanks to Justin Schimmack. I'm Ben Madoff-Haffrey.
38:57 Malcolm Gladwell? For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner and he said, oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes. And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery. And now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership.
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