Clean Meat, with Paul Shapiro

Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the future of clean meat and animal agriculture with comic co-host Maeve Higgins, author and animal advocate Paul Shapiro, and Dr. Liz Specht, Senior Scientist at The Good Food Institute. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/clean-meat-with-paul-shapiro/ Photo Credit: World Economic Forum (File: The Meat Revolution Mark Post.webm (7:53)) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. My co-host today, comedic co-host Maeve Higgins.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Hi, good to see you.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's been so long, it's been too long.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I was in Ireland, I had my sister's we- you don't need to hear all this.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your longtime veteran of StarTalk and your host of the podcast, Maeve in America.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cute title. I did your podcast.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  You did, yeah.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hope I did okay.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  You did great. I mean, my podcast is about immigration and your point was, we're all from Africa.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  So that was, really blew my podcast out of the water.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody is an immigrant to where they are.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't matter how far back you look.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, don't come to me telling me, "Well, you're an immigrant and you're not, you're native." No, nobody's native.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even the people who call themselves native are native.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's true.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's hot. It's a hot topic.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're all natives of Africa.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you want to go all the way back.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Which is why it was cool when the English went and claimed "Africa." No, I'm just kidding.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, today, we're not talking about immigration. We're talking about the future of meat. Meat. And meat, as it might appear to have a future in the laboratory. That's according to Paul Shapiro, author of the recent book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. And we've got him in studio to give us all the details on the future of this sustainable humane and-

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Tasty?

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tasty.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Indeed, it is, man.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, welcome to StarTalk. Not your first rodeo with us.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I'm very honored to be back.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, excellent, excellent. Uh, you have, you carry a title, Vice President of Policy at the Humane Society of the United States. That's a thing.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  That is a thing, yeah, amazing, I know. Uh, but it's great to be here and I'll tell you that if you go back to the time when we were walking around the plains of Africa, when where is our, the cradle of humanity, uh, never since that time have we had the ability to divorce meat production from live animal raising or killing. And now, scientific advances are allowing us to do just that. And there's a lot of reasons that we want to do that. So, for example, uh, Neil, your brother from another mother, Bill Nye, often points out that raising animals for food is one of the leading contributors to climate change and love other pressing environmental problems.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Agriculture in general, yes.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Agriculture, but especially animal.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially animal raising.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Right. And so one of the solutions could be just eat less meat and enjoy more plant-based foods. That's a great solution. We ought to do it.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I feel like that's something we all know and like not many of us do.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Maybe, a million on the head.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  You know, like we've, I've heard that.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're trying to change people's behavior.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Right. It's like exercise. And we're like, mm-hmm, I absolutely mean to.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And I will.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had intended to this morning, yes.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  All the more reason why we want to divorce meat production from livestock raising. And so now, if the problem is that we're raising too many animals for food, one of the solutions may lie within those animals themselves. That is within their very cells.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Like if they could learn to speak, they'd be like, stop it.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  That is one of the things we need to pioneer to enable them to have a voice.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Please, no, yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Until then, though, there's now a group of startups that are creating what's called cellular agriculture, the process of growing real foods, like real meat from animal cells as opposed to animal slaughter. And what these companies are doing is producing real animal products. We're not talking about alternatives to meat here. We're talking about real meat simply grown with vastly fewer resources than are needed to produce whole animals only to slaughter them. I know it sounds like science fiction and indeed in many sci-fi plots.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're not animals, so they're not animal products.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Uh, well, they are come from animal cells a lot of the time. So you're growing meat from animal cells.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  But they don't have like-

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're culturing the cells.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. Yeah. So basically you're producing this through cell culture. And so it's been the demand of sci-fi for a long time. Everything from Star Trek on the USS Enterprise, that's how they ate meat, was eating clean meat. But now it's not sci-fi. In fact, it's science fact.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what, that's what you cover in your book.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how real is it? Can we, is there a restaurant that's gonna get a T-bone steak? That you grew in your lab?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Uh, perhaps one day, uh, but for right now, uh, these companies are making ground meat products think more like, uh, hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, sausages-

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff where the texture of the meat is, is lost from its original fibers anyway. And there's so many meat products that are on the docket-

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, for that, uh, like as you said, just ground beef anyway.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, hot dogs, sausage, that sort of thing.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Cause you're not, you're not growing creatures, right? Like you, they don't have like bones or brains or-

• 5:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Organs. It's just like the stuff we use.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, that's exactly right. So we just need the meat. So, you know.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It reminds me of, there was one of the Gary Larson comics and it said, uh, boneless chicken ranch and the chickens have no bones. They're just like on the ground.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Like a rubber chicken farm. It's so convenient.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Well, maybe this will be like the brainless chicken ranch where it's just a bunch of cells.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Right. None of them reading or, yeah.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how soon is this gonna happen?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Uh, well, these companies are not yet commercialized with the exception of one, a company called Gel-Tor, which is producing gelatin, uh, from, uh, basically through cell culture, but-

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gelatin has always been like animal hooves or something, right?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, hooves or skin or skeleton. Uh, gelatin is basically just like-

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the day I learned that, I said, "No, I don't need Jell-O that bad." Okay. I'm sorry. I don't crave Jell-O.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's funny that they never like branded it differently. They were like, "Gelatin, Jell-O." Like the link is so there for us all to know about.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Well, with the exception of Gel-Tor, which has commercialized, uh, these companies are looking at introducing products like meat or milk or, uh, eggs or even leather. Really in the next-

• 6:25Speaker 01

  They can make eggs.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so what we're talking about is probably for some of them, like leather and egg whites and milk, probably another year or so. Uh, then with the meats, you're looking probably more like 2021. Although one company, Hampton Creek, does pledge that within 2018, they will start selling some product that is a clean meat product.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And they're called Hampton. Hampton Creek.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And it's like a race, right? Like, so I can imagine there's all companies, is it like the space race almost, like where they're all trying to get there first?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Oh, that's gotta be hugely lucrative. Hugely lucrative. These companies are bringing in millions of dollars from venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, and even agriculture giant Cargo is investing in this space because they see clean meat as part of the future of humanity's protein consumption. Who's gonna be the first to adopt clean meat? Would it be vegans? No, quite the opposite. The, the reality of the surveys shows that the more meat you eat now, the more likely you are to want to eat clean meat. The less meat you eat now, the less likely you are, because this is meat. It's real animal meat. And so vegans- And you're not enslaving and killing animals to get it. And that has been one of the many arguments posed against meat eaters. Uh, so that is one of the reasons why some people choose to be vegetarian or vegan.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And for those people, that is, uh, that problem is addressed through clean meat. People have other reasons too. Uh, but the fact remains that the more meat you eat, the heaviest meat eaters, so to speak, are the people most interested in eating this. And why, how do you know they'll be most interested? One is, I want my T-bone out of the rib of a cow. And none of this new fangled Franken food. No, no scientist gonna put it-

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Like a barbecue guy.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Right, barbecue guy. Right. Well, interestingly enough, uh, Memphis Meats, which is one of the companies leading this space, is- See, that's the kind of name, Memphis Meats. Yeah. Well, like, one of, one of the guys who-

• 8:14Speaker 01

  For those of you listening on the radio, Neil is wearing a cowboy hat. It just appeared out of nowhere.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  It just materialized. It just materialized.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  As soon as the voice started.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Uh, but anyway, yeah, they are, uh, one of the top people of the company is a guy whose family owns a, a chain of barbecue joints in, uh, in Memphis and the surrounding areas. And they have pledged they wanna be serving clean meat on their menu, uh, as soon as these guys get it ready. And what they're envisioning is something to be pretty cool. So they wanna do, um, like, can you imagine right now a restaurant? You might think in the back, they're brewing their own beers, maybe they got their own type of IPA. Imagine a restaurant-

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I live in Brooklyn. That's like every-

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Imagine, instead of brewing their own beer, they're brewing their own meats. And you could even imagine, like, the mascot, like a pig from whom these cells- For biopsied in the restaurant.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be cool.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And you could eat the meat.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pat the, pat the pig on the back and say, thanks pig.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  In fact, in fact, the company we were just talking about Hampton Creek did exactly that. They took a sesame sesame seed sized biopsy from a chicken, grew real chicken nuggets from his cells and ate them while he pecked about in the grass right before their feet. Wow. So creepy. Yeah.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's cool. It's sci fi in the, in the moment. Now, what is this that NASA has to do with this? I know that there's a huge food research group in Houston.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For this, to keep food fresh for the length of space missions.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I know they think a lot about food texture, food taste. And so what, what's their role in this? I have that in my notes and I'm, where's it coming from?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Oh, they're the progenitor. So NASA was doing research around the turn of the century, funding this research into growing meat. Because if humans are going to travel the cosmos, they're not bringing Noah's Ark and till. If they want meat, they're going to have to grow it. And so NASA funded this research.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's not a separate spaceship for the cow.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the cows and the chickens.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. NASA needs to be ultra efficient with how they're producing food for anybody who wants to go on long distance cosmic tourism. And the way that you do that is you grow it. And so they funded this research to grow real fish meat outside of the fish. And it got a lot of attention when they did it right around the turn of the century. And that spawned this whole industry because people thought to themselves, wait a minute. They want to do that out in space. Why not here on earth? We have a real problem with animal agriculture. And if we could address some of the key problems of sustainability with animal ag, you could address huge problems from climate change and so many other issues.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know enough about the molecular structure of the different cuts of meat? To be able to duplicate that in the lab? Well, I know it's T bone meat versus, you know, a filet mignon.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so far they don't have the capacity to make those type of whole cuts of meat. Yeah, so right now what they're doing is like we said, ground meat. And so, yeah, they can do different cells. I mean, they could even do like a turducken type thing where you take cells from a turkey, cells from a duck and cells from a chicken and mix them all together. So you could do that, but it's still.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Turducken?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, but you still.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't say I've ever had that urge, you know? These three birds, I want to put them all together.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  But you know, this field of cellular agriculture, it is still a nascent industry. I mean, this is really these companies.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Is it easier to make fish than it is to make like steak?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. In fact, one company called Finless Foods, I ate their clean fish recently. And it is definitely easier to produce fish. And then the next would be like avian, like poultry meat, and then mammalian meat comes later. But these companies are doing it all, and their goal is to compete with animal products. Not in some type of a way where these are a niche product, but rather to compete on cost and on taste with commodity meat.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is fish easier because almost no matter where you are in the filet, it tastes the same? Or is it not so with the side of a cow?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  That may be one reason, but a bigger reason is that fish are in a much colder environment than we're in. And so the cells don't have to be kept at such a high temperature. So you have far fewer energy costs because fish cells can be kept at the temperature in which the fish live.

• 12:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So, yeah, I didn't ask you about the energy and the cost to make it. So first, let me agree with you. If you make hamburgers this way, you can just transform the hamburger market. Everyone's going to agree.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one is going to deny that.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely. And that's a huge part of the American diet, is the hamburger. And I might even eat more hamburgers knowing that this is what it is. So what would, per pound, what's your, what's your lab meat going to cost?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Well, the

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your Franken meat?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Hardly. The first ever clean burger that was ever produced was in 2013. And Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, funded it. And it was for a bargain price of $330,000 per burger.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, the second burger

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is the one that costs $5.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yes. And so in the last four years, the prices come down more than 80%. And

• 12:51Speaker 01

  They took all the diamonds out of the burger.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now the burger's only $20,000 rather than $300, maybe not.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know why they didn't use ketchup instead of gold dust. But, yeah, but no, so now the, these companies are saying they think by around 2020 or so, they might get it down to like $11 a burger. But there's a long way to go, but you know, the first iPhone was over a billion dollars to produce. And these companies have only been in existence for a couple of years. They're already driving the cost way down and clean meat will become a reality within years, not decades.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, recently I, I posted a tweet that I didn't think would be controversial. I thought people would just be intrigued by it. Uh, the tweet was cows are biological machines invented by humans to turn grass into steak.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I thought the blunt truth of that would just sort of wake people up and say, oh, my gosh, is that what this? Oh, I didn't know that kind of thing. I think many people don't know that we invented cows. There's no herds of roaming cows terrorizing the hillsides, right?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Because that's what cows do, terrorize.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they do.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  These herbivores are always terrorists.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man, yeah, the gang of herbivores. So, so they, so, and it received a very strong negative reaction. I would say 80, 20, negative to positive or to neutral. And, and I didn't see that coming. Did you see that coming? You follow, you follow me on Twitter, right? Is that right?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  I certainly do follow you on Twitter.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  He's the one.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're the one. You started. Mr. Humane Society guy.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  So, yeah, as you know, I published a piece in, in response to this where I was defending part of what you were saying. I mean, I think, look, if you consider that when you domesticate wild animals into domesticated animals, that that's an invention of an animal that didn't exist before, then sure, that is a type of invention. I will say, though, that the wild animals from whom they were domesticated, the auroch, they were turning grass into meat too, before we ever saw them. That's what ruminants do. That's what giraffes and camels and deer and elk do. They turn grass into meat. So, I don't know that we caused them to do that, but to the extent that we did create cows by domesticating.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our cows do it way more efficiently than the auroch did, I'm sure. Although, we still use the aurochs.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we actually exterminated them. They're extinct. The last one died in the 1600s.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I heard. They actually came farther into modern times than just the Ice Age debacle of the mammals.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  But did you, don't you think that it's because, like, people were just feel so bad and weird about that stuff? And that's why, when you just said the blunt truth, they were like, no, that's not it.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was like, cows are feeling creatures. And I said, my tweet has nothing to do with that.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to separate it, I think.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're right, Maeve. I think the idea of an animal being a machine is what some people found offensive, because a machine implies that they're not sentient, that they don't have thoughts.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said biological machine.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I think for anybody who follows AI.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  That's a very scientist-like kind of thing.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it could be a mechanical machine. It's a biological machine.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Right, because in a way, we are biological machines too.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, of course.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, exactly.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, but that one has a very tuned purpose. That's all. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more on the future of clean meat.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got my co-host comedic Maeve Higgins.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, here I am.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maeve, and host of the podcast Maeve in America.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Maintaining an Irish accent since 1981.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that on purpose? Right. You actually have a Brooklyn accent now. You're hiding it.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Hey, thank you.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a special in-studio guest is Paul Shapiro, author of the recent book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. Cool subtitle there. And we've been exploring just the cutting-edge technology that Paul says is going to revolutionize everything about how, about our relationship to animals that are farmed for their products. It wouldn't only be food, but leather presumably, or other, and other products. We're going to bring in some more expertise here. Joining us on video call to help us just break down the science inside the laboratory is biologist Liz Specht. Liz, welcome to StarTalk.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Hi, Liz. Thanks so much for having me on.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So you're a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, is, who's the senior scientist at the Bad Food Institute? That's what I want to know.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Her arch enemy.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, her arch enemy. In the parallel universe. I want the scientist in the badass food institute. How about that?

• 17:32Speaker 03

  That I'll own.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you use biotech to, in the field of synthetic biology, to make clean meat? And I don't know that that's a common term yet today, synthetic biology. It sounds almost oxymoronic. Could you define that for us all?

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah. So my academic background is in the field of synthetic biology. And the way I like to explain it is to think of biology like a Lego set. So in all of the millions of years that biology's been doing its thing through evolution, we've developed this really cool toolkit of all of these various enzymes, metabolic pathways to make cool molecules, structures that have different functions and properties. So synthetic biology is simply looking at all the Lego pieces across a lot of different Lego sets and building new things that never existed before, rather than just building the objects on the front of the Lego box. Um, what's cool though is that you actually don't need something like synthetic biology

• 18:36Speaker 03

  to make clean meat. Um, so that's, you know, certainly there's room for synthetic biology to do more sophisticated tricks down the line, but clean meat is just farming animal cells, muscle cells and fat cells and so forth, rather than farming the whole animal. So when we grow and multiply these cells in culture, it's, it's kind of the most natural thing for cells to do. There's nothing really synthetic about going from one cell to two, two to four, four to eight. Um, that's, that's what they do best.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Did you just diss Paul and his book? It feels like you just dissed his entire work here.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I think, no, I think there's definitely room for synthetic biology. I think, you know, folks who, who kind of assume that there's something engineered or synthetic about clean meat, um, might be wary of it as the technology going into their food. Obviously, you know, we find our food very personal. Um, so certainly there's room to leverage synthetic biology and obviously I'm incredibly excited about the potential of that. Um, but we can grow these cells in a very straightforward way in culture.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, if I understand you correctly, um, you're interested in creating transgenic life, life that nature itself hadn't produced or doesn't know to produce, and you had some clever need for one kind of animal or bacteria or a virus versus another, and you just go at it. Is that a fair characterization?

• 20:00Speaker 03

  So that's, certainly that's been part of my research background. Yeah. Um, and again, I think there's a role for that in clean meat, um, but it's not, it's not necessary. So clean meat is separate from whether these will be genetically engineered cell lines. One thing that I find really cool about clean meat is that, um, you know, whether you engineer the cell lines or not, you completely decouple the manner of production from the animal itself. So now we're, we're open to all of the species we could possibly want to farm for the meat. It's just as easy for us to make an antelope steak as it is a cow steak.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Paul, if you're just duplicating cells that, or cult- culturing cells, whatever the proper bio word is, does that mean you could also manufacture organs for transplant?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, interestingly enough, the lead company in the cellular agriculture space, a company called Modern Meadow, they're making clean leather, it was founded by a father and son team that before that had founded a company called Organova, where they were making human organ tissues for experimentation purposes, and one day for transplantation purposes too. One key distinction, so you can use synthetic biology, for example, to make some of these products, like milk and egg whites and so on. The clean meat companies, though, not the liquid products, but the solid products, really are just using tissue engineering, not so much the type of syn bio, so to speak, as the others are using.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I'm, I'm just curious if there might be part of the world who's afraid to eat food that a scientist made in a laboratory?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  I heard that there was a restaurant-

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For no reason, of course, because if it's the same cells-

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Right, it's the same, right?

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be out of the absence of awareness and knowledge of what you're actually doing, and the fear factor that comes with every new wave of scientific discovery.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I heard there was a restaurant around the corner here that got busted, they were trying to make their food more palatable, and so they were throwing sodium chloride on it.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, can't do that, oh my gosh!

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I know, so, of course, as educated listeners of this show know, it's just table salt, but for most people, they hear sodium chloride, or, or dihydrogen monoxide, and they think, like, you know, this is, these are real problems, and of course, it's just table salt and water. And so I think that there are some people who have a concern about technology as it's applied to food, but keep in mind, virtually everything we eat has had some type of food technology applied to it. I mean, most people aren't concerned about eating a seedless watermelon, despite the fact that it's hardly natural.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A seedless anything, right, right.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Liz, are you the weird one at the Thanksgiving table?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think the weird one might be that father and son team who were like, "Well, we used to make human organs, but now we make bacon."

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm just wondering, how are you received by would-be friends or family?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  I think I am lucky in that I reside in pretty nerdy circles. So I think most people that I interact with day to day really, really get the value of leveraging all the tools that we have to build more sustainable food system. I think a lot of people who kind of initially push back on this, same, same thing with genetically modified organisms in, in our crop species, once you actually explain to them the benefits of having that type of precision when you're developing, you know, better foods, it really resonates with people.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. And, and tell me, Paul, why did you choose, maybe not you, but your people, if not you, choose the word "clean meat"? Because that, that, you know, that's a little unfair because it implies that meat from a living animal is dirty.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Well, the term-

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's, that's not, you know, would you agree that you're playing dirty pool there?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  The term "clean meat" was really popularized by the Good Food Institute where Liz works. And I'll tell you, one, like clean energy, clean meat is just cleaner for the planet. But it's also just literally cleaner. So think about it, right now, we're warned to treat raw meat in our kitchens almost like toxic waste. Why? Because it's riddled with feces, E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter. These are all intestinal pathogens that can sicken us if we don't cook the crap out of our meat, literally.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cook the crap out of the meat. I like that.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Yes, literally cooking the crap out of the meat. But when you're growing clean meat, you don't need to grow intestines at all. You don't have those intestinal pathogens. You're just growing the muscle that you want. And so that's why it's both literally cleaner and cleaner for the planet.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you've convinced me.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Great.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't think that would happen.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  We got a cosmic query from somebody-

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, we're ready for cosmic query section.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is-

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, I have to introduce it. Now is the time for cosmic queries. We have two good experts about this topic and I will just sort of watch as this unfolds. Okay, go.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So this came in through Facebook. There's a huge fascination with this whole topic, right? This is Daniel S. Haltgrew and he said that he read that clean meat tastes bland because it's muscle cells and there's no fat cells. So what do you need to do to get stranded fat, marbling, like that you find in a good steak? And how far away is that?

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So Liz, you know, if I'm choosing a steak, it's, it's the marbled steak because it's not, of course, it's not just the meat, it's the fat.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is, and the Kobe steaks and all that, that whole other sort of branch of steak eating, that's fat level, very high fat level. So what's going on there?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and fat is such a flavor carrier, carrier, obviously. So it's, it also provides some nutritional value. There's all kinds of reasons you would want a genuine marbled steak. So for this, for this question, I would just urge that all of the companies that have developed products so far, these are early stage prototypes, they're working with single cell cultures. So yeah, some of the products so far have just been muscle cells. But of course, there's the ability to co-culture multiple cell types. So to have muscle cells growing right alongside fat cells. What's cool and what really geeks me out is that when you have these cells grown on what's called a scaffolding material, that's helping to kind of structure the final product, you

• 26:09Speaker 03

  can actually use that scaffolding material to help guide the cells where spatially you want them to differentiate into muscle versus fat. So imagine having the perfect marbled steak, and you can make a million of those with that exact marbling pattern, because you're defining it at that level.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so once, so you would need someone to study the perfect steak under natural causes, and then duplicate that or possibly even improve on it, now that you have laboratory controls. Very cool. So you can cultivate fat cells the way you can protein cells? Okay, I didn't, I didn't know that. I'm thinking fat is just fat.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  So it's, you need to just like sit those cells down in front of Netflix for three weeks.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you get them. Eat nachos, that's how you get it. So you got another.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is Shay, and he wrote in on Instagram, he asked, how much energy will be consumed growing meat in a lab versus raising animals?

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pound for pound.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Pound for pound. So there are a lot of different life cycle analyses that have been done so far. But, and they show generally, not always, but generally that you're talking about a big energy savings, but also way fewer greenhouse gas emissions, way less land, 99% less land, much less water use. But as Liz correctly points out, these are still early prototypes. Like, they don't know what it's going to be when it's at commercial scale yet. Presumably, it will be even more efficient. But for right now, it's looking pretty good.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is the projections for the land use, water use, power use are so much better than anything going on now that even when it becomes mass market commercialized, you win and you you're gonna win every contest up against whatever whatever was used to be required to get the same product.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Hands down.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hands down. Water, water use, everything.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, cuz you don't have to create the grass that the cow eats to make the steak.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, think about it, right now, an animal is doing all types of things that require calories for things that we don't care about. Breathing, digesting, thinking, seeing, walking.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  When you're just growing the muscle that we want, or the fat that we want, you need way fewer resources to do that.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  And even don't animals like taste better when they can move around, like, and you give them space?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Ha.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Like, they actually need more space?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know, I mean, I, I don't know.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that's what they say.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that's what they say. I don't think that's what they say.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  But you know, like, free range chickens taste better than chickens who live in a cage forever.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, usually the free range also have other aspects about them that make them...

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Like a little treadmill.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I'm sure there are no treadmills. You don't, you don't wanna buffs, uh, uh, uh.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  No, you don't wanna like a big muscular, like, chicken on your table.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you have?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, so Mason, um, Everest on Twitter, he asks, how long, roughly? That's nice that he gave you that out.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Roughly, um, it's a process from animal cells to edible product. So I guess he's talking about like two cells in the beginning.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so, so Liz, if you start with like one cell, and then it doubles and quadruples and whatever, uh, how long does it take? Just physically, if you were to watch it happen?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, good, good question. So we can work out the math on that. Obviously, cells are growing exponentially. The doubling time for these types of animal cells is typically on the order of about 20 to 24 hours. Um, I've done some calculations myself when I'm trying to, to look at how close might we get to cost parity and so forth, where I'm trying to bound how long a process might be from, say, a starter vial to growing, say, a 20,000-liter tank full of cells. Um, and for that process, being pretty conservative with doubling times, we're looking at something between maybe three weeks and five weeks.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  And keep in mind-

• 29:55Speaker 03

  And that's for a whole, that's for a whole batch, kind of from start to finish. But as with any scale process, you'll be making use of the latter end of that exponential growth curve and simply harvesting, get another doubling and so forth.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but I'm, but it still feels short to me because if you, uh, two to the 30th power, if you go over a month, uh, what do you get there? You get five billion, I think, something like that?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  You're a better mathlete than I am.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But cells are very small, so five billion cells, that's not very much-

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Is that like a Shake Shack double burger?

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but because you're, because doubling time is in your favor, that if you don't have what you need in the 21st day, you might have what you need in the 22nd day. Because what happens in the 22nd day duplicates what happened between day one and day 21.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So really, this is a non, this is a no-brainer here.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Literally.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he good? Is he good? He's good. Okay, what else you got?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Okay, this is, I think-

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One more question before we take a break.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Last one? Okay, cool. Um, how do the nutritional benefits, and this is from Frank Kane on Patreon, he's one of our Patreon supporters.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're supposed to read his question first.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I am?

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Patreon get their questions first.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Oh, let's edit this.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Sorry, Frank Kane. Um, how do the nutritional benefits of clean meat stack up to soy and bean-based meat substitutes that are already available?

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good one. Good one. Uh, who's gonna take that, uh, ball? Yeah?

• 31:27Speaker 02

  I'm happy to.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Do you eat soy?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  You still, you're a vegan or a vegetarian?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I've eaten clean meat many times, so whatever that makes me, I'm a clean meatitarian, I guess, but, um, you know, you could-

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Were you so happy to eat it the first time?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  The first time I ate clean meat was in 2014, and at that time, more humans had gone into space than had eaten meat, real meat grown outside of an animal. So in that, I was happy. I thought it was a cool thing to do.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Uh, but it didn't do much else for me other than that.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Uh, but since then, I've eaten clean beef, fish, duck, chorizo, liver, yogurt, like lots of these products are now-

• 32:03Speaker 01

  All in one? Go.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like the ultimate turducken, just everything altogether. No, I've eaten them separately. One of the benefits of writing this book was that these companies want to share their products with you.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nutritionally.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yes. So you can control. So as Liz was saying, you can control how much fat, the types of fats. I mean theoretically, you could envision putting instead of saturated fats in maybe omega-3 fatty acids. So you would have a hamburger that rather than causing heart attacks would prevent them. But right now they're just trying to get it to the point where it's just the same, the same exact thing.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  The same amount of protein in meat. So then you could just do a comparison directly with soy as with regular meats.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, right now the clean meat products are trying to get them as to be exactly like the meat that we have, except much safer. Then when you compare it, let's say to plant-based products, plant-based products are very nutritious. They're good for you. They're sustainable. They're very energy efficient and they're great. We want them. Clean meat is not an alternative to them. It's really a supplement because if you think about it, think of them kind of like, like fossil fuels in that fossil fuels are such a big problem. You want more than one solution. You don't want just wind. You want solar, you want geothermal. You want to put everything in one basket. The same with the problem of animal agriculture. It's so bad. It's so serious that you want many alternatives, including plant-based meats and whole plant-based foods, but also clean meats too.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, we got to take a quick break and when we come back, more about clean meat. StarTalk is back.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson with my co-host, Maeve Higgins.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Yep, here I am.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our topic today is clean meat. And I've got someone who literally wrote the book on it, Paul Shapiro.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  I literally wrote the book because I literally wrote the only book.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The only. Hence, the book on it. How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. And joining us on video call is Liz Specht, Senior Scientist at the Good Food Institute. And you're joining us from San Francisco. That's right. Yeah, so thanks for being on the show. And just a quick question, I heard before the break, a poll just slipped in, talked about vegetative meat?

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Plant-based meat.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plant-based meat. I don't know what that is. What is it? Or is it just, is it just the fake, like the soy burger and that sort of thing?

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if I would call it fake. It's very real. It's very real, natural food. It's just we use plants to mimic the taste and texture of meat.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you, wait, have you seen the YouTube video where it's meat eaters talking about food the way vegetarians would?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I haven't seen it.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they say, okay, well, have you tried this celery made from animal meat? We've taken out the flavor and put in celery flavor, so it tastes just like celery, except it's made from burger. It's a whole, it's a whole video skit. It's pretty funny.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what it reminds me of a little bit? I want to just tell a very brief story. So, in the mid 19th century, you had a huge natural ice industry. They're harvesting lots of blocks of ice from frozen lakes in the north, transporting it all around the world. Then, you have the advent of industrial refrigeration. And all of a sudden, it's a lot cheaper to produce ice from the water right in front of you, just cool it down. The art, the natural ice makers...

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that took major understandings and advances in physics and thermodynamics.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, big advancement.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To be able to take heat from something that's, that's, take heat out of something that's already colder than the environment, to make it colder.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a major advance in, in sort of the engineering physics of thermodynamics. But go on.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Well, the natural ice people, the barons of the natural ice industry were really upset by this because it threatened their market. And so they derided what they called "artificial ice." And they said, "Oh, be careful of the artificial ice. The ammonia used in the coolant could leak in. It could hurt you." The irony at the time was that the so-called "artificial ice" was actually much safer than the natural ice, because the natural ice, one, is coming from waters that are polluted with industrial revolution pollutants, and they've got horses dredging the ice out, going to the bathroom right on top of the ice, as they're pointing out, whereas the artificial ice is being produced from water that had been filtered or boiled. You fast forward to today, and virtually every one of us has an artificial ice maker in our homes. We call them freezers. And nobody thinks there's anything unnatural or fake about it. We just call it ice.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. So Maeve?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're still in Cosmic Queries mode.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yes, we are.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So give it to me.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Okay, this is from Chris, this is from Chris Ryu, and he's on Patreon. Now, he opens by saying, "Nice to meet you." Okay, I just want to say that.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's he meeting?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I mean, M-E-A-T.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, nice to meet ya!

• 36:48Speaker 03

  None of us have ever heard this joke.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  You've never heard it before. I'm sure you haven't. That's very nice of you. So he's asking, "How does a clean meat process compare with organic farming when it comes to greenhouse emissions, energy consumption, and the space that you need?" So he's writing from the UK, actually. So what do you think, organic farming?

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Liz?

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Sure. I'll hop on this. Paul took a life cycle analysis question. So I think the most relevant attribute here is really the amount of resources used. Like Paul said, when we're growing meat by funneling calories through an animal, it's an inherently inefficient process, just thermodynamically. There's no getting around that. So organic farming, just like industrialized animal agriculture, will always be much less efficient. In many cases, organic farming often ends up taking more land, because you're not able to kind of get the same yield out of the same area of land for the feed, for example, for these animals.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's organic farming relative to traditional farming. Even takes more land for the same, for the same yield. That's what you're saying?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, uh, yeah, so it's more efficient than all of the above is what this comes down to. Whether or not you're organic, right? So it could be put organic, we have them rethink. Because, uh, you can have organic animals, of course. It's not organic is not just vegetables, right? So this would, uh, completely transform.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It means that they're not given, I guess, antibiotics and hormones and stuff, right? That's what an organic animal is.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not formally defined.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Organic.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Right. This is an interesting question from a chef. His name is Aaron Nelson, and he said, um, I'm a chef. I'm interested in the idea of lab-grown meat. As it stands, um, where a cow is raised, how it's raised, what it eats, all affect the flavor and the texture of a steak. Do you think lab-grown meats could open the possibility of designer meats with customizable taste, appearance, and texture?

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because I've been in restaurants where they say, this meat, what was, no, it was cheese. You can buy cheese. This is spring cheese versus fall cheese. In the spring, the cows are eating on this side of the hill, and if the grass is this, but later on, it's a different grass, and so.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Right, there's like fires on them.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so are you, uh, so Liz, do you, do you know the molecules well enough to duplicate the subtleties that go on not only in the food we eat, but in our capacity to taste it? Are you there?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Like a sunshine morning in Montana. That's where this cow was.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the monks treated this, massaged this.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  The cow felt uncomfortable.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have the monk massage gene in there. Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  They actually have monks stirring the bioreactors.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Give them something to do.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  They add their secret sauce. I know, not there yet, just because people haven't looked at it yet, but I think that's a relatively straightforward question to answer. And I think what's, um, so exciting about this process is the degree of control you have over it. So you can do an analysis of what are all of the, the subtle flavor components that you're getting when, you know, you're, you're fermenting grass from a certain area, uh, and you can figure out what that actually is. And then you make your cell culture media their nutrient feed to have exactly that composition. So from a culinary perspective, I mean, you could, you could patent your formula of what you're feeding to your cells, and that can be your, you know, your five-star, um, meat, one of a kind that you hang your hat on as a chef.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, I hadn't thought about that. Patent your own steak. And what it would also mean is whatever might, because it's not just whatever the cow.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Didn't Donald Trump have his own steaks?

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he did.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  He's such a leader in scientific thinking. Well, how lucky we are.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, uh, it seems to me there's not only whatever the cow ate, giving whatever flavor and texture to the meat that was in it that you now can possibly duplicate, but there's also the topical dressings you might put on it, the, the dry rub. In principle, you could infuse your cultures with, with like Texas barbecue sauce, right? So then you just get the meat, cook it. It's got all the flavor you would have put on it after the fact.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  That's just like Iberico ham, right? The pigs eat this special type of acorn and then they taste so good.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know about this.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's delicious, but it's basically your idea. It's happening.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  We're gonna drop acorns in with the cells.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, yeah. It would be an interesting cocktail, I guess, when you do that. What else you got?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time for a couple more questions.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so, uh, I mean, this is from Instagram, the granol in, I can't wait to try this. I hope it's good enough to shut all the vegans up. I mean, vegans do love to be vegan.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a thing. It's not all of them, but we all know the ones that do.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  We do, yeah.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's odd because, uh, Paul, I mean, I'm, I'm the senior citizen here. Uh, there was a day where you were invited to someone's house. They didn't ask you what you couldn't eat. You just ate what you were served. Any allergies or, well, I'm vegetarian, I'm this and I'm allergic to these seven. Okay, I will now accommodate you. That is today, but back in my day, no, you ate what was put in front of your face, no matter what. So, so the whole culture.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  It was, it was snowing outside too, all the time.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time. Uphill, back and forth to school. Um, so I'm, I'm just intrigued how, like you said, uh, it's almost as though people's food habits have become their religions and you choose friends based on it and you, uh, so it'd be nice if that we can do away with that. If we just manufacture everything in the lab, I'm a scientist, just go, go for it. I'm there for you.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, already our food, a lot of our foods do start out in a laboratory, right? Like you think about corn flakes. I mean, they're not, it's not like they just grow on a tree. Some, some white cut scientist in a lab created corn flakes and now it's produced in a factory. Eventually clean meat isn't going to be coming from a lab. It'll be coming from a menu, like a brewery, basically. And so. Sorry, Liz, go ahead.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, what excites me about clean meat is that it actually levels the playing field in terms of what globally we can all eat. Because we're lowering the resource burden of making meat, so this is no longer a, you know, wealthy western world type luxury. This is now something that could be accessible to everyone. So I think, you know, in some ways, it makes eating less politicized because we're all using a much more effective method that makes this kind of democratized.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  And...

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that's good. We just pause on that moment.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Depoliticizing food. This is beautiful. That's beautiful, Liz.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Because like, here in America, we have so many options, is that right? And but like...

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the options we take for granted, as well.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  But I mean, that doesn't really... Like, already, we have like, so much here, but it does hasn't evened things out around the world.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, of course not. Right, right. Because we have access to too many resources.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Right. We're just getting so chubby.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, a diet heavy... A diet's very heavy and meat is a first world issue, right? Like, there's a reason why the poorer nations of the world don't eat that much meat, because it's very resource intensive. And so I think Liz is right. When we're talking about democratizing food, if you could have these type of systems where you're producing meat much more efficiently, you could make it available not only to people who don't have access to it today, but to the billions of people who are gonna come onto the planet primarily in developing countries like China and India and Brazil.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The billions yet born.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And who are gonna wanna eat like Americans.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  China's not a developing country.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Uh, to the billions yet born. They're still, they're still coming into...

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  China has a space program. They're not a developing country.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Let's keep that clear.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  But what you're hoping for, like, in, it would be like, kinda trickle down chicken nuggets.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta have one last quick question.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Okay, great. Okay, so, um... If I, this is from Andre Frost. If I want to support the development of vat grown meat and hay, vat grown meat?

• 44:51Speaker 02

  First thing to do, Andre, is to stop calling it that.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  That's your first thing to do.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vat grown meat, okay.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And hay, and it's commercial viability. Which company or organization should I throw money at?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Ah, so, you know, one thing, Liz doesn't want to be self-serving to say it, so I'll say supporting her nonprofit, the Good Food Institute.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's enough for profit?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cool.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  So, so I will say, that's a great place to invest your money, Andre.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  The Good Food Institute.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  But, also, you know, if you buy the book, which you can get from CleanMeat.com.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is not a not-for-profit.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You can see the main companies that are leading in this space right now, because I profile those companies in the book, and...

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Profile in a good way.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're chronic, they're...

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in my world, it's never good to be profiled.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, yeah, right. Yes, good point. They are, they are historically profiled.

• 45:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Meaning that I chronicle their exploits, and so you can check them out. But, Andre, go to CleanMeat.com and see for yourself.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, excellent. So, I, I, I trust and expect and hope the book will do well and help sort of change the dialogue out there. And Liz will be keeping an eye on you. I want my, my T-bone steak in...

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Three weeks, three weeks.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medium rare. But we'll be, we'll be looking at the Good Food Institute, and good to know, we've got good people out there just trying to change the world, all for the better. So, thanks for being on StarTalk, Liz.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me on, it's been a pleasure.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and, and May.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good to have you.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was so, that was so fun. No, I'm hungry.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think that the actual role of science, yes, it has affected information technology, it's affected transportation, and can still. There are many more places that science has yet to tread in our lives, that it could just transform civilization as we know it. And it's always science that transforms civilization. And this seems like it would be the next one, and would be welcome to us all, all 10 billion of us, sharing this planet, in the year 2040, 2050. You've got it. Well, we gotta end it there. You've been watching and more likely listening to this episode of StarTalk. Thanks, Paul, Paul Shapiro, May, Liz. I've been your host,

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.