Frankenfood | The Mistakes Series

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3:07Pushkin.

3:12So I went to California at your behest. Did. I wish, first of all. I know you wish that you had been there yourself because this is your favorite place. This is one really hurt. And I'm... We should just say what we're talking about. 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, basically. 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 the R &D. if you're a food company in America and you want to do something new or cool, maybe you try it 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.

4:17They'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. Oh my God. It's like if you walk to a grocery store after going to Madsen, you're like, oh, that's Madsen. Oh, that's Madsen. Oh. And you realize my diet is basically Madsen. 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.

4:56And carrot cake became a phenomena at first because of the airlines. And Barbara Stuckey, their chief new product strategy officer, who is an old hand-on revisionist and is just a font of amazing tales from the Mattson archives. 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. like I I've really I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work everyone did you get that sense of her? 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 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 if you take my daughters to work day And I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job.

5:59So I sent you out there. Now, why, Ben, you tell us. Why did I send you out there? 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.

6:50And 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. Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey. And in this, our final episode of the Mistakes series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pantheon of food science, the hallowed halls of Mattson. It's a place you may remember from way back in season two, episode 9, McDonald's Broke My Heart, all about McDonald's french fries. But my mission wasn't as greasy. I was sent to Madsen for a more cultivated reason.

7:43Okay, 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. 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 meat by using cells of meat to make more meat. And that idea just, to me, it was just brilliance. And also no animals will suffer.

8:37And there's not, you know, factory farming, things like this, you won't have. There's so many things that we don't have to worry about anymore. It can be done inside. So it just seemed like magic. It just felt like something's happening here. This would be, like, huge for me because my wife is an ethical vegetarian. And if I could tell her that there was nothing killed in producing meat that we were eating, I would suddenly be eating meat again at home, which would be thrilling. Steak would return. Steak would return and not just when Julia's out. But there are all sorts of potential upsides to this technology, and Barb's just sitting there thinking about them.

9:17There'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. Methane emissions. Methane emissions. You could make a case that replacing the cattle industry with something that comes out of a lab would be one of the single biggest things we could do in favor of the environment. I mean, there's no... Yeah, there's obviously runoff, too, runoff from cattle farms. Fertilizer, I mean... So there are all these huge upsides, and Barb, who's the person who's most excited to go to work, is just thrilled about this.

9:55However, there was a problem. It started with an image. And I'm going to show you the image. So we're looking at a Petri dish of what looks like a perfectly round patty of raw ground beef. Yes. And to me, having it in a Petri dish. Not good. Not at all appealing, delicious, or anything I want to put in my body. And already, like, raw meat is not something I see and think not super appealing. 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, 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?

10:52I 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 we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world. I have tasted meat made this way and I was shocked at how much it tastes like real meat. But it's not. No one's going to get there if it's called lab-grown meat. Exactly. Going to end up like GMOs, which is our first mistake.

11:39That's after the break.

11:46This message is a paid partnership with AppleCard. There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things. It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone, and approval can happen in minutes. So it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet, or oops, maybe I use cash, where's the ATM? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future. There's no going back. With Apple Card, purchases earn daily cash up to 3 % with no points to track and no waiting for rewards.

12:32It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. 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. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85 % of merchants in the U.S. And the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch. To explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners, subject to eligibility.

13:18Savings and AppleCard by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, member FDIC, terms and more at AppleCard.com. This show is sponsored by Liquid IV. For those of you who are regular listeners to Revisionist History, you know I'm a big runner. When I was just in Florida, the Gulf Coast, with my family, that lovely, hot, humid Florida weather, and every day I go for a long run through the piney woods near our hotel, eight miles, nine miles, and come back delightfully and gloriously sweaty. But not just sweaty, seriously dehydrated. You try running in 85-degree heat for over an hour. Liquid IV.

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14:43That's 20 % off your first purchase with code REVISIONIST at liquidiv.com. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around L.A. in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. Want the full story? Take a listen. Hedy, she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator. Right. She says he's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well. Give us examples. I know.

15:19They do get along intellectually. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings. And she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamar and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Goodbye. So the first mistake, we had to talk to Steve, who was the CEO at the time.

16:00And 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 Matson and says, we have created a genetically modified tomato and we need your help. We're here to talk about the story of the tomato. I mean, why did this GMO tomato exist? What problem was it solving? It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing. So tomatoes, by their very nature, are delicate. So the most optimum tomatoes for the hedonics and the organoleptics and how it tastes and all those criteria they were very difficult to harvest economically.

16:57Because you had, if you let it ripen on the vine, you had... Too long. It was a very short window in which you could ship it, and it was easier to puncture. Yes, exactly. They became delicate. They were harder to harvest. Basically, it's like tomatoes are a really difficult crop because if you pick them ripe, then they're very soft. You have lower yields because you're using these huge combines to harvest them. And so you're likely to lose a lot of tomatoes, which then drives up the price of the tomatoes that you do ship. And then you're shipping these ripened tomatoes, which means they have a very short time to get to wherever they're going to be sold and then used.

17:37So 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 this sort of red look that you expect from a tomato. So it was like overall a suboptimal situation for tomato lovers. And GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin. And then in 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.

18:21So there's an, this is one of those first GMO products that Zeneca 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 GMOs, which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to like buy into this thing? It's funny because I was in the early 90s covering the FDA and NIH for the Washington Post. So I was writing about all these early things in that period. And I feel like it was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of genetic modification on all levels, right?

19:16Because it was so new back then. I mean, you've got to understand, now 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. I mean, people can't even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something. Yeah. And so I feel like the backlash has shifted over time. But the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystification. I was thinking about the Flavor Save the Tomatoes, 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.

20:01You're kind of like, we're not supposed to be doing that, right? Yes. It fits in with, you know, there's a kind of moral element, which we don't see as much today, that we should not be disrupting God's creation in this way. So Steve talks about this, actually. They begin to bring people in to actually encounter the tomato, the Zeneca tomato, and study how they respond to it. In these focus groups, would people try the tomato? So do you recall how people would react when they tasted it? Yeah. Yeah. This is a great tomato. I remember especially cutting them open. There was one thing, you know, people handle them.

20:47So you put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say, one of these is genetically modified? No, not that way. You just start talking about how are they grown? Where are they grown? Are they good for you? what makes a bad tomato, what makes a good tomato. You kind of build up 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. And then you're like, this was made in a lab. This is a new hybrid tomato. then we just kept going deeper and deeper into the story until we find found the point where they pushed back that okay now now you've crossed a line where was that you've got scientists who are not just breeding these aren't agronomists and agricultural specialists this is like stuff in the lab where you're modifying the seed genetically.

21:58I mean, these were words that were not, genetics was not a common word back then. The word modified organism sounded like, I remember consumers sounded like bugs, you know, or bacteria or mold. You know, there were all kinds of - So all three words. Oh, put them all together. Genetically modified organism. And you have Franken food. Right. It came from a 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. Lewis wrote, quote, if they want to sell us Franken food, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.

22:45Steve basically finds that everybody has already been freaked out by the name genetically modified organisms and they call it Franken food. And so what they try to do at Mattson 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. And he even talks about how people just shortened the acronym, like pronounced it by the acronym, like they called them GMOs.

23:24And 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 just like in some fundamental way, it's not. 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.

24:13It's a zombie. It's a zombie to me. Yeah, it is. It is. They have attached one of the most kind of elemental dystopian human fantasies. Right. Right. This thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually. Yes. It has the appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign. I mean, there's a huge category of sci-fi movies that are just about this thing. Yes. they're everyone's worried that they made the zombie tomato and i think basically it's like however good the analogy is it's like zeneca's tomato loses out like at one point it has a 60 something percent uh it sells way better than like the average tomato puree in uk supermarkets uh and then after some of the backlash to the flavor saver tomato zeneca like vastly loses market share it plummets so now you can't get a zeneca gmo tomato on the market i'm sure there all kinds of reasons, but like a big one is that there's this huge resistance to GMOs, frankenfood GMOs.

25:17Wait, so when I buy tomatoes in the supermarket today, are none of them GMO? I don't think that none of them are GMO, but I suspect that the vast majority are not GMO, which honestly I get. I think if you gave me a choice, I would prefer a naturally occurring tomato, which is not something I'm proud of. But there is something about the intensity of the anti-gmo thing that i relate less to this morning i open up my morning yogurt and when i open 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 it's just like oh or i had i had like i made my friend mutter paneer the other night and i used this these like this chili spice i had and it says like non-gmo chili and i was like that's it didn't even occur to me that this might be GMO, Shelley.

26:09Like, it's become this rallying cry where whatever Matson wanted to happen, whatever Zeneca wanted to happen, with the way people would respond to GMOs, the exact opposite happened. And it's because, I think, like, they never could change the name. The first time I heard frankenfood, I was like, okay, this is bad. Words are very powerful. And And for whatever reason, I think it was a hard stop. 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.

26:55And she's sitting there getting all excited about this technology and then hearing this word thrown around and she's just like, oh no, we're about to do it again. Whiplash. Whiplash. Maybe this is a good time for a commercial break. Okay. We'll be right back.

27:44This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things. It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone, and approval can happen in minutes. So it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet, or oops, maybe I use cash, where's the ATM? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future, there's no going back. With Apple Card, purchases earn daily cash up to 3 % with no points to track and no waiting for rewards.

28:29It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. 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. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85 % of merchants in the U.S. And the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch. To explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility.

29:16Savings in Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, member FDIC, terms and more at AppleCard.com. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around L.A. in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. Want the full story? Take a listen. Hedy, she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator. Right. She says he's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well.