#12 - Uma Valeti: Cultivated Meat and Food Sustainability

0:00Hello everyone and welcome to a special win-win episode. An episode where you get to see me cry over a chicken dumpling. because I recently visited Uma Valletti, the CEO and founder of Upside Foods. Now, Upside are one of a growing number of companies developing what is known as cultivated meat. Meat that is 100 % animal, but instead of being grown on the skeleton of an animal in a farm, that meat is grown in a bioreactor, which I appreciate sounds rather sci-fi. But as someone who is a huge meat lover and also a huge animal lover, This technology is a real win-win in my book. Because, I mean, let's face it, the modern meat industry sucks, especially factory farms.

0:43Not only in how they treat their animals, but also what they're doing to our environment, and even to our own health with things like antibiotic resistance. So, for me at least, this technology provides an elegant solution to the cognitive dissonance that I often have around my own carnivorousness. This episode is a look behind the scenes of what it's taken to bring this technology to a point where it is almost ready for market. And quick disclaimer, I am an investor in Upside Foods. I wasn't paid or even asked to make this video. I just really, really believe in this technology. So I'm happily shilling for it for reasons you'll hear.

1:19But please do keep that in mind as you watch, obviously. That out of the way, let's dig in.

1:36So, what are we going to be trying today? We're going to try a number of things that you can do with chicken. He's doing dumplings. He's going to make a breakfast sausage, complete whole-cut chicken breast that we do our own version of. And then we're going to go into fried chicken. We wanted to pick something very familiar. Chicken is the most familiar meat. People love eating chicken in many forms. and we're like, let's not compromise that experience. People should recognize that when it hits their taste buds, oh yeah, I know that. Yes. So as you can imagine, I was pretty excited to try this stuff.

2:11But first, let's hear how Uma went from being a cardiologist to a cultivated meat grower. When I was 12, I went to a friend's birthday party, our neighbor. We were in the front of the house having a lot of fun. And then I just walked to the back of the house. And in the back of the house was where they were slaughtering the animals to feed the people in the front. I think that was the first time ever I came face to face with the duality of meat production. I didn't do anything about it then. I kept eating meat. I loved eating meat. And then I went to medical school. So we had this group of 50, 60 kids that were in one medical school.

2:53I volunteered to run the cafeteria. and during that time I used to go with the chefs and the sous chefs to the market and buy all of the produce and all of the stuff. One day we went to actually the meat, the slaughterhouse and I saw for the first time intensified, intense animal production operations and that was like a moment I can't forget. I'm like, on a chain there were 60 chickens every second being slaughtered, moved to the next thing, slaughtered, moved to the next thing. I did not know how to react but I think those two moments, the birthday, death day when I was 12 years old and this was when I was 18 years old I'm like okay, I love eating meat but I'm going to stop eating meat and that's the choice I made for myself I didn't tell anyone and then I came to the US to do cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, I was fortunate to be able to you know, get there and as I was training to be a cardiologist international cardiologist we also started working on stem cells and stem cells are these incredibly versatile cells in every person's body are also animals bodies where these cells can do anything.

4:02They can become muscle, they can become connective tissue, they can become bone, they can become brain cells. And what we were doing were taking those cells and injecting them into patients' hearts when they had a heart attack or a cardiac arrest. As I started thinking about it, I'm like, could we actually do this with animals? And take cells from an animal and grow meat. And that was somewhere in the range of, I think, 2005 or so, that idea came into my head. And I could not get it out. I just could not get it. I tried really hard because there was lots of things going on in cardiology. But every morning I wake up and that thought comes back to my mind.

4:38So I started talking about that with my friends, my family. And finally people, they got fed up with me talking about it and not doing anything. And they said, why are you not doing it? So that became a call to action. But how does it work? Like, how can you begin to grow meat without its host animal? So the process starts with us taking cells from either an adult animal, young animal, or an egg. It's a small biopsy, and a biopsy usually gets you one or two drops worth of cells from any part of the animal.

5:18nutrients, and identify the animal cells that do a fantastic job of growing and retaining the flavor and the textures. They are the ones that graduate to become a commercial breed at Upside. Once they do that, we don't have to go back to the animal. So for instance, these chickens' products you're eating today, we got them from the source about four or five years ago from a chicken, and we haven't had to go back. We can keep producing with that for the next 30 years. The DNA is on. identical to the sort of old school style of chicken. Yeah, I mean, the DNA here is chicken DNA. Like if you just go and do put it through any DNA reading and ask it to read what species is this, it'll say gallus gallus.

6:03So the DNA question is probably the biggest misunderstanding I keep hearing about cultivated meat. People understandably assume that it must be genetically modified in some way in order to grow, but it's not. It's genetically identical to whatever farmed animal the cell samples originally come from. So it's not a GMO food. What is different though, is how much time and energy and space it takes to grow the meat, especially when you compare it pound for pound to current methods. Any meat takes about two weeks. Maybe it takes three weeks, maybe it takes four weeks if you're trying to add some exquisite features into it.

6:39Right. But let's say it averages out at two weeks, or let's push it to three weeks. When you compare that with a cow, which is two years, a pig which is nine months, and a chicken which is two months, and a lamb is about six months. It's just a much shorter process, 4x to almost 50x. And in terms of energy efficiency, again, I don't know if you can make a comparison, but how much energy it takes to get a kilogram of steak versus a kilogram of steak grown in a lab. How much more energy is that? So we have our own work that we've done and started to say, at scale, when we project out our production methods, the efficiency and the time it takes for us to grow the meat, and compare with the literature out there, the majority of it is saying unequivocally that when we get to scale of tens of millions of pounds or hundreds of millions of pounds, the land use goes down to about 90 % less than what we need for conventional meat.

7:46The water use goes down by about 90 plus percent to what it requires to feed an animal before it's slaughtered. And the greenhouse gas emissions also go down by about 90 percent. So those three things, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, go down about 90 percent. We have 70 billion animals right now drinking a third of all the fresh water that we have in the world, using a third of all the arable land to make the feed for them. And if the demand for meat is doubling, simple math. That means animals will be drinking two-thirds of all the fresh water 30 years from now that's on Earth.

8:21And two-thirds of all the agricultural land is going to be used to grow crops for feeding animals to feed humans. That math won't work out. And the thing is, he is right. As more and more poor countries modernize, trends show that their demand for meat will significantly increase, which is going to make our current very inefficient farming system even more unsustainable long-term. A statistic that really blows my mind is just how much the distribution of biology on Earth has changed since the agricultural revolution. Before humans started farming, we only made up a tiny sliver of all the biomass on Earth.

8:57Now, we and our livestock represent 98 % of all biomass. That's more than a 10 ,000x increase, much of which has only happened in the last couple hundred years. So such a rapid swing is obviously going to create a huge shock on any ecosystem. But ultimately, I can throw stats around all day long, and none of this matters if this meat doesn't actually taste good, or at least taste as good as what you can buy in a supermarket. So here is my rather emotional taste test. Does the product feel different in any way to cook with? No, we've kind of put it through its paces. We've kind of tried all sorts of stuff.

9:35We've fried it, we've brined it, We've smoked it. We've made sausages. We've made kind of everything that you could kind of imagine. And yeah, it really acts in the same way as you would expect chicken. This is the potsticker. So like Uma said, this is cultivated chicken. It has some ginger, scallion, kind of traditional seasonings in there. Have you ever tasted cultivated wheat, by the way? I have never tasted cultivated wheat before. I have been waiting years to do this. As someone who like, I love meat, but I love animals and I love earth. This is like, this is the ultimate win-win technology.

10:10I'm quite actually emotional about it. Like, I can't believe I'm about to finally taste this. Well, we're so glad you're doing that here at Upside. Thank you.

10:22It tastes like chicken. Wow. I mean, it's, I don't think I would, there's no way I could tell the difference. That's amazing. Thank you for saying that. This is the reaction we get every single time people come in and taste it. Has anyone ever cried before? A few have. A few have? Okay, so I'm not the only one. I can't believe it's real. I can't believe it's real. So yes, I can definitively say it passed the taste test, at least to me. But of course, the question you're probably all wondering is, what are the health and safety implications of this technology? I mean, after all, we've evolved to eat meat conventionally for thousands of years.

11:07And this is as far away from nature as you can get, really. So how can these companies ensure that it lives up to safety and nutritional standards? Presumably, you don't actually have any, you can't have any long-term studies, right, on the effect of humans eating cultivated meat because it's so new. You know, the first person ate, what, in 2013? Mark Post Burger in 2013, August, about 10 years ago, is the first time that was eaten publicly, televised. But there have been people who have been tasting it before that and at various small events. But you're right, it all has been happening in the last 10, 15 years.

11:43Are there any studies planned to sort of measure the effects on people who have been eating it consistently and so on? Because I imagine there's going to be a lot of people who aren't willing to try it until there is some sort of long-term study. I think there will be. You know, I get calls from people that are very interested in doing studies and people that have scientifically rigorous things that want to do long-term studies. And I said, those should happen. They will happen as they should happen in a very well-designed fashion. It'll take time to make all of these studies happen, but it'll come back to the challenge, which is, what do you compare it with?

12:18Where is the gold standard? What do you accept? if you accept a third of us could develop cancers from the food that we eat, we're already at that level right now. So in scientific design of a proper study that can be interpreted well, we really have to keep those things in mind and start questioning that because that's also changed over time. There's so many of these caveats that we need to think about designing studies. And what I would say is let's step back. Let's step back and say, are there any studies that just say, I'm going to put people in eating conventional meat-only category and people that don't eat any meat at all in their diet category.

12:55Do we actually have really strong evidence to say one group is at a higher risk than the other group? Now, that study has not been done then. In that case, if you do a meta-study on top of it without a proper foundation, it becomes very challenging to interpret. So the way we approach it is the following. Let's make sure that we know everything possible about the cell. We know everything possible about the nutrition that is going into these cells. And we know the growing conditions. And everything that we do is trackable. How can you ensure that the meat products are as healthy for you as, you know, say a chicken breast I would go buy, you know, from a conventional farm?

13:35Or, you know, perhaps more accurately, let's compare it to like a factory farm. Let's not, you know, we can compare to free range as well, but maybe more factory farms, which is where, you know, 90 % of meat is coming from nowadays, right? So we think about putting products that are nutritionally rich and part of a well-balanced diet. Conventional meat, as we know it, and processed meats, as we know it, have been associated with certain diseases, whether it's cardiovascular disease or cancers or chronic diseases or diseases that could lead to inflammation. Now, when I step back as a physician and think about what are we trying to really do here, I think the opportunity with cultivated meat to start making meat better is significantly higher than you can ever imagine with conventional meat.

14:21And a couple of examples. If we know how to select cells that are capable of giving us the right omega-3, omega-6 ratios, suddenly it's like, okay, can I make beef with the health benefits for the heart like a salmon? Right. Those possibilities open up. And that's when my eyes light up, our team's eyes light up and say, yes, we see that. We can start thinking about touching that future. Do you need to use, because I know in conventional farming, and especially in factory farms, the amount of antibiotic usage. I couldn't find the exact numbers on what percentage of antibiotics worldwide are actually given to farm animals, but it's a very significant amount, which is obviously contributing to antibiotic resistance, other sort of growing threats.

15:10and people are quite understandably concerned about the idea that they're ingesting meat from animals that have been consuming so many antibiotics. Do you have to use them in your systems? Answer is no. All of the products you ate, they never saw antibiotics. And that's what's going to be another distinct advantage of cultivated meat, right? As we start scaling our production techniques and keep going to scale, people are going to see that. and 60 to 80 percent of all the antibiotics made in the United States are made for animals, not for humans. That's a very large percentage. So what's happening to all of that antibiotics?

15:50The animal is eating and then it's secreting it or excreting it and it gets into the runoff and then we get exposed to that and there's a lot of worry about antibiotic resistance and we've seen lots of antibiotic resistance organisms with hundreds of thousands of people being affected every year and tens of thousands dying from it. So that's one distinct advantage. The second one is pandemic risk. I worry about that even more because antibiotic resistance, major problem, can affect pockets of people and it could be a slow rolling disaster. When you suddenly think about pandemics, the biggest risk that we are facing and looking at every day in the eye is if you are confining 70 billion animals every year in tiny, tiny areas, and those animals are so close to each other in the middle of breathing, infectious agents circulating, and excreting their excrement all being in one place.

16:49It's like a petri dish. It's the literal petri dish. Talk about an entire lab-grown experiment in the world that we do every single second on a massive, massive scale. That is the lab-grown experiment that I'm very scared of. We've lived that through the pandemic of what it can cause to our lives and do to our lives. I lost my dad from COVID and he's a veterinarian. He and we used to talk about this pandemic risk always. Zoonotic diseases spreading from an animal, either a wild animal or a domesticated animal jumping into humans. Always talked about it. It just is really sad that I lost my dad to it.

17:32But when these things start happening to people, we've got to be able to say, let's open our eyes wide. Let's look at opportunities where we can decrease that risk. I'd love to get into the sort of more economic side of all of this. Yes, do it. So initially, the production of, I think, a pound of beef through cultivated meat was$18 ,000 a pound. Chicken was$9 ,000 a pound. Where is the price down to approximately now? And how do you plan to scale it so that it becomes commercially competitive to conventional meat? This is a fantastic question. comes every single day for us. And our answer is there's three things we're focusing on.

18:22People have to fall in love with the product. People have to be able to afford it. And then people have to be able to see how it's made. Those are a must-have. How do we take care of the first taste thing? That's the first magical thing for people to see. They have to come into a kitchen, see it being cooked and taste, right? We're never going to pass the sniff test if you don't get across that. So that was the laser focus for the last, for the first three, four years. The focus now is cost. We're like, we want to be able to put this product on the market. It's going to be expensive to make it in the early days, but we do want to be able to price it for a consumer in the range of a premium meat product that they're going to be able to go and buy at a restaurant.

19:07If they're buying a chicken sandwich, if they're paying$15 for a chicken sandwich now, they're like, we want to be able to capture a slight premium on that because it helps us continue to do the research and innovation. So what we're thinking is price it above organic in the range of 30 % or so above organic. That we think a lot of people can start affording to pay right now. Enough for us to be able to keep building the business and start saying we'll get to closer and closer to conventional meat price parity, which will be another 50 % lower than what an organic chicken costs right now. Those are what our North Stars are.

19:43and our first products that we'll put on the market will be in that range. The cost of manufacturing it is higher right now because we're doing it in small scale, a lot more bespoke craft type of manufacturing. But when we are building the next commercial facility based on what we are sitting in right now, that is focused on bringing the cost of chicken to$10 a pound. That's the goal we've got. The next one is to get it to$5 a pound. I think that is kind of where it's going if we use today's prices. What about the role of subsidies? Because I think what a lot of people don't realize is, you know, a lot of the meat and food that we eat is already very subsidized, right?

20:24Is that the case with meat? And do you think it could be the case with cultivated meat too? The conventional industry has taken advantage of enormous amounts of subsidies, incentives, loan programs, tax benefits, to get to a place of efficiency that they're at right now. That took several decades for them to get there. And there has been an incredible amount of taxpayer support and public-private partnerships. And I think if we have to be realistic and say a transformative change like this should be funded similar to that, that's a level playing field. And we will have to be eligible for all of these same benefits that conventional meat industry has been able to avail for cultivated meat to go to the next level.

21:14And there's great examples of that that we've been living through. Think about the energy transformation happening right now. The Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, the IRA. All of these are offering an ability for American manufacturing to be able to compete with Chinese manufacturing or some other manufacturing location. So on that note, let's finish up with the main course of the day, a full cultivated chicken breast fillet. Unlike ground chicken, a full fillet like you'd get straight off the breast of a living chicken is, of course, much harder to produce, given all the sinew and nerves and stuff that normally hold a breast muscle together.

21:54But they've even cracked that too. Yeah, so this is made with a different process than the previous deep products. So in this method of production for the chicken breast, what we have is we have the cells together and we keep them close enough that they actually start attaching to each other physically. And they start forming the junctions and attach and then they line up in a file. And that's what you need for a fiber. And then they are stacked up against each other and then they start becoming more and more fibers. And then the cells themselves secrete something called the extracellular matrix, basically collagens and elastins that hold them together.

22:30So therefore, when you call out the chunk of meat, it's all staying together. Excuse my feralness, but I want to experience the actual texture. It's just, what? This is a world we should live in, where we can have all the protein that we need and want without the, like, endless suffering and environmental degradation that comes with it. There we go. Thank you so much for watching, everyone. And of course, a huge thank you to Uma and his team at Upside for letting me come ask them questions, for letting me grill them. There you go. That's the pun of the day. Anyway, if you found this interesting or useful, please share.

23:16I'm also really curious to know if you'd actually try this meat if it was given to you, you know, offered on a plate. Let me know what you think in the comments. But either way, I'm really hopeful that this meat will become an option for those who would like to try it soon. because as I said, I think it's a massive win-win. It's a win-win-win-win. Animals, environment, people's health, sustainability. It doesn't mean you can't eat conventional meat anymore. That will still be there. It's all about choice maximization. So anyway, on that note, thank you and I'll see you next time.