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Can I have your attention, please?
Maybe with this question, have you been
drinking milk lately?
No, but it's very
good for your health.
What about cheese have been
eating cheese lately.
Yeah.
Huh.
What about hamburger?
Yeah, we said double layered
and double layered hamburger.
Extra cheddar cheese with some
egg on it.
It tastes perfect, doesn't
it?
Now, maybe it's good, but maybe it's also
bad. Have you thought about this, maybe
how irresponsible this is?
How why?
OK, well about this exactly.
We'll talk to us today.
Benjamin Robbert, he is a chemist.
He's an animal rights activist
and also a bio hacker.
He's also I would like to say that
he's also the author
of a very famous paper talking exactly
about how to turn meth into
a treatment for nasal congestion.
Please welcome home was a very warm
applause.
So I want to tell you that the
future is vegan,
we have very little choice about this if
we want to be able to feed the world and
avoid environmental disaster.
But you're not necessarily going to have
to change your diets. You may not have to
give up that hamburger with cheese.
And I'll tell you how.
First, I want to show you a video from
the future. Though I've obtained an
authentic video from the future.
Lieutenant, I was confused.
We no longer enslave animals for food
purposes.
She tweeted,
You've seen something as fresh and tasty
as meat, but organically materialized
out of patterns used by our transporters.
OK, so we're not quite there
yet, but there's some really impressive
technologies out there that I'm going to
tell you about in a few minutes.
But I want to tell you about why we
should care about this.
So I am an animal rights vegan, so
I actually care about it because of the
animals.
There are other reasons.
So these are pictures from factory
farming in the US.
You probably think, well, the US is
actually the worst in the world. That's
true. We are the cruelest to animals in
the world. It's not as bad in Europe.
I would still say we shouldn't do it.
The thing is that the environmental
impact from raising animals is huge
and you actually have a lower greenhouse
gas emission from this intensive farming
than from pasture raising animals, which
is obviously kinder to the animals.
But none of it's actually very good for
the environment. It turns out to be
incredibly inefficient.
So if you care about the environment,
you should care about replacing animals
with something more efficient.
And so I'll show you a few numbers.
So when we talk about greenhouse
gas emissions, we usually talk about
generating electricity, driving cars,
you know, transportation industry, but
actually it's a pretty significant
amount of the greenhouse gas.
Worldwide emissions come from
animal agriculture.
About 18 percent of all of our emissions
are from animal agriculture.
We use one third of the ice free
earth for
raising animals, either for their feed or
if the animals themselves and over half
the water in the US goes to animal
agriculture. So this is a huge impact.
If you look at the environmental impact
of different diets, so
there's three bars for each kind of diet,
the one all the way to the left, the
tallest one is our current state of
technology.
And these other bars are assuming
different technological innovations.
But you can see that the way we currently
eat, there's no level of technological
innovation that was predicted
in this study. At least that gets even
close to as good as a vegan diet is
at the moment.
So really going vegan,
you have a much lower impact
on your greenhouse gas emissions.
A few other interesting numbers.
This study showing that if we want
to hit our environmental targets, it
would cost about half as much to do.
So if we transition to a
low meat diet.
So it actually costs less to do this.
In the US alone, if we switch to from
animal agriculture to just vegetable
and grain farming, we could feed one
billion more people than we currently do
with the same resources.
And actually, I like the study.
The name of the study is redefining
agricultural yields from tonnes
to people nourish per hectare.
And this is a much better way to think
about agricultural output.
Why do you care about the weight of the
food you get? How about caring about how
many people you can feed with those
resources?
And a study from the USDA,
which is not opposed to animal
agriculture in general, they usually
promote it, saying that we probably
can't hit our greenhouse gas emissions
targets and keep
farming animals, basically, we just can't
do it.
So now for something slightly different,
I don't know how many people have seen
this movie Sharknado.
It is completely ridiculous, I've never
actually seen it, but somehow there's a
tornado and sharks in it and this menaces
people, you know, not realistic,
but cows,
absolutely the worst as far as greenhouse
gas emissions intensity resources
needed for calories out.
So farming cows increases, global
temperatures, increase in global
temperatures, leads to more storms.
More storms can lead to more tornadoes.
So a realistic threat is the
tornado.
So watch out for this.
OK, that's entertaining, but this problem
is not actually funny, right?
Fifty percent of the world's population
lives in areas that are
at danger of coastal flooding
over the next few hundred years.
That's a lot of people.
We've already had millions of people a
year displaced due to climate change.
And this is going to increase greatly.
And we there's the coastal
areas. But then if you live inland,
most people rely on snowpacks
and glaciers that are not being
replenished.
So they're going to experience extreme
drought if we keep going the way we're
going. So, yeah, this affects everybody.
It's a really bad problem.
So are we condemned to tofu?
Tofu is great.
You shouldn't think of it that way.
You should you should eat tofu.
You can ignore the rest of my talking.
Just go vegan. Now, that's what I would
prefer, but.
If you don't want to do that, there are
other options.
There is a new generation of vegan food
that which is currently being developed,
which aims to either exactly replace
meat with something that's the same
that's animal cells
and is indistinguishable because it's
actually the same thing.
Or there's also some genetic engineering
approaches. I'm going to tell you about
that. Replace single proteins that are
the most important for whatever
food you're interested in.
And I'll talk about some of those.
So the kinds of things I'm going to talk
about first is food science and
engineering. And this is not exactly high
tech. This is the kind of technology
we've been working with for nearly 100
years. It's just usually using a
scientific approach to
making better foods.
And so any processed food you've had
falls under this category, food
packaging, food, transportation.
So this is a well-established
discipline.
A newer one is in vitro meat.
This is where people take an actual
sample of animal cells,
grow it up in a petri dish, and then
harvest it and make hamburger or whatever
other meat out of it.
I'll talk a little bit more about that.
And then there's also the genetic
engineering approach where a
non animal organism
gets the DNA from an animal and
we make some protein that we're
interested in.
I'll talk about some of those efforts as
well.
Before I go on with those, I want to say
again, there's a lot of great vegan food
out there already. These are traditional
chef kind of approaches
all over the world. There's really good
vegan food to go check some
of that out.
But getting back to technology, so
food science is basically, like I said,
just the scientific approach to
any aspect of food production and
for the purposes of what I'm talking
about for vegan replacement foods,
is taking an engineering approach to
plant proteins, plant starches,
other plant material, and finding a way
to engineer that to be a
convincing meat alternative.
There's some really good ones out there
right now.
There's good egg replacements already.
So Hampton Creek Foods is one company.
Bill Gates is one of their investors.
And he made the point that we're only
we've only explored about eight percent
of the plant proteins in the world.
We don't know what most of the rest of
them do or if they can be used
as replacements
for animal products.
So Hampton Creek Foods went search
for a bunch of these.
They found a specific protein that
was very similar to
the to some proteins and eggs and found
that they could make some pretty good egg
replacements and Mayos first product.
That's actually one of the easier things
to replace. But they're doing quite well.
But they're using this first
investment and sales of these products to
make a huge database and explore
all of these proteins or as many as they
can.
There's also a very realistic scrambled
egg replacement.
And I found a good Amazon quote that
that supports my point where
a lot of people say that they
can't really tell the difference, that
this stuff is very convincing for
scrambled eggs.
So those may not seem that far out there.
There's a replacement seafood that is
also no genetic engineering, no
cell culturing.
This is just plants that they've taken
and made shrimp out of.
So they're reviews
calling it insanely realistic.
One thing about this, you get to
start about start to think about new
things that you can get out of these
plants. It's not exactly just a
replacement in this case.
There's no allergy problems for most
people. You know, seafood allergies
are fairly common.
There's a lot of people who have them.
So this gets around. For most people,
that allergy problem,
it gets around some religious laws.
There's this company called Lime
Sushi that is using the shrimp
and a big one for shrimp.
Child slavery in South East Asia
is really sort
of vital to the current shrimp
production chain.
And so this gets rid of that problem.
OK, so that's the engineering approach.
That is a fairly traditional
way of doing things.
Now we get into some of the really new
stuff.
Such as the in vitro meat
also sort of being rebranded as clean
meat, and there's some good reasons for
this kind of sounds like a marketing
term.
But but it really
does have some good reasons.
You would call it that. But let me
describe first how this works.
So cells
from a cow are taken and this doesn't
have to be invasive, you'll only need
a few cells and you get to grow these
cells up basically in a VAT, maybe
doesn't sound that appetizing, but
you grow them up. And then interestingly,
just like real muscle cells, you don't
get the right texture unless you exercise
them. So people actually put pieces of
Velcro on either side and move them back
and forth. And this gives it the correct
texture.
From there, you get to formulate it into
a hamburger.
Now there's a few things
and of course, other meat will be
possible after that.
Hamburger is the easiest, but you should
be able to make a steak eventually once
we get really good at this.
This is a little bit more complex
than some other things we'll be talking
about, because meat is not just muscle
cells. You also need fats,
you need some other things.
And so you actually need to get these
cells to grow together correctly
and the right 3D architecture.
So this is something people are working
on. I don't think we're quite there yet.
And also it's kind of expensive
at the moment.
Mark posts first hamburger costs nearly
half a million dollars.
Most of us probably are not going to pay
that much for a hamburger.
Also right now, it requires
at least most of the efforts rely on
fetal bovine serum.
And even if you don't know what that is,
you can probably guess that it is not
vegan.
Also, Michael Isen, who actually
works for a competing company
here, so he makes
his point that this is kind of disgusting
both to vegans and to everybody else as
well.
But that turns out, I'll say and it
turns out about how you frame the
question, but, yeah, a lot of people are
kind of weirded out by this.
You know, it doesn't have to really be
that that disgusting.
You know, when you grow this these cells,
you know, most people think food grown in
a test tube doesn't sound that great.
But the way you actually do this is you
put this in a big bioreactor that looks a
lot like brewing beer.
You know, most people are OK with brewing
beer.
These cells grow in a very similar way.
You don't usually have to exercise beer.
We still have to do this where
it's going to need the stage where it's
stretched and exercised.
But look at this.
The batch process can be as short as
seven days.
So you can up this huge amount
of muscle cells and just a week
it can be 10 percent the greenhouse
gas emissions.
As for the same meat grinder and animal,
so, you know, there are some big
advantages to this fast, low
impact.
And, you know, there have been surveys
where people have been asked about this,
where it's been framed differently.
If you say it's grown in a
similar way to fermenting beer, would you
be willing to try this?
A lot more people say yes compared to
when you asked them if it's meat from a
test tube, would you be willing to to try
it? So, yeah, it kind of depends
on the marketing little bit.
And the one other thing, when
you slaughter animals, there's always a
chance of contamination from other some
other part of the animal back into the
meat. So mad cow disease
is an example of this.
And I know in the UK a few years
ago, there were a lot of bans on
importing beef.
And I think the EU may have had some as
well because of mad cow disease.
There's also E. coli
contamination from the intestines of the
animals that sometimes cause pathogenic
E. coli.
You don't have that risk in this case.
So there's that's why
one of the reasons that people are
calling it clean meat is because you
actually have a much lower chance of
contamination.
So this seems kind of far off, but
actually maybe not quite.
So this is the first time a meatball has
ever been with beef sales,
did not require how to be slaughtered
like a.
So there has actually been
there's this company in Memphis Meats,
which has made they've
made a meatball, but
it's supposed to be very, very realistic.
They are scaling this up now.
It's still fairly expensive.
Their price right now is supposed to be
eighteen thousand dollars a pound,
down from half a million dollars a
hamburger. But it's the right direction.
But Mark Post, the one who made this half
million dollar hamburger, says that his
burgers are now 11 dollars a patty.
He's not actually selling them, so we
won't know till they're actually on the
market. But he claims that that's
where you can get right now.
And he has also said that he has a
replacement for the bovine
fetal serum.
I hope all that's true.
We haven't actually seen proof of that
yet, as far as I know.
But but
I think this is still a few years off
before it becomes a real mainstream
thing that that you can go out and buy.
But the technology is moving there.
So I'm going to talk about slightly
different technology now, one that I work
on for one of the projects.
I work on genetic engineering.
And I know this is a slightly
controversial topic, especially in
in Europe.
But specifically, I want
to talk about transgenic organisms.
This is where you take the DNA from one
organism and put it into another,
hopefully for some good reason.
And let me explain the process a little
bit.
This can be it's actually not
that hard to do.
I do this at a hackerspace
in Oakland, California.
And basically you have to start with a
DNA sample.
Well, from humans, you can get a DNA
sample from spit or scraping a little bit
from the inside of the mouth.
You then take the sample and you
get the DNA sequenced.
We don't do this in my lab.
It's kind of hard to do
with an expensive equipment, but it's not
actually that expensive to have DNA
sequence. You can send it out to
commercial services.
Anybody can do this and
it's not that expensive.
Once you have that sequence, you put it
into your nice modern computer where you
need to optimize the DNA sequence
for the organism that you're putting the
DNA into.
So if I have a sequence from a cow,
that exact DNA sequence will not make the
same protein and yeast.
So we need to do this optimization.
The interesting thing is that there are
free online tools that allow you to do
this if you say this is a mammalian
piece of DNA. I want to grow this protein
in yeast.
You can find online tools for free that
will do this and they will check your
work.
So this is actually pretty accessible,
not very hard to use.
This part's a little bit harder, takes a
little more practice, but again, there
are free online tools that will help you.
You then get the DNA synthesized.
You can do this as a commercial service.
Again, not that expensive.
You can do it for a few hundred dollars.
You put the DNA that you're interested in
into this circular piece of DNA and
you get to put other instructions on here
and this is really important, you get to
do a lot of cool things.
One thing you can do is tell the organism
when you've made the protein,
kick it out of the cell.
So if you have yeast that has one of
these plasmids in it and you're making a
protein, the yeast will then kick the
protein out of the cell and then you get
to collect it much more easily than if
you had to grind the step to get
it out of the cells.
You can put kill switches into this so
that if this escapes from your
bioreactor, it cannot spread in the
environment.
So this is important. Also, you can
consider it a safety feature that you can
program in.
From there, this is a picture of
bacteria, but this works in
other organisms as well.
You get your circular DNA, the plasmid
into the cell of the
organism that you want to produce your
protein.
If you leave it as this standalone
piece of DNA, it will produce your
proteins. You can also recombine it with
the genome of
this cell.
If you do that, then future generations
will also have the ability to make these
proteins.
So that's generally what you want to do
if you're making a large scale product
again when you scale this up.
It's very much like brewing beer.
In fact, if you're working with yeast,
it's almost exactly like brewing beer.
Of course, it needs nutrients.
Sugar is one of the main things you have
to feed these things. And this is where
and this whole process most of your
greenhouse gas emissions come from.
Of course, sugar takes some energy to
grow, take some resources.
But this is a very small amount
of resources compared to growing an
animal. So this is still a big advantage.
You don't have to separate out, and this
can be one of the harder parts of this
whole process, you need to separate
your protein to have the pure material.
And this actually is what people often
spend the longest optimizing.
But once you've done that, you have your
pure protein.
You can go on and and make your
food replacement.
So this is the project I work on, real
vegan cheese, so we're a bunch
of bio hackers in Oakland,
we are engineering yeast to make
milk proteins so that we can
make cheese that is identical to real
animal cheese because it's got the same
protein in it.
But it came from years, not from animals.
And so our process is very much what I
just described where we we didn't
do this thing where we
sequenced the genome ourselves.
We found this on a database.
We got the DNA synthesized, we put
it into yeast.
We get protein out and then we will
formulate milk and make cheese.
We haven't actually gotten to cheese yet,
but yeah, this is the idea.
We picked a particularly hard project
and that most of the other things I
mentioned are single
proteins that people are using.
We're actually doing something.
Kason is a complex of four proteins.
It's got a lot of other stuff in it.
And so it turns out that we have a lot of
work to do to get this whole myself to
reform.
But this is this is really
what makes cheese cheese.
It's this complex protein that we're that
we're synthesizing.
I'm not going to go through all the details
here. I gave a talk at camp that
if you want to see a lot of details on
this project can be done in that talk.
So I'll go just very
briefly through our progress.
Basically, we've made these proteins in
very small amounts, we're pretty sure,
but we had a lot of trouble identifying
that we made the right ones because yeast
makes other proteins the same size and
our inexpensive method only tells us
the size of the proteins we're making.
So we went back and redesigned the
protein to have a tag that will make it
easier to find.
We're also looking for
other yeasts, not bakeries,
that will give us higher output.
But one important thing, most of us
are not biologists.
We don't put a lot of time into this.
But we really want it to work, so we're
actually just filed
for a grant where we are
trying to get some money to hire people
to do this, but we're still going to keep
it open source. So if we have people paid
working on this, we'll still release all
the data as we get it.
So what else can you do with this?
It turns out it's not just food you can
make leather.
Leather is mostly collagen
and you can get used to make collagen
and you can make very realistic leather.
There's a company called Modern Medo and
Brooklyn that is doing this.
And another important thing, as I
mentioned before, you get to optimize
past just replacing the animal
product.
They say that they can make leather
that's actually better than animal
leather for many like strength's, tests
for the way it feels.
You get to engineer past what evolved.
Another interesting thing that's not
exactly replacing a current product,
this company bought threads, is making
spider silk garments
and growing spider silk, and this
is probably easier than farming spiders.
I haven't tried myself, but
I think I go with a yeast.
So there's another egg replacement, and
this is a genetic engineering one, again,
in yeast and egg whites,
there's really one important protein
albumin.
This can be made in yeast.
And again, you get to engineer it, maybe
even be better than egg whites.
But another important thing, a couple of
years ago in the US,
a very large percentage of the egg laying
hens died of avian flu.
There was this huge outbreak.
All these hens died.
Egg prices went up 80 percent over a few
months.
It turns out the yeast is a much more
secure supply chain.
Disease is not likely to wipe
out a bunch of stuff that you have in
these fermenters that are separated from
each other.
You're not going to spread diseases
easily.
So this is very attractive from from that
viewpoint. Also, you also
are not going to get salmonella.
And the other thing is that intensive
bird and pig farming operations are where
most human flus develop.
They're spread from farms largely in
China into human populations.
That's why it's called swine flu.
Bird flu, avian flu.
They have this quote, that's not exactly
appetizing, exactly, talking about
their baking and binding applications
team, but again, they're just saying that
they can make something that's even
better than egg whites.
You get to optimize past the animal
product.
Another thing, gelatin,
again, you can make it in yeast, it's
usually made from animal bones and skin,
but you can make it and said and some
things you might recognize jello
marshmallows if you take anything
in a gel capsule pill that doesn't say
that's vegetarian and that is gelatin.
It's also used as an additive and
thousands of processed foods.
So this is a very common thing, something
cool.
This company made Mastodon gummy bears.
They actually took the genetic sequence
from mastodons.
They have been they have been
sequenced and used
it to make gummy bears as
if they had ground up mastodon bones.
Pretty sure this is the only way you're
ever going to have a Maston gummy bear,
so again, you get to do completely new
things with these technologies.
So with genetic
engineering, I haven't really talked
about meat yet,
and so this is the last thing I'll talk
about.
Where does cooked meat
come from?
The flavors, textures?
Well, of course you need the protein you
need the fat is a very sad but something
else that's really important.
If you want it to be a really realistic
flavor, you need basically
blood. You need the hemoglobin type
proteins.
So these proteins have a very specific
flavor themselves.
But something else really important, they
do, they catalyze this reaction.
So when you cook your
proteins plus your team containing
proteins together, you get
I gave just a few examples here.
There's actually thousands of small
molecules that are made and this is what
meat flavor is.
So if you want to make your meat taste
really like meat, you need to make these
make these things, make him containing
proteins occur almost
entirely in animals.
It turns out that there are some plant
sources.
So there's a company and possible foods
near San Francisco.
They're making a burger that is mostly
made of wheat protein.
And this is interesting because wheat
protein has been used for over a thousand
years in China to make meat substitutes.
It's sometimes called Satan and
but it has other names in China.
It makes a very good texture, the flavor.
It has very little flavor, but the
textures, it's pretty good.
So impossible. Foods also uses coconut
fat. It turns out that animal fats are
not really that unique.
You can use a lot of other substitutes in
there. OK.
But they're there innovation, really,
they take engineered yeast that doesn't
show up in the final product, but they
have engineered it to produce a hymn
containing protein. So they basically get
blood out of yeast.
And so putting all this
together
and there's a there's a bigger picture of
all their ingredients.
That's what goes into their burger.
There's a picture of what it looks like
cooking, and there's a picture of the
burger put together.
I've had one of these.
It is disturbing, I think,
to me, because I'm a vegan and it tastes
like a real hamburger.
But also people who eat meat have
largely said some people say it's not
quite there, but most people say it's a
pretty good burger replacement.
So this is
very, very similar. And is because of
that catalyzing those reactions,
you know, who are working to getting
the texture right.
But really, the flavor is that him
protein that came from the yeast there,
plant blood, as they call it, making
the same reactions that make these small
molecules.
OK, so you can make all these different
kinds of
meat replacements, other animal product
replacements by genetic engineering,
by growing individual cells.
But I've mostly besides my project, the
Bacon Cheese Project I've just been
telling you about.
These are all startups I've talked about,
actually.
And so, yeah, that makes you think, well,
OK, so is capitalism going to solve this
and not entirely.
But it depends on what question you're
actually asking.
So what capitalism is good at is
if you have a new product and you think
you can make money from it, making
something that fits into that market,
capitalism is really good.
And there's another part they haven't
been talking about, and that is that we
already actually make enough food.
It's got to have an environmental impact,
but we're not feeding everybody.
Capitalism's not going to solve that.
So that part of the problem, nothing
I've talked about here is going to
address.
So, again, we could all go vegan now
and have a much lower impact.
But I suspect that's not going to happen,
which is why I'm excited about these
projects. Basically, what they will allow
you to do is if you're not willing to
change your diet, you don't really have
to. There will be things that probably
whether you think or not, now,
most of you will probably eventually be
convinced by some of these products.
The other thing is that they will be
cheaper and once they're cheaper
and if you think they're good enough,
that's where people are going to start
adopting them.
And that's it. Thank you.