Explained (2018–…): Season 2, Episode 8 - The Future of Meat - full transcript

[ticking]

[narrator] Every ten seconds, humans
kill roughly 24,000 animals for food.

That adds up to 75 billion each year.

And it's done with a speed and efficiency
previously unimaginable.

While the global population has
more than doubled in the last 50 years,

the amount of meat we produce
has more than quadrupled.

There are now approximately
one billion pigs,

one billion sheep,

1.5 billion cows,

and 23 billion chickens on the planet.

Raising this many animals
is a marvel of modern technology,



but it's reaching a breaking point.

The land, water, and greenhouse gas
emissions involved in meat production

are rapidly becoming unsustainable.

The way we eat meat will go down
as a historical anomaly,

one that began
in the mid-20th century

and can't continue
for much more of the 21st.

But demand for meat isn't going away.

In fact, it's expected to hit
455 million tons by 2050.

So...

how will future generations
satisfy their craving for meat?

[theme song playing]

[man] Probably food was one of the first
uses to which animals were put.

[man 2] It is free from disease

and can be eaten
without fear of contamination.



[man 3] The skins are dropped
to the fleshing machine.

[woman] The excessive consumption of meat

is what makes it
unsustainable for the planet.

What else they wanna do?
Ban beef altogether?

We're built to eat plants.
Animals are just a middle man.

[man] Clean, safe, wholesome,
and truthfully labeled.

It is a lovely pot roast.

[narrator] It can be hard for meat eaters
to describe what makes meat taste so good.

[boy] Like, it tastes... satisfying.

Um, like, it makes me feel like, uh...
like I'm filled.

It's really juicy.

And it's yummy because...

it's just really juicy.

You can't compare it to anything,
because it's not the same as anything.

[narrator] The indescribable sensation
we get from eating meat goes way back.

This is a 3.4 million-year-old animal bone
found in Ethiopia.

At the time,

Australopithecus afarensis
roamed the plains of Eastern Africa.

These early humans had large flat teeth

adapted for a diet
of fruits, seeds, and leaves.

But these cut marks are
the earliest evidence of a new behavior:

butchering.

Humans had started to eat meat.

Three of the great omnivores of the world
are humans, rats, and cockroaches,

because we're all over the place.
We can always find something to eat.

[narrator] Meat is packed with calories,
proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins

including vitamin B12,

which is hard to find in nature
outside of animal products.

It also contains a lot of iron,

which is crucial to the health
of our red blood cells.

And while plants have iron,
most of it is a different kind

that doesn't absorb well into the body.

The iron in meat is special,

because it's bound
with a compound called heme,

and the only major source of heme iron
is animal blood and muscle.

This influx of protein and nutrients
may be why our bodies changed.

Smaller stomachs, shorter intestines,
and bigger brains.

Some believe that hunting meat
is what led our ancestors

to first develop tools,
complex language, and social structures.

Meat eating is arguably
what made us human.

It is natural, I would say,
for humans to like meat.

It's part of our biology.

I think humans have always wanted
more meat than they could get.

[narrator] But 10,000 years ago,
something major happened.

We learned how
to domesticate animals for food.

We bred wild oxen into cows,

wild boars into pigs

and red junglefowls into chickens.

It's one of the most important things
in human history:

the domestication of plants and animals.

It changed the world.

[narrator]
Farming led to human settlements.

Our population started to climb,

and through selective breeding,

we kept transforming animals
to fit our desire for more meat.

And then, starting a century ago,

modern science enabled us to transform
these animals like never before.

[man] Farm research has led to
the control of disease,

improvement of breeds,
advancement of production.

[man 2] And like big business,

there's a serious effort
to improve the product.

[narrator] To understand what that
looks like, consider the chicken.

Both of these are the same age,

and this one has been on a diet
which included an antibiotic.

You notice the difference in size.
It's much larger.

Whereas the smaller one here
has been on just a normal diet.

You can see a chicken from 1957
compared to a chicken from 2005.

Huge chicken breasts,
it's just this monster,

and it's the exact same age
as this chicken from 1957,

which looks kind of like a pigeon.

[narrator] Chickens today grow
four to five times bigger

thanks to growth-promoting antibiotics,

vitamins, and selective breeding.

[Datar] When you look at that chicken,

you understand that it must be slaughtered

at five weeks of age

because the legs can no longer
hold up the mass of its body.

We've kind of reached biological limits
with what we can do with whole animals.

[narrator] We're also reaching the limit
of how many farm animals can fit on Earth.

If the whole world ate as much meat
as these top meat-eating countries,

every square foot of habitable land
would have to be used to feed people.

And it still wouldn't be enough space.

And we're already packing most of those
animals together as tightly as possible.

According to chicken industry lore,
that's all thanks to this woman,

Cecile Steele.

In 1923,

she placed an order
for 50 hatchling chickens.

But because of an accidental
extra zero on the order form,

she wound up with 500.

Steele decided to keep them.

So she stuffed them into sheds
and tried to raise them all at once.

At the time,
people didn't really eat chickens.

They just used them for eggs.

But because of that economy of scale,

Steele was able to sell her chickens
more cheaply.

The following year,
she expanded from 1,000 to 10,000.

[man] Want something special
for Sunday dinner?

Chicken, inspected and graded,
is now thrifty every day.

Yes, in one generation,

people of this country have
doubled their consumption of poultry.

[narrator] Factory farming exploded,
and so did our appetite for chicken

and every other kind of meat.

And we invented new ways to eat it.

The 1930s brought us Spam,
meat in a can.

In the 1940s, hamburgers took off,
made from slaughterhouse scraps.

And the 1980s saw the rise
of the chicken nugget.

Eating animals no longer involved seeing
anything that looked like an animal.

Animal agribusiness makes it easy for us
to distance ourselves

from the reality of who we're eating
when we're eating animals.

Many people are uncomfortable eating meat

that actually resembles
the animal it once was.

[narrator] Today, the majority
of farm animals are grown out of sight

in concentrated feeding lots
like this one.

The only reason animals don't get sick
from being packed so tightly together

is that they're fed antibiotics.

But decades of news reports show
that hasn't always worked.

An estimated two million Americans are
affected by Salmonella poisoning annually.

It could happen again.

Another outbreak of deadly food poisoning
from tainted meat.

Can't they buy cleaner meat?

That would be the goal, but there's only
so clean that you can make the meat.

[in Portuguese] I went to buy meat,
and I was scared to buy it.

I even smelled the meat,
and I thought the smell was not good.

[narrator] And antibiotics
don't work on viruses.

And sometimes,

those viruses jump
from factory farm animals to humans,

like mad cow disease,

and swine flu,

and bird flu.

I think people need to wake up
to the idea that... animals...

[stutters] take a very heavy toll
on our lives in the environment.

We're about to have ten billion people
living on a space

that will require us to grow more food
in the next 30 years

than we've grown in all of human history.

[narrator] While meat consumption
is now steady in the wealthiest countries,

it's exploding in emerging economies.

[Rozin] What's happening is that
[stutters] the 20 percent of the world

that are high meat eaters
are getting more and more concerned

about the effect of their meat eating.

And the 80 percent of the world

which is concerned with just
getting enough good nutrition

is um... rising.

[Specter] As countries get richer,

and China and India
are the most obvious examples,

the middle classes tend to eat like we do.

Meals with meat.
They want lots of protein.

[narrator] But meat is one of
the least efficient ways to feed people.

Every 100 grams of plant protein
fed to a cow

ends up as just four grams of protein
in the resulting beef.

For calories, it's even less.

So you have giant swathes of land
in the Midwest, in Brazil, in China

that's just devoted to feeding animals,

and it would be nice
if they could be devoted to feeding us.

[narrator] The problem, of course,
is that we like meat,

and plants don't taste like meat.

But what if they could?

Meat lovers love meat not because it comes
from the cadaver of an animal,

but in spite of the fact that it comes
from the cadaver of an animal.

[narrator] This is the Impossible Burger.

And this is the Beyond Burger.

They're both plant-based patties
trying to compete with meat.

[Brown] The key is very simple.

You have to create...

meat that is uncompromisingly delicious,

delivers as much or better protein
and iron and the other nutrients

that people like from meat,

performs in the kitchen,

and is accessible and affordable.

And if you do those things,
it's game over.

[narrator] Since the 1980s,

plant-based meat alternatives mostly used
soybeans and wheat gluten to mimic meat.

And advertisements,
like this one for Quorn,

suggested it could replace meat
in consumers' diets,

but they never claimed
they tasted the same as meat.

[man] Quorn burgers
are a tasty alternative to meat

and very healthy.

And just like other burgers,
you can eat them any way you want to.

[narrator] Even the people
selling those products

weren't sure how to advertise the taste.

[man] It looks like a turkey.

- It looks like a turkey...
- Will it taste like a turkey?

It should taste a little like a turkey.

The psychological barrier is
that most meat lovers expect

any plant-based replacement for meat
to suck as meat.

[narrator] And that's still
the biggest challenge for these companies,

making something
that tastes, smells, and feels like meat.

By far, the most important scientific
question in the world right now:

what makes meat delicious?

[narrator]
It's a lot harder than you might think.

[Brown] There's not, like,
one beefy flavor aroma molecule.

[narrator] To figure out the recipe,
food scientists heated up pieces of meat

and collected air samples
right above them as they cooked.

[Brown] On the other end of that tube
is a little funnel

with someone's nose stuck in it.

And that person, for 45 minutes, is
sitting there, sniffing. You know, like...

[sniffs]

[narrator] What they're smelling are
the components of what makes meat meaty.

[Brown] The molecules that
come out of it smell like

maple syrup, burnt rubber,

freshly struck match...

-dirty diaper,
-[baby coos]

mint, lilacs,

sweat, sulfur...

[narrator] But one of the major things
that gives red meat its distinct flavor?

It's that special compound
found in animals: heme iron.

And in 2015, Impossible Foods patented
a way to synthesize heme iron in a lab.

The result is a new generation
of plant-based alternatives

that taste, feel, and bleed like meat.

But while their ingredients look wholesome

and they have zero cholesterol,

they have around the same number
of calories as an unseasoned beef patty,

similar levels of saturated fat,

and more than five times as much sodium.

These aren't health foods.

They're burgers.

And investors are betting big on them,

from Bill Gates and Richard Branson

to Jay-Z and Katy Perry,

who even dressed up
as an Impossible Burger

for the Met Gala after-party.

In May 2019, Beyond Meat celebrated

as it became the first meat alternative
company to go public.

And by the end of that day,

the stock price had jumped 163 percent,

something that hadn't happened
since the height of the dot com boom.

The plant-meat movement

has the virtue that it's not asking you
to make a compromise.

It's able to give you the same experience
and you can serve your moral goals.

Now, that's a really good deal...

if you can do it.

[narrator] So if this could be the meat
the next generation is eating,

do they like it?

[woman] Do you like veggie burgers?

They're okay.

Never had a veggie burger.

I don't like vegetables.

This one is munchy. I kind of like it.

You like this one?

I like this one.

It has a good taste.

My favorite would probably be this one.

That one tastes to me like... beef.

I would have never really guessed
that was a veggie burger

because it tasted
just like a real burger.

That does not taste like a hamburger.

[woman] What does it taste like?

Carrots.

I'm so used to eating regular burgers

that it's gonna be kind of hard
to adjust to veggie burgers.

[man] What if I told you
that your favorite burger,

the one in the middle,

is made entirely of plants?

Uh...

I would never eat this thing
in my life again.

[narrator] Changing behavior is hard.

A lot of people just aren't going
to give up meat that easily.

[Joy] We have been so deeply habituated
to eating animal foods

that for many people, we're not just
going to simply lose that craving

because we wake up and recognize
that these foods are problematic.

[cow mooing]

[narrator] So some companies
are trying a different approach:

making animal meat
without killing the animal.

You're looking at chicken cells.

In a few weeks,

they'll be breaded and fried
into a nugget like this one.

But these cells
aren't growing inside of a chicken.

Cultured meat isn't any different
than conventional meat

that we've been eating
for tens of thousands of years.

Uh, it's made from an animal.

The only difference is
you don't need to kill the animal.

The recipe is a pretty easy one.
It's meat.

[narrator]
Actually, the recipe's pretty hard.

There are four main components involved.

The first is a cell culture,

a tiny tissue sample taken
from the body of a live animal.

Then there's the scaffold.

That's the surface that
the replicating muscle cells stick to.

To grow, the cells
also need a growth medium,

the soup that provides proteins,
vitamins, sugars, and hormones

to feed the cells as they grow and divide.

And finally, a bioreactor,

the temperature-controlled environment
that intakes fresh nutrients

and outputs waste.

You can think of it like an artificial
body for the meat to grow in.

In about nine weeks,

this goes from a tiny group of cells
to an edible chunk of meat.

Early research suggests

that this process could use about
half the energy of beef production,

a tiny fraction of the land and water,

and greatly reduce

greenhouse-gas emissions.

But the key question:

does it taste any good?

In 2013, the world got to watch
the first lab-grown meat taste test,

televised on BBC.

They said it kind of tasted like meat.

There's quite some intense taste.

It's close to meat.

It's not that juicy.

[narrator] And another big difference
is that hamburger

cost $330,000 to make,

engineered by this guy,

Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post.

Only six years later,
Post's meat start-up, Mosameat,

says it cut production costs
by 99.997 percent

to just ten dollars a burger.

Right now, dozens
of cell-based meat start-ups

are racing to be the
first ones to go to market

from the Netherlands
to Israel to Singapore,

but none of them
have perfected the recipe... yet.

The first problem is
sourcing the growth medium.

Right now, the liquid used
is fetal bovine serum.

And that's a nicer way of saying
blood taken

from the heart of an unborn cow,
immediately killing it.

Cell-based meat companies are working
toward a plant-based replacement,

but experts aren't sure when
or even if that could happen.

Another problem is structure.

So, ground meat is that hamburger,
that ground chicken nugget,

and the structured meat is that steak

and that nice, fatty piece
of bluefin tuna.

The ground stuff is a lot easier.
The structured stuff is a lot harder.

[narrator]
That requires delivering nutrients

to cells at the center of the meat

like blood vessels do
in an animal's body.

Researchers are experimenting
with different techniques to do that,

like using the vein structure
of a spinach leaf,

but experts think
we're at least a decade away

from pulling off something
that resembles a big juicy steak.

And then there's the yuck factor.

In a 2016 survey,

many Americans said
they weren't interested

in regularly eating meat grown in a lab.

And some people won't even try it.

So you still like the idea of
a piece of meat grown in a lab?

- No, it... It almost makes me vomit.
- [host laughs]

[man in Italian]
Why not try a new experience?

[man 2] No, no, no.

- If I paid you 200 euros?
- No, not if you paid me.

- 1,000 euros?
- No, no.

[in English] It doesn't sound appealing
anyway, man-made test-tube burger. No.

[narrator] A lot of people find the idea
of cell-based meat disgusting,

but a lot of people find
different meats disgusting too.

Disgust is very cultural. It's not innate.

Every culture has selected
some animal things to eat.

There are a lot of cultural differences
in what's disgusting.

[narrator] In many languages,

the names used
to describe different meats

can make eating
those animals easier.

Language can bring us closer to
or disconnect us from a reality.

When we look at the language
that we use around meat,

for example, it's very interesting.

We camouflage
the actual source of the meat.

[Rozin] So we don't say cow.
We say we're eating beef.

And we don't say we're eating pig.
We're eating pork.

When you start thinking about a pig
when you eat a pork chop,

you're on the way to being a vegetarian.

[narrator] And cell-based meat
might just have a naming problem.

Lab-grown, test-tube, and in vitro
don't sound especially appetizing.

That's why these companies
have been fighting for names like

cultured, clean, or cell-based meat.

But some people are fighting back.

In 2018, Missouri became
the first state in the US

to ban food products from being sold
under the name meat

unless they came
from a slaughtered animal,

punishable by up to a year in prison.

That same year,

the European Union proposed
banning meat alternatives

from advertising themselves
with words like

steak, sausage, or burger.

And many people who do
the work of raising farm animals

feel passionately
that cell-based meat isn't the same thing.

Consumers, when I travel,
tell me all the time

that when they purchase product
at the grocery store,

they think of what
we're doing as families,

on the land,
taking care of the land,

taking care of those cattle every day.

They don't think about... um...

somebody putting a group of cells together
and growing a new product.

That's not beef.

[narrator] But today, most of our food

isn't going straight
from the land to the table.

In fact, much of what we eat
started in a lab.

Like anything...

yogurt, cereal...

Gatorade...

applesauce.

All that stuff for commercial use
started off in a lab.

But where something starts
isn't where it ends.

It's not gonna be made in a lab. It's
gonna be made in a manufacturing facility.

[narrator] And the animals we eat
have been engineered over millennia

through selective breeding,
artificial insemination, growth hormones,

24-hour climate-controlled warehouses,

fortified feed, and drugs.

In the US, more than 70 percent
of all antibiotics sold each year

now go to farm animals.

Now, people think
of corn or beef as natural.

They're not natural, of course.
They're highly domesticated products.

An enormous amount of human processing
is going in there.

[narrator] Technology enabled us to eat
animals the way we do today,

and new technology
might be the only thing

that can help us satisfy
our craving for meat in the future.

The reason why we're here today is
because animal products are so awesome.

But they change the surface of our Earth.

It's creating epidemic viruses.

It's threatening how useful
our antibiotics are.

What's going to change the market
is what always changes the market:

money and a product that people like.

This is just the story of technology,

and I know people don't like to think
of food as technology, but it is.

The idea of meat is a lot more...

emotionally fraught
than the idea of a smartphone.

Right? Meat is more
than just a taste of the animal.

Right? Meat is identity, it is culture,
it is the stories we tell ourselves.

[narrator] For decades,

we've dreamed of a future
when we could have meat without animals.

[man in Italian] No head... no wings.

It's all meat!

[machine buzzes]

Oh!

[man in English] We no longer enslave
animals for food purposes.

You've seen something
as fresh and tasty as meat,

but inorganically materialized,

out of patterns
used by our transporters.

[narrator] Back in 1932,
even Winston Churchill predicted...

"We shall escape the absurdity
of growing a whole chicken

in order to eat the breast or wing,

by growing these parts separately
under a suitable medium."

Just think about the modern world.

How we've conquered problems
in water purification.

We have satellites.

Why can't we do this?
And the answer is we probably can.

[theme music playing]