I eat Yorkshire pig Dawn and it is very tasty. But don't worry. She's fine, wandering around a shelter in upstate New York. (She is said to appreciate belly rubs and sunshine.) I'm in San Francisco, at an Italian spot south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon made not from meat in the traditional sense, but from plants mixed with “cultured” pork fat. You see, Dawn donated a small sample of fat that a company called Mission Barns obtained to multiply in devices called bioreactors, providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Since much of the flavor in pork and other meats comes from animal fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami from plants, but still make them taste a heck of a lot like sausage and salami.
I'm struggling to describe this experience because cultured meat short-circuits my brain – my mouth thinks I'm eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows it's fundamentally different, and that Dawn (that's the one above) didn't have to die for it. This is the best thing I came up with: this is dietary meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so are cultured meatballs. They just taste a little less meaty, at least to my taste. Which is understandable, because the only animal product in this food is fat grown in a bioreactor.
Cultured pork is the latest entrant in the effort to reimagine meat. For years, plant-based foods have imitated burgers, chicken and fish with even more convincing combinations of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside of animals, then combining it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, reducing the environmental and ethical costs of factory farming. The company says it's starting with pork because it's a big market and foods like bacon are high in fat, but its technology is “cell-independent,” meaning it can also produce beef and chicken.
To be fair, Mission Barns' creations taste great, partly because they're “unstructured,” in industry parlance. Pork loin is a complex ball of fat, muscle cells and connective tissue that is very difficult and expensive to replicate, but meatballs, salami or sausage include other ingredients. This allows Mission Barns to experiment with what plant they use as a base, to which they add spices to bring out the flavor. It's a technique they can iterate on, essentially creating better and better meat by playing with ingredients in different ratios.
So the bacon I ate, for example, had a nice applewood smoke to it. The meatballs had the expected springiness. On a later visit to the Mission Barns headquarters on the other side of town, I also got to try two salami prototypes—both were as spiced as you'd expect, but less elastic, making them a little easier to chew than what you'd find on a charcuterie board. (Feeling of food in mouth renowned in the industry The salami slices even left greasy marks on the paper they were served on, a small trace of Dawn on the world.
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I was one of first people purchase a cultured pork product. While Mission Barns has so far only sold its products at this Italian restaurant and, for a limited time, at a grocery store in Berkeley ($13.99 for an eight-pack of meatballs similar to more expensive products from organic and regenerative farms), it plans to expand production and sell the technology to other companies to produce more cultured foods. (She's assessing how big bioreactors need to be to achieve price parity with traditional meat products.) The idea is to provide an alternative to animal agriculture, which uses a lot of land, water and energy to raise animals and ship their flesh around the world. Livestock accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions – depending on who estimates them – and that's not to mention the cruelty involved in keeping pigs, chickens and cows in unpleasant and sometimes inhumane conditions.
However, getting animal cells to grow outside of the animal is not easy. First, if cells have nothing to attach to, they die. That's why the Mission Barns cultivator uses a sponge-like structure full of nooks and crannies to provide more surface area for cell growth. “We have a medium, which is a nutrient solution that we give to these cells,” said Saam Shahrokhi, chief technology officer at Mission Barns. “Essentially, we are repeating all the environmental signals that tell cells inside the body to gain fat. [but] outside the body.” Although Dawn's fat is the fat of a Yorkshire pig, Shahrokhi said they can easily produce fat from other breeds such as Mangalitsa, known as Kobe beef from pork. (In June the company received approval from the USDA to bring its cultured fat to market.)
With fat in hand, Mission Barns can mix it with plant-based proteins. If you're familiar with Impossible Foods, they use soy to mimic the feel and look of ground beef and add soy leghemoglobin, which is a heme-like substance that gives the meat its beefy flavor. Depending on the flavor and texture it's trying to copy, Mission Bay uses pea protein for meatballs and sausage, wheat for bacon and beans for salami. “The plant-based meat industry has done a pretty good job with texture,” said Bianca Le, special projects manager at Mission Barns. “I think what they're really lacking is flavor and juiciness, and that's obviously where the fat is.”
But fat is just the beginning. Mission Barn's offerings not only have to taste good, but they also have to be odor-free when they come out of the packaging and while they're cooking. Formulators have to adjust the pH level, which can lead to protein degradation if not balanced. You also need to know how food behaves on the stove or in the oven. “If someone has to relearn how to cook a piece of bacon or a meatball, it's never going to work,” said Zach Tindall, product development and culinary manager at Mission Barns.
When I pick up this piece of salami, it should feel like the real thing, in more ways than one. Indeed, it is greasy in the hand and tastes like smoked meat. It even went through a dry aging process to reduce moisture. “We treat it like a regular piece of salami,” Tindall said.
Cultured meat companies could also go further. Andcommon. “I also like the idea of taking their pork fat and adding it to a beef burger—what happens if you do that?” said Barb Stuckey, director of new product strategy for Mattson, a food developer that has worked with many cultured meat companies. “Mixing species is not something we usually do. But with this technology, we can.”
Of course, the big question on this new food front is: who exactly is it for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it was separated from the cruelty of industrial agriculture? Are meat eaters willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? According to Le, market research conducted by Mission Barns found that his early adopters are actually flexitarians—people who eat mostly plant-based foods but occasionally consume animal products. But Le adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley involved people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans.
There is also the issue of quantifying how much environmental benefit cultured fat can offer compared to industrially produced pork. On a larger scale, one of the benefits of growing food could be that companies could produce it in more places—that is, instead of moving sprawling pig farms and slaughterhouses to rural areas, bioreactors could be run in cities, cutting down on the costs and emissions associated with shipping. However, these factories will require energy to grow fat cells, although they can be powered by renewable electricity. “We modeled our process on a large commercial scale and then compared it to bacon production in the U.S.,” Le said. (The company wouldn't disclose specific details, saying it is in the process of patenting its technology.) “And we've found that with renewable energy, we get significantly better results in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”
However, it remains to be seen whether consumers bite. US Meat Alternatives Market has softened significantly lately: Beyond Meat, which produces plant-based foods such as burgers and sausages, incomes drop significantlypartly due to consumer shift away from processed foods. But by licensing its technology to other countries, Mission Barns' strategy is to expand into new markets outside the United States.
The challenges of cultured meat go beyond engineering when you get into messaging and branding—telling consumers that they're buying something that might actually be part meat. “When you buy chicken, you are getting 100 percent chicken,” Stuckey said. “I think a lot of people get into cultured meat thinking there's going to be 100 percent cultured chicken on the market, and it's not going to be that way. It's going to be something else.”
Regardless of the trajectory of fatty foods, Dawn will continue to rub shoulders with llamas, bask in the sun, and rub bellies in upstate New York—even as she makes the plants taste more like pork.
