Two Steps Forward For Meat Alternatives

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, are there limits to science and the things we can know, plus spaghetti science, and why physicists are fascinated by a buttered noodle. But first, we’re plating up a different kind of food story.

As you have surely noticed, there’s a movement in the science world to find ways to develop meat and dairy substitutes that don’t require animals, and that might be more climate friendly. And there are a few ways to do this– by building off of animal cells grown in a lab or growing plant based.

Scientists are now reporting two new breakthroughs in food science. And here to dish about them and other notable news from the week is Science Friday producer Kathleen Davis. Hey, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Hey, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What is the first course in our food science roundup?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, so before I lift my cloche on this platter I have for you, are you a big calamari person?

FLORA LICHTMAN: You know, I’ve never met a battered and fried food I didn’t like.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I like that attitude.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I guess, yes. But I also will say, I have also heard stories of counterfeit calamari that have made me think twice about it.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, I don’t know that story. What is that made out of?

FLORA LICHTMAN: You do not want to know.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. [CHUCKLES] I do like calamari. I’ve been known to order some fried calamari for the table. And this recent breakthrough might bring you back on to team calamari. So there’s new research that was published by the American Chemical Society that there’s a new type of calamari, and that is 3D-printed calamari.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 3D printed from what?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes, so this is a much-tested recipe that involves mung bean protein as the base. And you’ve also got microalgae, a thickener, and canola oil. So basically what happens is a 3D printer forms this paste into rings that are about two inches wide. These rings are frozen over night, and then they are battered and deep fried.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, so this is like veg-amari.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes, exactly. So this is plant-based, 3D-printed calamari. And one thing that I really like about this story is that the researchers behind this have been steadily improving their recipe over time. So in 2023, they presented a previous version of this 3D-printed, plant-based calamari. And this was at a conference. And the reaction was that the taste was acceptable, but the texture was kind of gross. [CHUCKLES]

And with calamari, or plant-based calamari, you want the texture to be optimal because it’s kind of gross if it’s not. Now these researchers say that they’ve nailed the texture. And another interesting thing is that this plant-based calamari actually has more protein in it than the actual squid version.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s amazing. What is the texture? Is it just the right amount of rubbery?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes. So they were analyzing all sorts of textural things from chewiness, hardness, springiness, and cohesiveness. So they say that once this is deep fried, the textural properties are close to real calamari. And they were kind of the right amount of soft and the right amount of chewy.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Would you order this?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I would, for sure. I think, especially because it’s plant based, even if the texture is a little bit off from actual squid, I can’t imagine it would be so off putting that I just wouldn’t eat it. But I am just one person. The researchers behind this study say that since this has been successful in a smaller sample size, they’re going to study now if consumers would accept this and see if it’s even scalable.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so we started the meal with calamari for the table, as you say. What’s our main?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, so I need you to have a little bit more of an open mind for this one, Flora. So we were just talking about plant based meat. What we’re going to talk about now is an example of cultured meat. So this is cells grown in a lab to make, in this case, what is biologically chicken.

So there was a big breakthrough recently by Japanese researchers who made a single square piece of chicken that is a little bit less than three inches wide and a little bit less than an inch thick. It weighs a third of an ounce. But this is the largest lab-grown chicken nugget to date.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, it is exactly the dimensions of a nugget, it sounds like.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, so in theory, it should look like a chicken nugget.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So I thought we could make biggish hunks of lab-grown meat. Why is this a breakthrough, or what am I missing?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So it’s been notoriously hard to make these lab-grown groups of cells cohesive. So what tends to happen is that they stop growing and sticking together at a millimeter or less. And because traditionally these little cell clusters have been so small, they don’t really mimic muscle. So what is happening here is that this is one cohesive group of cells that has been grown together, and it really does mimic muscle.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Which is kind of fascinating and ironic, given that chicken nuggets themselves actually don’t mimic muscle in any way, if you’ve ever had a nugget.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes. So you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLING] So how did they do it?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So it’s a little bit complicated. The scientists made a bioreactor that mimics a circulatory system. And what they did is they used these hollow fibers that act like veins. And they distribute nutrients and oxygen into this meat. And this seems to be the trick to keeping these cells alive and helping them grow cohesively.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does it taste like chicken?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: One thing about this story is that the chicken has actually not been tasted. And the scientists say that they didn’t make it with food grade materials because this was more so a test to see if this fake circulatory system would work and how big they could get this piece of chicken.

So there are obviously still questions about what the flavor, what the texture, is going to be, and if it will be indistinguishable from another chicken nugget. But this is just one test case. There’s been work on cultured meat happening all over the world. There have been burgers. There’s been sushi grade salmon and chicken fillets that have been created from cultivated cells.

But, as I said previously, those have been instances where they’re these smaller clusters that are put together. But the real question in this sphere is, would you eat this? Flora, would you eat this cultivated chicken?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I don’t– in what context?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Would you fry this up in your air fryer and serve it to your kids?

FLORA LICHTMAN: In the apocalyptic future, for sure! In the now, [CHUCKLING] I just don’t know. It’s not sounding super appetizing to me. But nuggets don’t sound that appetizing to me. So I might be the wrong audience.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. That’s fair. And another huge component here is even if you say yes, I would try this. How much would you actually be willing to pay for it? Right now this stuff is super hard to scale up. So it’s going to be a while before the prices of lab-grown chicken or lab-grown burgers are actually comparable to the real deal that you can get in the grocery store right now.

And there’s this other interesting layer, that this has become a really politicized topic. So Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama have actually criminalized the creation and the sale of lab-grown meat. So that means you could be fined or jailed, in theory, for making or distributing this. And the reasoning behind this is that they say it’s an effort to protect local ranchers and food producers.

But frankly, this doesn’t mean a lot right now because there are only two companies that are even authorized to sell cultured meat in the US right now. And those sales have been to restaurants. And none of this is happening in those states that have banned this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, staying with food, there were some pretty big composting news out of New York City.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes. So as a lot of our listeners probably know, composting is this practice of separating food scraps and organic material from the rest of your trash and then processing it, breaking it down to be this nutrient-rich dirt. And you can use it in gardens and parks, and it improves soil health. So what it looks like in your house is that instead of your banana peels and your eggshells going into the garbage, they go into another container.

So here in New York, composting very recently became mandatory. And so that means you have to get a new bin to go alongside with the trash and the recycling. And it’s picked up every week alongside those other things. And starting next year, property owners and landlords can be fined between $25 and $300 if residents don’t sort their food waste out of their trash.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what’s the reasoning? Why did New York City make this mandatory?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Composting is good for the planet, point blank. So taking food waste out of landfills is a huge way to cut down on methane production, which is a greenhouse gas. And this isn’t a new concept for cities. So other large cities have had mandatory composting for years. San Francisco started doing it way back in 2009, for example.

And for being the largest city in the US. New York is just really bad at composting. So less than 5% of compostable materials were collected and processed last year. That other 95% wound up in landfills. And this went into effect last month, this mandatory composting. So even in this last month, there has been a significant increase in the amount of compostable material that has been picked up by the Department of Sanitation.

So in just one week, 2.5 million pounds were picked up across the boroughs, and that was compared to 737,000 pounds the same week the year prior.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s awesome. I do feel like, as someone who’s used one of those New York City little brown bins, there is something very satisfying about diverting that and knowing it’s not going to a landfill.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah. I like to think of myself as a pretty good composter. I’ve volunteered at composting sites in the city. The thing is, when you live in an apartment like a lot of New Yorkers do, you do have to get kind of crafty. So what I do personally is, I’ll put my food scraps in a bag. And then I put that in my freezer. And then once that bag fills up, I just kind of dump it in the bin outside.

But I slip up sometimes. And I think it’s likely that it’s going to take a while to get the city used to this new mandatory composting. There has been a little bit of criticism that the city is not doing enough outreach to residents. And once those fines come along, then people might get kind of mad at composting.

But at the end of the day, this is a city with so many people and so many restaurants and so many grocery stores. And so any improvement with the amount of food waste and compostable materials that we can take out of landfills is going to make a big difference.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, your last story for us is new research about how we heal.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes, so it’s pretty obvious that we, compared to other primates, are pretty hairless.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Speak for yourself, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: [CHUCKLES] I feel very grateful to not have a rug of fur on my back. But it turns out that the fact that we don’t have a lot of hair on our bodies– again, compared to primates. Everyone’s a little bit different. This means that our recovery time for injuries is longer than it is for other mammals.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Tell me more.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, so researchers studied wounds in a few different animals. So they looked at chimpanzees, monkeys, mice, and humans. And in the wound healing process, they found that human wounds took twice as long to heal as the wounds of any other mammal.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And they think that hairiness is the reason, or lack of hairiness?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes. So here’s the theory. So hair follicles have stem cells. And so normally those stem cells focus on making hair. But in the case of a wound, those stem cells shift focus to grow new skin instead. So in a zoo, if you have some chimpanzees that get into a tussle or something, and they get injured, in theory their wounds are going to heal twice as fast as if the same thing happens to two kids on the playground.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Twice as fast?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Twice as fast. And so the benefit of being– kind of the thought process or the theory behind why this may be the case is that a long time ago, humans had this evolutionary trade off where we shed most of that thick body hair to have skin that is better at cooling off. So we have this awesome ability to sweat and cool off. But because of that, we’re not covered in hair anymore. And so we lost some of our magical wound-healing abilities.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Got it.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, Flora, it is your turn. Did anything catch your eye this week?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. There was one study especially that really hit close to home for me, like basement floor. It was a new paper in PLOS One about the limits of your home washing machine. And just to set this up a little bit, I love my washing machine. It’s my favorite appliance.

I have two small kids, and I think of my washing machine as my one-and-done sanitation device. I really believe it capable of miraculous things. I just pop in our virus, bacterially caked clothes, and in my mind they emerge sanitized.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Sure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have a special relationship with washing machines?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Listen, Flora, as I said, I live in a small New York City apartment. And I do not have in-unit washer and dryer. And so my washing happens at a laundromat. And I really hope that I’m getting sanitized clothes when I go to this communal place.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so this new study may shock you just like it did me. So this was the question that the researchers posed– do home washing machines disinfect clothes? And they posed the question in the context of medical professionals– nurses, doctors, home health care workers– who might be exposed to antibiotic resistant bacteria at work, because we know from previous studies that fabric can transmit pathogens for weeks.

So these researchers wondered, does it make sense to trust, like I trust, that your washing machine is going to kill microorganisms?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I’m scared what you’re about to tell me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLES] Here’s what they found. They tested six models of washing machine. And you better believe I was in the supplemental data to see if mine was on there. And it wasn’t. And they tested these machines on normal and rapid cycles, using hot water. And here’s what they found. On rapid cycles, half the machines did not disinfect clothes, or their measure was cut down microbes by 90% And on a standard cycle on hot, one third did not disinfect. So you can’t trust your washing machine.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Don’t love the sound of that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Some of it, they said, was that the machines weren’t actually getting as hot as they said they would. So they suggest servicing your machine. They suggest disinfecting your washing machine, which is, of course, something I’ve never thought to do in my years of having one. So I will surely be doing that as soon as we wrap.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, Thanks for telling me about it, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’re so welcome. Enjoy your next trip to the laundromat.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I will be thinking a lot about bacteria.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Science Friday producer, Kathleen Davis.

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