Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food. Friedrich details his vision for a more sustainable food system through technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat and outlines the promising progress and significant challenges remaining in scaling these novel proteins. Worthington and Friedrich debate the roles of policy, public opinion, and big agriculture in determining whether alternative proteins can truly transform our food system or remain forever niche.
Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food. Friedrich details his vision for a more sustainable food system through technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat and outlines the promising progress and significant challenges remaining in scaling these novel proteins. Worthington and Friedrich debate the roles of policy, public opinion, and big agriculture in determining whether alternative proteins can truly transform our food system or remain forever niche.
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Bryony Worthington
Hello. I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Bruce Friedrich, founder and CEO of the Good Food Institute. Bruce and the international team that make up the GFI network are focused on feeding the planet more efficiently by advancing and promoting meat-like proteins, minus the rearing and killing of animals. The theory is that if science can crack how to mass produce these alternative proteins at lower price points than today's meat, they can provide calories to consumers in the ways that have proven so popular, but with a much lower environmental impact. As the industrial meat industry is such a big contributor to climate change and other unpriced externalities, I was eager to dig into this theory with Bruce and to learn about some of the challenges they're facing. Please join me in welcoming Bruce Friedrich to Cleaning Up.
Michael Liebreich
Before we get started, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like episodes. Subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com. That's cleaninguppod.substack.com. Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.
BW
Hi, Bruce. It's such a pleasure to have you on Cleaning Up. Thank you for joining us. I wanted to get going just by asking you to say in your own words who you are and what you do.
Bruce Friedrich
Thank you very much, Bryony. I'm really delighted to be on, I love the podcast. It's been a while since you and I saw one another, so this is fun. My name is Bruce Friedrich, I'm the president and founder of The Good Food Institute. The Good Food Institute is a network of science focused think tanks that are focused on alternative proteins. So we were founded on the basis of the observation that about 20% of direct emissions are attributable to animal agriculture, about 80% of agricultural land goes toward animal agriculture, and that is expected to go up and up and up. We're up 70%, the amount of meat consumed on the globe, north of 360 million metric tonnes in the last 26 years. We have 26 years to 2050 and meat production and consumption is going to be up something like that to 2050. If that happens, climate goals are going to be impossible. Biodiversity and deforestation goals are going to be a lot harder. And we think giving people what they like about meat but produced without all those external costs, we think that is the challenge, and what we focus on.
BW
Great. Well, thank you for that, and I've been tracking your work since, I think, quite early on. So it's really lovely to get this opportunity to dive in with you. Could we just take a little step back then and tell us a little bit more about your personal journey? So what led up to you founding the Good Food Institute?
BF
Well, I read the book 'Diet for a Small Planet' a very long time ago, by Francis Moore Lappé, and Lappé's observation is that animals are extraordinarily inefficient at turning crops into meat. So as somebody who took very seriously the idea that we should live simply so that others may simply live, the idea that it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of chicken meat, because the vast majority of what you feed to a chicken, the chicken expends simply living their life. That means nine times the land, nine times the water, nine times the pesticides and herbicides. It's literally 800% food waste in the physiology of the chicken and farmed fish, pigs and cattle are even worse than that. So that was the thing that really sort of shook me awake about the harms of industrial animal agriculture. And the thing that caused me to found GFI was the observation that meat consumption globally just kept going up and up and up, even in the face of overwhelming efforts to educate the general public about the harm. And then hearing people like Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, Josh Tetrick, the founder of EatJust saying instead of begging people to eat less meat, why don't we produce meat from plants and cultivate actual animal meat and cultivators without the land use needs, without the level of emissions, without the antimicrobial drugs and so on And that just really struck me. I spent some time chatting with people about whether a nonprofit organisation focused on that made sense. There was a lot of enthusiasm and so I started one.
BW
And what was it about your previous life, then, before you did this, that kind of gave you the skills or the insights to be able to run this not for profit group. What were you doing beforehand?
BF
So I spent about six years running a homeless shelter in a soup kitchen in inner city Washington, DC. I spent a couple years teaching in inner city Baltimore, Maryland, through a programme called Teach for America, which takes professionals and drops them into our worst performing schools. I spent probably 20 years working for nonprofit organisations in animal protection, and that's kind of my background up until I founded GFI. I also got a master's degree in education at a university called Johns Hopkins, and got a law degree from Georgetown University's Law Centre. But I'm not sure... I don't have the... so GFI is: we're six organisations, I said, a network of science thinktanks. We have about 220 odd full time staff. The plurality are scientists, and I have a non-profit background and economics and law degree, and so I don't really understand science that well, but we have a lot of incredibly smart scientists helping us figure out, what does it look like to produce meat from plants that competes? I mean, the whole goal is, just like with renewable energy, the idea is to give people everything they like about energy, so you need to solve principally cost and intermittency. Or if you're talking about electric vehicles, you need to have them be a reasonable price, you need to have a charging infrastructure, you need to have a reasonable battery range. We think absolutely necessary for plant-based meat and cultivated meat to compete, it needs to taste at least as good and it cannot cost more. So those are the basic scientific challenges that we are focused on. Basically producing something from plants that is indistinguishable and the same price or lower, and cultivating actual animal meat. And there, it does taste already exactly the same, but we've got some challenges to getting the price down.
BW
So let's get into then, what encompasses this idea of alternative proteins? So you talk there about plant-based alternatives, but there seems to be two groups of technologies that you're particularly following, right? There's the plant-based alternatives that look like meat, and then there's cultivated meat. Can you just give us a quick description of the two categories?
BF
Yeah. I mean, the first thing to say about plant-based meat is that it's not the plant-based meat that I grew up on. So the central brainstorm is that meat is made up of lipids, amino acids, minerals and water. That is everything that constitutes meat. Plants also have lipids, amino acids, minerals and water. But because plant protein is so much more efficient than animal protein — again, nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out, 40 calories into a cow to get one calorie back out — we should be able to hire scientists, chemical engineers, biotech specialists, mechanical engineers. We should be able to figure out how to replicate the precise taste, texture and everything else of meat using plants so that it is literally indistinguishable. And because it is so much more efficient, we should be able to get it to a place where it costs less, plus it will be more nutritious, lower fat, lower saturated fat, some complex carbohydrates, some fibre, no cholesterol. So a healthier product but from plants. And then cultivated meat: So just like you can take a seed from a plant or a cutting from a plant, and grow it into an entire plant, you can take a small sampling of cells from a chicken or a pig or a fish or any animal, you can bathe the cells in nutrients and grow it into actual animal meat. Again, far more efficient, far less land, no need for antimicrobial drugs, no contribution to pandemic risk, no bacterial contamination. If it's seafood, no dioxins and mercury. You've got a healthier product but again, because it's so much more efficient, as we scale it up, we should be able to get to a place at which it's literally the exact same thing, far fewer external costs, and also at the same price, or a lower price.
BW
So then starting, perhaps thinking about the the plant-based, the first category. I mean, many people will have come across the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Meat products because I think it was four or five years ago that they started to appear on shelves, and many people will have tried them. So I think for that part, people probably can imagine what this entails. But for the cultivated meat, talk to us a little bit more about the process, because I think I understand it that this came out of tissue and organ growth, this came from the medical profession originally? Is that correct?
BF
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So it really is as simple as: take what we know about human therapeutics for tissue engineering, figure out how to slash the costs of this... well, slash the cost of all of the production processes and scale it way up. Because right now, we're using pharma-grade feed to grow human tissue, and we need food-grade feed to grow animal tissue. We're doing it at very small volumes. So what does it look like to solve going from a petri dish or a small bioreactor to something more at the 50,000 or 200,000 or even a million litre scale, those are basically the scientific challenges. And one of the great things about cultivated meat is the long line of really impressive medical doctors and tissue engineers who are super enthusiastic about what their skillset can do with regard to slashing the climate emissions, the land use needs, the global health consequences of the current system. So it is a long list of very impressive doctors and PhDs in tissue engineering who are working in this field, both in academe, as well as people who are starting companies serving as chief science or chief technology officers for the various startups in cultivated meat. And that's basically the science. It's a big site. It's a little easier to say than it is to actually accomplish. But the more scientists dive in, the more optimistic they become.
BW
Oh, that's interesting. Let's just bring this to life for people. So essentially, you start with a very tiny culture of an of an animal cell, you immortalise it, meaning that you allow it to reproduce itself. And then you hold it in a bioreactor, that's got all the nutrients and the oxygen and everything it needs to grow into, what you then shape into a meat product, minus all the fur and the feathers and everything else that would would be, as you would describe it, as food waste, which goes up to make an animal. But what other some of the challenges in those bioreactors and give us a little bit of a sense of what you're trying to crack there in the science?
BF
Well, there are a bunch of things that we're trying to crack. It's very easy to say immortalised cells, it's less easy to do. It's very easy to talk about bathing the cells and nutrients but if you look at what actually works to cause cell growth, the variety of different cell culture media is really quite broad. The cost of some of the growth factors, the cost of some of the ingredients, can be extraordinarily high. So figuring out how to bring those costs down or produce those growth factors, or things like albumin, produce it synthetically, are some of the challenges. Making sure that we get the... Basically, making sure that we get the ingredients in the media precisely right and slash the costs — this is a wonderful opportunity for artificial intelligence, by the way, both of those challenges, both cell immortalization... It doesn't have to be immortalised cells. There are also people like the company Mosa Meat in the Netherlands that will have a small herd of donor animals so that they're not immortalising the cells. If you immortalise the cells, hypothetically, you could just have a few cells in a bank and never eat animals again. But that generally is going to require genetic engineering which may not get past the European Food Safety Authority, in which case they can have a small herd of animals and still produce an awful lot of meat from just a few cells per cow or chicken or pig in a painless biopsy. And then big challenges. You know, if you're going to have a 200,000... Like, there's a big debate about whether you want to have a bunch of 20,000 litre bioreactors, or a few 200,000 to a million litre bioreactors. There are really smart people on both sides of the debate in terms of what is going to be easier and less expensive. But at the end of the day, even in a 20,000 litre bioreactor, what it looks like to make sure that the cells are actually growing to maximum density in those conditions, it's never been done. So again, that's another pretty terrific opportunity for AI to do some of the modelling and figure out how to get that right?
BW
Yeah. And that's why a lot of what you do is try and get money into research and funding into science, because ultimately, there are still some fundamental science challenges, right? It's not ready to go. This is not something that's on the shelves today. Or if it is, it's got an extraordinarily high price bracket? Is that correct?
BF
Yeah, no, that's That's exactly right. So I said the plurality of our team members are scientists. We are a science thinktank. What we think is the way you create the maximally robust scientific ecosystem is through the sorts of government funding that currently flow into things like drug development, energy transition, advanced chips for AI, etc. We want to see that sort of government support for the science focused on solving the myriad challenges of bio-mimicking meat with plants, or cultivating meat directly from a small sampling of animal cells.
BW
And can we just talk a little bit about energy? Many of the viewers, listeners of this podcast will come from an energy background, and they'll be immediately thinking, 'But hang on a sec. All this sounds quite industrial. It sounds like it could be another demand on the energy system.' So tell us a little bit, have cost benefit analyses been done on, you know, are you going to get more calories out than you have to put in from a thermodynamic perspective?
BF
Um, well, definitely the energy needs are significant, especially on the cultivated meat side. There's a lot of heating and cooling that's going to be required, and that requires energy. It definitely profits from using renewable energy as the energy source to power the factories. There are an awful lot of very, sort of, obvious areas. So there was a techno-economic analysis that dives into the energy needs, and it dives into the various climate and air pollution and water use and kind of all of the standard life cycle analyses variables. And energy use, especially for cultivated meat, is very high. They point out that there are an awful lot of advances in technology that could slash the energy use needs, but the suggestion is definitely that using renewable energy will be extremely valuable. So one of the big advantages of cultivated and plant-based beef, relative to conventional beef, is that it cuts methane to zero. Right now, globally, more methane is produced... the plurality of methane comes from ruminant digestion, it's significantly more than oil and gas put together. It's about as much as oil gas and coal put together, and this slashes that to zero. Something like 70% of nitrous oxide, which is something like 250 times as powerful as CO2 as a greenhouse gas that's attributable to manure from farm animals. So all of that goes away, but energy use needs are significant. So energy transition is going to be critically important to maximum advantage for these technologies.
BW
And obviously, there is a, there is a waste product associated with the bioreactors and the processing rate because not 100% of the nutrients go in gets converted. So what happens to the waste product from these from this process system? I mean, that could be a source of methane, but it would be concentrated, so I guess you could process it, right? And you could actually use it, maybe as a form of energy generation. I'm imagining a lot of gloopy water, essentially. So maybe the calorific content isn't there, but you've got to take into account that that kind of externality, right as well?
BF
Yeah, the techno-economic analysis looks at that and basically finds that it's, I mean, it's not zero. And one of the things that they did not assume in the techno-economic analysis done by CE Delft is media recycling. There are already multiple companies who are doing media recycling. So the energy use numbers get better. Kind of all of the numbers get better if you're recycling the media. But yes, as with any industrial process, there is going to be, in this case, wastewater, although a fraction of what you're going to get from industrial farms. I mean, again, you're growing, right now something like 80% of soy is fed to farm animals. More than a billion metric tonnes of corn and wheat globally are fed to farm animals. A lot of those crops have fertiliser dumped on them, chemical fertilisers dumped on them, et cetera. That is an incredibly wastewater intensive process, and that stuff goes directly into streams and rivers. And then you've also got the industrial farms and you've got the slaughterhouses, both of which use overwhelming amounts of water and create an awful lot of wastewater that's sort of a toxic stew. This is a tiny fraction of that. And as you rightly noted, it's contained in a way that most of that is not.
BW
So looking at this a little bit holistically then. The movement as you describe it, that's been calling for changes in agriculture over the years. You'd essentially describe that as having failed? Because, actually, you know, if you look at the data, you can make a huge dent on all of the problems you've described if you just switch red meat for white meat, or, even better, switch all meat to a protein like a nut or soy, more directly, without the processing. Why not work on that too? Why is that not something you focus on?
BF
Oh, I definitely think the world should work on that too. So we're absolutely not suggesting that alternative proteins are some kind of silver bullet. We're not suggesting that they solve all the problems of our industrial food system. I'm here because of education, most of the people who started these companies and most of the people who work at GFI are in our roles because of the movement to educate people about the external costs of the current system, so 100% supportive of that. The one thing I would just say is if your goal is, you know, if you look at what's true, which is that, right now, we consume 70% more meat than we did 26 years ago. The upward trajectory really just is a basically straight line, except covid. All of the predictions are at least 50% more meat by 2050 and all of the science indicates that if we go up at all, 2.0 is out of reach, just on the basis of the meat industry. It has to go down; methane from ruminants have to go down. The only scenario in which that happens is if alternative proteins are successful. So it's not that anything we've been doing we should stop doing. It's not that it's been a failure, but it is that it is extremely unlikely to change the basic upward trajectory of meat consumption. So we're definitely in favour of all of the above. We think this tool should be added to the toolkit, not that other things should be abandoned, but that we should do this too, essentially. I will note antimicrobial resistance, the UK government has said it is a more certain risk to humanity than climate change. 70% of medically relevant antibiotics, dual use, useful in human beings, are fed to farm animals. If we have 70% more farm animals in 2050 that problem gets significantly worse. And that is actually worse in smaller animals, rather than larger animals. And then similarly, pandemic risk, the UN Environment Programme and the International Livestock Research Institute released a report in July of 2020 called Preventing the Next Pandemic. They listed the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one was more animal agriculture, because every additional animal is an additional potential vector for the next pandemic. The second one was the industrial treatment of farm animals, because when you have 50,000 chickens in a barn, all of them so genetically similar, if one of them get sick, they don't have the immune response to fight off the bacteria and it wipes out the entire flock of chickens. That goes away with alternative... I mean, first that is, again, that's chickens and pigs, more than it cattle. So it's the smaller animals more than it's bigger animals. And the risk of that happening if you're making meat from plants or cultivating meat directly, the risk of that goes from kind of huge to zero with this way of making meat.
BW
To the extent that it can penetrate the market, right? At the moment, it's about at a very low penetration, and it's got to grow. But coming back to your points about the global meat trends. I think it's true, I've been looking at FAO data, that yes, globally, meat consumption is rising, but that's mainly because of affluence in places like China and Southeast Asia. In fact, in western, more developed economies, our meat consumption is relatively flat. And actually, there's been a very helpful trend from a climate perspective of switching out red meat for white meat for chickens. We've just talked about some of the challenges of that. But if we were to just focus in on what's making up that growth rate? There are some good trends. And I would argue, as as much as we need to talk about these alternatives, we should be celebrating and talking about what we've seen to be working to pull down that growth in highly processed beef in favour of a highly processed white meat. I'm not saying it's a perfect answer, but it's not true that we can't see some pathways to some of these problems being solved. And in fact, decades of data show that some of these things are going in the right direction in developed economies.
BF
But do you think solved Bryony? I've seen an awful lot of forecasting from agricultural economists, and even ruminant meat is predicted to be up 60 to 90% through 2050.
BW
In particular parts of the world, right?
BF
Yeah, exactly. And I think that I'm a big fan, yes let's do all of the above. Let's not stop doing anything that's working. But if you're thinking about what are... I mean, one of the things that's really great about alternative proteins is that, like renewable energy and electric vehicles, they can scale globally, if we're successful. Other interventions don't have the same economic incentive. And what that means is that it's very hard to take success in Germany or the Netherlands or Denmark and replicate that success in Brazil or China or someplace else in the world. And then the other thing I would just say is Climate Works Foundation and the Global Methane Hub released a report last year, they called it a Global Innovation Needs Assessment. McKinsey economists did the work. A global innovation needs assessment on agricultural methane reduction. They looked at rice interventions, they looked at food loss and waste, they looked at livestock interventions, and they looked at alternative proteins. The one intervention that had significant economic benefits — 98% of the economic benefits, according to their analysis — was alternative proteins, because it's the one thing where, if you get it right, if you create, just like renewable energy and electric vehicles. If you get it so that it is what consumers want, it can scale in a way that most other interventions seem to be unlikely to.
BW
Yeah, I hear that. But also, I would just contend that there are whole swathes of the global population who are living on protein, rich diets, without the need of highly processed Impossible Burgers, and without the need for cultivated meat, they just use legumes and chickpeas and other forms of protein, soy in its raw form. And you know, I'm thinking of India and China here where they they've sustained themselves on a plant-based diet. Many of them, are vegetarians, and it's culturally what they do. Now not the whole country, but we could all just probably just be a little bit more Indian, right? And that may well be a significant wedge that can scale, because it already has scaled to that country's scale, which is huge, right? And same in China with its soy consumption. I'm not saying there aren't problems associated with it, but just saying, the only thing that can solve climate change is manufactured proteins... You know, there are examples out there, if we can just get them to leapfrog without having to go through the highly processed, synthetic, industrialised agriculture of the West, then there's hope there in that, right?
BF
I definitely don't think we should stop doing any of those interventions. I will say it's my strong impression that that is precisely what the global climate and global health community has been attempting to do — get the rest of the world to go a little more Indian. Even in the US, the five highest years for per capita meat consumption are the most recent five. Even in the UK, which is oftentimes referred to as like vegetarian Mecca, meat production and consumption is not down. In the last 10 years, maybe in like —
BW
Our read meat... our ruminants are down. Our overall meat isn't but our ruminants are down because we switched to white meat because it's easier, cheaper. People find it easier to cook with, etc. So, so, from me,
BF
Yeah, no. And I think that's a that's sort of exactly the point and the theory of change. And you think about something like land use needs and nature and biodiversity preservation. Cultivated meat... cultivated chicken requires a fourth of the land, cultivated beef requires a 10th of the land. Plant-based chicken requires a sixth of the land. Plant-based beef requires 1/20th of the land. So the land use needs and the climate benefits, as well as getting rid of the antibiotics that are useful in human medicine, as well as slashing pandemic risk, these are really powerful positive outcomes. And they don't take away from anybody eating more like Indians. Let's encourage that. But mostly people are not eating more like Indians, they're eating more chicken instead of beef, which, from a climate standpoint is a win. But it's a little bit of a win, like going from driving a SUV to driving another really big car. It's better than driving the SUV, but shifting toward legumes, which most people are unwilling to do, or plant based and cultivated meat, which, if we can get to price and taste parity, I think we'll, see people simply switch.
BW
So let's talk a little bit about the role of the farmer in all of this then. So it seems that there's obviously going to be feedstocks that need to go in with the plant-based meats. There's plant-based proteins that need to be grown and cultivated and fed in. And there's growing material that's needed for the cultivating meat. So what role do you see the agricultural industry playing going forward? What kind of crops? Where is this growth going to happen?
BF
Yeah, I mean, the Green Alliance in the UK released a report maybe two or three weeks ago, and they looked at 10 countries in Europe, because they're focused on Europe. And a couple of things they said that I think are worth noting. The first one is that the 10 countries put together were able to go from massive amounts of agricultural imports to sustainability, so it was really good for the farming communities in those countries, in that it allowed them to shift toward producing crops for human beings instead of producing crops for animals. But one of the really interesting things for farmers who farm animals is that it allowed for a four times, so 400%, of the level of agroecology and regenerative ranching. Because the really big pressure on agroecological practices with farm animals and regenerative ranching is the land use needs, because alternative proteins require so much less land, it challenges the get big or get out system, and allows for a system that works in harmony with nature, rather than in conflict with nature. So we do need farmers, obviously, to grow the legumes. So in the United States, a part of the group that lobbies with GFI to basically move more USDA resources in this direction, the Pea & Lentil Council, the American Soy Foods Association, other organisations that represent legume farmers. And then for people who are animal farmers, if they would like to move away from intensification and toward regenerative and agroecology, this offers a really great opportunity to move in that direction.
BW
But isn't there going to be a tension between the price parity challenge, because the whole thesis is this has got to this patty has got to be cheaper than a meat party. So aren't we just going to see the same big companies — Cargill, ADM, JBS — they'll just still want to produce these commodities at massive scale, potentially with more land going into this, with the lowest possible price point so they can compete and that will just mean soy production still growing. I love the idea that it's all going to be small pea producers in England. But unless there's something in the price and the economics of that that makes it cheaper, that is not going to happen. Still going to be a massive commodity market.
BF
So, I mean, there's, there's a lot packed into that question. I guess the first thing I will say is that right now, roughly 80% of global soy is fed to farm animals, mostly chickens and farmed fish and pigs. And as we discussed, it takes nine calories into a chicken, 10 or 11 calories into a pig or a farmed fish. Right now, less than 5% of the global soy crop is turned into tofu or tempeh or Impossible Burgers. That inefficiency, I think, is going to indicate that we're very unlikely to increase the amount of even the input crops relative to the industrial production of feedcrops.
BW
No your point about the efficiency is made. I'm just saying that this idea that it could be done through some kind of extensive, small farms or, like... I don't see how that changes, because the economies of scale are still going to be there, and it's still going to be the Cargills and the ADMS who are doing this. So they will just still source their commodities from the cheapest places, right? So they are not going to be nice regenerative farming in Europe.
BF
Well, I think that is a big part of why policy needs to be part of the equation. So if you look at, for example, the Green Alliance report... Yes, it's not going to be self... it's not going to happen automatically that all of this land is freed up. The other thing they talk about, in addition to having the opportunity for four times as much agroecology and regenerative ranching, is the obligation that countries have made the commitment that countries have made toward land restoration, rewilding, other forms of biodiversity preservation, focused on sequestering carbon That doesn't happen automatically, and agroecology and regenerative ranching doesn't happen automatically. But it becomes significantly easier in a world where the pressure to create massive amounts of mono-cropped feed crops exists in order to feed billions and billions of chickens and pigs and cattle. So yes, you're right, it's going to require policies, the same sorts of policies that the progressive food movement is already advocating, except those policies become a lot easier in a world where we're shifting away from the vast majority of crop land and grazing land going toward cheap meat. And just becomes a lot easier to shift toward a world where we have higher quality farm production.
BW
Yeah because I think at the root of this... What we probably both agree on is that the industrialization of the food system, which is both incredibly efficient at getting calories to people, but those calories sometimes are almost worthless by the time they arrive, is the root of the problem, right? And somehow most people in this space are saying, we've got to try and get to a system which is more diverse. That the people who are saying eat less meat are also helping in this. Take two, three days of the week where you don't eat meat, you're also contributing to that, taking the pressure off. Your wedge is another wedge. And then once you do that, then there is more space for nature. But also perhaps we can get to a point where the alternatives are coming down in price, so that the whole thing is self sustaining, because people are choosing it on price basis. But I think it's going to take all solutions moving at once, because the ones that you're advocating aren't quite here yet, right? Whereas giving up meat for a few days a week, anyone could do. They could do it tomorrow, right, that would be already taking the pressure off.
BF
Oh, yeah. And obviously there are lots and lots of organisations, from the World Wildlife Federation to the broader environmental and global health movement that are advocating for those sorts of campaigns. And those are great. We're definitely not suggesting that we have the only solution, and we certainly are humble about the fact that we've got a lot of scientific work to do to make sure that this is a solution at all. We do think it's the key tool in the toolkit for changing the global upward trajectory of increased animal meat, and we do point toward things like the World Bank, just last month in May, releasing a 250 page analysis of land use and agriculture and finding that alternative proteins have 6.1 gigatonnes of mitigation potential before you're even looking at sequestration potential from land use change. I mean, that's more than seven times the equivalent of simply eliminating air travel. It's roughly four times the equivalent of every car, bus and light truck on the planet turned electric. So the emissions potential is huge, but it's only realised if the products taste the same and cost the same, or taste better and cost less. And there is a fair amount of science to do, still, to get us, to get us to that point
BW
And if it's safe, right. You know, human health benefits, all the standard and standardisation around health concerns. You know, as I'm listening, I'm thinking, I know you'd like to draw an analogy with renewables, but my worry is that this could be more analogous to hydrogen in that it's a similar, but not quite the same, way of doing natural gas. It's kind of got potential, and you could probably read World Bank reports from years ago saying what great potential hydrogen has. But actually, when it comes down to it, the chemistry is different, it is harder, there are all these complexities. It isn't as safe, and therefore its role will actually be quite niche. And so, you know, I suppose that's a bit of a challenge, right? How do we make sure this is truly the renewables, not the hydrogen path that you're on here? What I guess your answer will be not to put words in your mouth. The more science we do, the more we'll know, right?
BF
I mean, it is certainly the case, the more science we do, the more we'll know. I'll also just note that people like David Kaplan — he's published more than 1000 peer review papers, he's the chair of Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. I was on a fireside chat with him in January, he said he's been completely shocked at how quickly the science has progressed over the last five years. He's absolutely convinced that this is doable, we didn't know five years ago. He's convinced now. You look at somebody like Mark Post, also a medical doctor and PhD in tissue engineering, kind of the father of this science, he's been at it for longer than anybody. He was a medical professor at Harvard Medical School. He's now a tissue engineering professor at Maastricht University. He said, the more he dives in, the more enthusiastic he gets, year by year, for the prospects for this. There are literally dozens of scientists who have dived in and who are incredibly optimistic about the prospects. That obviously doesn't mean that it's going to work out. But I do think, if you look at the upward trajectory of meat production and consumption, and you think about what that means in terms of antimicrobial resistance, pandemic risk, biodiversity loss, land use, climate change emissions, we don't know what's going to happen with solar and wind. We don't know what's going to happen across any technologies that are not currently omnipresent. We know that it's going to cost, you know, the energy transition is going to cost us another $4 trillion a year for quite a while. This is one thing that we should dive into and explore. Because if it works, and there's an awful lot of good evidence that it will, the benefits across a range of externalities are really, really high.
BW
No, no. That's exactly why I think science is there to help us advance.... It is not an easy problem, how do you feed this many billion people with minimal externalities, is a huge challenge. So we shouldn't be tying any hands behind our backs. We have every player on the field. But I guess in terms of our rhetoric and how we talk about it, for making sure that people are aware that it's a tomorrow technology, right, it's not here yet today, and that there are some challenges which are associated with the energy consumption that in the short term could push emissions up if they're done badly. We've just got to place it in this context. So that it's not overhyped or overrelied on. Sorry, there wasn't really a question there, but perhaps my question is, one of the things that GFI has done is, you know, you have an open table policy, you bring everyone to the table, you've sat down with some of the big industrial, agricultural, dominant companies, and it's a highly centralised supply chain, right? There's only five or six companies who dictate most of the world's agricultural prices. How confident are you that that engagement is resulting in a genuine change towards a more sustainable practice? Or do you run the risk of being the fig leaf, the little green tinge that they can say, that they can point to, to say it's okay, we've got climate change. Because we've got this novel protein idea, which the oil and gas industry has done for decades with CCS, right? You know, or are now doing the hydrogen. Don't worry, we got this. No need to change. Is it risk that novel proteins serves that purpose for the big guys?
BF
There's certainly not any indication that it's going to serve that purpose. You don't see any of the big guys doing sort of any of that. I think they're, very reasonably not enthusiastic about talking about the work they're doing in alternative proteins, because the vast majority of the work that they're doing is in conventional agriculture. So that's sort of part one. And then part two is: it is also the case that the work they're doing in alternative proteins, I think is laudable and positive. It's mostly, not behind the scenes, exactly, but they're not running ads saying, you know, we are beyond petroleum or whatever. And if you talk to people, you know, they have invested in some of the startups. JBS has their own cultivated meat endeavour and their own plant-based meat endeavour, they seem to be going all in on it. And if you chat with them, they say, basically, we want to provide high quality protein profitably. If what that means is plant-based and cultivated meat, then we are all in with that. They don't have the same sunk costs that the fossil fuel industry has. It's not going to be as hard for them to shift in this direction. And if they do shift in this direction, there would be an awful lot of positive ramifications/repercussions of that. I do agree with sort of the thing you said at the outset of that question is, which is that we should be realistic about the prospects for this technology. I would encourage people to read the UN Environment Programme report that Inger Anderson launched in December at COP. They had about, I think 25 scientists. The three leads are scientists: Sir Robert Watson, who led the IPCC just before they got the Nobel Peace Prize, was one of the three lead authors. It's a really deep dive analysis of the science. And one of the things that Sir Robert Watson said at the two events that they had to launch the report, what he said was, basically much of what I'm saying now, which is meat consumption is going to skyrocket unless this technology works. Let's not undersell it either, because if it doesn't work, meat production skyrockets and climate goals are impossible. That doesn't mean it's going to work. It certainly does mean you know... There are two ways it cannot work. One of them is, it turns out that it simply doesn't work. The other is, we don't bring the will. Let's not have it fail because we didn't bring the will, was basically his point.
BW
Yeah, you've made a point very eloquently, that the this is the potential is there, therefore we should... I suppose, I'm trying to explore the unintended consequences. One of which I think is, you know, we've spent a lot of time talking about this, we work with the big guys. But actually what the big guys are doing is using this as a reason not to take on responsibility for their externalities, right? Because one way you could go about this, if we had enough political will, is to say we're going to price in the externalities of beef, right? Methane prices are all going to be fed back down to the consumer, so that you're paying the real environmental externalities. We could even put in a anti-microbial resistance levy so that that you hold them back. And one way of stopping that exponential growth would be to load on the costs. Now, we all know, certainly in the United States, that might go down very badly. But the policies of like not just allowing the future to decide itself, you know, of actively constraining this growth through education, through taxation policy, through progressive investment in the common good, you know, is an important alternative way than just saying, "But it's okay, we're gonna have a techno fix, we can all enjoy our burgers, just as we do today, because this is on the horizon." And it turns out on the horizon is never really going to be price parity, and it's never really going to stand on its own two feet without this acknowledgement that somewhere we've got to pay for the damage that's being done by the other system. And the guys you're sitting down with, they're some of the most vocal opponents of any kinds of regulation. And they're essentially global, right, so they're bigger than any member state is ever going to be. So they wield an enormous influence over the way that food is produced. And I just want to... I'm sure you have your eyes wide open, but you are essentially... it's the equivalent of the renewables industry relying on the oil and gas industry to get itself built. And that's not what happened, right? That was not how we got renewables.
BF
Yeah, and I'm definitely not in a world where I think GFI should be the only player in alternative proteins. I think, as you know, the sort of equity food system that you just described, and the work focused on creating an equitable food system globally, there are millions of food activists working on that. There are hundreds of food justice organisations working on that that is all incredibly noble and valuable work. If we can shift these big companies away from the maximally harmful ways of producing meat and towards less harmful ways of producing meat, that doesn't solve all of the equity issues, but it does a lot to mitigate climate change, land use change, deforestation, anti-microbial resistance (amr), etc. So it feels worth doing, and it doesn't jeopardise the work toward a more equitable food system. It doesn't make any of that work harder. All of that work continues to go on in parallel, in ways that hopefully mitigate some of the harm.
BW
Yeah, no, I agree with you that they're complimentary. Just to keep coming back to this energy analogy, it is true that hydrogen has derailed electrification of heat. It is true that the lobbying against electric vehicles by the incumbents has slowed down the progress of policy and the uptake. The incumbents had a way of making sure this didn't happen fast. So I guess I see you as an organisation that's very adept at playing inside track game in the corridors of power, talking to the officials and politicians. But do you think you're going to need something broader, like a more public education around this whole agenda that helps make sure that the politics of this doesn't get manipulated by the by the status quo, and ultimately, it's relatively easy to scare people about new things. Is what we've found.
BF
Yeah. I mean, that feels like at least two different concerns. I think both of those concerns are entirely valid. We absolutely need a robust narrative of inclusivity, and we need a robust narrative of the benefits of these products. So it's not the case that we get to products that taste the same or better and cost the same or less, and there's, you know, suddenly global mass adoption. But it is the case that if we don't get to taste the same or better and cost it same or less, the products stay niche. So that's not, you know, necessary, but not sufficient. And we need to create a broader ecosystem where alternative proteins are on the agenda of the broader biodiversity, climate and global health movements, and hopefully that will allow us to be a lot more players, thinking about a lot more things and implementing sort of a broader array of strategies, from sort of the bottom, grassroots, up to the top. I think, is what's going to be... that's basically necessary across any kind of change that is worth working on. And we're very early, so, I mean we're definitely not suggesting we're the only strategy. It feels a little odd when people say we're suggesting we're the only strategy, and we need to do all these other things too. The other things are 99% of the effort right now, and we're suggesting this should be sort of a part of the effort, and that it should be a part of the effort for the broader community that cares about these issues. And I think as that happens, and we're hopeful that that will happen more and more, there'll be a much broader sort of variety of ways of thinking about these issues. And that's great.
BW
Yeah I think what would help is, you know, because you you are extraordinarily great communicator. And I've listened to podcasts in the past. Maybe one thing, take this or leave it, but just in the framing... I think you're brilliant on the benefits, but the framing of how... there are going to be some potential co-benefits of, let's just take legumes as an example, right? I know you've told me this in the past, that there are now farmers in Canada growing pea crops and realising, actually pea crops are great. You know, they have less inputs, the nitrogen problem goes away. And, you know, as a side benefit of that, maybe we start to just pay a little bit more respect to the fact that certain legumes, certain types of plants are just very good. And the fact that we chose wheat and corn and rice, white rice as staple bits of our diet was perhaps a bit of a wrong turn right. There are other co-benefits that could come from it. So maybe the way that you talk about this issue can be in that more holistic way that we're pushing towards not just these technos fixes, but also a broader appreciation of what it's like to eat healthily?
BF
Yeah, I think that's definitely we'll take that on board, Bryony, and I agree entirely. So yes, the options for farmers in terms of the broad variety of legumes and the options for farmers... GFI, as I mentioned, we have six GFIs. So GFI India and Brazil are two GFIs in the Global South, and the work that they're doing with millets as one example, in India, and figuring out how to take advantage of the crops that farmers in India are growing. Or the work that we're doing in Brazil, GFI Brazil, in the rainforest, we've got a biomes project that was is looking at what would it look like in a sustainable way to create ingredients that allow incomes for indigenous farmers. And then similarly, exactly what you just said, in places like Canada, huge enthusiasm from Protein Industries Canada, funded by the Canadian government. They're really leading on this, looking at some of the crops that are particularly good for the soil. Things like, you know, pea protein, and that's where Beyond Meat gets their pea protein is from Canada. So the options for farmers, and the value to the land of non mono-cropped legume farming, and the variety of inputs that would be available, it really is a good opportunity for farmers.
BW
And I think perhaps we should wrap it up here, but I do want to emphasise that the importance of keeping farmers on board right. And in your scientific debate between, what was it 100,000 litre reactors or 100,000 ten litre reactors, whatever the math is. You know, there's a value in leaning in on the socio-political aspects of this, which is, farmers are incredibly powerful lobbyists. And as you'll know, in Brussels, they'll routinely show up in their tractors and stop everything from happening if they're not happy. So unless you've got a plan which incorporates a story for the farmers and for the socio-political aspects of farming and what it means to countries. I think the science will be brilliant, but the political science is as important, if not more important, to making this a success. And I'm sure that's what you're doing but again, maybe leaning in a bit more on that will help, I think, in terms of giving you the political will you're going to need.
BF
Yeah I think you're absolutely right. And things like the Green Alliance report, and a land use report we're doing in the United States, as well as the explicit work that we're doing in places like India and Brazil are focused on building those alliances, relationships which we could not agree more, are going to be absolutely essential to success. So policies that incorporate farmer concerns and are good for farmers are going to be absolutely essential. I could not agree more.
BW
This isn't the same as precision fermentation, although I know precision fermentation is another way of helping replace some things. But, you know, it wasn't long ago that farmers would have their own hop farms, or their own production of ciders and dairy products that that were closer to home, that were more at a sort of farm scale. And done right you know there is a role in which farmers are just taking control of more of the supply chain, not less. But it's going to take a heck of a lot of policy interventions to get us back to that, where the globalisation of it all and the least-cost trends that we've seen that led to this industrial system we have. There's a lot of unpacking to do, isn't there. If I may, there is also, I think, just on the narrative side, you need to have a slightly defensive position in this day of like nobody trusting science anymore and everyone's entitled to their own facts. And I would just like to test, how are you keeping abreast of what is being said about these technologies that's perhaps not true? I've certainly had it said to me, 'well you're just eating cancers.' You know that if that takes off in a malicious way, because it's deliberately seeded, because the status quo wants to protect its market. How are you thinking about just combating that public narrative space?
BF
Our communications department is is sort of the go to for anybody in the media who has concerns about kind of anything. So we're very aware and are following the narrative closely. There is obviously a desire not to blow something up that's, you know, nothing. There's the whichever of Newton's law is the equal and opposite reaction. So I think for us, a bigger concern is, you know, something happens and because we scream about it, we make it a bigger deal than it would be otherwise. And it's a bit of a fine line, responding and blowing it into something versus not responding, and when you make that call. But it's definitely something that we're following closely and spending a lot of spending a lot of time thinking about.
BW
That's great, and maybe, if there are any philanthropists out there listening, you know, that's strengthening that narrative side, and the ability to just be alive to the fact that we're in a world where, you know, electric cars would be going a lot faster if it wasn't for the thousands of memes that have been spread about why they're no cleaner than a diesel car. Which clearly, you know, I find quite hard to imagine anyone believing, but it is possible to make that case if you have a particular way of cherry picking the data and presenting it. And that sadly that makes for good clicks, good attention. So there is a way in which information is being driven out to the poll, to the polarising of data. And I suspect, given the nature of what you're what you're working on, and food being so integral to people's identity, health, social conditions. It's a very fertile ground for these memes to take off, so I do hope that you're investing in that as you think about these levers that you have to pull to get this to work. But Bruce, is there anything else you want to finish by saying that we haven't touched on, just to give you the final word.
BF
So GFI, one of our values is united at, is invite everyone to the table. We put out a steady stream of scientific analyses. We have a quarterly review of everything happening in the science across alternative proteins, we do a webinar. We release it every three months and do a webinar around it. We have a monthly business of alt protein webinar, a monthly science of alt protein webinar and a steady stream of science policy and industry reports. So if people would like to find out more, gfi.org/newsletters, is where our various newsletters are, and that's a really good way to keep up. We are, as you nodded at, a nonprofit organisation. Or I guess we're six nonprofit organisations. Charity Navigator selected us as one of the four most impactful charities for climate mitigation. So if people have room in their philanthropic portfolios, we'd be delighted to have a conversation with you.
BW
That's brilliant. Thank you, Bruce. And I do hope people think take that seriously. And I wonder also, given that our audience is often very steeped in the energy transition, there may be really fertile conversations to be had between those who've been pushing for the energy transition — what they've experienced, how — because you're kind of the next wave, right? And you're going to need a lot of clean energy to make this work. So I'm sure there's opportunities for dialogue there as well. Thank you, Bruce, for your time. You've been super generous and it's been really great to connect.Thank you.
BF
Thank you so much, Bryony, I really appreciate your support and your friendship and love the podcast. So thank you. Thank you for that as well.
BW
That was Bruce Friedrich. In comparison to the clean energy transition, the clean food transition feels a long way behind. The GFI have chosen to focus on meat substitutions, where, in Bruce's words, there's still a lot of science to do. But it feels as if there will also then be an awful lot of policy and politics to do if these solutions are going to scale. Only time will tell, and I'll continue to watch the GFIs progress, with great interest. As ever, we'll add links to the reports mentioned in the show notes, and I'll also add a link to the previous episode number 136, with Jim Mellon of Agronomics. My thanks to Bruce for making time for this interview. We had a number of technical issues, and he was incredibly generous with his time. And thanks also to our producer, Zak Cebon, and to Jeannie Harrison for her research support. And thanks to you for listening.
ML
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