UC Davis

Transcribed using A.I. May contain errors.

Amy Quinton 

Hey, if you like listening to Unfold, please subscribe and follow us on your device. That way you'll never miss an episode. You can do this on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Go ahead, make your listening easier.

Kat Kerlin 

Hey, good to see you. 

Amy Quinton 

Good to see you. Ready to try some food? 

Kat Kerlin 

I am hungry. Yes, let's do it. 

Amy Quinton 

I invited Kat over for lunch to try the impossible. The Impossible Burger that is. Impossible, ground beef.

Kat Kerlin 

New look. Meat from plants. Okay. 

Amy Quinton 

19 grams of protein, 33% less saturated fat. I can't even read all the ingredients that are in there. 

Kat Kerlin 

I was going to say, what are the ingredients? 

Amy Quinton 

But this little package, which is one pound, was 10 bucks, almost. 

Kat Kerlin 

I see soy protein as the first ingredient, soy protein concentrate. 

Amy Quinton 

I bought this Impossible Foods ground meat at the grocery store, not too far for me, Kat and I threw in some chopped onion and spices, made it into burger patties and then threw it in a pan. 

Amy Quinton 

All right, now it's starting to sizzle. Look at it brown. After choosing our favorite burger condiments. We had a taste test. Okay, dig in. 

Kat Kerlin 

Here goes. First Impossible hamburger. It's pretty good. It feels meaty. Tastes different. It's not bad. It's definitely not the same. 

Amy Quinton 

Well, they were designed to taste just like a burger made from a steer, even though its plant based.

Kat Kerlin 

 That's the heme Amy, the iron containing molecule that makes meat taste like meat. It can also be extracted from the roots of soybean plants. 

Amy Quinton 

That's right, I remember that from Unfold's very first episode from Season One. We visited the headquarters of Impossible Foods. They created the Impossible Burger. It wasn't widely available then, like it is now. 

Kat Kerlin 

One of the company's main goals is to reduce the impact of animal agriculture on the environment. See, cows belch greenhouse gases in the form of methane, and we use a lot of land to graze cattle and grow their feed. UC Davis scientists are making huge strides to reduce that environmental footprint or hoof print.

Amy Quinton 

Like feeding cows seaweed to reduce methane or even using CRISPR, the newest technology.

Kat Kerlin 

Exactly.

Amy Quinton 

I actually don't eat cow. I think they're cute.

Kat Kerlin 

Well, lots of people don't eat meat because they don't want to see animals killed or for health reasons. 

Amy Quinton 

Well, regardless of whether you are a vegan, vegetarian or hardcore burger lover for life, experts say there is a very compelling reason to develop more alternative proteins. 

David Block 

If you look at the projections for the demand for meat, 25 years from now, somewhere between 25 and 100% more meat is going to have to be produced to meet that demand globally, and it's not likely to happen just by growing more animals. 

Amy Quinton 

That's David Block. He heads the new Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein, or iCAMP at UC Davis. 

Kat Kerlin 

So, there's not enough cows, chickens and pigs to sustainably feed a growing population. 

Amy Quinton 

Yeah. And David says it's not just Americans, although we are among the largest consumers of meat, but low- and middle-income countries are also developing more of an appetite for meat. It's why one of the goals of iCAMP is to provide the technology and research to bring new alternative proteins to market on a large scale. 

Kat Kerlin 

Well, first, let's define what we mean by alternative protein, because there's several options. There's plant-based proteins, like Impossible Burgers. There's cultivated meat, which is grown in a lab using animal stem cells, and there's fungal-based proteins. 

Amy Quinton 

And by fungal based, we're not talking about mushrooms, we mean protein made from a fungus. And we're also talking about hybrid products that combine both plant and animal, or fungus and animal. 

Kat Kerlin 

But there are hurdles to getting newer products on the market and convincing more of us to eat them. Cost is a big one. 

Amy Quinton 

Even the plant-based products on the market now are often more expensive than ones made from cows, pigs or chickens. Researchers also need to create the same flavor, texture or mouth feel of real meat to entice consumers to try alternative protein. 

Kat Kerlin 

Speaking of trying it, Amy tasted a few types during her research for this episode, find out what she thought. 

Amy Quinton 

And we'll discuss the many challenges involved in creating these products, as we take an in depth look at the promise of alternative protein, in this episode of Unfold,

Amy Quinton 

Coming to you from UC Davis, this is Unfold. I'm Amy Quinton. 

Kat Kerlin 

and I'm Kat Kerlin. 

Kat Kerlin 

Let's start with plant-based meat, since there are so many of these products on the market. Newer forms of plant-based meats, like Impossible Burger or Beyond Burger, they've been around for a while.

Amy Quinton 

But David Block says a lot more research is needed to improve plant-based products. He says sometimes the soy or pea that serve as the base of those products can produce flavors that taste a little off and need to be covered up. 

David Block 

Different companies handle that differently. Fat is really important to flavor and texture and cooking properties, and so in those in those plant-based meats right now, in order to mimic what's going on in conventional meat, the fats are not very healthy. 

Kat Kerlin 

Sometimes the texture can be off too. 

Amy Quinton 

And David says, if the product is not as good and it's twice as expensive, only vegans are likely to buy that product, and that's a small market. 

David Block 

So I think part of what ICAMP needs to do is figure out what's really critical about what's going to make a consumer keep on buying these products, or buy more of these products, and really gear the technology and food science towards developing those products. 

Amy Quinton 

Fungal-based proteins face similar hurdles as plant-based proteins, so let's talk about those. 

Kat Kerlin 

We're not talking about a mushroom burger here. All mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi grow mushrooms. Most fungi do have branching thread-like structures called mycelium. UC Davis researchers are using mycelium, sometimes called mycoprotein, to create all kinds of food, and this so-called mycofood, is designed to mimic the taste and texture of real meat. I went to learn more about this in a UC Davis lab in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department.

Amy Quinton 

UC Davis graduate student researcher Cody Yothers, reaches his hand into a large container of almond hulls. That's the hard outermost layer of the almond and the part we can't eat. 

Cody Yothers 

At the processor, this gets shucked off. It's considered a waste or a side stream. You can see here that hull. 

Amy Quinton 

But that part of the almond is also full of nutrients, antioxidants and flavor. Researchers are using this waste product to feed their fungi. Cody shows me how this works. 

Cody Yothers 

So we're standing in front of a bioreactor, which is really just a fancy word for brewing tank. 

Amy Quinton 

The five-liter glass tank holds a brown liquid. Inside it, tiny, round pellets swirl around. 

Cody Yothers 

So we take the almond halls and we basically make tea out of them. And then the actual the fungal spores are inoculated into this tea. And then over the course of three or four days, they grow into these nice, spherical pellets.

Amy Quinton 

He pours the concoction through a cheese cloth to harvest the fungal pellets. Those pellets can then be made into all sorts of food. Researchers use a strain of fungus that humans have used for centuries for fermenting foods such as miso, soy sauce and even sake. Professor Ruihong Zhang, a bioenvironmental engineer, leads the microfood research. She says you can eat these fungal pellets right out of the bioreactor. 

Ruihong Zhang 

When they are fresh, they're edible. It's like a meaty material, chewy and meaty type of structure, texture, or we can flavor, add some color nutrients to it. 

Amy Quinton 

Ruihong says the fungi will take on both the color and nutrients of whatever you add to the bioreactor. 

Ruihong Zhang 

For example, if you start with the almond hulls the fungi will be brownish, yellowish color, like nutty color. But if you produce fungi from orange juice or tomato pomace, they will have reddish-orange color or tomato color. 

Amy Quinton 

She first used these fungal pellets as a protein replacement for the tapioca balls in boba tea. She's also made jerky. The protein pellets can even be ground into a powder to add as an ingredient to other foods. Ruihong says mycofoods, especially those made with agricultural byproducts, are more sustainable than animal or plant proteins. 

Ruihong Zhang 

They have low greenhouse gas emission, low carbon footprint, and they're sustainable and lower cost source of protein. 

Amy Quinton 

Ruihong says the next step is scaling up these products. It would require bioreactors about the size of winery fermentation tanks. But their work has already led to a startup co-founded by Cody Yothers, called Optimized Foods. They make a fungal based replacement for one of the most expensive foods in the world: caviar. 

Zane Starkewolfe 

So this is our cultured caviar. 

Amy Quinton 

Inside Ruihong's lab, Optimized Foods' CEO Zane Starkwolfe opens a small jar of what looks like black fish eggs. They're modeled after sturgeon caviar. 

Zane Starkewolfe 

So we use the exact same mycelium pellets, but now grown with sturgeon stem cells, that gives you the best of both worlds. You get the form, function and structure of the mycelium. But now with the sturgeon stem cells, it gives you the taste and that wonderful texture and deliciousness of caviar.

Amy Quinton 

While the caviar made with sturgeon stem cells is not yet available, the company is now making a fully fungal-based caviar. Zane expects to launch that caviar at restaurants in San Francisco and Sacramento this fall.

Amy Quinton 

Kat I had a taste of the fully fungal-based caviar, and it does have the same texture, mouth feel and buttery notes as real sturgeon caviar. While it wasn't spot on. It was very good. 

Kat Kerlin 

I wouldn't know how that tastes. 

Amy Quinton 

Don't like caviar. What?

Kat Kerlin 

I probably do. I haven't actually had it.

Kat Kerlin 

Um, so how did Ruihong come up with the idea to make these products? 

Amy Quinton 

Well, she began studying fungi as a way to break down wastewater from food processing facilities, and she noticed that these fungi grow really well when fed. 

Kat Kerlin 

Wait from wastewater to food. That doesn't really sound appetizing.

Amy Quinton 

I know it's strange, right? But fed in the right environment, fungi are nutritious and perfectly edible.

Kat Kerlin 

You said this fungus will take on the flavors and nutrients of whatever you give it. So what has she fed this fungus? 

Amy Quinton 

She's experimented with walnut hulls and pistachio shells. She's used byproducts of cheese, carrots, tomatoes and red beets. 

Kat Kerlin 

That's cool, so it helps with food waste, too. And now a company's making caviar based on this technology. But caviar doesn't exactly feed the world. Are there other companies with fungal-based proteins on the market?

Amy Quinton 

Yes, right around the corner from UC Davis in West Sacramento, there's a company called Better Meat Co. and it makes a mycelium protein that can be eaten on its own or blended with plant-based foods or animal meat. And I had a recent visit to their pilot plant. 

Doni Curkendall 

Okay so we're going into our research lab right now, where you will see the process at a smaller scale, but this is ultimately where we learn what we need to do. 

Amy Quinton 

Doni Curkendall is Executive Vice President of Business Operations at Better Meat Co.  The company makes a mycelium protein called Rhiza, which they sell directly to other food companies. 

Doni Curkendall 

What we're trying to do is make an ingredient that can be used as the basis of a plant-based meat, but also for blending with animal meat. We know it's not going to be possible to make everybody stop eating meat, but we think that you can make a small change. You can take one step at a time, and that step for us is hybridizing. 

Amy Quinton 

Similar to other fungal-based products, Rhiza is made by feeding the fungus starchy foods through a fermentation process. Moran Farhi is Executive Vice President of Technology. In his research lab, he shows me a jar of mycelium after it's been through fermentation. 

Moran Farhi 

What you get is very dense material that kind of looks like applesauce, basically, at least, that's how I would describe it. And that's very dense, very long filaments from the mycelium. 

Amy Quinton 

The white applesauce-like mycelium is then drained and its texture is immediately transformed. Moran demonstrates the process by straining it through a cheese cloth in his lab and pressing it into shape. 

Moran Farhi 

You basically get a structure that is very similar to meat. 

Amy Quinton 

Yeah. I mean, looking at this, I wouldn't think that it would be anything except like ground up chicken. It almost looks like a chicken breast. 

Moran Farhi 

Exactly, exactly. And it is white on purpose, in our case, by the way, because we want an ingredient that food producers can use as a blank canvas to basically paint with whichever flavors they want and any color they want. 

Amy Quinton 

The focus of this lab is to try to improve the ingredients to make production cheaper and more efficient. What they learn can then be tested in their pilot plant. Inside the plant are hoppers, boilers, 9000-liter fermentation tanks, slicers, shredders and dryers. The pilot plant can produce about 200 pounds of dehydrated cubes of mycoprotein in batches. It's sold to food companies in one-pound bags. Because it's dehydrated, it makes a lot more than 200 pounds of meat. But this is still small scale. Again. Doni Curkendall. 

Doni Curkendall 

It's no secret our process is very expensive, and scaling up even from bench scale to medium scale can be, can take a long, long time. I would say that our biggest hurdle right now is just getting that funding. 

Amy Quinton 

Still. Doni says they've been able to reach price parity with beef. 

Doni Curkendall 

Everybody wants good food, but ultimately, we also have to make something that's accessible and affordable. 

Amy Quinton 

She's hoping the new Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein at UC Davis can help move them in that direction. 

Doni Curkendall 

It is expensive to do research, and so we work with limited means. UC Davis can help us with that. They have the expertise, they have the facilities, they have the people that can help us continue to do our research and continue to grow the space. Doni envisions a time when Sacramento, known for being the Farm to Fork Capital of California, will also be known as the Fermenter to Fork Capital.

Kat Kerlin 

Fermenter to Fork. Catchy! But Amy, I'm dying to know if you try the Rhiza mycoprotein. 

Amy Quinton 

Well, of course. And I brought along our coworker, multimedia specialist Alicia Beck to taste test, and we tried a street taco and a mycoprotein steak. The taco is 100% mycoprotein and taco seasonings and garnished with onions, micro greens, red cabbage and salsa verde. Alicia and I dug in. 

Amy Quinton 

Don't forget the lime. 

Alysha Beck 

The texture is awesome. It tastes just like a normal taco because of all the other flavors on it, I want to try just the protein here.

Amy Quinton 

It tastes like a good taco. 

Alysha Beck 

It just soaks up, yeah, the flavors and the spices. It's like kind of flat, so I guess that throws you a little bit, just like the shape of it. The flavor and the texture is great. 

Kat Kerlin 

So tell us about the steak. 

Amy Quinton 

Well, the steak was a hybrid, about 70% mycoprotein and the rest was plant based. It had the color and chewiness of meat, but not the long muscle fibers you'd find in a steak. Of course, I haven't had a steak in a really long time, so I'm kind of a poor judge, but Alysha said the taste and texture were good, but she could tell it wasn't meat. 

Kat Kerlin 

Okay, so let's move on to the newest alternative protein, cultivated meat. In 2023, the USDA approved its sale in the US but it will be a while before it's widely available. 

Amy Quinton 

UC Davis animal scientist Anna Denicol says making meat in a lab is not a simple task. 

Anna Denicol 

We see cows grazing here in California right that eat dry grass and turn that into the highest quality protein that we know, which is meat. So we are really trying to replicate in the lab something that nature took 1000s of years to perfect. 

Kat Kerlin 

Denicol is one of two UC Davis professors developing the lines of stem cells needed to make meat.

Amy Quinton 

To cultivate meat, you take stem cells from a cow and feed them the right nutrients, growth factors or ingredients in the lab to make them grow. And these cells need to differentiate or become the muscle cells, fat cells and connective tissue cells that make meat, meat. 

Kat Kerlin 

Assistant Professor Lucas Smith in the UC Davis Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, is using adult cow muscle stem cells. 

Lucas Smith 

They basically are cells that are in your muscles, and they are responsible for if your muscle is injured or receives a response to grow for some reason, they become activated. They proliferate or duplicate themselves, and then they go through this process of differentiation and turning into that new muscle tissue. 

Amy Quinton 

The problem with using adult cow muscle stem cells is that they don't duplicate forever. 

Lucas Smith

The challenge is to expand them to greater degrees than you typically would in the body, and then have them efficiently create muscle in an environment that is not the native muscle itself. 

Kat Kerlin 

For food production, researchers estimate that the cells would have to double 30 or 40 times. Adult stem cells don't do that. 

Amy Quinton 

Anna Denicol is using embryonic cow stem cells, which have the potential to grow pretty much forever, and they can grow up to become anything. 

Anna Denicol 

From that one cell, you can make muscle, you can make fat, you can make connective tissue, for example, the three cell types that you need for meat. So the advantage of using this, you can make everything from the same starting material. Disadvantage, it takes longer.

Kat Kerlin 

Differentiating those cells is complicated. 

Amy Quinton 

Also, the ingredients needed to make those animal cells multiply is another challenge. 

Kat Kerlin 

Currently, the industry uses highly purified growth media. David Block says it's pharmaceutical grade and expensive. 

David Block 

The projections are that the cost of the media is going to be something like 85% of cost of the product at scale. I mean, the biopharma media is maybe $200 a liter, and the projection is that to be a commercial process for cultivated meat, you would need it to be less than $1 a liter. 

Amy Quinton 

David says cultivated meat needs to be grown using food grade ingredients. Otherwise, it will always be more expensive than conventional meat. 

Kat Kerlin 

The cells would also need to grow in giant 250,000-liter fermentation tanks. No one has ever tried growing animal cells at that scale. 

Amy Quinton 

Creating structure for cultivated meat is another hurdle if you want something that looks like a marbled steak rather than a hamburger. Scientists are looking at using 3d printers for this. 

Kat Kerlin 

But those printers might need to be fast enough to create a piece of meat every fraction of a second. 

Amy Quinton 

So it may sound like there are too many hurdles for cultivated meat, but David remains optimistic it will be on the market. It will just take time. 

David Block 

It may take another five or 10 years to work out some of the technology and get the knowledge needed to do all that scale up and have really widespread commercialization. It's going to take a while to build the very large facilities to produce it. Widespread distribution, my guess is 10 to 15 years, but I am very optimistic that we'll get there. 

Kat Kerlin 

Amy, cultivated meat is allowed to be sold in the US, but is it available? 

Amy Quinton 

Well, one company made its cultivated chicken briefly available at a high-end restaurant, and another company is selling its chicken in Singapore, but only 3% of that chicken is made using cultivated meat, and that's mainly because it's so expensive. 

Kat Kerlin 

Cultivated meat doesn't involve killing animals. But do we know whether it's more sustainable than animal agriculture? 

Amy Quinton 

David says the jury is still out on its sustainability. He says a lot of it may depend on how these companies choose to scale up. 

David Block 

I think there's potential for it to be as or more sustainable than conventional meat, but I think it's hard to actually just look at it without doing all the work and all the analyzes to really understand whether that's going to be the case. 

Kat Kerlin 

And that's one of the many research questions that he hopes the Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein at UC Davis can help answer. 

Amy Quinton 

You can learn more about iCAMP and alternative protein at our website, ucdavis.edu/unfold. I'm Amy Quinton. 

Kat Kerlin 

And I'm Kat Kerlin. Thanks for listening.

Andy Fell 

Unfold is a production of UC Davis. It's edited by Marianne Russ Sharp. Original music for Unfold comes from Damien Verrett and Curtis Jerome Haynes. Additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions.