I spend nearly as much time talking about how I want to stop
eating meat as I do eating it. I care about animals and the environment and,
even more, virtue signaling about how much I care about animals and the
environment. I just don’t want to make any effort or sacrifice any pleasure.
اضافة اعلان
Lucky for me, a slew of venture-backed companies want to help me
with my lazy altruism. They envision a world where we sit down for dinner and
brag that no animals were harmed in the production of this carbon-neutral
porterhouse. They want to Impossible Burger our entire diet. They want me to
shift from farm-to-table to lab-to-table.
It’s beginning to work. Consumer sales of the increasingly
impressive simulacra of meat, eggs and dairy products grew 24 percent from 2015
to 2020, according to the market research company National Purchase Diary Panel
Incorporated (NPD) Group — and 89 percent of those people are, like me, not
vegetarians.
I wanted to see just how realistic the lab-to-table future could
be, so I decided to throw a dinner party filled with bleeding edge products
that don’t bleed. The carefully chosen guest list would consist of my lovely
wife, Cassandra, and our 11-year-old son, Laszlo, mostly because of the
pandemic, and partly because it was going to be hard to find friends eager to
consume bacon made from fungi and ice cream spit out by yeast cells.
It took me two months to gather the items for my party. They had
to be animal-free, environmentally friendly and made in a sci-fi-impressive
manner. They’d include not just food, but all the wow factors like jewelry and
beauty products that could make a dinner at home with the same three people for
the 300th day in a row feel like a party.
When I began shopping for our event, I learned that there are a
lot of complicated methods to make basic things. You can mix together a lot of
plants to approximate an existing product, which is what Beyond Meat does for
burgers with pea protein, canola oil, coconut oil and 14 other ingredients.
You can find a breed of mycelium (the root system of fungi) that
approximates a particular meat texture and call it something like “beef
fauxginoff.” Or you can insert DNA into algae, bacteria or fungi so they spit
out whatever protein you want.
The newest tech is growing real animal cells the way you grow
human organs from stem cells. You take different kinds of lab-grown muscle with
different kinds of lab-grown fat, layer them in just the right order, and you
may get, as more than a dozen companies are working on, wagyu beef, lobster or
foie gras.
You can also combine these methods, as Impossible Burger does,
using soy, coconut oil and a tiny bit of heme — an iron-y, bloodlike, soy
protein spit out by DNA-manipulated yeast.
None of this information made it on my party invite.
My first challenge in getting all the products I wanted was that
the US government hasn’t approved the sale of cell-grown meat, so companies
were too scared to sneak me any. I could fly to Singapore, which became the
first country to approve cell-based foods in December, and try chicken nuggets
from a company called Eat Just. Or to Tel Aviv, where, despite the fact that
the Israeli government hasn’t approved sales of cell-based animal products,
SuperMeat opened a restaurant in November where it exchanges chicken sandwiches
for feedback. (A lot of it has focused on whether the chicken can be considered
kosher.)
I settled for the other production methods. And because I was
nervous about preparing unfamiliar foods, I enlisted the help of Sascha Weiss,
the former personal chef for George Lucas and current research chef at Perfect
Day Foods, a startup that has raised about $400 million to make dairy protein
from DNA-altered fungi. Weiss’ approach to veganism spoke to me: less reduce,
reuse, recycle and more reconceive, redesign, rebuild.
He got so excited about planning our meal that he sent me all
the ingredients I’d need in separate containers, including one marked “toothpicks”
(which, to my disappointment, were made from real wood).
Mycelium Bacon and Lactoglobulin Ice Cream
For our first course, I presented a salad of gem lettuce,
roasted carrots and watermelon radishes served over a smear of fake labneh. I
kept tasting the labneh directly from the container, confused at how beta
lactoglobulin and coconut oil could be this convincing. I surrounded the salad
with bits of Prime Roots’ fake bacon, which is made from a mycelium called kogi
that was impressively smoky and textured, although not all that meaty.
I topped it with potato-and-dill “egg bites.” They’re coming to
supermarkets in March from Just Egg — the same company selling cell-based
chicken in Singapore — made out of mung bean protein and canola oil. It was
almost as tasty as the company’s liquid “egg,” which I had already come to use
as a scrambled egg replacement.
For our main course, Weiss prepared ravioli stuffed with
mushrooms and cream cheese from beta lactoglobulin and coconut oil, and again,
it was utterly convincing. I felt vaguely superior, as if we were leaving the
Animal Age. I know it isn’t all that hard to be vegan where I live in Southern
California. (I know this especially because I am constantly told so by Moby,
the musician and activist who has “vegan for life” tattooed on his neck and
lives down the street from me.) But it seemed more possible when I replaced
meat with this fun futuristic world than a simple gatherer past.
For dessert, I brought out a freezer full of ice cream made from
Perfect Day’s protein. Instead of making their own products, the company’s
strategy is to get existing brands to put out vegan versions — and hopefully
proclaim that they use a real milk protein, without getting into the
DNA-tweaked fungi detail.
Late last year, Graeter’s, the 150-year-old Cincinnati ice cream
institution, introduced six flavors for its Perfect Indulgence vegan line.
Laszlo ate a bowl of its Cookies & Cream happily. “I like it,” he said, and
then added, “It tastes like slightly worse ice cream than normal.”
Someone recently sent me a gift of traditional Graeter’s ice
cream so I was able to compare both versions of Oregon Strawberry. The Perfect
Day version was the best vegan ice cream I’ve ever had. But what Laszlo might
have been noticing was that it was denser and lacked creaminess, perhaps
because of all the oils replacing milk fats.
A future where natural and man-made are indistinguishable is
still a bit away. Still, we all liked the dinner. And as with the pandemic, it
seemed possible that the scientists were going to save us from ourselves.
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