The Sentience Institute Podcast - Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat

Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat

06/17/20 • 141 min

“There’s a relatively clear path on dramatically reducing the costs of the cell culture media. So I’d say it's definitely the most pressing bottleneck... not perhaps the most technically involved bottleneck... The recombinant proteins are by far the driving source of those cost contributions where probably anywhere from over 90 to 95% or more of the cost contribution of cell culture media today comes from those recombinant proteins. An independent group at Northwestern University in Chicago came out with a paper this past year... they were able to drop that cost of the media to around 11 dollars per liter... that was a 97% cost reduction in media that this group basically did for fun just to demonstrate that it can be done.”
- Elliot Swartz

Animal-free food technologies, such as new plant-based foods that accurately mimic animal products and cultured meat (meat cultured from animal cells without requiring the slaughter of any animals) have the potential to dramatically displace the consumption of conventional animal products. But what are the bottlenecks in the way of successfully scaling up and reducing the costs of these products? And how can these bottlenecks be overcome?

Dr Elliot Swartz is a senior scientist at The Good Food Institute and the author of a number of in-depth resources on cultured meat. He has previously worked as a consultant in the biotech industry.

Topics discussed in the episode:

The different stem cell-types that can be used to develop cultured meat, what work still needs to be done in this area, and how it can be done (5:26)
Cell culture media as the most pressing bottleneck, and the clear path towards addressing this (19:06)
Scaling up bioprocessing and bioreactors (39:55)
Scaffold biomaterials as a fourth technical bottleneck (49:43)
The technical bottlenecks in the way of the improvement and scale-up of highly meat-like plant-based meats and the career paths that are relevant to this area (58:41)
How Elliot started to get involved in the animal-free food tech space and the similar opportunities that might exist for others to enter the space by synthesizing existing research (1:09:30)
The lack of funding for research in the space and how this compares to the availability of talent as a bottleneck towards further progress (1:19:39)
The pros and cons (beyond funding) of seeking technical research opportunities in academic vs. for-profit environments (1:30:09)
To what extent medical advances in tissue engineering and related areas will drive progress on cultured meat (1:41:19)
The importance of and opportunities for startups to operate a business-to-business model in the animal-free food technology space (1:45:52)
When will cultured meat and highly meat-like plant-based meat products become competitive with conventional products in terms of cost and taste? (1:49:02)
Should the proponents of animal-free food be prioritizing cultured meat or plant-based meat? (1:56:02)
The skills and characteristics that would make someone an excellent researcher in the cultured and high-tech plant-based meat space (1:58:50)
The transferability of career capital between academia, startups, and nonprofits and between research into high-tech plant-based meats and cultured meat (2:04:18)
Concrete opportunities for getting work in this space (2:07:46)
Which forms of academic and professional expertise are most urgently needed for the development of animal-free food technologies (2:13:43)

Resources discussed in the episode are available at https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast

Support the show

Dr Elliot Swartz is a senior scientist at The Good Food Institute and the author of a number of in-depth resources on cultured meat. He has previously worked as a consultant in the biotech industry.

Topics discussed in the episode:

The different stem cell-types that can be used to develop cultured meat, what work still needs to be done in this area, and how it can be done (5:26)
Cell culture media as the most pressing bottleneck, and the clear path towards addressing this (19:06)
Scaling up bioprocessing and bioreactors (39:55)
Scaffold biomaterials as a fourth technical bottleneck (49:43)
The technical bottlenecks in the way of the improvement and scale-up of highly meat-like plant-based meats and the career paths that are relevant to this area (58:41)
How Elliot started to get involved in the animal-free food tech space and the similar opportunities that might exist for others to enter the space by synthesizing existing research (1:09:30)
The lack of funding for research in the space and how this compares to the availability of talent as a bottleneck towards further progress (1:19:39)
The pros and cons (beyond funding) of seeking technical research opportunities in academic vs. for-profit environments (1:30:09)
To what extent medical advances in tissue engineering and related areas will drive progress on cultured meat (1:41:19)
The importance of and opportunities for startups to operate a business-to-business model in the animal-free food technology space (1:45:52)
When will cultured meat and highly meat-like plant-based meat products become competitive with conventional products in terms of cost and taste? (1:49:02)
Should the proponents of animal-free food be prioritizing cultured meat or plant-based meat? (1:56:02)
The skills and characteristics that would make someone an excellent researcher in the cultured and high-tech plant-based meat space (1:58:50)
The transferability of career capital between academia, startups, and nonprofits and between research into high-tech plant-based meats and cultured meat (2:04:18)
Concrete opportunities for getting work in this space (2:07:46)
Which forms of academic and professional expertise are most urgently needed for the development of animal-free food technologies (2:13:43)

Resources discussed in the episode are available at https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast

Support the show

Previous Episode

Laila Kassam of Animal Think Tank on popular protest movements, mass arrests, and publicity stunts

Social movements often seek to shift public opinion and mobilize supporters on a large scale. But which tactics achieve these goals most effectively? And how have social movements achieved this in the past?

Dr Laila Kassam is a co-founder of Animal Think Tank and the co-editor of the forthcoming book, Rethinking Food and Agriculture: New Ways Forward.

Topics discussed in the episode:

“The social movement ecology” and the theoretical framework that Animal Think Tank uses (3:10)
The importance of public opinion for social change, and the pros and cons of actions that polarize public opinion (16:35)
The evidence base the Animal Think Tank and This Is An Uprising use, and the weaknesses of using social movement evidence to glean strategic knowledge for the farmed animal movement (20:55)
Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rebellion — what they’re doing, why, and Animal Think Tank’s lessons from the first actions (25:48)
Sacrifice, demandingness, and mass arrests as potential motivators and demotivators for activists (33:07)
Creative actions, stunts, gimmicks and the effects that these have on perceptions of social movements (42:07)
The value of confrontational tactics like Direct Action Everywhere’s disruption of Bernie Sanders’ rally (49:30)
Whether veganism or “active and sustained participation” in the movement is more tractable (55:38)
Animal Think Tank’s current research priorities (1:02:22)
Other resources that Animal Think Tank recommends reading (1:09:12)
Rethinking Food and Agriculture — Laila’s co-edited book and the value of expertise in “sustainable agriculture” for the farmed animal movement (1:17:17)
Laila’s experience with international development work and her concerns with this field (1:25:15)
The importance of funding constraints for Animal Rebellion and other organisations focusing on building a mass protest movement (1:33:08)

Resources discussed in the episode are available at https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast

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Next Episode

Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill on policy dynamics, lobbying, and issue framing

“In my career, one of the things that I’ve focused on the most is developing the theory of punctuated equilibrium. And I think recognising that things occasionally go through real transformations with radical change has changed people’s understanding of what we can expect out of government. It’s a much more fruitful way to think about how policy changes within government. It is true that for the most part, governments are very status quo oriented. But every once in a while, that’s thrown out and people recognise that there’s a crisis or a certain set of policy actors are discredited and other people come in and follow a different paradigm. And I think those events are relatively rare compared to the periods of stability, but if we don’t understand them then we can’t understand long periods of policy history in any domain.”
- Frank Baumgartner

Governmental policies are not fixed indefinitely; social change is possible. But does change happen incrementally or dramatically and suddenly? And how can individuals or social movements best use their time and resources to encourage positive social change?

Frank Baumgartner is a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an author of many books, including Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why, and The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence.

Topics discussed in the episode:

The role that financial resources play in efforts to encourage policy change (1:51)
The methodology used in Agendas and Instability and the research priorities for political science as a field (11:26)
The theory of “punctuated equilibrium” as a representation of how policy changes (15:23)
The implications of the theory of punctuated equilibrium for seeking radical policy change rather than smaller incremental policy changes (21:13)
The importance of public support for policy change (29:30)
The importance of framing for determining policy outcomes (33:56)
The importance of the tone of the media coverage of specific sub-topics of social issues and what this implies for social movement strategy (40:46)
The value of linking policy reforms to underlying problems that people would like to see solved (56:18)
The importance of having credible professional communities that can develop workable policy solutions (1:03:25)
Critiques of Frank Baumgartner’s work plus alternative theories and methodologies (1:08:06)
The relevance of Frank Baumgartner’s work for the question of “How tractable is changing the course of history?” (1:11:11)
The extent to which Frank Baumgartner’s various findings apply outside the US and the differences between countries (1:14:16)
How you can use your career to most effectively encourage policy change (1:28:28)
How Frank Baumgartner’s own career has developed, how his work relates to “advocacy,” and his recommendations for other researchers (1:34:12)

Resources discussed in the episode are available at https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast

Support the show

The Sentience Institute Podcast - Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:06.700

[inaudible] .

Jamie00:00:06.959

Welcome to the sentence Institute podcast where we interview activists, entrepreneurs, and researchers about the most effective strategies to expand humanity's moral circle with a focus on expanding the circle to farmed animals . I'm Jamie Harris, researcher at Sentience Institute and at Animal Advocacy Careers. Welcome to our ninth episode of the podcast. I was excited to have Ellio