S6. E20: Isha Datar: Cellular Agriculture will Disrupt Everything it Touches
“…because animal advocacy has now escaped advocacy and is entering different types of work, really science-oriented work… maybe that was all it took in the first place. We just had such limited roles in the traditional sense of animal advocacy before. Because it was so communications driven…
And so that's another reason why I'm so proud of how this field has developed is I think we've turned people into animal advocates by creating jobs that let that happen.
It's such a special thing to be part of.”
- Isha Datar
Isha Datar speaks at TEDMonterey on August 2, 2021. TEDMonterey: The Case for Optimism. August 1-4, 2021, Monterey, California. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
Isha Datar is the executive director of New Harvest, the nonprofit research institute that funds open, public cultured meat research.
In 2010 while still an undergrad, Isha wrote a paper called “Possibilities for an in vitro meat production system.” This was among the few papers to ever discuss cultured meat in academic literature and a few years before anyone had tasted the world’s first cultivated meatball. It was the beginning of Isha's quest to establish the field of animal products made without using any animals.
Isha has been executive director of New Harvest since 2013. She’s also co-founded Muufri (now Perfect Day Foods), where they make milk without cows, and Clara Foods, where they make eggs without chicken.
In 2015, Isha coined the term "cellular agriculture" — officially creating a category for agriculture products produced from cell cultures rather than whole plants or animals.
Cellular agriculture is the future of food and Isha is one of its greatest pioneers.
Learn more about New Harvest
First image: Isha Datar speaks at TEDMonterey on August 2, 2021. TEDMonterey: The Case for Optimism. August 1-4, 2021, Monterey, California. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
Transcript:
Isha: [00:00:16] Because animal advocacy has now escaped advocacy and is entering different types of work, really science oriented work, marketing etc. Maybe that was all it took in the first place, we just had such limited roles in the traditional sense of animal advocacy before because it was so communications driven and whatever. So that's another reason why I'm so proud of how this field has developed. I think we've turned people into animal advocates, by creating jobs that let that happen. It's such a special thing to be part of.
Elizabeth: [00:00:57] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. For the month of September, we are asking you to join us in our mission to change the way that the world treats animals and become a member of Species Unite. The benefits of joining our pretty awesome for a monthly donation of any size, even two bucks, you will receive access to exclusive content, outtakes, bonus podcast episodes, updates and newsletters, priority access to all Species Unite events and a welcome pack from yours truly. So go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Become a member. This conversation is with Isha Datar. Isha is the executive director of New Harvest, the global nonprofit that is building the field of cellular agriculture and changing the future of how and what we will eat. In twenty ten, while still an undergrad, Isha wrote a paper called Possibilities for an In vitro meat production system. This was before anyone had tasted the first cell based meatball or beef chip. It was also the beginning of Isha’s quest to establish the field of animal products made without using any animals. Thank you, Isha, so much for being here. I am really excited to talk to you and really excited about your TED talk that is going to be released very soon, and I think the whole world should watch it. But before we get into all that, will you talk about what brought you into cellular agriculture to begin with, like how this all started.
Isha: [00:02:50] I grew up here in Edmonton, Alberta, where I'm calling from today, and we are known for oil and gas and cattle ranching. I was doing a cell biology degree in my undergrad, and I just sauntered over to the Agriculture Department and decided to take a meat science class. There is a part of me that's like, you know, agriculture, food science, this is all biology. But why isn't it offered in my biology degree? So part of taking meat science was because, like, this was the biology that we actually interacted with every day, and I wanted to experience the science that I was learning about in a way that I could talk about at the dinner table with my mom and my dad. So I took this meat science class as an avid meat eater and learned in the first class or so just how impactful animal agriculture is on the world in negative ways. I was just blown away because I grew up with this idea that farming was some kind of all natural activity that was cyclical and returned to the Earth and everything, when actually it is just as extractive as the oil and gas industry. Unlike shifting towards more public transit and less emissions and all that kind of stuff and what that would require, which is essentially large infrastructure changes and rebuilding cities in different ways, changing the way that we eat, especially the way we eat animal products, could have incredibly huge impacts for the world and was relatively easy, in my opinion. So of course, my first thought was we will all become vegan and then our problems will be solved. I still think that's probably a thing that would be very positive if most of us became vegan. We'd probably solve a lot of things.
Elizabeth: [00:04:36] But it would never happen.
Isha: [00:04:40] Yes, it would never happen.
Elizabeth: [00:04:41] But it would work, yes.
Isha: [00:04:42] Yes. You know, maybe that was the naive person in me that thought it could happen. But then I quickly realized that the message of not eating animals has been around for thousands of years, probably as long as Buddhism has been around right, maybe even longer, and the number of people who have worked on other people eating less animals. I wasn't someone who could add to that conversation as myself. I am also a hedonist. I'm still not a perfect eater. I still eat animal products and I don't feel great about it. But I think I represent a large proportion of the population who totally is on board and agrees with all the reasons why we shouldn't eat animal products, but continues to do so. Because the cognitive dissonance of being with your family and not having turkey at Christmas, all those things is a really powerful thing. I commend the people who are able to step over that for the animals, but I just don't think the average person does, and I think that they would if it were easier. This is where cellular agriculture steps in. A few classes in my professor casually mentioned that maybe one day we could be growing meat without animals by growing meat from cells and because I was learning about how to grow cells into organs for people who needed organ transplants or skin for burn victims or all these other things, I was like, Oh, that's exactly it. That's so obviously the next step for the world. It's not just the next step for animals or for agriculture. I think it's like the next step for humanity's kind of way that we interact with the Earth. So I mean, that's what got me into it was this kind of personal confrontation with my own diet. This confrontation with how the world eats and this real excitement for a technological solution that could solve an ethical problem, and to me, it just checks so many boxes at once, you know, environmental impact, cruelty towards animals and public health too.
Elizabeth: [00:06:51] What year was this?
Isha: [00:06:52] This was two thousand eight.
Elizabeth: [00:06:54] So we're still like how far before the first actual meatball?
Isha: [00:06:59] Yeah, this was a long time ago, but a few years later, we had the cell cultured hamburger that was tasted on August thirteen. So I was just so obsessed with this idea that I wrote my term paper about it. My professor wanted us to write about the future of meat, and I was like, This is the future of meat, obviously. I spent my whole term paper actually reading papers from the medical side of the world and applying it to food science. This is the first time I felt in a really interdisciplinary environment because a lot of my peers in that meet science class were animal scientists, veterinarians, nutritionists, and so they were writing about meat in an innovative way, but more an incremental way. So what are these little changes we can make to meet today? Whereas my paper was a totally radically different approach, and actually I couldn't even look into food science to get any information on, I had to look at what was happening in regenerative medicine. So I wrote this paper. There was an organization already around called New Harvest back then. It was a one page website like just the landing page, and it had a bunch of links to like documents and stuff on it. So I sent this into the new harvest back then and said, Here is another document for your website if you're interested. Then suddenly, the executive director of New Harvest, whose name is Jason Matheny, emailed me back, CC’s like half of the scientists I had cited and and they were doing a peer review in my email, and I had to send Jason and email on the side being like, Jason, you know, I'm just an undergrad student like, I felt like I was whispering in an email, you know? And he's like, You know, this is really important literature like, we haven't really seen any publications on this. You should publish it in a journal. So I worked with my professor to get it into shape where we thought the whole world could look at it. We published it on January twenty ten and it still remains a really important paper for the field because it just lays out the basics of how to produce meat from cell culture and I think a lot of those basics remain pretty much true today.
Elizabeth: [00:09:05] And why had I thought, like, it's changed so much in the past decade? But no.
Isha: [00:09:10] Well, I think I think the rudimentary way you do it hasn't changed. But the details have. It's kind of like saying, has farming changed in the past 50 years? Like, yes and no. So it's that kind of thing. I think a lot of the basics are true, but who's doing it? How many people are doing it? How many different approaches, you know, that's evolved a lot.
Elizabeth: [00:09:35] It's incredible that you've been part of this world since almost the beginning and where it was versus where it is now and where it is 10 years from now. Is it true that you coined the term cellular agriculture? Is that your word?
Isha: [00:09:49] It is. It is true.
Elizabeth: [00:09:51] That's pretty cool, too.
Isha: [00:09:52] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:09:53] Somebody asked me a couple of weeks ago they were like, Beth, I'm so interested in all of this cellular agriculture, but I still can't picture it.
Isha: [00:10:03] I think we do need mental pictures. I think some of the problem with science communications is we're describing processes that some of us haven't seen before. But when you start putting the visuals of, imagine a brewery, right? And instead of beer inside there are cells growing.
Elizabeth: [00:10:19] No one really understands scaffolding very well. This is not here really right now, except in Singapore, but it's going to be without realizing that there's this entire enormous picture behind it. It's not just like the meat being made in the lab, but the whole like how many other things go into this and how many other people and how expansive for this to actually be a reality that's creating a huge impact. For people who don't know or don't quite get it, will you paint a picture of what it is and you know what you start with and what you end up with?
Isha: [00:10:53] Where to begin, cellular agriculture as a concept is growing any agricultural product from cells instead of from plants or animals. But the reason why we focus so much on animals is because I think it matters the most. But we could totally be growing tomato cells if we want to. Does that really make sense today? No. But the idea is instead of raising a whole chicken, who has its feathers pulled out its beak sometimes snipped off its bones, bones removed, skin removed. All these things arrive at these things like chicken nuggets and boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Why don't we just grow that chicken breast directly by taking a muscle cell and multiplying it in cell culture? So instead of a factory farm where you have those long, dark tunnels full of chickens? Imagine that the factory farm is actually a factory and is like a brewery where you have huge stainless steel tanks and inside of those tanks instead of yeast growing to make beer. You have chicken cells growing to make chicken directly. I hope that's a good picture of what I'm painting.
Elizabeth: [00:12:12] How long does it take till the chicken is grown?
Isha: [00:12:15] I mean, that is an interesting question that I don't know if I'm confident answering, but I've heard some companies say that you could grow the same amount of mass of chicken in a matter of days or weeks, because cells double whereas chickens, I think you slaughter them around six to eight weeks. Cows, I think, are slaughtered around?
Elizabeth: [00:12:38] I think, like 18 months.
Isha: [00:12:39] Yeah, between one and two years. But if you're growing those from cells, those times are the same. So chicken and beef would take the same amount of time to grow, and you can probably grow as much as the bioreactor will allow.
Elizabeth: [00:12:54] In your TED talk, you say, compared to growing beef, cultured meat would require 99 percent less land, 96 percent less water and produce 96 percent less greenhouse gas emissions. Will you just talk about that a little bit? Because that's like, why aren't we doing this right now, right? I mean, this is saving the world.
Isha: [00:13:14] Yeah. So I will say, because of the kind of science person in me, I will say those are early estimates based on processes that didn't exist yet. But. I mean, I think the point comes across that even if those estimates are high, even if it's half of this, that's incredibly impactful compared to growing beef from cows. The reason why I don't think we're doing that is because I think our world has just not been set up for interdisciplinary work like this. So remember back when I was telling you when I wrote the paper, I had to pull a lot of information from the medical field and apply it to food. Right now, most research funding and science funding is USDA funds, agricultural staff, NIH funds medical stuff, but we probably need to pull stuff from NIH and apply it to USDA. We're kind of this field that's really stuck between worlds, right? I think that’s why I'm so excited about cellular agriculture is that it's so inherently disruptive that it will disrupt everything that it touches. It'll disrupt the funding agencies and how they're set up. It'll disrupt regulatory agencies and how they need to actually approach these problems. But the problem with something that's so disruptive is that there's a lot of blockers, and so I think that's why I'm so excited about New Harvest, because how often have we seen a technology be ushered in by, like a nonprofit that's trying to actually create this path for it, a path that has never been created before.
Elizabeth: [00:14:54] Yeah. Talk about some of the larger hurdles with this because when you first hear about it, when I first heard about it, my first reaction is like, this can't happen fast enough and the world can't change quick enough, and all you see was upside. But of course, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, and there's a lot of ways this can fail, I guess, right?
Isha: [00:15:13] Absolutely. I think it's important to talk about how anything can fail before it's happened so that we can plan for the best case scenario. I mean, technologies are never good or bad. They can just be used in good or bad ways. And that's the way it has always been. So while we hear about there could be 99 percent less land, 90 six percent less water. We also have to think about what else comes with a technology like this and some of the things that I'm worried about come from the blending of food with biotechnology in the way that pharma has kind of managed it over the years. I'm worried about ownership in cellular agriculture. You know, there are some people who have painted the picture that, if Cargill produced cell cultured meats like that, it would be a better world. I think it probably would be a net better world. But I feel like that's like the lowest bar we could set, right? Do we want one company to be controlling all the meat in the world? Like, No.
Elizabeth: [00:16:19] Like five, even?
Isha: [00:16:21] Or even five, right? Or it doesn't even matter the number as long as it's a number you can count. We don't like that number, you know?
Elizabeth: [00:16:28] But so how do you stop that from happening like ownership wise? Well, how does that not happen?
Isha: [00:16:34] That's the really, really hard question, because I think that requires a real rallying together of the field today to explore the ways that this can go wrong and be comfortable with a different solution. So, you know, we could pool patents, for example, we could license the technology in different ways. But what I don't want to see is. You know what happened to insulin, where only three companies in the world produce all the insulin in the world? That only happened after insulin stopped being made from animals and started to be made from cells, for example? I'd love for our food industry to still be, seeds and animals where anyone can buy a seed or anyone can raise an animal. I'm just worried that when we introduce this much technology, it introduces many levels of IP that prevent that from happening. So, you know, I wish I had an easy answer for you, but I don't. Instead, I think that there is some hard answer out there and I do feel optimistic that we could figure it out. The field has grown so much. There's a hundred companies around the world working in cellular agriculture today, but I still feel like every one of those companies is driven by mission because this is one of the hardest companies you could found right now. I mean, it's a very difficult scientific problem, and I think that now is an awesome time for the field to come together and figure out what we really care about. Do we really care about animals and the environment? Then let's put that at the top and let everything else follow, and I think it's possible. I really do.
Elizabeth: [00:18:15] Are those conversations happening, not just about animals in the environment, but about ownership and about, you know, does this all of a sudden, ten years from now, you know, it's huge and working and scaling, and then Cargill or Tyson is like, I want to buy all of you, right? Like, there's a big danger with that, I would think.
Isha: [00:18:33] Yeah, and so I think those conversations are just starting to begin. I think New Harvest is one of the earliest voices talking about openness in cell agriculture, both on the transparency side of openness, but also in terms of, like, open source. We just saw a really awesome paper come out two days ago, authored by Rob Chiles and Garrett Broad, who are both awesome researchers who wrote about how cellular agriculture in particular could explore some more open models of industry. I think we're at the nascent stages of that conversation becoming more alive, but I think we will see more of it going forward. As I said before, I think cellular agriculture is so disruptive that I think it actually will force this to happen because think about, so you mentioned what are the bottlenecks? I think one of the bottlenecks is scaling up and creating a pilot facility is a very expensive experiment. I mean, it's like you have to build a whole factory essentially to see if this works. One of the outcomes of that experiment might be that that factory sucks and you need to build a whole different factory. That's a lot of expense for one company to take on. So already we have this interesting situation where because we have no government funding, we might actually be forced into a situation where we have to collaborate with one another just to move things along because the costs are so prohibitive. So that's an example of how I think open, could actually naturally come into this world because it's just such a big problem with such a big outcome that for any one group to try and answer it would be quite challenging.
Elizabeth: [00:20:19] And is pretty much all funding private?
Isha: [00:20:21] Pretty much all funding is private right now. And, you know, I don't love that, but on the other hand, I do think it again forces this issue of there is an inherent collaborative angle here. So maybe for the first time in history, we can get a lot of private funding to work together. It's probably not the first time in history, but.
Elizabeth: [00:20:41] But in the food system, yeah.
Isha: [00:20:43] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:20:46] Those are kind of the big ones. Then scaling is obviously a huge hurdle. But I mean, once you kind of get going and it's regulated, then there's money because there's products being sold and then you can scale. Is that how it works?
Isha: [00:21:00] Yeah, I think I think that's how we think it should work and. I again, I still think all these companies are very mission driven, I think a lot of the funders are pretty mission driven, too. So I'd like to think there is more patience for this field to work because the return on investment isn't just monetary. It is so huge, I mean, you can't put a price on food security, you know, you can't put a price on on all kinds of outcomes that cellular agriculture could have, so.
Elizabeth: [00:21:34] Right, I mean, just what it's going to do for the planet, for the animals, for health eventually.
Isha: [00:21:40] Yes. A lot of people ask me, when will cellular agriculture disrupt animal agriculture and end animal agriculture? And my answer to that is that animal agriculture is going to end itself. I mean, it's already so maxed out, like so maximized. I mean, we've already bred animals to produce so much meat, milk and eggs that they can barely hold up their own bodies, they are very prone to disease. It's a very inefficient system, actually, and it of course, costs a lot to animals.
Elizabeth: [00:22:18] And to people too?
Isha: [00:21:40] Absolutely and to people and to work. I mean, look at how COVID has so disproportionately affected meat facilities compared to any other kind of factory. Like what does that mean? This is an industry on the edge of collapse, in my opinion. As we enter this kind of changing climate world, I just don't see how animal agriculture can stand up. I mean, we are already seeing fires and storms wiping out populations of animals. We're already seeing these viral infections. Cell ag is more of a risk mitigation strategy than it's trying to end animal agriculture and if anything, it's probably trying to perpetuate meat eating.
Elizabeth: [00:22:58] In your TED talk, you talk about, I didn't realize the numbers of African swine flu, and the numbers. How many pigs have died since 2018?
Isha: [00:23:07] Yes. So, African swine fever has got to be the most underreported human caused tragedy ever in history, and it has already killed an estimated one in four pigs on Earth. So if we think about COVID. Covid has killed one in some, many millions of people, one in four pigs, which is about three hundred and fifty million pigs.
Elizabeth: [00:23:35] It's incredible that no one is talking about it.
Isha: [00:23:37] If Earthlings were all thought of as one thing and there was a newspaper for all of Earthlings that would be on the front of the newspaper, not COVID.
Elizabeth: [00:23:47] Right. I mean, it's incredible. People have sent me videos of pigs being buried alive, like hundreds of thousands of pigs in China, horrible, horrible videos. But you don't read about it, you don't hear about it. But that's happening. Bird flu’s pop up all the time.
Isha: [00:24:03] Yep, at least once a year, there's some huge bird flu where millions of birds have to be culled.
Elizabeth: [00:24:09] Covid gave the world a kind of a view of all the holes that are happening in it anyway, or at least some of them.
Isha: [00:24:16] Yeah. COVID radically showed us what we needed to change first, and I think animal agriculture is just too precarious. I mean, it is nature. It is nature that we have modified so much to a world that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it's just not resilient to climate change.
Elizabeth: [00:24:39] You've been talking to people for a long time about this. Has it changed in that sense? Do you feel like it's growing like kind of the normalizing of this? Like that this will be normal at one point in the world. You know, it's still very new. A lot of people have never even heard of it, but the more people talk about it, you know, the more it doesn't seem so strange.
Isha: [00:24:59] Absolutely. I think every time I am out in public talking about it, it feels more normal. I mean, the first year or two. Everyone would say frankenmeat or like some word like that and I actually haven't heard that for years now. I think the kind of science fear that surrounded this has really fallen quite a lot. I think people are also cluing into animal agriculture in ways that we just weren't around before. I mean, veganism used to be mostly about caring about the well-being of animals and now you meet so many more people who have gone vegan or vegetarian for climate reasons. The whole narrative is shifting and it's really helping this field emerge. But I think it's helping everything. I mean, it's really positive.
Elizabeth: [00:25:48] We're still pretty far away from being able to go to a grocery store and buy a steak.
Isha: [00:25:55] Yeah, I think there's a lot of gradations from how far away we are. It reminds me of self-driving cars where we think, you know, when we talk about self-driving cars, we think we're going to be like sitting in a car, reading a newspaper and going to work or something when we don't have that yet. But we do have cars that will parallel park themselves. We do have driver assist, cruise control one could argue, is like self-driving kind of stuff. So I think we're going to see those, you know, the parking and that kind of stuff equivalent to cell ag, come out first.
Elizabeth: [00:26:33] What would that be?
Isha: [00:26:34]. So we're not going to see the full stake that is marbled and everything right out of the gate. But we might see something that is plant based with some cell culture components, which I would argue Impossible is already kind of opening the door to. I think we might see some kind of fusion products that maybe even are incorporating meat from animals, like maybe it's half meat, half cell cultured meat, and that would be effectively reducing meat consumption, I would hope. I think that kind of stuff we'll see in the very near future. But I think the steak in particular we talk about is like a holy grail because it's so textural. But there are all kinds of other products that could happen before that and I hope will. Actually I talked about the chicken nugget, but there is a cell cultured pet food product that is being tasted out there. So, you know, there's meat that goes well beyond just the steak that could make a real impact for animals everywhere.
Elizabeth: [00:27:28] Will there be foods we've never heard of? I mean, you could make anything out of cells, anything that has cells, right?
Isha: [00:27:33] That is my biggest hope because I think that the thing that's going to make the biggest difference in the world is actually not a replacement for animal products, but something that is totally its own thing. I still think replacements are important, but they're kind of following the coattails of plant based replacements, which continue to have a bad reputation, even though they're pretty good now. They just have to shed the reputation of what they were like in the seventies or whatever. I think we kind of need to forge a new path with the cell cultured foods a little bit and really highlight what the technology allows us to do that plant based didn't allow us to do. There is one company called Vow Foods in Australia that is growing like Galapagos, tortoise dumplings and things like that, which honestly gave me a little bit of an emotional reaction. Should we be eating tortoises? Is that a good idea or is that just not a place we should go with this? So that's an open question up for discussion. But suddenly pigs, cows and chickens don't have to be the thing that we consume. I would hope that chicken, pork and beef don't have to be the things that we consume either. So you know, many, many years ago, actually it was seven years ago as of yesterday, Paul Shapiro, sent me a photo of it. But Paul Shapiro and I and the guys from Perfect Day Foods and Andress from Modern Meadow all tasted a steak chip together. It was the same texture as a potato chip, very thin but entirely made of cell cultured like meat cells. And that was just like a first example of, OK, we don't even have to replicate what we know, like we can make totally brand new things. I think there's a lot of reasons why snack food might actually be a really great introductory food. I mean, we all know how addictive potato chips are, and we also know how much we're willing to take a risk on snack foods. It's such a low ask to pick up something like at the gas station versus deciding that your whole family is going to eat this thing and if it sucks, they're all going to tell you that. That's why I'm really pumped about what else we can do. I'd love to see more of that. I think we're still in the early days of that now.
Elizabeth: [00:29:54] That could get really creative. I mean, it's kind of like literally the world’s your oyster. I mean, there's nothing you can’t do.
Isha: [00:30:03] Yeah. I think we're really transforming food and how it's made in a way that we haven't seen for a really long time.
Elizabeth: [00:30:10] It's pretty awesome that you were, you know, in school like, yes, this is going to happen. This is it. And now it's really happening. We're going to have a whole new food system.
Isha: [00:30:20] I feel so lucky to have been in the right place at the right time and also I guess have been young enough to be foolish enough to take a risk like this and be like, Yeah, I'm going to do this, why not? There's really nothing to lose. I feel like our current animal agriculture is a ticking time bomb of. The sooner something happens, the better. In the meanwhile, animals are suffering, and that's just that's just the whole thing. We need to take risks and a lot of people have asked me, why did you do this? Instead of that? I chose this because I think it's impactful. It actually uses my skills. There are other people like me who are science minded, who want to apply their work to a mission, who don't just want to work at some company out there or some pharma company. I think that's why this field has grown so much is that this opportunity just didn't exist. So many of the founders I met were just researchers who just didn't have a way to support animals in their work, and this brought it all together.
Elizabeth: [00:31:29] Well, that's one of the cool things I've noticed because I've had a lot of people from the field on the show, everybody I've talked to or met. They're, of course, very mission driven. They're incredible people like really with this incredible desire to not only make the world a much better place, but to take these huge leaps. It's just like this community of, you know, world changers with huge hearts. It's awesome.
Isha: [00:31:52] It actually makes me wonder, because animal advocacy has now escaped advocacy, and is entering different types of work, really science oriented work, marketing etc, like maybe that was all it took in the first place. We just had such limited roles in the traditional sense of animal advocacy before because it was so communications driven and whatever. So that's another reason why I'm so proud of how this field has developed. I think we've turned people into animal advocates by creating jobs that let that happen.Yeah, it's such a special thing to be part of.
Elizabeth: [00:32:29] For this whole thing, to work and scale and grow. It's a lot more than making meat in a lab like a lot of systems have to change. Will you talk about just how that works, how exponential that is.
Isha: [00:32:43] Oh my gosh, so much needs to change and because we were talking about jobs, one of those things is training. So we created the first PhD in cellular agriculture a few years ago, and Natalie is graduating this year. But there is no established cellular agriculture institute at a university. We need to have an institute of Cell AG at every university, just like there's an Institute of oncology or whatever kind of emerging science exists. We don't have that right now, and so pretty much everyone in the field is coming in with some different background and making it work, which is great, but also kind of means there's a lot of on the job training happening. That's an example of private money being used to train people when normally that would be a public money thing. So the first thing to change is how universities work. Another thing to change is our supply chain. I mean, at the end of the day, these cells don't just grow on their own. You have to feed the cells something. So what do we want to feed the cells? Do we want to continue feeding them kind of monoculture crops like corn and soy? Or do we want to try and diversify that a little bit? Do we want it to come from algae or more sustainable sources? I think those are really open questions because they're so tied to scale. I think they matter a lot, but they're just hard to answer today. I also think, you know, I mentioned that this would require ninety nine percent less land, which I think is one of the most exciting aspects of cell agriculture, because we already use a third of our planet to farm animals, which is just like mind blowing.
Elizabeth: [00:34:24] It's astronomical, and it's not a stat you hear that often. I mean, it's a third of the planet.
Isha: [00:34:30] Yeah and you know that phrase, there is no Planet B. Farmed animals is one of the reasons why there's no Plan B like one of the biggest reasons and I think we need to really think through if we can alleviate that land, what happens to it? What is the entire world that we want to live in? Because I would hate for that land to just be misused in some other way. One of the biggest ways to combat climate change is nature. I mean, nature is an inherently homeostatic system that recreates normal and tries to establish stasis, and we just have so little nature on the planet right now. So if we could rewild areas, if we could bring back bison where cows are today, you know, that's the other thing I kind of only clued into in the past year or two is that the animals that we farm are such a product of colonization like cows and pigs and chickens are kind of random animals in the places that they're farmed. They didn't exist on a third of the Earth, we made that happen. So we have really radically changed the planet through their presence. These are the kinds of things we need to rethink, like which are the best animals to live in certain climates.
Elizabeth: [00:35:55] Well and give them back their land, right? I mean, that would be ideal.
Isha: [00:36:01] Yes. Absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:36:02] Isha, I am so excited. I'm so excited about your TED talk. I am so excited about everything that you guys are doing at New Harvest.
Isha: [00:36:07] Thank you, Beth. I'm so excited too.
Elizabeth: [00:36:21] To learn more about Isha, about New Harvest and about the future of food, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana, Polky and Anna Conner who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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