S5. E12: Thomas King: Plant-based Wunderkind
“…From everything that I'd learned and from everything that I'd seen, I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture links to almost every issue I'd worked on from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity.”
– Thomas King
Thomas King is the founder and CEO of Food Frontier, a food innovation think tank dedicated to diversifying the world's food supply through the development of alternative proteins.
For the last decade, Thomas has driven food systems and environmental and poverty alleviation initiatives across five continents.
Thomas is 24 years old.
At 13, he launched an awareness campaign about deforestation caused by unsustainable palm oil production, which catapulted him right into the deep end of advocacy where he has lived ever since.
At 18, he was named Victoria's Young Australian of the year for his environmental and humanitarian work.
I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Learn More About Food Frontier
Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn
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Transcript:
Thomas: [00:00:00] From everything that I've learned, from everything that I've seen, I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture, links to almost every issue I've worked on, from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity.
Elizabeth: [00:00:26] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review species your night on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Thomas King. Thomas is the founder and CEO of Food Frontier, a food innovation think tank dedicated to diversifying the world's food supply through the development of alternative proteins. Thomas is 24 years old. At 13, he launched an awareness campaign about deforestation caused by unsustainable palm oil production, which catapulted him right into the deep end of advocacy. At 18, he was named Victoria's Young Australian of the Year for his environmental and humanitarian work.
Elizabeth: [00:01:38] Thomas, hi, it's so nice to have you here today.
Thomas: [00:01:42] I'm so pleased to be here. Thanks, Beth.
Elizabeth: [00:01:44] I want to go way back. You're not really even that old now. You're pretty young and you've done more than most people who are double your age already because you started so young when you were 13-14. What was happening in your life and with your childhood that drew you toward activism and caring so deeply about the planet?
Thomas: [00:02:05] Yeah. So I grew up in the outer east of Melbourne here in Australia. I always been a pretty entrepreneurial and creative person, and I certainly was as a kid and always had a deep fascination with the natural world. I think I had just about every David Attenborough box set series ever created and would watch them pretty much every weekend and was just captivated by the rich diversity of Planet Earth. I was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by it. When I was five years old, we were living in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. My mum decided she wanted my brother and I to grow up in the Dandenong Ranges, which is a forest in the Yarra Valley. It's about a 50 minutes drive east of Melbourne City.
Elizabeth: [00:02:52] Why did you decide this? She wanted you to grow up in the wild.
Thomas: [00:02:56] She just thought that it would be a great place to raise kids and to foster that curiosity in us. That was such a gift for a kid like me who had that real passion and curiosity in nature and animals and plants.
Elizabeth: [00:03:13] What was it like there?
Thomas: [00:03:14] Very much like a community village kind of vibe. We lived on sort of three quarters of an acre and very forested, the kind of place where if there was a storm, there'd be people out with chainsaws having a cut up. Tree branches sort of fell across their driveways. I went to school down in the suburbs and then spent my weekends exploring this natural place. There were plenty of insects and birds and spiders and scorpions and all sorts of interesting creatures. So you can imagine how frustrated and saddened and confused that I became when I began learning about how, how rapidly we're destroying all of those things around the world. That happened to me when I was about 13 and saw footage of a logging site in Borneo in Indonesia that was just cleared, smoldering as far as the eye could see. This orangutan who was sort of dragging its body through this scene of absolute destruction and. It hit me pretty hard, and then I learnt that the cause of that destruction is predominantly palm oil, an ingredient found in half of all supermarket products that I was using and friends and family and people around me were using without knowing what they were contributing to.
Thomas: [00:04:51] So that sort of sparked something within me and I found a friend at school. This was sort of early high school. I found a friend who knew a little bit about web development, and he hooked me up with this DIY website builder and I created this site and this campaign that it started very small. It's something I would share with friends and family, and I was the kid at the family Christmas that wouldn't stop going on about world issues. It quickly grew within about a year. It picked off on my global and became the highest ranking site on Google for that topic worldwide. What was it called? It was called Say no to palm oil. That's very important to me. Well, I had a very black and white view of the world back then as you do at that age. Of course, I came to learn that it's far more complex than just trying to boycott something. But yeah, it was my launch. It's what catapulted me into advocacy.
Elizabeth: [00:05:55] As you grew in popularity were you stunned? For some reason I was thinking, Oh, you did this? Like, I'm going to change it all right now and create this and bring all this awareness. But you really did it for your community more.
Thomas: [00:06:07] It was very much about building awareness at that point in time. There was growth in the conscious consumerism sort of movement, but people hadn't pieced it together in terms of this. This particular issue, which was in our region of the world, Borneo is not far from Australia and it is such a hotspot for biodiversity. There are indigenous communities and cultures that are being disrupted by that expansion. It hit home for a variety of reasons. So the site was really about how do I raise awareness and educate more consumers about this issue and what they can do about it? Then at the same time, place more pressures on manufacturers to try and change their sourcing and ensure that either they're using a genuinely sustainable supply chain or they're swapping out that ingredient for a more sustainable alternative.
Elizabeth: [00:06:59] Talk about the first organization that came to you and said, Hey, we want you to work with us. How old were you?
Thomas: [00:07:05] So 13 going on 14 when I started this initial campaign and I ended up being exposed to a number of different projects and initiatives, and I basically spent the remainder of my teens helping lead various climate conservation, animal protection and poverty alleviation initiatives. I deliberately took up those opportunities to focus on different causal areas and was fortunate to travel the world. I went to five continents for different projects from a conservation initiative with indigenous tribes in the Borneo jungle to a wildlife event in South Africa. I was working on a poverty alleviation fundraising initiative in Cambodia. I even got to go to Greenland, where I was one of five youth representatives from different countries around the world who were in a film with IMAX that was shown at the Paris Climate Summit. I was incredibly fortunate to work with some phenomenal groups of people who, unlike many folks that I grew up around, shared my appetite for change and believed in their ability to help create it. I was lucky to receive recognition at that time. There's an initiative here called the Australian of the Year Awards, and they have a young Australian of the Year category. So I was fortunate to have my work recognised through that. The great thing about that is it's then a tool in a platform to further that mission and gain greater exposure for the cause.
Elizabeth: [00:08:43] Then you've done all these things like conservation and climate education. Poverty alleviation. How come you ended up like your mission now and your big mission in life is centered around food? Why food?
Thomas: [00:08:58] I learnt from everything that I've learned, from everything that I'd seen. I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture, links to almost every issue I'd worked on, from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity. I'd also learned that simply telling people not to do things or trying to make them feel bad about their choices really works. People don't respond to that, and I think there's certainly an important place and role for traditional advocacy and campaigning if it's strategic and if it's directed in the right places. But I felt pulled towards investing my time in bringing people together and driving forward viable, better alternatives. So I found myself in the U.S., maybe four and a half years ago now, speaking at an event called Nexus. I think you had lies there on the podcast.
Elizabeth: [00:10:04] But for people who didn't hear it? Will you explain what Nexus is?
Thomas: [00:10:07] Nexus is this phenomenal network of young people around the world who are really a combination of wealth holders, impact investors, philanthropists, as well as social entrepreneurs and people that are driving forward solutions to some of the world's greatest problems. Nexus facilitates these conversations and these events to bring together those, those various young people, to collaborate and to work through how we can overcome issues from poverty alleviation to human and sex trafficking to climate change to biodiversity conservation. I was lucky enough to speak. It was, I think, the first nexus of note ever to be in New York a number of years ago. On that same trip, I decided to spend a bit of time before I came back home to Australia on the West Coast and meet with some of these food companies that I had sort of heard about and learned about through the news who were recreating meat either by replicating it from plants or growing actual animal meat by feeding nutrients to cells. I just felt hugely buzzed and excited by the potential for these food technologies to create enormous change in the world, knowing that you know, consumers, for the most part, don't eat meat because of how it's produced, we added it.
Thomas: [00:11:33] In spite of that, most people eat it because they enjoy the taste. It's accessible and affordable. It's culturally significant. It's something that we've grown up with or in some cultures around the world are aspiring to eat more of because of the status symbol that it holds within those cultural contexts. This space meets consumers where they're at by recognizing all of that and saying, Hey, here are options that satisfy all of those drivers without the same adverse consequences that come with models of industrial animal agriculture. So it's not about trying to change people in the way they're eating and the recipes that cook and where they're shopping. It's about changing the method of production so that we're actually taking out the vast majority of the environmental impact, the public health risks, animal welfare concerns, et cetera. So I returned home. I came back down after having spent time with these companies in California, super excited only to then realize that next to nothing was happening in that space in this part of the world.
Elizabeth: [00:12:42] Was there even much of a plant based meat space happening?
Thomas: [00:12:47] We've had a couple of long standing manufacturers that have been around for quite some time and that that was really it. The conversation here around alternative proteins in the future of food wasn't really happening yet, so this was probably about four years ago. Not that long. What concerned me is that it wasn't only happening in Australia and New Zealand, but the broader Asia Pacific, which is the region that those two countries exist in, which is home to more than half of humanity and represents the greatest portion of the projected meat consumption increase globally over coming decades. There was next to nothing in terms of start ups, investment, people pioneering in R&D. So the question for me as an Australian was what role could Australia and New Zealand play as the local western trusted prestigious bases for food production within the Asia Pacific? Because Australian and New Zealand made food is highly sought after across Asia? We export the vast majority of what we produce, and just to give you an example, there's this thing called the DIGO phenomenon in Australia, which DIGO is a. Personal Chinese shopper who will clear shelves of particular food products and send those products through sort of great export channels to Mainland China for clients who will pay a premium just to get their hands on Australian made food or pharmaceuticals or whatever it might be.
Thomas: [00:14:34] That's because you find the Chinese middle class consumer. I don't trust food that's grown in China. I only eat imported food. If it's imported for a particular country as Australia and New Zealand being at the top of that list, it's part of that. That prestige factor, sure. So we have an estimated 150000 digo in Australia, for my students too people that have emigrated and so Australia is our landmass is almost the size of continental USA. Yeah, and half of that space is used for livestock production and we export 70 to 80 percent of that to the rest of the world with many of our key markets being in Asia. The question in my mind at that point was to what role could Australia play in that diversification of protein supply within our region? Could we leverage that influence of that intellectual capital, that industry infrastructure to become another base for protein innovation alongside California alongside Israel and parts of Europe, which were already leading the way at that point? That left me questioning, well, well, what am I going to do about this and what role can I play in it?
Elizabeth: [00:15:51] These are really big questions to be asked.
Thomas: [00:15:53] It is a really big question. How do I bring together the right stakeholders around the table to try and facilitate solutions? So I had conversations early on with folks like Bruce Friedrich out of the United States, who I think had hired about 10 people at that point at the Good Food Institute. Long Story Short ended up deciding to establish an independent, not for profit in Australia. That could be the think tank and expert advisor on alternative proteins for Australia and New Zealand called Food Frontier. The idea was if we could support stakeholders here, both business leaders and policy makers to understand the emergence of alternative proteins and the role that new protein sectors will have to play in feeding the future and then how they could participate and diversify that. That would enable Australia and New Zealand to become leaders in these new protein sectors alongside those food and agricultural sectors that were already known for
Elizabeth: [00:17:00] What kind of response, especially in the beginning, were you getting from that world, the agricultural world? I can't imagine that in Australia, people are excited.
Thomas: [00:17:08] I think as humans, we're naturally cautious of what we don't understand and often fearful of what we don't understand. So the conversation back in 2018, if I think back to early days and some of those initial meetings that we had was very different than what it is today. Back then, there was this uncertainty and fear and this rhetoric that began building around it being a problem, basically that should be feared and forward. That was really unfortunate to start to see key voices within the agricultural sector and even within the government perpetuating those kinds of messages which ignore the opportunities that alternative proteins present for their constituents. Yes, we have a lot of livestock production in this country, but we also have tens of thousands of Aussie farmers that produce millions of tons of crops, including hundreds of thousands of tonnes of protein rich legumes that could be evaluated for industries like plant based meat, rather than going out into the global commodity market where they don't command a premium. Trying to help those stakeholders understand that this can be an and not an all that protein demand and meet demand is estimated to more than double by mid-century, and that alternative proteins are what we now consider alternative proteins, which will just be a significant part of the future protein market within years and decades from now will have to play a significant role in feeding populations into the future. The data is crystal clear in that we don't have the resources to rely to the extent we have previously on unloved systems of livestock production to feed the world. I have found myself in rooms over the last couple of years, standing in front of a hundred plus cattle and sheep farmers talking about alternative proteins. Some people think I'm nuts doing that. Farmers and business people and a lot of farmers I've met are actually very forward thinking people and they have to be. They need to adapt to changing and it's incredibly exciting that we're seeing some of the biggest meat companies in the world now investing in new protein technologies because they see the writing on the wall. They get that we can't rely solely on traditional production methods to produce meat. So if we can do it in different ways and diversify our production systems, that's how to adapt to the changing world that we live in while still generating profit.
Elizabeth: [00:19:54] What about consumers in Australia? Are people really responding well to this whole kind of influx of alternative meats coming in?
Thomas: [00:20:02] Yeah. So we did consumer research with Colmar Brunton, which is a leading market research agency here last year and found that one in three Australians are now in the meat reducer or flexitarian category. So we classified meat as people. But regardless of how much meat they're eating and eating less in the last 12 months and flexitarian being people who eat about one to four meat meals a week and then an additional 10 percent are in that sort of meat free vegetarian vegan category, which includes a percentage that may on rare occasions, eat meat but predominantly ate a meat free diet. So that's 42 percent of the population that are eating less or no meat. The grocery sector, I think, has realized over the last couple of years that. For a long time, there was a gap in the market that they weren't filling. There was an instance in 2018 where the biggest retailer actually in the country was the first to put a plant based meat product in the meat section. They were putting their neck on the line by doing that, but luckily it paid off because the products sold out in the majority of stores nationwide that week, and they said they'd never had a response to a product like that before. That was sort of a wake up call, I think, for the retail sector in realizing there are consumers out there who are demanding products that we're not currently providing. And so since that point since mid-2018, we've seen a doubling in the offerings of plant based meat products.
Elizabeth: [00:21:41] You did an analysis on it and it is awesome because I had never heard of this being done before on each type of meat versus the plant based alternative of the same exact thing and nutrition behind it. When you talk about that a little bit because I find it fascinating, especially because people just love to say it's not that much better.
Thomas: [00:22:01] As this category started to get more attention, there were more and more products hitting supermarket shelves and restaurant menus. There was this commentary around is, are these products healthy? Journalists going to dieticians who would cherry pick one product from here and one product from there and build this story out of it to say, you know, these meat alternatives are not healthy products. People should be cautious about choosing them if that's their motivation. So we wanted to undertake a study to determine the nutritional averages of pretty much every product across the market that fell into the key categories: sausages, burgers, mince, ground beef, bacon, crumbed, poultry and uncrowned poultry. We calculated the nutritional averages of every plant based meat product that fell within those categories and compared it to the same average for the conventional meat equivalent. So plant based sausage for beef sausage. What we found is that plant based meat alternatives on average nutritionally comparable or superior to their conventional meat equivalents. Interestingly, one of the nutrients that had the greatest difference with saturated fat and when we compared plant based bacon with conventional bacon, it was 82 percent less sausages. It was 69 percent less. For burgers, it was 51 percent. What we found through our research is that one third of the meats that Australians eat is non lean or processed, which are the kinds of meats that the Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend avoiding because of their contribution to chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So it's not a fair comparison to say well based meats of processed food products without realizing that they're most commonly alternatives to processed conventional meats. Unlike conventional meats, they have inherent benefits like dietary fiber, like considerably lower saturated fat. They're not considered carcinogenic. Right?
Elizabeth: [00:24:14] What's been the response across the board with cellular meats since all this has started to kind of really grow and explode?
Thomas: [00:24:22] We've got quite a diverse cross-section of different startups, ranging from those that are creating finished products to some focused on scaffolding, some focused on fat, some focused on media, which is the nutrients needed to feed cells.
Elizabeth: [00:24:36] What is scaffolding?
Thomas: [00:24:37] It's basically the three dimensional structure to support those cells to develop into a particular kind of meat. So if we're talking about creating certain cuts of meats that have more of a three dimensional structure as opposed to those that get their texture from downstream processing like a burger or ground ground meat, you typically need some kind of scaffold to support those cells to develop into that into that three dimensional structure that could be a food grade edible, plant based material that ends up dissolving. By the time the meat is actually fully developed, their whole range of different technologies that these companies are pursuing, we're really eager to see more public funding go into this space because of the potential of cellular agriculture to help overcome some really significant challenges and to increase our food production outputs. We think that it makes a lot of sense for the government to be supporting an industry like this, and that's not currently happening at any considerable level. But it's great to see that happening in other nations, including within our region like Singapore, that have put considerable investment dollars on the table to support the rapid growth of their alternative protein sector.
Elizabeth: [00:25:59] It's where the whole world is going. At some point, I think everyone's probably going to jump on. They're going to have to.
Thomas: [00:26:04] That's part of our message, that there's a window of opportunity for countries to take a lead in these industries. Already the technology has been under development for a decade, so that window will start to close.
Elizabeth: [00:26:27] What now with Food Frontier? Where are you guys now and what's coming up?
Thomas: [00:26:32] We're in strategic planning at the moment for 2021 and beyond. What we were doing two years ago is completely different to what we're doing now and what we're doing two years from now may look different again, as some of that's come from a traditional advocacy and campaigns background to now be working with government and with industry and with some of the biggest corporations and most influential sectors in the country is really encouraging. It's no easy feat to create sustainable change.
Elizabeth: [00:27:01] It's awesome what you're doing. Thank you so much for being here.
Thomas: [00:27:05] Thank you, Beth. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
Elizabeth: [00:27:17] To learn more about Thomas and about Food Frontier. Go to our website, it's speciesunite.com We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, we'd love it. If you would review, subscribe to species unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to support the show, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon. Patriarchs' species unite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Pokey, Gabriela Sybil Scott and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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