Emergency pizza

What I talk about when I talk about organic cultured meat, the branding of emergency pizza, and how to get a free sandwich.

Hi everyone. What a week. I’m gaming there’s a lot on everyone’s minds, and I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to read my newsletter. I hope that Technically Food is a fun read where you learn something new to tell later at a dinner party or find a nugget that makes you want to dive deeper. This weeks subject line is a nod to a Domino’s Pizza campaign. If ever there was a week for free pizza, this was it.

And the sun will continue to rise.

German-startup Meatosys caught my eye this week when it received pre-seed funding from Big Idea Ventures. The tagline grabbed me. Under the company logo it read: “Organic Cultivated Meat.” Organic? I’ll come back to that. The biggest problem with cultured meat startups is figuring out how to scale without building prohibitively expensive facilities on unproven – and in some states illegal – commercial ideas. Meatosys wants to sell farmers on its idea of an in-the-box lab to grow meat. Think a shipping container filled with lab equipment. Meatosys makes money by selling the cells and chemicals needed to grow the meat; farmers make money selling back the finished meat. (Meat not from animals on the farm but from bioreactors.) 

The fantasy of an organic cultured meat farm. Photo Meatosys.

So it’s grown on a farm. OK, I’m skeptical, but maybe this could happen. Can cultivated meat be labeled organic? Eric Schulze, former head of regulatory at Upside Foods, texted me back when I pitched the question his way: “It’s literally impossible to be certified organic under current regulations. I looked into it.” There ya go. I heard a few years back that there was a startup hoping to get verified by the Non-GMO Project. I’ve yet to see it. Since Meatosys is based in Germany, it’s possible the company thinks it can happen there but as a part of the EU, with even stricter controls than the US, I’ll vote no.

Another sector hoping to lean on the promise of “organic” marketing are vertical farms. While the USDA is open to allowing it, if they follow specific guidelines, the regulatory agency also say: “Produce can be called organic if it’s certified to have grown on soil that had no prohibited substances applied for three years prior to harvest.” Vertical farms use a potting medium that is not soil. Some companies don’t even grow in a potting medium but in fluffy carpet-like substances with the plant roots dangling in the air.

Back to Eric Schulze who appeared on David Chang’s podcast recently to chat cultured meat. The episode starts with a tangent about height (Schulze is tall), so skip to 12:37 in the show to get to the more interesting stuff. Schulze tells Chang that cultivated meat could be a “choose your own adventure” food where we get to make things like dinosaur dino nuggets; or humans, which he generally shares as a joke. (No Brad Pitt meat. Just no.) On the topic of what chefs want from cultured meat, Chang said chefs want “perfectly imperfect” meat. “They don’t want a cylinder of meat,” he said. 

Yes, chef. Consumers don’t want it either. Chang is an investor in Meati, which makes a fine mycelium “chicken” that you can pick up at your local market. Yet the chicken is identical-shaped blocks that lack the imperfect-perfect that Chang says he craves. Chang is also partnered with Berkeley-based Prolific Machines, which is building technology that may help other cultivated meat startups. You can read my story about them in The Information.

That’s all I have this week. I planned something entirely different today but sometimes you need to pivot. Please leave a comment, like or share this newsletter. Keep reading to learn where to get your free Prime Roots sandwich.