A cup of cultured coffee
What I talk about when I talk about cultured coffee, synthetic chocolate, and eating with the seasons.
The hot business idea used to be this: find a non-vegan food (any non vegan food—even pet food) and make it vegan. (But definitely don’t call it vegan.) Things have changed. Now it’s take whatever animal thing and recreate it in the lab. The harder the better, or maybe the more premium the better. There are startups working on wagyu, foie gras, and caviar. At the most recent Indie Bio demo day there was a startup working on chocolate. I was both thrilled and horrified. How could they get all of those same incredible flavors in a synthesized chocolate? It sounded mission impossible.
A few months ago I pointed you to a startup working on cultured coffee. I wrote in this newsletter that the idea of creating conventional coffee stopped me “because what I love about coffee is its uniqueness.” Each bag of beans “has its own natural fingerprint of taste and smell,” I wrote. “Can we really expect to reproduce a cup of coffee with the same nuance of what we grow in the earth?” It feels similar to my chocolate complaints. Basically, don’t mess with my very favorite foods. How could anyone expect to tackle such a complex ingredient that’s been around for 2,000 some years?
Startups see the food industry as a giant problem to throw their techno solutions at. These are huge challenges that add up to dozens of Holy Grails. But these fixes exist in silos, independently re-creating one small widget instead of ideas that span the entire problem—the American Diet. Founders are looking at the protein on our plate, the fat in our sausage, the umami between our buns, but not everything on our plate.
At a climate conference this week, Sandhya Sriram, the founder of Shiok Meats, a cultured shrimps startup based in Singapore, said she expected that getting cultured meat to market would take hundreds of companies to get us there. She even offered to license her technology to anyone that wanted to get there faster. Had any man in her field said this yet? Not that I know of.
Unless we look at who holds the power in our food industry, and break their stranglehold, we will solve nothing. The concepts that seem most exciting to me are when companies look at the entirety of a problem. If doctors are telling us to eat less meat, then let’s create more hybrid approaches—mostly plants and if it needs it, a tiny amount of meat.
The pressure on our natural resources is real, but culturing things—growing them in the lab––isn’t the only possible route. It’s a route with potential, but we need more startups spinning in different directions. I recently tried some chocolate from Voyage Foods. It’s not chocolate at all, but made from plant-based ingredients that come together to approximate commodity chocolate. (Think Cadbury or Hershey’s milk chocolate.) It wasn’t dark and bitter and single origin like the Dandelion bars I love, but it may have the potential to fill a void. To take the pressure off of cacao, which has notoriusly bad labor practices, and growing demand that will ensure some of us can afford the “good” stuff and others get the “just okay” stuff.
Which brings me back to coffee. Perhaps the point here, I wrote in that newsletter, is that we can use cultured coffee to replace the cheap stuff (gas station coffee?) and tax the land less because we need to grow less. Our planet is finite. Are we ready to adapt?
Other tidbits:
Eating ultra processed, convenience foods are, ahem, bad for you. A new study by Ohio State University fed rats our usual junk feed (you know, the basic American diet of chips, cookies, pizza and burgers) for four weeks. At the end, the data indicated “that consumption of a processed diet can produce significant and abrupt memory deficits -- and in the aging population, rapid memory decline has a greater likelihood of progressing into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.” What can you do? Add omega-3 DHA to your diet. You can boost your omega’s by eating a wide variety of fish (go for the little ones in tins), algae supplements, flax and chia seeds, and walnuts. (Bonus points, eat more whole foods!)
Did you know that eating spinach grown locally (to wherever you live) has higher levels of vitamin C in the winter? Yep. According to this 2018 study out of Virginia Tech, winter-sampled spinach had 436 mg kg-1 versus spring 298 mg kg-1 and summer/fall 180 mg kg-1. This kind of variance held true for oranges and broccoli. It also means that generic database figures, for example numbers that are lifted from the USDA’s data, would actually be wrong depending on what season you’re looking at. Bonus points: eating seasonally and locally helps cut down on the miles your food travels to get to your plate, and transportation is one of the biggest offenders of greenhouse gases. (Bonus bonus points: go buy some spinach.)
Read this because it’s such a good story with a great ending and I’m sad that Season 2 of Ted Lasso is over. It’s about a restaurant critic who started with a pen name that allowed her to become the mythical white dude, and what happened when she finally stopped using the name.
Where you can find me:
My two dinners at 18 Reasons are sold out. I’m hopeful I can use the things I learn here and take the show on the road.
More podcast tapings--links to come.
I interviewed Uma Valeti, CEO of Upside Foods, for the SOSV Climate Tech Summit. Here’s a link to the 20-minute interview.
If you’re reading this, and it’s Friday, I’ll be at the Cultured Meat Symposium in San Francisco. It’s officially my 2nd in-person conference of the year! I’m leading a talk on transparency with Patricia Bubner of Orbillion Bio and Patrick Mills from Bi-Rite Grocery.
More exciting things coming soon!
Fascinating article... cultured cocoa? I too wonder how that will change its taste - and consumers' taste perceptions. Cocoa, and coffee I would imagine - have a lot riding on terroir -where they were grown... The subtleties of Ecuadorian chocolate vs. Sao Tome, for example will be lost if all of it is "essence of lab" ... And we can extend that to other foods that leverage their "sense of place." Imaging lab grown merlot ...