Jacob Goldstein co-hosts today's show with Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful. Jacob and Dan eat their way through the history of fake meat -- from Gardenburger hockey pucks, to meatier Impossible burgers. And they get a report from the fake-meat frontier, where scientists are trying to make lab-grown chicken breasts.
This is the third episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
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Pushkin. Dan Pashman, host of the Sportful podcast, Jacob Goldstein, host of the podcast What's Your Problem. I am here in your kitchen in the Sportful test kitchen. Welcome. So we're old friends. We've collaborated back when you were a planet money and you're more like business tech economics reporter guy and I'm more nerdy food guy. Yes, and we found a story that is the crossover podcast event of twenty twenty three, right, and the story is this, so we'll go with that short. Come on, yeah, this is the Sportful. It's not for food ease, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsessed about food to learn more about people. And I'm coming to you from my kitchen with my friend Jacob Goldstein, host of the podcast What's Your Problem? The show where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're gonna say change the world. The show where entrepreneurs talking about how they're gonna change the word about say solve if your problems, you gotta work. I'm memorizing your own tagline, kind of anti tagline. At this point, like people know what the show is. They pushed play yes, Yes, Today, Jacob, we're gonna talk about the past, present, and future of alternatives to meet Meat from animals is clearly a problem in the world right now right. It's a huge driver of climate change, a huge driver of land loss, of biodiversity decline. And so this is a real high stakes problem in the world, and people are spending billions of dollars to try and come up with new technologies to give us meat without animals. And I know a lot has been said about this, but I really feel like we have interesting, new, big stuff to say here. That's right, things have changed in the past year. Some of the things that looked very promising are struggling. Some of the things that felt like pipe dreams are becoming more real. So we're gonna get into all of that. The moment that sort of sets the stage for our story. Really, hippie is essentially right, Hippie vegetarian is right. And there is this chef who is who is kind of hippie adjacent. His name's Paul Winner, and in the seventies, he has this restaurant in Portland, Oregon. It's called the Garden House, and he wants to figure out what to do with his leftover food at the end of the day, and you know, he's got rice peel off. He's got to sort of random veggies, and he tries a few things, and he comes up with basically making it into a patty and cooking it and putting it between two buns, and he calls it the garden Burger. This garden burger that he invents in his restaurant becomes the garden burger. That was the go to veggie burger in the eighties and definitely in the nineties. But it wasn't a high end thing. It was almost the kind of thing where like when a bowling alley wanted to offer something vegetarian, they would have the garden Burger, or a chain restaurant or like a one level above a diner type place. Yeah, and you could also buy to the store. And you can't get the garden burger anymore. That just last year. Actually it got phased out. But I think you got sort of the closest thing, right. That's right. Let me step over here to my freezer and I have Morning Star Farms garden veggie burgers frozen. What's cooking up while we're talking about it. Yeah, let's do it. So let's just say before we even put it in, the veggie burger starts out brown. It looks to me, actually, it looks kind of like a like a hash brown. It's gotta that's got a brownish, almost like Cure Aid potato type vibe. Unlike meat, right, Like, it's not. It's not really supposed to be like meat. Right. It's supposed to be a thing you can eat between a bun when your friends are eating meat. So, so now we're gonna put the veggie burger into the pan. Let's see what kind of sound it makes. Oh, there's a little bit of sizzle, but not much. Yeah, I think I think the sizzle is just like because it's maybe a little icy from the freezer. So what happens to Paul Winner and his restaurant in Portland in the eighties. He winds up closing the restaurant, but the gardenburger turns into this product. He turns the gardenburger into this thing you can buy at the grocery store that restaurants buy to have a sort of token option for vegetarians. You know, it fills a need in the nineties if you want to get something for vegetarians at the barbecue. You pick up a pack of Gardenburgers. It's the go to veggie burger of the era. Right, It's functional. That's a great word for it. And that's why Gardenburger gets so big. It's doing a job in society. And this company blew up. It did great in the nineties. The Gardenburgers a big deal. The company actually has an IPO, it goes public, they sell stock. This chef who ran a vegetarian restaurant in Portland is like a multi millionaire from it. And maybe peak Gardenburger comes in the late nineties. It's huge. The stock is doing well. They advertise on the Seinfeld Finale Wow, which is like, you don't get more nineties than that. That's like Super Bowl ad level. Yeah, oh no, I want something and yo, Gardenburger the burger and the squeals would be like, so they were big time and Samuel L. Jackson generating their kind of strange Seinfeld ad. Yeah. So the instructions say that we should heat burgers over medium for seven to eight minutes, turning burgers over frequently throughout heating time. So I got my spachelor ready, I'm going to turn the burgers periodically, and while we hang out here and cook, Jacob, why don't you continue your story? So now it's the two thousands, and the Gardenburger isn't the only mediocre veggie burger game in town anymore. There's enough competition that you can't just get by on being the one anymore. And Gardenburger eventually goes bankrupt in two thousand and five, and if I remember correctly, Kelloggs purchased garden Burger and they kept selling these patties forty years, like they just discontinued them last year. But Kelloggs also owns morning Star, which is the company that makes this Garden Burger adjacent patty that we have in the skillet right now. And it looks like it's done, actually should we Yeah? Yeah, we have ketchup, we have mustard, and then I have my burger sauce, which is basically shake shack sauce. I'm in your hands, all right, let's do the shack sauce. Then no, they don't. They don't give out the recipe for the shack sauce. But I don't know if you know the recipe developed with Kenjie Lobo salt you will not take for hamburg No, and just kind of likes that. Being said, eating this does take me back. It's had a little more of a more of a pepper taste than I remember, but just that sort of that texture, that kind of crispy edges and mushy interior. It still scratches a nostalgia itch for me. I gotta say not for me. I'd rather like eat Cheetos or something if I want nostalgia food. Garden Burger and the similar burgers. They are veggie Burger one point zero, the sort of basic puck you can eat like a burger if you don't eat meat. And so around twenty ten we get the start of this really different new era in veggie burgers. You know, the old one was hippies, vegetarians, natural. The new one is Silicon Valley high tech like engineered in a lab. And there are two companies in particular that get founded in Silicon Valley. You know what they are. Say the names I'm gonna go with Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods very good. And I have to say I have been a big customer of these companies. My wife doesn't eat meat, my daughter doesn't eat meat, and our definite preference in our house is for Impossible, And I can say I haven't tried both. I agree that I like the impossible better. So partly because of that, I talked with Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible. He does not come from a food background. He was not a chef. He was a Stanford biochemist who spend his career studying the genome. And then one day, as one does, Pat Brown thinks to himself, let me think about what are the biggest problems in the world that I might work on, And he decides not to start a podcast, but rather it decides that the biggest problems in the world are climate change and the decline in biodiversity, and he decides that the way to fight those for him personally, is to start a company that can make fake meat that's as good as real meat without using animals. And so his goal in starting this company and starting Impossible is to entirely replace real meat with fake meat. This industry is supported by people who love meat, okay, and for us to compete them out of existence, we have to give them exactly what they want and do it better than the animal I love vegetarians and vegans as much as the next guy. But we don't accomplish anything by making better meat for vegans, and that's a completely different project and it requires technology and science. Right, So he's thinking about meat as a scientist, and in particular, he thinks about all the amazing things that happen when you cook meat. One of the striking characteristics of meat in general is that it behaves like an active chemical system. It starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively not very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you cook it, in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms, and in the process it produces this explosion of aromas that weren't there at the beginning. That's why a barbecue smells so good, exactly exactly, and you will notice that you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you barbecue broccoli. You also don't get similar behavior when you cook a garden burger, right right, It doesn't transform. It looks at the end basically like it looks at the beginning. And so Pat Brown knows that he needs to capture that magic transformation that happens when you cook meat. And Patchman, I know you bought a couple of impossible burgers also for us. Maybe we should start cooking those here. Yeah, let's do it, right, you want to crack these open, Jacob, Yeah, we've got two impossible burgers here. And just to compare them to the garden burger, right, like the garden burger look brown like a piece of bread. These look red with little flecks of white, like ground beef. And it was also interesting to me, you know, these are all the little details the garden veggie burger. You keep it in the freezer. The instructions say keep frozen until cooking. The Impossible Burger label says, treat this just like meat. If you're gonna cook it, defrost at first. In practice, if the end result is good. In theory, it shouldn't really make a difference how it starts. But it made me feel like, oh, treat it like meat. It made it feel that much more like meat to me. That's a real sizzle. And you can see that the bottom of the burger, the part touching the pan is browning and change in color as it would for any normal burger. Right, so so it goes in red burger color. And yeah, it looks not exactly like a burger, but a lot like a burger. So, just to go back to the story of Pat Brown, he wants to capture that that incredible smell and color and texture change that you get when you cook meat. And he thinks about this molecule called right. Hem is a naturally occurring molecule. There's a ton of it in meat. We also have it. Right, You may have heard of hemoglobin in our blood. That's hematologist is a blood doctor, very good, and hem is in all animals. It's a big part of what makes meat taste like meat. So Pat Brown's going to find a way to get hem into his burgers without animals. There's a version of hem in soy, right, soy leg hemoglobin. It's a version of hem that occurs naturally in the roots of soybeans. It's very molecularly similar to the way heme occurs in meat. They decide to genetically engineer yeat cells to produce soy leg hemoglobin. So this genetically engineered version of soy leg hemoglobin works and it becomes essentially the secret sauce in impossible meat. Should I prep these up? Yeah, let's each buns, so you cut it in half. For us to split and it is what you call this medium rare medium is a little line of pink in the middle. That's right, Okay, let's see it. The fact that this thing reacts like meat from the second you take it out of the fridge, and that you can cook it medium rare, and that it's even reminiscent of a burger is pretty amazing. That being said, you still wouldn't fool me in a taste test. And can you, as a professional describer of food, like talk about why you still like the burger better. So the things that this does have. It has a little bit of a crispy edge like you get in a good burger. It has it has the texture down very well. It has a meatingness, but it's still a tenderness like you would get with a good burger. It's still missing that hardcore beef note. It's it's it's like a band without a bass player. I like it, so not bad, but the bet you kind of miss something. You miss something that's there's like a deep guttural that isn't quite there. So let's go back to the story sort of on that note. So Pat Brown is making the impossible burger that people at Beyond are making the Beyond Burger, and they come out in the teens, in the two thousand teens, and then their big moment, the real sort of rocket ship blast off, turns out to be the pandemic. It turns out to be twenty twenty. I talked about this with Laura Riley, she covers the business of food for the Washington Post. A lot of us, you know, let's say March of twenty twenty through the end of that year, a lot of us had a lot of time on our hands. We were panic eating frequently, and we were looking for new things to do, so a lot of us at least dabbled in the whole kind of alt meat space. Also, the Impossible Whopper. The Impossible Burger comes out at Burger King just before the pandemic in twenty nineteen, and during the pandemic that wound up being big for my family. Obviously we weren't going out to restaurants, but drive throughs were still open. Not everybody in my family each meet, and I have to say that is my favorite version of the Impossible Burger is the Impossible Whopper. It was pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't a smash. But what every fast food restaurant wants to do, and they've tried all different things over the year's salads, etc. They want to remove veto power. So you have a family of four and mom says, I don't feel like a burger. So you know, that's what you're always trying to do. You want to have enough menu items that you can appeal, you can find something for that person who would veto it. You know what's interesting about that is that's actually the same motivation as the garden burger. We have one person who we can't please with the regular menu, so we're going to have this thing in the freezer. And it is also not the dream of Pat Brownet impossible foods, not the dream of beyond right again, not quite there yet, but it's good enough right that in twenty twenty it's new. That is like the big boom for fake meat both you know, the impossible whopper people are buying at grocery store. Everything's great. It feels like we're in this new era of fake meat until we get to twenty twenty two, which is when everything changes. This last year is when really the kind of air starts coming out of the fake meat bubble, and you see this in a lot of different ways. One place you see it is the most important fast food restaurant, McDonald's, which in early twenty twenty two comes out with its mcplant burger, which is a collaboration with Beyond. They were massively late to the game, and they debuted it in the San Francisco Bay area, the Mcplant, and also in Dallas Fort Worth. So they roll out the mcplant in early twenty twenty two, and what happens. It bombs and they basically they cancel the mcplant. So okay, So the failure of the mcplant, that's like piece of bad news number one in twenty twenty two for this new era of fake meat. But there's more bad news. One thing that happens is just the growth really stop. Right. This sector had been growing, growing, growing at the beginning of the pandemic, and now it's not growing anymore. Essentially, one theory of why that happened is that people tried it. It was a novelty and like kind of like you, It sounds like they were like, yeah, it's pretty good, I would eat it, but I don't like it enough to keep buying it. But I actually think the most important thing that hurt fake meat last year was inflation. Food inflation was particularly high, and fake meat crucially being problem they haven't solved yet. Not only is it not quite as good as real meat, it's way more expensive, and people are feeling acutely higher prices at the grocery store. It's like, no, I'm not going to pay more for this thing that's not quite as good. Laura Riley the Washington Post reporter. She says, we do need another sort of technological leap forward, and the same way that there was a leap from the garden burger to the impossible burger, we need the next one of those. We need the next technological leap. What it's been launched so far is mostly patties or nuggets. What we need next in order to kind of grow the category is we need things that are really thought of more as ingredients, you know what I mean? Like that I'm making I'm having friends over tonight and two of them are vegged. So I'm going to make a stir fry with this plant based sliced chicken. The bowlless, skinless chicken breast is beloved by home cooks. We need to get to whole pieces of meat. Yeah, exactly, we need meat. We're coming up, Jacob. We're gonna hear about people growing meat right now, and we'll hear from my friend Sean Rama's farm who went out to California and tasted lab grown meat. Culture. You love to go to California. He's still got that edge, the no kid's edge. And now a delicious word from our sponsors. Welcome back to the sport Full. I'm Dan Pashman, and if you missed last week's show, you missed a big one. I announce that I've teamed up with Spollini once again and we have produced two new pasta shapes that are on sale right now. For these two shapes, I went deep into the pasta shape archives looking for obscure shapes that I wanted to share with the world. But before I could do that, I had to convince some of my toughest critics my family. All right, first ever tasted this new pasta shape, Quatratini. It's perfect in all three categories, like no offense to Cascatelly. I love it. I had a hope it didn't take away from Cascatelli sales, because I mean, do you think it has. It has all three right precability, sausability to think ability. There's think that's room in the world's fro more than one great pasta shape. Listen to last week's episode. Here the story of these shapes and buy them now only through Sfolini's website. That's also where you'll see a link to buy these new casketelly clutch purses limited edition by a designer named Julie Malow. They're really cool and they're just for Valentine's Day. There's only a couple of hundred of them. You can get all these things at s Folini dot com. That's sfogli Ni dot com. All right, I'm back in my kitchen with my friend and collaborator for this episode, Jacob Goldstein, host of the podcast What's Your Problem, and we're talking about the past, present, and future of alternatives. To meet now for the next and final stop on our journey, Jacob, I've been looking into cultured meat. Okay. This is where you take cells from a real animal, you take them into a lab, and you grow meat using those cells. So in theory, if it works, it will be real meat, but you won't have raised or killed an animal to get it. Now, The underlying technology here is not so new, okay. The idea of growing cells in a lab has been around for many decades. I mean, this is how they made the polio vaccine. What's new is using this technology to create something you might eat. Okay. Now, the first success with this was when a Dutch professor made a lab grown burger. That was in twenty thirteen, ten years ago, okay, ten years out in this new kind of era. Now, just in the last few months, it's got a lot more real, especially here in the US, because in November, the FDA declared cultured chicken from one company, Upside Foods, to be safe for human consumption. That's a major milestone. Now, it's still not going to be in stores quite yet. It's got to get past the USDA, and even when that happens, it's going to be you know, expensive, and in just a few places. So it's still early days. But I mean, we talked about this in the Sportfull a few years ago, and my impression then was like, this is space age stuff. So the fact that it could be coming to any kind of stores soon seems like a major development to me. I mean, I know, sort of On the business tech side, there has been a ton of a venture capital investment into fake me not just beyond and impossible, but to these kind of next generation sell culture fake meat, although I would say Jacob, I would not call it fake meat. It might not be a whole animal, but I think it's meat. And one company working on making cultured chicken and beef is called eat Just. They aren't have a product in grocery stories you may have seen called just egg. It's a plant based egg, and now they're getting in to grow in their own meat. To be clear, this is not the company that got the FDA approval, but they are one of the big players in this space. Their headquarters are in Alameda, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco. I wasn't able to visit, but my old friend Sean Ramas Farm, host of the excellent Daily News podcast Today, explained he went there and saw it himself. Here's how he describes the setup at each just there's all these tubes. There's very serious scientists hard at work. There's like big chambers and fridges and steel this and that, and rows and rows of lab equipment. It looks like, you know, there's like a billion COVID tests going on at once, with like little droplets of this going into little droplets of that. I don't know that COVID test is the metaphor I want for my cultured meat. I think he's saying. You know, there's that generic newsreel footage that we've seen on TV ten thousand times now anytime they talk about COVID and tests. You see those people in the coats with the droplets, and that's what it looks science. So after all these droplets that Sean described, the cells go into a bioreactor that speeds up their growth. And the bioreactors, as they're described to me, there like giant steel cylinders. They look like a brewery. You've ever been all those restaurants is also a brewery. You see the big steel tanks. It's like that. So to find out what happens next in those bioreactors, I talk to a scientist who works there. So my name is Vitor Sento. I am the senior director of cello Agriculture at Good Meat, which is a subcb area of heat just so Vitoor Santo trained as a tissue engineer. In past jobs, he worked on using cell cultures to regenerate human bone and cartilage. So he was in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Now he's growing meat. So once the cells are in the bioreactor, we feed them a solution, so it's in a liquid farm and it's a combination of different nutrients. So think of proteins, I you know, acids, vitamins, fats like miracle grow. But for meat, pretty much think of what you would what you would feed the chicken, like the soliditade of a chicken, but you just turn that into a into a cultural broth. When the sales come out of that bioreactor, they're not done yet. A lot of times people expect you to see a full steak or a chicken breast coming out of the bioreactor, but that's not really what happens. What do you see is more like think of a slurry or a concentrator which doesn't have yet a lot of structure. So not that they ask, but my tip to them would be stop using the words slurry to describe any part of your process. Slurry, we don't want to bioreactor. Basically, don't let a scientist talk to it. Just show me the chicken. Yeah, like, I don't want to eat meat that at any point was a slurry. But so so they get the slurry and they need to make it into a chicken breast, and to do that they need to add what they call scaffolding. All right, This is plant protein extract that is formed into a three D model of a piece of meat that the cells can then attach themselves to in order to get the shape and texture of a chicken breast. Now, I know it sounds very sci fi, but Beator says, it's not as far out as you may think. And what we're doing that by our reactors, to be honest, is just mimicking the natural process. We're just feeding. Instead, let's say, of having cells growing in tissues and organs and having blood circulating through them in the animal body, we're mimicking them, but inside of a stainless steel by a reactor with this mixture of nutrients. Now, as we've been saying, Jacob, the goal is to get whole cuts of meat like a chicken breast, right, But they had to start with a simpler project, the chicken nugget, and Viator still remembers the first time they made a chicken nugget that actually had the taste and texture of a chicken nugget. It was a turning point, I would say at eat Just, it was a little like touching the moon almost. In December of twenty twenty, Single Poor became the first country in the world to approve lab grown chicken for sale, and eat Just began selling their chicken nuggets in one fancy club in Singapore and since then now there's another restaurant in places in Singapore. Now eat Just is moving on to whole cuts of meat, like chicken breasts, which seems like profoundly harder than a chicken nugget, right, Yeah, I mean you can kind of throw anything into ground meat or a chicken nugget and to mimic the quote unquote. I mean, like, like like what's real in an original chicken nugget, Who knows. But when you're talking about an actual chicken breast, there's so much about the eating experience that you might not even consciously know, but you're gonna know if it's missing. I mean, that feels like a bigger leap. If we think of the leap from the garden burger to the impossible burger, like that's big. But going from a faked chicken nugget to a fake chicken breast that feels like an even bigger leap. It's huge. Do you think about it? Like a chicken breast has those kind of you pull up hearted chicken breasts has those sort of striations. Yeah, the sinews right, you had to chop across them when you're exactly right, and like the idea of creating that in a out of a flurry. Our friend Sean Rama's farm, he when he went there, he got to taste their chicken skin and their chicken breast. We started with an appetizer that looked something like like a pork rind. It was like chicken skin on top of a sort of mix of vegetables, and you know, because it was crispy, it was sort of hard to tell like like what the difference was, and so it was hard to be like, wait, is this chicken or is this is this not chicken? If it tasted just like the real thing, what do they served to you? Next? Next up was the piece de resi stalls. I suppose it was another mix of vegetables over like a muscular, fatty piece of chicken that felt like a kin to a piece of chicken breast, but again with with skin on it, And as much as I wanted to doubt, I was very impressed. It was you know, it had the texture, it had the taste, and it had the flavor of the genuine article. It was legit. So it sounds like you went in skeptical totally and you were impressed. I was impressed with the product. Now I remained skeptical that this is going to happen anytime soon, Jacob, What what Sean's alluding to is like, Yeah, they made tremendous advances on the taste and the texture. What they're struggling with is the cost. Yeah, okay, right now, vetours, does it cost them about fifty dollars to make one chicken nugget? Amazing? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's so they got a little ways to go here before this is gonna be a big product. In fairness, that's way cheaper than it was a few years ago. They're doing better, but they still have obviously a long way to go. They got to scale up, They gotta get cost down. They need to find a way to grow more cells per batch, faster and without spending so much to feed the cells. But it's a constant struggle, Viator tells me, because if they push too much in that direction, the quality of the product can suffer. That as an impact on the flavor of the cells. Maybe they don't taste as much as chicken anymore, or they are the flavor maybe is a little less powerful. Yeah, I mean this is a really interesting, profound question, right, Like making things get cheaper and better or at least equally good, is like a core technological problem in history, right, And maybe the most important thing in the world economy for the last fifty six years has been the way computing power has gotten better and cheaper. Right. There's this famous thing More's law that every two years computers basically get twice as good, and that has been this huge driver of like everything in Silicon Valley. Right, And this is very much a Silicon Valley universe. You have venture capitalists. This company is in the Bay Area. They're pouring money, and what they want is a computer like outcome. Right. They want it to get twice as good at half the price constantly. And it's not obvious that just because it worked with computer chips, it'll work with cultured meat. It doesn't work in every domain. But I have to hope that it will, right. I have to hope that all this money will pay very clever people who are motivated, who will make cultured meat, meat without animals, that is at least as good as meat from animals and at least as cheap. I think it's cool that they're trying, and it's exciting to hear Sean say that as close as they are, and I'm excited for the day that we can really take this technology to the next level of Jacob okay, because Vitor says that once they get the template, they can make almost anything. As long as you have the equipment, infrastructure, and the means, like the culture composition to feed those cells, you can essentially grow any type of meat, any type of meat. Jacob okay, are you thinking what I'm thinking, Human beings? No, No, Jacob, Jurassic Park. This is like almost the same technology from that movie. Okay, they got the dinosaur DNA, they made dinosaurs, And in fact, there's a company in Belgium right now that says they're developing wooly mammoth burgers. You know, in foody circles, there's all this talk about your burger blend like, oh, we do like you know, twenty percent short rib, twenty percent brisket or whatever, and every chef thinks they have the best blend or whatever. I cannot wait to go out to a restaurant and be like, I'll have the like half Dodo bird, half Stegosaurus burger. Please, I'm in. If it costs the same as a hamburger, it'll work. Oh come on, Jacob, you wouldn't pay an extra dollar for a stegosaurus burger. I'd pay an extra dog. How does it come with fries? Sure, I'll throw in the fries for free in I think the big question here with the cultured meat is even if it does taste the same, will people eat it? It still feels weird. I hear what you're saying. But a couple of things. First of all, think about all the stuff in the whatever freeze or aisle of the grocery store. Like, look at the ingredient list on any whatever frozen pizza. It's insane. Nobody looks at it. I think basically most people don't care, right, And if you think about today the way some people care a lot, you can imagine those kind of meat eaters, some you know, small percentage of people who will always want their meat. But I think if you have something that is indistinguishable from meat and the same price or even a little cheaper, let's dream big. I think people will get the cheaper thing that's basically the same. I also think that these things may be somewhat generational, you know, so like if you are have you been eating cultured meat from the time that you were five, then it doesn't feel weird to you. I think that I would probably I'm more excited about cultured meat than about the plant based I think they have a better chance of getting to the truth. What I would call it taste parody. It sounds like from what Sean said that they're already there in some respects. We agree with the impossible Burgher. As impressed as we were, it's not quite there. And to me, like I feel like I'm in the target audience for this because I'm not a vegetarian, but I care about the environment and animals. I try my best to buy meat that's been raised ethically. I don't always succeed, but I try so. If you said to me, hey, here's the thing that would check all those boxes and it tastes the same and it's the same price. I would go for that. I think we agree. Fake meat, cultured meat, whatever you want to call it, meat without the animals. It's not there yet, but it really sounds like it's getting there. And if they can get the price down, I think that'll do it and I hope it happens. Cashman, this is great man. Thank you for having me in the Sportful Test Kitchen. Is my pleasure anytime. Let's tell folks real quick. So your podcast, Jacob Goldstein is called What's Your Problem? And actually we've been doing a few food shows now. We did a whole interview with Pat Brown, the impossible food guy, who you heard a little bit from in this show. We have a whole interview with him. We did another show recently about this app Slice that's trying to help mom and pop pizza shops compete with Dominoes. So well, lots of food content as well as other kind of business and tech stuff. Jacob, thanks for coming to the Sportfel Test Kitchen aka My kitchen. Thanks for having me. This show is produced by me along with senior producer and producer Andreas O'Hara, with help this week from What's Your Problem host Jacob Goldstein and producer It's Our editor is Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sportfell is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Colin Anderson Nora Richie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pash and I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better that