There’s a lot to learn from the lobster. Its transformation from disdained prison food to fine-dining delicacy reveals how culture shapes our palate and how people could start to get a taste for food that does less damage to the planet than a bacon cheeseburger. In Episode 5, we look to the future of alternative proteins—from bean burgers to lab-grown nuggets—and ask what it would look like to live in a world less centered on traditional meat production.
Transcript
This transcript was not edited prior to publication.
Barbecue Earth
Episode 5 Transcript
HEEWON PARK: Consider the lobster. It features in the menus of expensive Michelin-star restaurants and conjures up images of flowing wine, celebration, and indulgence. What many don’t know is that just a few hundred years ago, the lobster was once dismissed as the “cockroach of the sea” and the “poor man’s chicken.” Looked upon with scorn, it was used mostly as bait, fertilizer, and prison food. So how exactly did the lobster go from disdained prison food to fine-dining delicacy?
NOAH GORDON: It might not seem like it, but there’s much to learn from the history of this crustacean. The story of the lobster is also the story of how culture shapes our palate, and how we could start to get a taste for foods that do less damage to our atmosphere.
HEEWON PARK: In this episode, we take these lessons from the lobster and think to the future. We imagine what it would look like to live in a world less centered around traditional meat production, and think through how our food systems might change in the process. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’re listening to Barbecue Earth.
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NOAH GORDON: Episode 5: Consider the Lobster
HEEWON PARK: When pilgrims first arrived in the New England bays in the 1600s, the ocean was teeming with lobster. Because it was so easily accessible, lobster was extremely cheap. It was considered a lowly poor man’s food. In fact, it was considered so contemptible that laws were eventually put in place to stop the “cruel and unusual” act of serving too much lobster to incarcerated people.
HEEWON PARK: Then, fast forward to the 1800s, when the invention of canned food and railroads transformed our relationship to the lobster. Here’s Melanie Joy, social psychologist and founder of the nonprofit Beyond Carnism.
MELANIE JOY: Lobster started to be used for soldiers and shipped across the country. And then people started having access to it—I think it was coming from Maine. People in California started having access to cooked lobsters, and through trying this food, recognized that it was actually tasty.
HEEWON PARK: By the 1880s, the supply of lobster had diminished significantly, while American demand for it was only increasing.
MELANIE JOY: The cost of lobster therefore went up, making it less accessible to people with less money and only accessible to people with more money.
HEEWON PARK: Today, lobster is seen as a rich man’s food–a gourmet meal that you might treat yourself to only on a very special occasion.
MELANIE JOY: I think what this story illustrates is that there isn't a lot of rationality around which animals we do and don't eat. Historically, people have eaten animals that have been geographically available.
HEEWON PARK: In other words, there’s nothing innate or fixed about why humans choose to eat some animals over others. Our perception of food is emotional, cultural, and sometimes even religious–for example, think of how millions of Hindus abstain from beef. Our relationship to food is not objective or static.
MELANIE JOY: Imagine that you are biting into a juicy hamburger. Your dining companion turns to you and says that the hamburger is actually not made from beef—it's made from golden retrievers. Chances are, what you thought of just moments ago as food you now think of as dead animals, and what you just had felt was delicious, you now feel is disgusting. And therefore, rather than continue to eat the hamburger, you probably want to throw it in the trash and maybe even take to the streets in protest.
HEEWON PARK: What are these invisible forces that make us salivate at the thought of, say, beef, but repulsed by the idea of dogs as food? In order to explain these normative structures, Joy coined the term “carnism.”
MELANIE JOY: Carnism is the invisible belief system or ideology that conditions us to eat certain animals. Carnism teaches us to justify eating animals by teaching us to believe that the myths of eating animals are the facts of eating animals. These myths fall under what I refer to as the three Ns of justification. Eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary. Because carnism is institutionalized, it's embraced and maintained by all of our major institutions, from the family to the state.
HEEWON PARK: Carnism isn’t unique to Americans; it’s present all over the world.
MELANIE JOY: Members of all cultures have been conditioned to perceive a select handful of animals as edible. All the rest they perceive as inedible and usually disgusting to consume and often even morally offensive.
HEEWON PARK: Of course, the specific iterations of carnistic ideologies vary by country and culture. Liz Specht, the Senior Vice President for Science and Technology at The Good Food Institute, explains.
LIZ SPECHT: I think our binning of certain animals into food versus companion versus recreational is really quite cultural and quite variable.
HEEWON PARK: And in the context of the United States —
LIZ SPECHT: – why are we basically eating five or six of them, right? We eat chickens, cows, pigs—there's not a whole lot else. And that's really an artifact of the fact that those animals lived near humans at the time that we were moving into agricultural production and happened to be pretty easy to domesticate. It's not at all a reflection of those being the most nutritious or having the most delicious meat or anything like that.
HEEWON PARK: In contrast, these same bacon- and steak-eating Americans might recoil at the thought of eating the snails common in French cuisine, the chicken’s feet found throughout Asia, or the grasshoppers frequently sold as street food in Oaxaca, Mexico.
HEEWON PARK: Culture is powerful. Carnism, and all the feelings it causes us to have about animals and food, are strong. These same feelings make us reticent to any change to the status quo of our food systems. But our current model of food consumption simply isn’t working. Here’s Noah Gordon, co-director of the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
NOAH GORDON: Food systems account for approximately ⅓ of global greenhouse gas emissions, and animal agriculture is by far the most polluting and most water-intensive of all types of agriculture. In the US, we grow cow food in Arizona deserts where we don’t even have enough fresh water to build new homes.
HEEWON PARK: So how could our food systems become more sustainable? One path forward is something called regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture involves practices that originated in indigenous communities and prioritizes improving the health of the land and ecosystem. Here’s Penelope Breese, a regenerative farmer from Longview Farm in Maryland.
PENELOPE BREESE: It's all about building the soil, harvesting the sun. It's about making this land better than it was.
HEEWON PARK: Regenerative farmers “improve soil health” by building up carbon. This practice helps farmers by improving crop production and preventing soil erosion. And it also helps the environment, since more carbon in the ground means less in our atmosphere.
HEEWON PARK: At Longview Farm, Penelope Breese works to improve soil through something often referred to as “rotational grazing.” This means that her cows graze just one section of a field at a time and are moved to new pastures frequently.
PENELOPE BREESE: So every day I move them. This purpose is that it moves the water. It moves their manure around. They're not all congregating under the shade and leaving manure in just one spot. And it allows the grass to rest for 60 days and then to regrow. Now, if I was a conventional farmer, I would put all these cows and more in this big field and move them in 30 days, and all their manure would be concentrated in one area around where the shade was and around where the water was.
HEEWON PARK: Practices like this help reduce farms’ carbon emissions. But there are limits to how “climate-friendly” a steak can be–you might remember the mirage of “clean coal” from the 2000s. Specht says we have another path towards more fundamental change: alternative proteins.
LIZ SPECHT: Alternative proteins is really a term that describes products that are drop-in replacements for conventional meat protein. Meat, dairy and egg proteins fall within that category.
HEEWON PARK: Specht says that these alternative proteins are vastly more environmentally efficient forms of food than traditional meat. Just consider beef, for example: it takes over 30 calories of feed just to produce one calorie of beef, whereas alternative proteins avoid all the resource cost of feeding and raising animals for consumption.
LIZ SPECHT: We're not taking calories from feed crops or from grazing and channeling them through a living, breathing, metabolizing animal. They're being turned directly into end products for consumers. Just from a thermodynamic perspective, that efficiency is far higher.
HEEWON PARK: One reason alternative proteins can be good for the climate is that they use less land. Humans use about ¾ of all global farmland for livestock, either for grazing or growing animal feed. It’s pretty unrealistic to think that we’ll replace all traditional meat with alternative proteins. But Gordon says that even a small amount of displacement would still have massive benefits for the environment.
NOAH GORDON: One study from Boston Consulting Group found that if alternative proteins rose to take up just [about] 10% of the market, the carbon savings would be equivalent to decarbonizing nearly the entire aviation industry.
HEEWON PARK: Specht says there are three main categories of alternative proteins: (1) plant-based proteins, (2) microbial fermentation, and (3) lab-cultivated meats. Let’s start with plant-based.
LIZ SPECHT: So for plant-based, you're just using plant-derived ingredients. That includes proteins, but of course there's other things in protein products, right? There's fats, there's flavorings, there's vitamins, etc. So using plant-sourced versions of all of those components, and then assembling a product that has taste, texture, nutritional qualities that consumers expect from a meat product.
HEEWON PARK: Think of the veggie burger made of various bean products, or the Impossible Whopper at Burger King. Sometimes, these plant-based proteins get a bad rap in pop culture for pretending to be something that they’re not, or for trying to resemble meat or dairy but failing to deliver the flavor that we might expect. Microbial fermentation presents a second alternative. Specht and Carnegie Endowment senior fellow Jon Bateman explain.
LIZ SPECHT: For microbial fermentation, there's a couple of different, sort of, subcategories within that. So one is using that whole cell biomass from microbes, which could be fungi, could be bacteria. Another way of using fermentation is to do what's called precision fermentation, where you're using those microorganisms, essentially as tiny host cell factories to produce specific high-value ingredients. So these could be ingredients for nutritional quality. For example, you can use fermentation to make omega-3 fatty acids and put those into an alternative seafood product, or they could be for flavoring compounds or functional proteins.
JON BATEMAN: The other thing to remember about these different styles of alternative proteins is there are hybrid approaches that combine more than one. So, for example, the Impossible burger, which you can get at every Burger King today, includes an ingredient called heme, which helps give it the kind of juicy, almost bloody, spongy, meat-like texture. That is a fermented ingredient that is added to the plant material inside that burger.
HEEWON PARK: There’s still a lot of innovation happening in the realm of fermented proteins today, but a lot of these products might already be pretty familiar to consumers. Here’s Bateman again.
JON BATEMAN: As far as fermented proteins, consumers can find some of these on the shelves today. There's a long-lasting brand called Quorn, which uses fermentation technology to create meat substitutes. Beyond meat itself, fermented cashew cheese has become one of the most popular cheese alternatives that exists today and probably the best simulation of conventional cheese that exists.
HEEWON PARK: But perhaps the most interesting up-and-coming alternative protein is the third and final category: cultivated meat. This is meat that’s grown from stem cells in a lab, and it triggers all sorts of responses. We spoke to some people at a farmers’ market in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and some of them were really excited about the idea.
AUDIO (SCOTT): I’m Scott, 35 years old, live in Washington DC for a number of years, work in the environmental field.
AUDIO (HEEWON PARK): So would you eat lab-grown meat, if it became accessible?
AUDIO (SCOTT): [00:00:43] Of course! I can’t wait!
HEEWON PARK: Of course, others were more hesitant about lab-grown meat, even if they were still open to the idea. Here’s 24-year-old Lisa in DC and 65-year old physician Rolf in North Carolina.
AUDIO (LISA): I’d be nervous about it, but I’d also be really excited because I get really sad about factory farms, and I really care about animals. So I feel like I’d give it a go.
AUDIO (ROLF): I think I would want to find out more, how it compares to quality of protein, macronutrients. Is there anything that’s health benefits or health detriments? Then that would be the consideration that I would be questioning.
HEEWON PARK: But many others are far more skeptical. In Petersburg, Virginia, we spoke with Bree and Eunice, two 23-year olds from Georgia and Virginia who are now working as cooks in the military. We asked them if they would ever try lab-grown meat.
AUDIO (BREE): We really wanna push toward more healthy options and everything, so being with the lab-made meat—that’s a little scary. That’s—it’s weird. I would not try that.
AUDIO (EUNICE): I just feel like it sounds really weird, and I wouldn’t want to do that either.
HEEWON PARK: Linda Smith from North Carolina agrees with Bree and Eunice, too.
AUDIO (HEEWON): Have you heard about lab-grown meat before?
AUDIO (LINDA SMITH): Yes. And I don't want it! Why would I want to eat meat that's grown in a lab? It's not real meat, just like these impossible burgers and all this stuff. It can't be good for you. What is it made from?
HEEWON PARK: A lot of the suspicion of lab-cultivated meat seems to come from the mystery of it all. What exactly is it? And how is it grown in a lab? Is it real meat? Or some strange Frankenstein-y substance? Specht explains.
LIZ SPECHT: The first step to producing cultivated meat is to get your starting cell isolate. So these cells do come from actual animals. You can take them from a fertilized egg; you can take it from a biopsy, from an adult animal. There's a lot of ways that you can get that initial cell isolate. And then those cells are characterized and refined into what's called a working cell bank.
HEEWON PARK: Once this cell bank is ready to go, then it’s time to grow the meat–just like we do with the animals we keep in cages.. This process has a few different phases to it.
LIZ SPECHT: First phase—you're just expanding the number of cells that you have. Again, this is what cells evolved to do is to reproduce and divide. So you're tapping into those exact same biological mechanisms.
HEEWON PARK: So how do you get these cells to expand? Well, you feed them. The cells receive a cell-culture medium, which is basically just all the nutrients that any animal needs to build muscle tissue, like salts, sugars, amino acids, etc. Then the cells “eat” this feed and reproduce over and over again.
LIZ SPECHT: And then depending what type of product a cultivated meat company is making, they might have a second stage to the process where they're seeding those cells onto a matrix called a scaffold providing, kind of, that structure for the tissue. So these are typically spongy, porous scaffold materials that the cells stick onto and then start to differentiate into kind of fully mature muscle cells and fat cells.
HEEWON PARK: This scaffold basically helps the reproducing cells to form some sort of structure so it’s not just a cell paste or ground meat product. For example, you might use scaffolding to cultivate chicken cells into growing a tasty thigh–without wasting energy on making a brain that can suffer.
HEEWON PARK: And this isn’t science fiction. Cultivated, or “lab-grown meat,” has been around since as early as 2013. But was this first lab-grown burger everything that environmentalists had hoped for? That’s coming up next, after this short break.
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HEEWON PARK: About a decade ago, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post produced humanity’s first morsel of lab-grown meat. It was a burger, created from three months of lab work and 20,000 muscle fibers from cow stem cells. Food writers who tried this first cultivated burger said that it tasted like meat and had the “mouth feel” of a conventional burger, although it did have less fat than one might have expected. Still, the biggest issue with this first 2013 burger wasn’t necessarily the taste or the texture, but rather, the cost.
AUDIO (THE GUARDIAN): It’s not yet cheap or created easily. It has cost 250,000 pounds to make, and 5 years of research and production up until this day.
HEEWON PARK: Of course, no one would actually pay hundreds of thousands for a burger. Since 2013, companies and investors all around the world have raced to improve upon this technology. Now, lab-grown meat’s production costs have been reduced by 99 percent, and it’s becoming more available. Noah Gordon explains.
NOAH GORDON: In 2020, Singapore approved cultivated chicken for public sale. Israeli firms are starting to produce it as well.
HEEWON PARK: And since June of 2023, you can order lab-grown meat in the U.S., too.
NOAH GORDON: But you can’t just go to a grocery store to buy it in the U.S. For now, it’s only sold for consumption in a few restaurants, for example China Chilcano in D.C., which is run by the famous chef José Andrés.
HEEWON PARK: As you might guess from the fancy restaurants selling this lab-grown meat, the price point of cultivated meat still remains a challenge. And this is true for other forms of alternative proteins, too.
NOAH GORDON: According to a report from the Good Food Institute, buying plant-based meats at the grocery store is, on average, 67 percent more expensive than buying animal meat.
HEEWON PARK: And price isn’t the only roadblock. As exciting as alternative proteins might be for their environmental implications, Gordon says they face several other barriers to wide adoption.
NOAH GORDON: Another obvious challenge is taste. Of course, there are lots of plant-based proteins like tofu that are naturally plant-based, rather than being an imitation of meat or dairy. But many alternative proteins like Beyond Burgers face the daunting task of convincing customers that plant-based hamburgers or nuggets can rival the taste of animal meat.
HEEWON PARK: This is no easy feat. Alternative meat products have gotten a lot better over the years, but for many, they’re still simply not good enough. And even if alternative proteins improved in taste and price, they would face one last hurdle: culture. Here’s Jon Bateman.
JON BATEMAN: Food and culture are so intertwined. And I think we need to be realistic that in the short term, merely achieving price and taste competitiveness might not be enough to drive very widespread consumer adoption, because people have a lot of cultural affinities to the foods that they've grown up with. There can be an association with family heritage, like a southern barbecue or a turkey at Thanksgiving. The development of meat itself is a deeply culturally ingrained practice. You think about cattle ranchers who are pretty close to what Americans have treasured as this cherished image of the cowboy, the cattle rustler. I mean, how many times have you seen an image of that in old Westerns,in Marlboro ads? It's deeply culturally ingrained.
HEEWON PARK: For a lot of people, this traditional aspect of meat would be difficult to give up. And even for people who don’t have particularly strong emotional attachments to meat, other cultural aspects frequently push people toward animal consumption. Bateman and Melanie Joy explain.
JON BATEMAN: In many cultures, including the United States, there's a strong association between meat eating and masculinity.
MELANIE JOY: There's still this protein myth that seems to be all pervasive—this idea that we have to eat animals’ muscles to grow our own muscles.
HEEWON PARK: This link between meat and masculinity is particularly prevalent in the far right. In recent years, the term “soy boy” has become a more popular online pejorative, used to refer to men deemed not masculine enough. Here’s a clip from the show, the Joe Rogan Experience.
AUDIO (Joe Rogan Experience):
JOE ROGAN: People get mad at soy. Soy is like a political fruit–or, a vegetable.
DONNELL RAWLINGS: Is it?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People call you a soy boy, if you’re a Republican. People call, uh, weak men “soy boys.” It’s like, it’s an insult.
DONNELL RAWLINGS: I never knew that.
JOE ROGAN: Soy is one of the rare foods that’s attached to being a b****.
HEEWON PARK: Beyond linking soy with emasculation, conservatives have even accused climate-conscious progressives of bringing communism into American kitchens.
AUDIO (SEBASTIAN GORKA): They want to take away your hamburgers… This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.
HEEWON PARK: That was former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka. But Bateman says the left has its own reservations about alternative proteins.
JON BATEMAN: I've talked to several left-leaning people who feel that there's a certain kind of “ick” factor around the idea of eating something that has been created in a lab, for example. Or they wonder about the health of, you know, so-called Franken-foods versus what they perceive to be, quote unquote, natural foods that come from animals, although the way that meat is created today bears absolutely no recognizable connection to what we would think of as the natural conditions of these animals.
HEEWON PARK: Alternative proteins don’t have an easy road ahead. They face taste, economic, and cultural hurdles. But Bateman thinks they offer us a more humane, more efficient, and more environmentally friendly option.
JON BATEMAN: I think what I would say on the optimistic side is that culture can be changed, has changed, does change, and will change. Factory farming itself is a very modern invention. It really dates to the 1950s and since. I think we just have to remember that once the ingredients are in place, so to speak, culture has a way of adapting. If you walk into a future grocery store and you see on the shelf one slab of meat that has been grown in a lab that may seem like something your parents wouldn't have eaten but also is just as nutritious, tasty and chemically identical as a conventional meat—and then you see that other slab of meat that costs the same, tastes the same, but you know is associated with untold suffering and ecological destruction as well as human exploitation in places like slaughterhouses—I find it very difficult to imagine that large numbers of people, generations from now, are going to consciously choose that second slab of meat.
HEEWON PARK: The widespread success of alternative proteins is by no means guaranteed, but it’s certainly possible. After all, solar power was once a far-fetched idea. Specht thinks governments around the world should be doing more to help make the alternative protein future a reality.
LIZ SPECHT: We're starting to see governments invest in the alternative protein sector, and that's actually ramped up quite a bit in the last year or so. So just looking back at 2022, we're now at over $1 billion dollars globally that governments have put into alternative proteins. That might sound like a big number. It is a total drop in the bucket relative to what's needed here.
HEEWON PARK: Admittedly, some governments are taking measures that may reduce traditional meat consumption. We covered in previous episodes the crackdown on farm emissions in the Netherlands. New Zealand is implementing a methane tax, and California has new rules forbidding pigs from being packed so closely together. But still, Gordon and Bateman say these are baby steps.
NOAH GORDON: A recent study found that European and the US governments spend more than 1000 times as much subsidizing livestock farming as they do on alternative proteins. It's reminiscent of how governments still spend hundreds of billions on direct fossil fuel subsidies, in a climate crisis largely caused by fossil fuels.
JON BATEMAN: The U.S. government has not really intentionally sought to nurture the alternative protein sector in any substantial way. There have been small investments here and there from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, DARPA, other parts of the U.S. government that fund important research and development efforts. But if you add up the dollar value, it's pretty small compared to what other countries are putting into this and quite small compared to what the private sector is putting into these sectors.
HEEWON PARK: But Bateman believes this should change. He says alternative proteins aren’t just a critical step toward combating climate change, but also for something perhaps more unexpected: national security.
HEEWON PARK: Coming up next in Episode 6: why alternative proteins are important for national security, and who might emerge as winners and losers in a global protein transition. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’ve been listening to Barbecue Earth.
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HEEWON PARK: This episode was written by Noah Gordon and me, Heewon Park, and produced by me with assistance from Emily Hardy, Daniel Helmeci, Tim Martin, and Zachary Mills. Music was composed by me and artists on Artlist. Thank you to Emily Hardy and Daniel Helmeci for research support, Ryan DeVries for fact checking, and Amy Mellon, Jocelyn Soly, and Amanda Branom for their graphic design work.
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