MATTSPLAINED [] MSP134 [] Selfies in Space: No One Sees You Scream
Do you remember that time Rey and Chewie bumped into Thor at brunch? No? It’s on Gamora’s Insta. Our feeds are full of omakase, dalgona coffee and selfies. But where are the selfies in sci-fi? Welcome to the Real Housewives of Space.
Photo: @Unsplash. Glitching by Kulturpop.
Hosts: Matt Armitage & Richard Bradbury
Produced: Richard Bradbury for BFM89.9
TRANSCRIPT
Richard: On the past few shows, MSP’s Matt Armitage has brought up the topic of his potato chip consumption. For the sake of well, all humanity, it’s time to stage an intervention as MSP delves, once again, into the thorny topic of food.
Richard: I’ve been warned that any time we let you talk about food you gross people with talk of lab grown meat…
Matt:
There’s an element of truth to that but only in as much as other people find it gross.
The idea of meat growing in labs to me is less weird than the idea of raising animals and killing them.
That’s really bizarre - especially when you consider the industrial scale that we produce meat on.
But I’m not going to digress into that first. We can bring that up later in the show.
2020, for a whole raft of reasons has changed our relationship with food.
Richard: Like the Dalgona Coffee craze?
Matt:
Certainly, being locked at home has rekindled a lot of people’s interest in food.
So we’ve seen a lot of food trends emerging via social media.
Dalgona Coffee is one. Bread making and baking.
Healing foods. No idea what that means. but, you know, the Internet…
What’s also been interesting has been looking at the predictions for food trends in 2020, most of which were made pre-pandemic last year.
One of the big food trends for the UK was suppose to be food halls - upmarket versions of the asian food court.
Can’t imagine anything being further from the actual reality of this year.
Richard: But it’s largely been a year for healthy eating?
Matt:
Well, you mentioned crisps in the intro - potato chips. So I don’t think we can say that.
And Dalgona Coffee is maybe something you don’t want to be drinking or eating every day.
In the earlier part of the year we were certainly seeing the Netflix and chill effect.
High calorie comfort foods and couches.
Restricted access to exercise.
To the point where - as we commented on the show a few weeks ago - the UK government is considering increasing access to gastric surgery solutions to tackle obesity.
Richard: And there’s a coronavirus aspect to that?
Matt:
From the reports I’ve read, which relate to the UK but I guess are relevant to many other countries.
Improving the overall health of the population - whether through diet, lifestyle or medical intervention - is thought to improve the way many people respond to the virus.
We’ve seen that people with underlying health conditions, high blood pressure, diabetes - are all more at risk from the virus.
So overall, it reduces pressure on health systems stressed by the pandemic.
Richard: So, healthier diets have been a focus of 2020?
Matt:
We live in a world - or we used to live in a world - that was fast and high pressure.
And a lot of us treated food in that way.
We eat out a lot. We eat a lot of convenience food - not that that makes it inherently unhealthy.
But we give a lot of control away in that we’re always eating from a menu and have little influence over what goes into the food.
What has been an interesting side effect of the pandemic - at least for those lucky enough to be able to afford choices.
Has been the ability to take back control of their diet.
Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean healthy.
You can easily make something at home that outstrips the calories in the most outrageous fast food joints.
Richard: But it’s enabled people to choose?
Matt:
That simple experience of choosing what you eat, the quality and the quantity of the ingredients.
And when you eat. Another hallmark of the way we used to live was snatched and late meals.
So our approach and attitude to food has altered this year.
Richard: Have we seen an acceleration of demand for items like plant based meat replacements?
Matt:
Definitely.
Plant based foods - essentially meat replacement products, mock meat, that kind of thing.
Which can be soy based, pea protein based.
All manner of options.
Jackfruit to give a local example.
So plant based foods, we were expecting to see an increase in demand for them this year in any case.
Building on the increases of the last few years.
That demand has exceeded a lot of people’s expectations in 2020.
Nielsen predicts these plant-based mostly burger alternatives to be worth over US4bn worldwide this year.
Which is a huge amount of money but still tiny in global food terms.
In the US alone, each person spends an average of almost USD1k on meat per year. Tens of billions in one country.
So US4bn is still a tiny percentage of our overall food consumption.
Richard: But meat industries have been affected by the shutdown?
Matt:
Absolutely. Global meat consumption in 2020 is likely to be well down on 2019.
Partly as we aren’t eating out so much.
All those cafes and bars and restaurants being closed for months - in some states and countries they still are - has had a huge impact on demand and supply chains.
But plant-based meats have seen their demand increasing throughout this year.
Brands like Beyond Burger, Impossible Food and The Meatless Farm Co are on their way to becoming household names.
And, obviously, 2020 has seen a surge in demand for all the raw ingredients of our meals as
Richard: But not always for the right reasons...
Matt:
True, Meatless Farm Co has just gotten into some trouble over an ad campaign in the UK where it made use of the company’s initials as though they were a rather crude exclamation declaring how good the company’s products are.
Similar to the kind of trouble the FCUK clothing brand got into with a campaign in the
But the interesting part about that is that it was part of a UKP1.5m ad campaign.
That’s the kind of spending you expect from mainstream brands not upstart niche foods.
So it represents a lot of business confidence in the sector, which is also evident from the rise in the variety of plant based ready meals they now offer.
These companies are moving away from the burger and mince type products they initially went to market with to create bolognaise type dishes and all manner of ready meals.
Richard: Are we seeing their prices come down?
Matt:
We are seeing meat alternatives being marketed now at prices that compete with meat.
I think most of them are still slightly higher but as demand surges, we will probably see production prices decrease.
How much of that gets passed on to consumers is anyone’s guess.
Obviously, in Malaysia we’re paying imported prices for them so they don’t appear to be a direct equivalent as yet.
But according to reports in New York Times and some other US publications...
People have been attracted to the products as genuine alternatives.
Supplies of products like burgers have at some times been interrupted due to COVID outbreaks at meat processing plants.
A food processing plant may turn out to be, if not the root cause, then an amplifier of Auckland’s new COVID outbreak.
Richard: So they’re not just being seen as a healthier food, but also as potentially less likely to carry a virus risk?
Matt:
At least anecdotally in the media, there seems to have been some incidence of people viewing these products as belonging to a safer part of the food chain.
Especially as, as of earlier in the pandemic, companies like Impossible and Beyond were claiming that none of their workers had contracted the virus.
That may have changed but I haven’t been able to find any direct information that suggests any transmission in their production facilities.
But it’s interesting - again anecdotally from media reports - certainly at least some of those that have tried the products for that secondary reason rather than for dietary reasons,
Are opting to continue buying them.
The taste is close enough to meat that they’ve been won over.
Richard: Are we seeing similar trends across Asia?
Matt:
Sure. There’s been a long history of vegetarianism and mock meats in Asian cultures, obviously.
I think a piece in the Nikkei mentioned that the market was worth around USD15bn across the region, a lot of the products being made from soybean rather than the high tech bio-chemistry of the likes of Impossible Burgers.
Hong Kong’s Green Monday saw a 120% rise in demand for one of its meat replacement brands from January to April this year.
In China, brands like Starbucks, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC have added Beyond Meat sourced alternatives to their menus since the start of the pandemic.
MosBurger’s outlets in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore have added a mushroom sourced alt-meat burger.
And my wife really likes Just Egg a plant based egg alternative.
Richard: To be clear, the demand hasn’t been created by the pandemic?
Matt:
No. I mentioned earlier. We’ve seen strong growth in the sector since 2015 at least.
A lot of people have had concerns about the amount of meat they eat or the way meat is produced.
The pandemic seems to have accelerated those concerns.
It also helps that technology and the products have improved - in terms of their comparability to meat.
And it’s not just the giant conglomerates getting into the industry. We’re seeing startups emerging worldwide.
We mentioned Green Monday in Hong Kong.
In Thailand, a start up called Thai FoodTech launched a plant based meat alternative called More Meat at the start of the year.
While the quantities are still very small, demand for the product has been roughly 5 times stronger than the company had anticipated at launch.
I think we can certainly say that this is a food technology that has truly arrived.
Richard: Mock meat from a mock human? When we come back Matt puts his lab coat to explore the hidden science of our food.
BREAK
Richard: Matt, you’re no stranger to laboratory experimentation...
Matt:
No. I’m like the reverse Spiderman.
Or a Banner/Hulk hybrid without the intelligence or strength...
Richard: But I know you’re itching to get to the lab grown meat part.
Matt:
Yeah, so this on I think I covered on one of the last Geeks Squawk shows with Jeff.
A lot of cultured cell meat - where you take actual cells from an animal - and then create edible meat by culturing those cells and replicating those cells in a lab.
KFC recently announced a partnership with a Russian based biotech company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to create lab made chicken nuggets from a mixture of animal cells and textured plant materials.
And as the name suggests the nuggets will be 3D bio-printed.
Richard: It sounds extremely unnatural...
Matt:
Some chicken nuggets have been subject to legal proceedings in the past, concerning whether or not they are truly an animal product.
But I think a lot of our inbuilt horror comes from the idea these foods are created from a chemistry kit.
Yet KFC claims that the bioprinted nuggets will be cleaner and more ethical.
Their production won’t harm animals and won’t require the chemical additives that are a feature of many fast food products.
Richard: When are we likely to see these strange nugget creatures?
Matt:
I think the two companies are hoping to get them finalized kind of September/October time.
One report I read suggested they might be trialed in some Moscow KFC outlets before the end of the year, but I’m not sure if that’s the case.
Would you try them?
Richard: [ad lib reply]
Matt:
I’d be perfectly happy to give them a go.
All the science seems to point to meat production having a major impact on the planet and our use of resources.
So, if we can reduce that impact safely and in ways that are nutritionally equivalent, or perhaps even better, then I’ve got no problems with that.
Richard: That brings us to the bigger question of whether these products are actually better for the environment?
Matt:
Firstly, we have a presentation issue. Largely related to terminology.
We happily eat fermented products but cultured sounds a bit too scary.
Other terms like tissue-engineered are plain terrifying.
I’m pretty open-minded but I think we need cuddlier words. Tissue-engineered jerky is probably not going to leap from the shelves.
The idea of clean meat being lab grown I think is still to cement in people’s minds.
I’m not a fan to be honest. I think it’s a term that adds more confusion.
But it’s not a done deal that lab-grown meat will benefit the environment.
Richard: This is the 2019 study by Oxford University?
Matt:
Yes. On the one hand we have the potential gains from reduced land use to raise animals, and of course, hopefully a halt on the deforestation that has been linked to the cattle industry.
Then there are the associated benefits from not having those animals - less food diverted to feed them.
Use of chemical fertilisers to create that animal feed. The housing and transportation of the animals.
And of course, the emissions - mostly methane - they emit.
However, despite all those gains, the study concluded that it may even be possible that lab grown meats will be worse for the environment.
Richard: Because labs are energy intensive?
Matt:
Yeah. Using contemporary energy and power generation methods, the carbon dioxide emissions from the labs could potentially be more damaging than the methane emissions from the animals they’re replacing.
While methane is a potent and global warming gas, it spends less time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Leading perhaps, to a greater increase in CO2 accumulation over the long term.
There are caveats on this. A piece I read on Vox makes the point that the study assumes that we won’t make significant energy gains in terms of power over the next 1,000 years.
Then there’s the issue that a lot of current production is relatively small scale and still highly experimental.
And the secretive nature of many biotech firms means that there’s not a huge amount of published data on the actual power consumption.
So we don’t really know at this point what global mass production might look like at this point and what kind of efficiency gains are possible in the medium and long term.
Richard: Will the land that’s freed up be used sustainably?
Matt:
These are all interesting what ifs.
Ideally, you’d want to see a large proportion of that land being converted to uses that reduce emissions and benefit the environment in general.
You don’t want to create sterile environments devoid of animals and vegetation.
Or convert it all into urban or commercial land.
For the purposes of a lot of media content - including shows like these - we often have to edit for space.
And that can create situations that seem more concrete or black and white than they are.
Richard: So, really we’re at the point of exploring the potential of these new food supply systems?
Matt:
Very much so. And not just these but other new and alternative technologies, like insect proteins.
And, however you look at it, we need the buy-ins of the multinational food producers.
Not only their appetite and pockets for R&D.
But their expertise in production. Farm to table has been a growing trend over the last decade or more.
But I’m not sure how that model plays out when you’re talking about the large scale laboratory conditions required for clean meat or the the kind of heavy processing that’s needed to make the current batch of plant-based meat substitutes.
We present these as being very technical, chemistry based solutions to food.
But it also ignores a more simple truth, that we know surprisingly little about the chemistry of the food we currently eat.
Richard: In terms of additives and preservative?
Matt:
No, in terms of the structure of the food itself.
I read this amazingly interesting article in the New Scientist called Hidden Nutrition by Graham Lawton.
It points out that when we read the ingredients on food - we get a list of the chemical additives - flavorings, colorings, preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers.
But you’ll also just get the names of other foods. Sugar, Wheat. Carrot. Beef.
We take it as read that we know those foods are.
But it could be that as much as 99% of these foods - in terms of the compounds and micronutrients they contain could be unknown to us.
Richard: And this is what they’re calling Nutritional Dark Matter?
Matt:
Yes, so physicists accept that the bulk of the universe is made up of Dark Matter, material that we are unable to find.
The Dark Matter in food is slightly different. It’s not that we can’t identify it, it’s just that for the most part we haven’t bothered.
Richard: And what kind of implications does that have?
Matt:
Well, according to Harvard Medical School professor and physicist Albert-László Barabási, who coined the term Nutritional Dark Matter, we’ve been dumbing down our knowledge and expectations of the health impacts and interaction of food.
Our foods are a complex mix of macro and micronutrients.
Minerals, fats, proteins, vitamins and all sorts of bio chemicals.
Even the way we cook those foods, the effect of temperature or the influence of external cooking additives like oil or garlic can create new compounds that may interact with the body in new ways.
And not only is Prof Barbarasi looking at food in new ways, his research applies the principles of big data to help us understand these foods better.
Richard: It’s a bit of a bonus week for you, isn’t it. Two of your favorite things - Big Data and 3D printing combined with you third favorite: crisps?
Matt:
I’m not going to deny it. And don’t forget lab grown foods.
Today is a very rich and sustaining stew for me.
Let’s go back to the example of garlic, which I mentioned earlier.
The USDA - US Department of Agriculture - keeps a National Nutrient Database, which lists the nutrients in thousands of foods.
Its database lists 67 compounds for raw garlic.
In fact, its entire database lists around 200 different micro and macro nutrients in foods.
Around 10 years ago, a group of researchers looked to create a more comprehensive list of compounds and foods they’re found in.
The result is essentially a Wikipedia of food. A publicly accessible database called fooDB https://foodb.ca
The imdb of food.
Which now numbers more than 70,000 compounds.
On FooDB, garlic contains 2,306 different compounds.
That’s an an enormous difference from the 67 listed by the USDA.
Richard: What about crisps?
Matt:
I was very disappointed to find out that crisps are not listed as a food type.
But potatoes contain almost 4,500 different compounds.
That makes crisps a very elegant and complex choice, IMO.
Richard: Presumably many of those compounds are in tiny concentrations?
Matt:
Absolutely. The classical nutritional thinking is that we know pretty much all we need to know about the nutrients in our food.
And that those trace elements are in such tiny concentrations as to have no impact on our health.
However, Barbarasi points out that some vitamins like vitamin E are usually only present in micrograms, yet their absence from our diet has health effects.
Richard: Does this explain why thinking on foods changes so often?
Matt:
You mean - one week fats are bad, the next they’re good?
Barbarasi makes the point that we may be missing the bigger picture.
For example, it’s thought that beta-carotene can help to protect against heart disease.
Yet studies where beta-carotene is added to the diet haven’t shown benefits.
He comments that perhaps it’s because beta-carotene doesn’t occur on its own in plants.
Over 400 different molecules are always present where it’s found.
So our narrow focus may be causing us to miss the truly active molecule, which may be hidden amongst that 400.
Richard: Is it also assuming that all foods and their compounds affect people in the same way?
Matt:
Yes. We’re discovering a lot more about our gut flora literally month by month.
And those flora vary enormously from person to person.
And it’s those bacteria that break down and process the compounds in the food.
So it’s very likely that we will respond differently and even create different compounds from person to person as those bio-chemicals react with one another.
One of the parallels made is with DNA. Before we sequenced the entire human genome, 98% of it was written off as junk.
Yet, we discovered that more than two thirds of the sequences linked to disease were hidden in the supposed junk.
Something similar may turn out to be true of food.
Perhaps not on the same scale but it seems odd to write off 99% of the constituents of our food as irrelevant.
Especially as this Dark Matter is something we can detect and chart and study.
If only we bother to try.
Episode Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/dining/plant-based-meats-coronavirus.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032080-400-accelerating-the-cultured-meat-revolution/
https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/covid-19-shifts-food-trends-in-southeast-asia/43717
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/06/16/How-COVID-19-is-shaking-up-consumer-trends-Mintel
https://sea.pcmag.com/news/38246/kfc-to-3d-print-chicken-using-lab-grown-meat-of-the-future