How AI is making the food industry a newly vulnerable market
JUST is a biotech company turning the agricultural industry upside down, as it is proposing meat and dairy alternatives as tasty as the real thing, with the help of machine learning. JUST uses the database of the molecular properties of thousands of plants and computes how the chemical interactions between these molecules would imitate the texture, the taste and color of animal-derived food. It has for instance, discovered that the protein of mung beans has similar properties to scrambled eggs. JUST already sells mayonnaise, egg replacement and cookie dough entirely plant based. The replication is so perfect that corporations/incumbents in the egg industry have tried to take down the company, feeling directly threaten.
Replicating solid products like steak is harder, so JUST is taking one step further, shocking and shaking the food industry: growing meat in the lab by duplicating protein cells feeding them with vegetable-based nutrients identified by AI. The idea of plucking a feather from a chicken to collect a cell and duplicate it until it transforms into a fully lab-grown chicken breast and then transform it into nuggets is going to drive away more than one consumer. This revulsion for artificial imitation of lifeform even has a name: the uncanny valley effect which also applies in robotics, when we feel that something is quite off when seeing humanoids.
Yet, JUST is releasing lab-grown meat in US supermarkets by the end of 2018, has the support of PETA and the US government. How come? Because the environmental costs and animal cruelty are real issues that current industrial farming have a hard time finding answers to. Animal farming is alone responsible of 60% of food-related greenhouse emissions and a third of the annual global freshwater footprint (Nuwer, 2016) (Gerbens-Leenes, Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2013). And with the advantage of being 30% cheaper than other meat products, JUST ambitions to introduce lab-grown meat in countries that are truly in need where people are touched by nutritional problems, war and famine. Do you think we should give lab-grown meat a try?
Click here to see examples of the uncanny valley effect (#4 and #10 are absolutely terrifying):
https://www.strangerdimensions.com/2013/11/25/10-creepy-examples-uncanny-valley/
Click here to watch JUST CEO Josh Terick talk about his company:
References:
Gerbens-Leenes, P., Mekonnen, M. and Hoekstra, A. (2013). The water footprint of poultry, pork and beef: A comparative study in different countries and production systems. Water Resources and Industry, 1-2, pp.25-36.
Nuwer, R. (2016). What would happen if the world suddenly went vegetarian?. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160926-what-would-happen-if-the-world-suddenly-went-vegetarian [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].
Hi Gwenn!
Great post, definitely a very interesting topic! The benefits seem so obvious to this new technology that I find it difficult to find the negative side to it. I’m guessing the ethical implication of it is what truly stands out. But even in that front, as opposed to killing animals for their meat we can now do it in a much more sustainable way. It might even get Vegetarians and Vegans to jump the fence.
I find it fascinating that we are able to record a specific food structure on a molecular level and store it in a database. It will be interesting to see how this further transfers over, such as in DNA alteration of animals for other purposes, or even humans for medical reasons.
Thanks for the new insights!
Alexander de Leeuw
Hey Alex,
It would be very interesting to see how vegans would react to this product.
And it is indeed very innovative of JUST to use machine learning in order to recreate food! Definitely not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about artificial intelligence.
Hey Gwenn!
As a vegetarian, the new concept of ‘cultured’ meat is something that I am quite familiar with. While I still haven’t formed a full opinion about it, I think it’s something I would be willing to try. Never the less, I’m quite skeptical about how revolutionary cultured meat will be in our meat obsessed society. As you wrote, the massive industrialised livestock systems that we have are hugely problematic, not only ethically but also environmentally. The question is whether lab grown cultured meat is the solution to these problems. While it is ethical, as far as I know their haven’t been any comprehensive studies into whether it is more environmentally friendly. I assume these labs need a considerable amount of energy to cultivate these products. As you also mentioned, people also feel quite uneasy about artificial imitation of lifeforms, so I really question whether companies such as JUST will be able to get the kind of consumer backing that they are looking for. Lastly, I wonder what role cultured meat will play in societies where the majority of people rely on livestock not only for food but for economic purposes as well?
Thanks!
Hey Saga:)
Indeed it has not been proven yet that cultured meat produces less greenhouse gas emission than normal meat. At least it would provide an answer to animal cruelty, as only a few cells will be harmlessly collected from livestock.
I have delved deeper into the matter after I have written this blog, and have found other meat alternatives that are less radical than JUST: Impossible foods, for instance, is suggesting an option made of soya, coconut oil and cultivated heme cells found in animal muscle. Perhaps this idea could be more easily accepted than the idea of a full grown muscle in the lab ready to be consumed because it seems to have a closer affilitation to nature.
As for economic consequences of cultured meat on the farming industry, the evolution will be indeed, very worrying for some. Firms are already actively fencing off these startups as they introduce a new business model with differnt actors involved (scientists instead of farmers..). Yet, I believe that this change will be not sudden and radical thus, a time for adaptation and reconversion is most likely, as it was the case with the introduction of computers in mainstream use. Outsourcing had dramatic consequences in Europe for blue-collars working in coal, fabric, and print. It seems that a change in operations (outsourcing) is much more consequential than a change in product(PC or meat) thus, the farming industry may progress and have time to readapt.