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].