The Revolution Won’t Be Meatless: Erin Somers Finds the Beef

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. Back in February of this year, we did a show entitled How Meat Can Save the Planet, the vegan case. And it was a case about created meat rather than, shall we say, natural meat. It was with Bruce Friedrich, who's the president of the Good Food Institute. Friedrich [unclear] seemed to suggest, and he had a book out at the time, Meat, How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food and Our Future. Friedrich made the argument that all this technology was inevitable, and in the future, we're just gonna be eating artificial meat rather than the real thing, which would, at least in his case, save the planet. It's a nice idea, but in practice, it may not be true. Our guest today is Erin Somers. She's best known as the author of The Ten Years' Affair, or The Ten Year Affair, the best-selling novel, first novel [ed.: Somers's first novel was Stay Up with Hugo Best (2019); The Ten Year Affair is her second]. And she is also the author of, an interesting piece in Harper's this month, Where's the Beef? It's the cover story for Harper's, so they like it. It's a narrative of where exactly not the beef, but, the fake beef industry is. Erin is joining us from Upstate New York in Beacon, in the Hudson Valley. Erin, congratulations on the piece. I thought it was very good, and it's the cover piece for Harper's. Have I presented this right? Is your piece bursting the bubble, so to speak, of guys like Bruce Friedrich?

00:02:19 Erin Somers: I don't necessarily think that, it's bursting the bubble just sort of a dose of realism about how long it might take to get where, Bruce and the Good Food Institute want to go. And you know, just injecting a bit of realism into, the idealistic dream of cultivated meat.

00:02:43 Andrew Keen: So I'm not sure if you've read his book, Meat, How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food. I know you're sympathetic to the camp. You're a twenty-year vegetarian. What's the general consensus of guys like Friedrich that technology will somehow, create products that taste like meat that aren't meat. Is that fair?

00:03:09 Erin Somers: Yeah. The hope is that, you know, these great products will come along that are, where meat is cultivated in labs or partially cultivated in labs, and we'll have all of these substitutes on shelves so people are able to cut down on meat or cut out meat completely and will reduce our carbon footprint. So that is the hope of people like Bruce. I have read his book, and I did find it really good.

00:03:35 Andrew Keen: And it's not just Bruce. I don't wanna pick on him. A few years ago, we had George Monbiot on the show. His book, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, makes the argument that, factory-farmed meat and cattle are causing are the biggest problem with literally devouring the planet. You have, as I said, kind of emotional investment in this. You note in the piece that you've been a vegetarian for almost twenty years. Why are you a vegetarian?

00:04:10 Erin Somers: It started out as an aesthetic decision. I just didn't like it that much, and I was sort of put off by the bite you get every twentieth time or whatever where you get a little bit of gristle. This was sort of, at the time, not bearable to me. So I cut it out and then I stopped eating it altogether. And then over time it was just sort of reinforced by my environmental, you know, we hear all these things about the environment and about carbon emissions and it just sort of reinforced my decision. But I would say that my convictions around vegetarianism are loosely held, you know, they're not sort of religious and they're not I'm not a die-hard, but I, you know, I have sort of kept to it.

00:04:59 Andrew Keen: So you're not high church, maybe low church. Maybe the piece should have been called where's the gristle? What's the problem with gristle?

00:05:05 Erin Somers: I just it's like something about the experience of chewing and chewing and chewing that it was like, you know, untenable for me. But yeah, no, but I don't actually mind the taste as I get to in the piece, you know, sort of. It's just like it's it tastes good.

00:05:23 Andrew Keen: So you said you're not in the business, so you didn't go about bursting the bubble. What was the point of the piece? You did a lot of traveling. We'll talk about where you went. But did you go out to test whether or not this, quote, unquote, industry is still for real? Did you suspect that the bubble had been burst? What was the purpose of all the travels?

00:05:46 Erin Somers: Well, I didn't really go out, thinking that, knowing what I would find at all. Mostly I was just over the, as far back as 2022 or 2023, I became sort of obsessed with this industry after seeing, this Australian company called Vow did this stunt where they created a woolly mammoth meatball. They extracted DNA from a fossil and they made a woolly mammoth meatball and there were many articles about it. And what was funny about it is that because they weren't sure that it was safe to eat something made from DNA that old, no one was allowed to eat it. And I thought that this is, there is something very funny about that to me, sort of like all these resources pouring into making this forbidden food item. And, I started paying attention. There were like many elements of the industry that seemed to me like a microcosm of what is going on culturally. You know, you've got a sort of gold rush mentality around investments, you've got a tech product that is never fully arriving. You've got the carnival aspect of it where it's like, there are these like really odd curiosities, going on like the woolly mammoth DNA. So I just started paying attention. And then, you know, then I just, as my curiosity grew and I was like, I just really wanna taste it. You know, I like want to taste it. So the initial spark for my quest was just like, I wanna taste the meat. And it unfolded from there.

00:07:18 Andrew Keen: Where's the beef, in other words? What you described is, of course, in a sense America, more promise than actuality, massive investment, this gold rush mentality. In a sense, Erin, could one argue that this hysteria around the technology associated with reinventing beef somehow speaks to the nature of America in the 2020s?

00:07:47 Erin Somers: I think it does absolutely, and I think that's what part of what drew me to the story is I thought that this specific trajectory applies to so in so many different areas. I mean, it sort of like speaks to our AI moment, it speaks to all of our tech trends really that are like there are so there is a massive amount of hype and then, you know the actual product doesn't pan out till many years down the line and is in a completely different form. And in the meantime, we're we are sold all kinds of cons and bills of goods around, you know, the coming revolution that's gonna change our lives.

00:08:27 Andrew Keen: In other words, there's probably some Jay Gatsby somewhere in the in this business. But there are real people too. You talk about them at first. There's a Dutch pharmacologist called Mark Post who you introduced in the first chapter. Where's the real technology in this industry? Or have there been breakthroughs? Are there breakthroughs? Is there a possibility to create artificial beef, meat, chicken that actually tastes like, quote, unquote, the real thing?

00:08:56 Erin Somers: I think on the technology side, the innovations are absolutely amazing. I mean, they can do it, they have figured out how to do it. As early as 2013, Mark Post in the Netherlands, he grew the cells, in a petri dish, and you know it's thousands and thousands of cells from, the shoulder of a cow, it's like shoulder muscle. And since then they have managed to scale up so now it's done in huge vats like a beer brewery or something, it's done in like these giant bioreactors. And they can actually do the things that they say, but the problem is it's extremely expensive, they haven't really figured out how to bring the price point down to compete with conventional meat, there's not really a workforce there yet who knows how to do all of these things and many other issues. So on the innovation side, it's amazing. Like the scientists working on it have solved a lot of these problems. It's just how to bring it to, you know, to factories and also to a populace that is a little bit indifferent to what I think. No one's clamoring for it.

00:10:06 Andrew Keen: Which is very disappointing, except for you, of course. Post is a Dutch pharmacologist. Your piece is about the development of this industry in the US. Do you get a sense that maybe Europe and America are on separate pages? They often are when it comes to new technology and new businesses.

00:10:29 Erin Somers: I think that in this case that it's a very collegial industry, and there is a lot of international collaboration. For the piece, I went down and went to a conference in North Carolina. The piece is centered mostly on North Carolina which has become, sort of an unexpected hub for this stuff outside of Silicon Valley. It's centered in the Research Triangle where there are a lot of universities, in Raleigh-Durham. So, I went down to this conference and there were delegates from all over Europe, you know, Denmark, everywhere, Africa, you know, like all over the world. And, there really is a sense of sort of like earnest collaboration, at least on the science side.

00:11:09 Andrew Keen: So was this associated with the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University?

00:11:16 Erin Somers: Yeah. They participated. And I went down on the same trip. I went in toward, that facility and met some of the people involved there.

00:11:25 Andrew Keen: So you note in the piece that there seem to be two things undermining this industry or threatening it. On the one hand, the VCs have lost interest. Maybe there are bigger wins elsewhere. You mentioned AI. And, also, the political conservatives have set their eyes on this industry, and, they don't like what's happening. They want the real beef. They don't want the artificial beef. Is that fair that there's this kind of pincer movement against the industry you write about?

00:11:57 Erin Somers: Yeah. I think that's fair. I think, on the VC end, they sort of abandoned ship once they saw how hard it was going to be to actually bring this stuff to market. And on, from the political side, it is being used as a wedge issue to sort of like create, the straw man of lab-grown meat enthusiasts who are going to take away your beef burgers, which is so far from being true. Like, the industry is so tiny and poses so little threat that it's kind of laughable that it's been legislated against at all. It's like almost total theater. Like, there's just no point. It's like a nonentity.

00:12:46 Andrew Keen: Should we be angry with this? I mean, it's easy, of course, to get angry with, the MAGA movement, with Trump, and all the rest of it. But are these people picking on this industry for some strange cultural reason? Does artificial meat make them insecure?

00:13:04 Erin Somers: I mean, I don't know. Angry, they're certainly wasting time and money doing this stuff. It's just like there's no reason. It's an imagined threat. Right? So they're just doing it to stoke outrage and just like create outrage. And I mean, yeah, to the extent that we should be mad and, you know, distrust people who are anti-science and anti-innovation, then definitely.

00:13:30 Andrew Keen: And should we be angry with the VCs? VCs, venture capitalists don't have the best of reputations. Some of them are billionaires. Most of them are extremely rich. But they tend to be, or at least the VCs I know, tend to be incredibly smart. Do they simply recognize that they misread this industry, they misread its technology, or are they in a sense also to blame for what's happened?

00:13:55 Erin Somers: I mean, I don't know that I would assign blame, it just is like it proved to not make them money that quickly. You know, they're in their it's a business. Right? They're in business and they're it didn't make them money quickly so they bailed. And, I don't know. Can they be blamed for doing the thing that they do? Maybe. You know, like, I'm I certainly distrust VCs, but it they just did what they do. You know? They sought to make money. They bailed when they did make money.

00:14:27 Andrew Keen: Jeff Bezos doesn't have the best of reputations, as one of the world's richest men, as the founder of Amazon and their labor practices and all the rest of it. And yet he gave his money to this well, part of his money, he has enormous wealth, to this center for sustainable protein. Is this virtue signaling for Bezos? Is it real?

00:14:53 Erin Somers: It's hard to say what his motivations are, at any given moment. But, you know, it's $30 million that he gave, which is a drop in the bucket really, in terms of what his vast wealth and also the amount of money it's going to take to develop these products. I think that, the focus of the Bezos Center is all alternative protein. So it's not just cultivated meat, but, you know, all the other forms of alternative protein that we already see on our grocery store shelves, things like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers, you know, these burger substitutes and things like that. I don't know, I can only guess at what his motives are there, but, you know, I'd like to hope that they are on the side of environmentalism.

00:15:48 Andrew Keen: I mean, we shouldn't we give him credit like Bill Gates. I mean, he's certainly no angel either, but these people are in their own ways trying. Maybe they're preoccupied with other things too. But the fact that he has created a center for sustainable protein is a good thing.

00:16:04 Erin Somers: Absolutely. And, you know, they work in conjunction with NC State University where a lot of this research is going on. And when I went out and visited, everyone there is really smart. They're doing amazing work. And so, yeah, we can give him his cred for helping to fund.

00:16:22 Andrew Keen: So you went to this event in North Carolina. You talked to a lot of the activists, the investors, the entrepreneurs, the workers, involved in this industry. What's the word on the street? What did they tell you about the current situation, what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and how this movement can actually be still salvaged.

00:16:45 Erin Somers: So the timing was really crazy of the conference that I went to. The day before, I had gotten to North Carolina, and we had heard that all was not right, with this huge company down there, Believer Meats, which had built this huge multimillion-dollar facility, in the area, like forty-five minutes out into rural North Carolina. We heard that things like rumblings, that things weren't right. There were, you know, there was like a lawsuit, they were being sued by their builder, and they stopped replying to my emails. So the day before I went out to check it out just to see maybe I could talk to someone there, you know, and sort of feel out what the deal is. And the factory was completely shuttered. And then the next day I was sitting at the conference with all of these people, all of the relevant people working on these problems, all of the scientists, all of the people on the funding side. And as we were sitting there, the news broke that company, that was the industry's best hope, for bringing this stuff to market had gone bankrupt. So the mood was really it was just really fascinating. There was like a ton of gossip. Like at every break in the conference, people were spilling out into the hallway and just speculating about what could have gone wrong and what happened. And, you know, everybody sort of said the same thing and what went wrong is kind of obvious, which is that they scaled too quickly, their efforts were too ambitious, they, you know, they weren't ready, they, were pushed by their backers to move faster than they wanted to. And all of these things sort of caused the company to fail. The mood was pretty depressed, I would say. Like people were not happy about it, you know, it was, everyone had felt hopeful about this huge breakthrough and now it wasn't going to happen. And we still had, you know, an entire two days of programming about how this was the future of, you know, the future of the industry. So kind of interesting.

00:18:55 Andrew Keen: Sounds like the narrative of a novel. Maybe, I know your successful novel was called The Ten Year Affair. Have we had an affair with artificial meat? Is it finished now? Is the affair over?

00:19:11 Erin Somers: Affair concluded. [ed.: attribution uncertain — may be Andrew continuing] Yeah. I tasted the meat, so, I think it's over.

00:19:17 Andrew Keen: Oh, dear. But I take your point on the fact that people were pretty pessimistic. I'm assuming not everybody. I mean, I know that you haven't written off the industry yourself. Where was the hope then in spite of this disaster?

00:19:37 Erin Somers: I mean, I think that among the people that I was talking to there, the thing that always provides hope is just the breakthroughs and the innovations and the science, which is like truly remarkable. And the people working on in this field and working on these problems are solving these problems and the things that they've managed to do are incredible. So they'll continue to innovate and their innovations will pop up in other areas of, you know, in our food systems or even in medicine. And nothing none of their findings will go to waste, you know, it's all progress.

00:20:14 Andrew Keen: You note in your piece as well a reference to a certain MrBeast, one of the most popular figures on if on YouTube, maybe the most popular influencer. You're disappointed with, a show that Mr. Beef put on associated with meat. Tell me about that and how maybe influencers can help ideally in, the lab-grown meat revolution.

00:20:42 Erin Somers: Yeah. So there was a video of MrBeast. He visited the Upside Foods factory. My piece isn't really focused on what was going on in Silicon Valley, but Upside Foods is based in California and they are working on chicken specifically, cultivated chicken. And so they had MrBeast taste testing, like a chicken sandwich. And they were doing it like a blind taste test with a conventionally produced chicken sandwich and the cultivated chicken sandwich. And he could not, he toured the factory, then he tasted the sandwiches and he claims that he could not tell the difference. At the time I had not tasted the meat myself yet and I would just this made me sort of like very irrationally jealous of, you know, the influencer MrBeast because I was like, he got to do it, why don't I get to do it? I mean, I think that influencers can help. A lot of people watch that video, and it's cool that he took an interest and, you know, I am sort of I'm sort of skeptical of influencers generally, but it's like if they're going to be of use in this way, I think that's great.

00:21:55 Andrew Keen: Maybe he should change his name to Mr. Beef from MrBeast. In all seriousness, though, Erin, I mean, what does your piece and your experience and your thinking on this tell us about us? I mean, we can always blame the VCs. We can blame Jeff Bezos. We can blame MrBeast. We can blame, of course, MAGA, who always seem to be blamed for everything. But, ultimately, isn't the responsibility with us? I mean, everybody knows that it's better for the environment to eat lab-grown meat. I mean, it's self-evident. It's hard to argue. So surely there is a degree of responsibility that we all have in the failure of this revolution.

00:22:35 Erin Somers: Sure. Yeah. I think that everybody should do what they can. You know? And, I can only control really like how I eat and I don't eat meat. But, yeah, it's sort of culturally complicated, I think, for some people to give up meat altogether. But I do think that personal responsibility probably won't be the thing that slows climate change. You know, I think that it has to come from legislation and innovation and all of these sort of like more macro places than convincing people that they should eat a certain way. I think that it just simply fails. Like you can't talk people out of wanting a burger. I think that is a very hard thing to do. And so it has to the problem solving has to happen elsewhere.

00:23:28 Andrew Keen: And talking we're maybe talking Americans at least out of a burger. You're in the Hudson Valley, which is kind of Brooklyn North. I'm in the Bay Area in San Francisco, which is kind of Berkeley West. Would it be fair to say, Erin, that lab-grown meat is much more expensive. I mean, you can go to McDonald's, at least judging from the ads. You can go to McDonald's or Burger King these days and get, a hamburger, a traditional hamburger for a couple of dollars. You certainly can't get lab-grown meat for that. There aren't any fast food networks for lab-grown meat. Is one of the problems that this is still, an industry for privileged progressives and that it needs to be democratized?

00:24:16 Erin Somers: Sure. Yeah. The price point is a really big problem. You know, it's like, why would you choose you got a family to feed. Why are you gonna choose X chicken, the cultivated chicken that's twice as expensive or three times expensive or as expensive or four times expensive as a conventional chicken which can feed your whole family and you can have leftovers. You know, just the pricing doesn't really make sense yet for your average person.

00:24:46 Andrew Keen: And does the technology scale? I mean, this would attract a VC. I mean, you can feed everyone in the world. I mean, that's the most scalable business model. So, surely that would attract VCs, or as we suggested earlier, have they just given up on the technology? Has the technology hit a wall?

00:25:05 Erin Somers: I think that they, the technology is there or almost there. They can do it. It's just expensive to build, maintain. That boarded-up factory wasn't boarded-up, but that closed-up factory that I visited in North Carolina, they have, it is ready to go. They have all this equipment inside that can do this at scale. It's just that they didn't quite make it over the finish line. So it can be done. It's just, you know, a question of can a company stay in business long enough to get it going?

00:25:41 Andrew Keen: In the long run then, of course, I mean, Keynes famously said in the long run, we're all dead. But in the long run, these industries come back. There was even an AI winter in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. So AI isn't just freshly hatched. It went through many crises. Is it conceivable that this current downturn, this recession in lab-grown meat is just one chapter in its narrative?

00:26:08 Erin Somers: Absolutely. I think that, you know, these people are still working on it. Like, there's so many professionals still at work on this and so many startups still out there. And I think that it gradually at a slower, you know, at a slower pace now that the hype has died down, we are going to see advancements and they'll continue to chip away at it.

00:26:29 Andrew Keen: I mentioned, George Monbiot earlier. His book Regenesis, is a book about regenerative agriculture. We've done some shows on the real meat industry, regenerative farms, where cattle, are properly fed and not treated in a in an industrial way. Is that an alternative future too from a progressive point of view of regenerative agriculture where the soil is respected, cattle are fed properly, and the quality of the beef or the chicken is different from factory-fed, products?

00:27:07 Erin Somers: I think so. And I think that the solution will have to be a hybrid of all of these things. You know, it's gonna have to be regenerative agriculture plus protein alternatives, plus people being responsible, plus legislation that pushes people to be responsible. You know, it's going to be a combination.

00:27:29 Andrew Keen: Finally, you end on the West Coast at the Berkeley Bowl, which is actually my favorite store. I used to live around the corner, but from the original Berkeley Bowl in Berkeley. Tell me about the bowl and why you end your story there.

00:27:45 Erin Somers: So I ended up at a tasting out there. They were doing a tasting, this company called Mission Barns was doing a tasting of their, meatball made with cultivated pork fat. And I had tasted it the day before at their offices, but I kind of wanted to see how other people reacted to the meat, you know, to observe some of their reactions. So I went to the tasting and, there was a little bit of a crowd, you know, they have some fans and some people following the progress of the company, and people seem to be responding well.

00:28:17 Andrew Keen: What do you think of the Bowl? Did you know it before or you just happened to go there?

00:28:21 Erin Somers: I didn't know it and I thought it was amazing. Like I got, I met their head of marketing there, I happened to start chatting with her and she just like took me into the produce section and I marveled at the variety and how amazing everything, looked and she pushed two oranges on me which is sort of how I ended the piece. And I thought, I mean, I thought it was heaven.

00:28:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You don't have, the Berkeley Bowl on the East Coast. That's why I live on the West Coast. So let's end with that heaven, as you said, with the orange. Why should we I mean, given that this piece is in some ways rather depressing. It's the it's about the failure of the lab-grown meat revolution, the popping of the bubble. Why should we why did you end on a positive note with you eating an orange? It's like Proust and the madeleine, isn't it, Erin?

00:29:12 Erin Somers: Yeah. I mean so I had these two beautiful oranges, you know hoisted on me, to take home back east. It was February, so it's like having a California orange to take home was like unbelievably amazing. And, I ate it as I was walking away and it was delicious and totally refreshing. And then, and it was a Sumo orange and in sort of like thinking about the ending of my piece I researched like what a Sumo orange is and how it came about and it is, they're not naturally occurring so they came about through food science, they're a hybrid, and they are engineered to be delicious and they are engineered to be resilient. And I thought it was just a great note to end on that it's like, look at what technology can give us. It's not so dark. We can, like, break through and get the Sumo orange. So that's where I wanted to leave it. Well, you know, a little bit of sunshine there at the end.

00:30:09 Andrew Keen: Lots of sunshine in the Berkeley Bowl. In other words, when you pick up a vegetable or a fruit in a place like even the Berkeley Bowl, it's engineered. There is technology involved. It's the cover story, an excellent piece from, Erin Somers. Where's the Beef? in this month's Harper's Magazine. Erin, finally, when are we where's the beef with you? When are we gonna get a new novel?

00:30:36 Erin Somers: Oh, I mean, I've just begun. So, a new one. So maybe two years or something, I take. I'm not one of these people that can just bang it out quickly. I need a couple years. But it's coming. I'm at work.

00:30:49 Andrew Keen: Good. Well, I hope you'll come back on the show to talk about the new novel. You're the first time you've been on the show. I've enjoyed talking to you. Congratulations on the piece, and best of luck with the new novel.

00:31:00 Erin Somers: Thank you. This was fun.