The Most Expensive Burger In The World

Reverend Hoord need coming up next. No, we wanted to talk about the future of protein, right the idea, this idea of protein and the various sources that we depend upon for protein, everything from beef to to park to chicken, to plant protein to well, I don't want to spoil it, we'll get there, but uh, I wanted to talk about how the way we get protein can make a huge impact on the world around us. Right. Well, well, why why are we talking about this in the first place?

I mean, if we've got perfectly good, four legged sources of food running around, why would we want anything else. Well, one of the reasons is because those perfectly good, four legged sources of food put a pretty hefty toll on the environment, particularly when we're needing to produce it in the the amounts that we we require, and particularly if we are talking about meat of the beef variety. Yeah, that one and that one is the worst of the

worst when it comes to environmental impact. And by environmental impact we mean everything from clearing enough ground for for grazing, which you know, as our demand for meat increases, obviously the demand for land for cattle increases. Uh. That can impact everything from rainforce to other delicate ecosystems, and uh we could end up losing lots of other valuable resources

in the process and causing other issues. Then you've got things like greenhouse gas emissions, which particularly with beef, are a real problem, things like methane. Cows produced lot of it,

But it's not just emissions directly from the cows. When you produce the process of meat, right, there's a huge backstory to that meat and all of the different things that have had to happen to make that meat available to you add up over time, right, and uh, you know, first of all, I want to say that the amount of meat that we are eating is on the rise. The world's total meat supply as of ninety one was like seventy one million tons. As of two thousand and

seven it was more like two four million tons. Yeah, yeah, it you know, doubled over that period. But in the developing world it actually rose twice as fast um, which which basically just means that as people come into better economic situation situations, they consume more meat. Yeah, there is a correlation between your financial status and the amount of meat you typically consume. You being societies out there, that's that's right, because you don't actually eat meat, Dad, don't.

I don't eat mammals. I I do eat fish and foul but I do not eat mammals. It is not It has nothing to do with an ethical situation in my case, although there are plenty of people out there who make their decisions based on their own personal beliefs

and ethics, and I have nothing against that. But in my case, it's because my wife had a bad experience with food poisoning in college, and due to that, she associates meat with feeling not well, feeling sick, and so she just she swore it off and she hasn't really had any sense then, and so when I was dating her, I started to phase it out of my own diet, and in the process that means that over the last eighteen years or so, I've maybe had meat maybe five times, so,

uh meat from the sense in the sitis of mammals. There there are other types of animals. I will hunt down and tackle and chew on. Ostrich, by the way, delicious and is delicious. I think most things are delicious. You know, the entire doesn't have a face, doesn't have a mother kind of scale his I'm like, I'm really sorry, but adorable creatures are pretty tasty, and I can't really you know, yeah, we we we have to guard our our furry friends. Whenever Lauren comes to the office. That's

not true. That's not true. It's true she does eat puppies. No, no, that's not only only rabbits. Okay, funny, but fuzzy bunny rabbits. Hey, we cannot, we cannot make jokes about eating kittens. Were on the internet. Okay, that's true, Lauren would we will be digitally lynched. But I do, actually, I do actually

limit my meat intake for some of these environmental reasons. Right, and we've mentioned a couple of greenhouse gases and rainforest but it goes well beyond that too, right, I mean, we're talking about think how much of the world's grains are dedicated to feeding the cattle that we depend the pond for for our beef. Right right, The number that I've seen is that it takes about eight pounds of feed to create one pound of beef. That's a lot of resources to create that meat that could be used

for other things, uh people exactly. And Uh. Then there's also how much water is necessary not only to water the cow, like so the cow has enough water to live, but from everything else that's involved in the meat industry, from growing that grain in the first place, to all the different production uh stages of meat. This is this requires a lot of energy, resources, stuff that we could be using for other things, and it's truly unsustainable, right.

Um that that that world consumption of meat is expected to double again by and these environmental issues are not small.

One study in two thousand seven by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that for every kilogram or two point two pounds of beef, it's it's responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car going two fifty kilometers or what's that like a hundred and that's that's a significant, huge, it's it's it's it's enough energy to to burn a hundred light bulb for twenty days, um and and when

you when you get into the kind of numbers that we're looking at right as as you know, one of the things we want to try and solve, obviously, I would imagine most people would want to solve is a problem like world poverty. I mean, that's a huge, huge problem, and obviously we don't want people living in poverty. It's a terrible thing. But as people do get more more more affluent than they do tend to consume more meat.

So if we were able to find some environmentally friendly way to produce that meat, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit, but let's assume that we could find an environmentally friendly way that that at east had a much lower impact upon the environment than the conventional method of growing beef. A lot of the concerns I've read, or a lot of the criticisms I've read, are not that it wouldn't uh, it wouldn't have a

positive impact on the environment. That part seems to be pretty much cut and dry, that this would be good news for the environment, The problem is that it would not actually go to necessarily combating world hunger, at least not directly. And the reason for that would be because the issue of access to meet It's not access, it's the price, right, It's a poverty problem. It's not just an access problem. Because, by by a lot of estimations, we produce enough food in the world right now to

feed every for two thousand calorie a day diet. We have enough to handle everybody, but not everyone has access to that food, not because of the the actual access problem, but because of the financial problem. So the while, while we're going to be talking in a little bit about some alternate ways of getting at beef besides raising an animal and slaughtering it, that doesn't necessarily mean that suddenly we've solved the world hunger problem. That's a much more

complex issue. Although once we can free up more of that land um to to to go to production of a more sustainable food source, I think that that would go that could help it all Again, it all depends upon how we dispense with that. Sure, So if we're talking about the future, I think we need to talk about alternatives because you do have this issue, this lingering issue that it's hard to overcome. And the issue is

people want to eat meat. They just want it, and it's going to be hard to just tell them no, you need to eat beans and grains and not eat me. Right, Well, it's it's tasting. It's always been a status symbol. I think, yeah, culturally, So is there a way we can come up with something that will at the same time, SAT spied this need people have without causing the same problems that meat does, Right,

are there are there real alternatives? Well, you know, for a long time at least people who absolutely love eating meat would have said no that the like, for example, plant proteins, plant proteins. We can get protein from plants.

There are certain plants that produce the proteins that are necessary for us that you could switch to those and receive a lot of the benefits you would receive from eating various types of meat that they do contain slightly different combinations of proteins and slightly different fats, and it's it's very um. There are a lot of questions in the nutrition industry about whether you know whether one kind of protein whether is more complete than another, or whether

a certain kind of fat is healthier than another. In other words, like none of the choices that we're about to talk about are necessarily like you should like one one to one replacement, right right There might be combinations of diet that would be necessary for you to have a healthy adult diet that is going to provide you all the nutrients and proteins that you need. Uh that that it also is not going to have any detrimental

health effects. But you know, in the past, we would say things like, uh soy based meat replacement things that soy burgers or tofu or uh tempei which is part of a that's made from fermented soy. Tofu is unfermented soy. But then there's a big controversy about the health benefits and and and drawbacks of soy right now, I mean right we talked in our last episode about GMOs, and if you thought that that was a big, big fighting issue,

then you have not read the forums. GMO can be considered a kerfuffle compared to the chaotic arguments that happened within the soy community and the people who are absolutely for the use of soy and those who say that it is the most poisonous thing you could put in your body. Uh. Really, the science is kind of still developing on this. There are conflicting reports from everything from the way it soy can impact your ability to absorb minerals to whether it's a carcinogen or it prevents cancer.

Right right, Well, okay, So the thing with soys that it contains isoflavorans um, which which are that that sounds delicious. That's no flavor savor its isoflavon that sounds like a delicious frozen treat. That it's um. They're chemically similar to estrogen's. So I'm not sure what cand of ice creamstand you've been going to, but I don't I don't think it's

quite the same thing. Um to two major types, and in particular found in soy, um can can act like estrogen in the body, which means that they find estrogen receptors, which can spur estrogen receptor positive tumor growth. Can sometimes in some studies. I mean, you know, it's it's any time that you're talking about nutrition, um, you're you're you're talking about individuals, all of whom have a different a different genetic makeup, a different history, a different environment. Um,

they're eating other things differently. You know, no, no one in any of these studies is is being constricted to precisely the same diet. So what you're saying is there are a lot of variables, and there are other studies that have shown that these same sort of elements can actually have a limiting factor on tumor growth. So it's

it's there's conflicting information within the science itself. And it may very well be that it's either a duration thing, like it's how how long you have been consuming this particular stuff, whether or not it has this initial boost to like and usually it's for people who are already already undergoing cancer treatments that are really at a high risk here. But there's a possibility that at first there's a negative impact and then over time there's a positive impact.

There's a possibility that it's an amount thing, but we don't really know. The problem is that there are people on either side of the argument who have taken very concrete stance is on this and uh, and so there's not a lot of dialogue in the middle. It's a lot of of you know, firm quote unquote facts on either side. The problem is the facts don't contradict one another in some cases. Okay, so I understand how things like tofu and tempe and satan which which in this

case satan is which is satan. Okay, so we're talking about protein made from wheat. It's essentially gluten in that case. Right, Things like this can be a one can be a good or maybe bad, we don't know, can at least be some kind of nutritional substitute for meat. But you wanted to actual like, well, I'm asking, I mean, how

close have we gotten to really replacing meat? I mean creating a plant based product that actually has the ability to trick them out into so not just something that would provide protein, but something that would give you the

same experience as if you were eating actual meat. That's what you're asking, right, Well, there are several companies that have been working on this, using plant proteins in various approaches to create fibers to create a kind of meat substitute that's supposed to mimic meat so closely that people who are meat eaters have said, you know, this is this. It tastes meat, It has that mouth feel of meat. It sounds I hate using the phrase mouth feel, but

that's the way everyone. Well, the mouth feel of meat, so you know how it feels when you take a big old bite of a juicy burger. A lot of it's part of what the eating experience is, Yes, it is it is. There's that that, the texture, the firmness, all of these things play a factor in what we consider the ideal experience for eating a particular type of food. Whatever that food might be. It doesn't have to be meat.

It could be whatever, right And for me personally, a lot of these plant based proteins wake me out the closer that they tried to get to meet, because it's it's kind of uncanny valley of meat where almost but not quite like whatever it is you're trying, and it's kind of terrifying. Like any any time that chicken has it has an apostrophe in it, I don't really want anything to do with it. I would much rather just

eate an actually, like I don't. I don't care for I don't care for a lot of veggie dogs, for example, because they just don't really remind me at all of what hot dogs tasted like. And it's been a long time since I've had one, so but even then I'll take a bite like, yes, this is not not it. I had enough hot dogs back when I Hate meet to know that this is not the right taste and

not the right texture. But there are companies out there that have been using plant proteins to create really really uh compelling products that really, apparently according to people who eat meat, taste and feel like meat, and those companies are well one of those. Beyond Meat Beyond Me, Yeah, it's um. It was the sequel to Son of Meat, which of course was was the lesser known uh successor to the great movie or mean a Me tour that was way downline. I'm talking about meat, just meat, meat,

Son of Meat. Beyond Meat Now. Beyond Meat is a company that was founded by Ethan Brown. And Ethan Brown grew up on essentially like a dairy production farm and went into the clean energy sector before he decided he wanted to find a way to create vegan friendly option of using plant proteins in a way that that mimicked meat so that it would be indistinguishable. And so he joined up with some researchers and they started working on this company. They got some funding from some big names.

The founders of Twitter ended up sinking quite a bit of money in this, not sinking investing money into it, because it actually has been very successful and according to the reviews I've read that the products that they create are they really do taste and feel like meat, so it seems to have a very positive response. Other ones, the other companies that also are doing the same thing include Match, which is a company that came out of the University of ill Noi at Urbana Champagne UM and Uh.

They mostly supply areas in the Midwest. It's you can also apparently order their stuff online. Uh. And then there's another one called Plenty p L E n t I, which is all of the Netherlands. And all three of these companies again and again when I was doing research, were the ones that were mentioned as the companies that were making products that really did feel like a true meat substitute, not just a different way to get your protein.

That's that mimics the shape of other things. Like we've seen veggie burgers everywhere, right, but there's you know, often a veggie burger can be really tasty, but it's not something like you don't bite into and think, oh yeah, that tastes like hamburger to me. It's just like, this is a different experience, but I like it. It's just not there's a burger place here in Atlanta that I

think just has an absolutely delicious veggie keenoa burger. But I like about it that it's like it's really good because it doesn't taste like it's trying to be fake beef. It's just of the fake all of the non meat protein products that I like. I I you know, I like lentils and I and I and I like tofu. Actually, I mean mostly when it's deep fried. But isn't that true of everything? Um? So, you know, chicken fried tofu

is a delicious, delicious thing. It is, um. But so okay, So if we're if we're looking for something that, let's say that you don't believe in this whole plant eating plants things. Right, Let's say that you have just decided that it's while while close is good, it's not good enough. You have got to have a beef burger. Is there any way of making a beef burger or making any kind of meat, any sort of beef product or or meat product in general. Is there any way of doing

that that doesn't have this hugely negative environmental impact. Oh yes, Joe Phillis and you sinister son of a whatever. Go So this year, uh in London, at an ex in August, a Dutch researcher named Mark Post from the University of must riaked cooked up a burger patty. All right, you do without killing a cow? That was made without killing a cow. Wait are you just are you telling me there's just like a cow wandering around the Netherlands that's

missing like a hamburger sized hole in its side. Um no, No, it is not a cow that you have just cut a burger out of. Ok this is what's called in vitro meat, all right, So what does that mean in vitro, Well, it comes from in glass. It's the idea of meat produced in a lab. So it's not just taken from a cow, but it is actually grown from a sort of cow culture. Okay, So what they did was they

took essentially a biopsy of a cow. Yeah. So all organisms have these things called stem cells, and these are or pluripotent cells that can mature into different types of body cells. So you have stem cells that can make the cells that occur in a muscle, and of course the muscle is the part of the cow that you

want to eat for beef. So an interesting thing that this researcher decided to try was to take a biopsy from living cow without killing the cow, put it in a culture in the laboratory UM, and get the stem cells to grow tiny strips of beef um. And of course it was a painstaking process that took a long time and many many cultures UM. But eventually what he did was he grew enough tiny strips of beef to mash them all together with some fat cells and make

a burger, a real beef burger. Gosh, that's kind of crazy. So wait, uh, two questions. How much did this cost? Uh? The first one costs more than three thousand dollars to make? Was it supersized? It's a very expensive burger. But of course it's that expensive because it's never been done before. UM,

and it's actually been estimated. I've got this interesting paper here. UH. It's called Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production, and it was a scientific paper from two thousand eleven that uh predicted or it offered comparisons of the predictions of the eventual cost of producing lab cultured beef with that of conventionally grown meat right, and the differences are pretty huge, like, for example, when it compared uh their estimations for cultured

meat to European raised beef. Uh so their findings where there was a seven to forty five percent lower energy use, uh seventy eight to nine six percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, percent less land use, and eighty two to ninety six percent less water use. So the demand on resources would be way lower if we went to some sort of in vitro be assuming we could scale it up to a point where it made sense. Obviously, if it never made economic sense, that it would never happen because we

just wouldn't be able to afford it. But this is a big thing because the problem with UM getting people to change their diets is they don't want to write, well, I mean, beef is tasty, you know. Well that that also kind of leads me to my second question. Did either of you see any of the reaction to what it tasted like? No? I didn't. Yeah, I read some reviews.

They were mixed. I mean, essentially I got the impression that this was not the kind of burger that you would be satisfied with if you paid top dollar forward in a restaurant, but it essentially tasted burger like. So I get the feeling. The general idea was we're getting there, but this was this was enough like a burger. I mean it did taste like beef. Um, it was getting there. And well it didn't just taste like beef, it was beef.

Again to reiterate, this isn't some weird synthetic thing. This is the same protein you'd be eating if you killed a cow and took it out. It's just made without killing a cow. Yeah. I find it really interesting that the initial reaction from most people I've talked to when it comes to this this concept is one of revulsion that it's you know, that's not natural. Therefore you know it's it's bad, it's bad, or I can't I can't stand the thought of eating something that was grown in

a lab. And I sit there and I think, so, you don't want to eat something that was that was grown. But it's exactly the same stuff. You know, if you were to look at the materials, it's exactly the same stuff as you would get if you had raised and killed an end moll. So you know, it surprises me in a way to think that you would have this

kind of immediate reaction. But I guess it's just one of those things where it's so different from what we've come to expect that there's that reaction where it's like, that's not normal, therefore I don't want it. Um. Yeah. And so there are a lot of benefits that this kind of meat could actually provide. It. So it's obviously got the edge on uh energy investure and all that water resources. It doesn't have the problem of you've got to put all this grain into it right um, the

way that normal conventionally raised beef does. So you could actually repurpose that that grain for um. Yeah. Or this is really interesting. I just read this today. There's the idea that, well, creating beef like this, you'd actually have a whole lot more control over the nutritional content of the beef. Um because in this culture you grow muscle

cells and fat cells separately. What you could actually do, and this I thought was a really cool idea, was replaced the normal saturated fat that occurs in a hamburger patty with something much healthier like Omega three fatty acid. Interesting that could mean you could get like a hamburger that would be very low in cholesterol, which is not the case with hamburgers today. Interesting. Well, that's that's that's

pretty cool. So there's also Sorry, one more cool thing I thought was was the idea that this could definitely lead to a decrease in food poisoning and zoonotic diseases. Interesting. So I have a question for you. Then. Let's say that we got the invitro beef solution, and we've talked about plants as a source of protein. Can you think of anything else that could be a good source of protein? Can I how many legs are we talking here? Six? Sorry?

I wrote that same joke into the made the same joke about the supersize me and the script too, So it's okay, Okay, here's the thing. Lots of people are talking about the future involving eating insects, and they're not joking, right, Okay, Well, the thing is that the present involves eating insects. Two over two billion people on the planet eat insects is a relatively regular part of their diet. Right those of us raised on a Western diet, it seems completely alien

to us. It's one of those things that is, it's one of those easy factors where you show someone like a bowl of insects or whatever that I haven't even been prepared yet for eating. Yeah, it's it's what Yeah, it's it's considered a punishment, right and like you lost, you have to eat or fear factor now you've got to eat a cricket and uh not keeping in mind, you know, ignoring the fact that this is something that in other parts of the world is a regular part

of a diet. Yeah. For example, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is really pushing this idea. And one of the reasons is that if you want to get animal protein in your diet, insects are a much much more environmentally sustainable and resource efficient way to do it. Right. As compared to that eight pounds of feed that it takes to create one pound of beef that I mentioned earlier, it would only take two pounds of feet to create

one pound of bump food insect. Yeah. Yeah, And insects are actually very healthy, low low and fat, high in protein, high fiber, healthy for you to eat or just like generally healthy. Like you've got healthy bugs out there, They're wonderful. There's this misperception that bugs are like dirty right, we have this idea that obviously, like the cockroach on your floor is dirty. You don't want to eat that, y'all.

Let me tell you about some pigs. You think that bacon is delicious, Let me tell you about some picks. But insects actually, I mean yeah, they're full of good protein that you can get good iron from insects. You can and get all kinds of nutrients that we need are abundant in insects like locusts and caterpillars and beetles that are already popular delicacies in cuisines around the world. And essentially all there is is a gross out gap. People who aren't used to this just need to be

able to get used to the idea. Um, right, right, they can They admit considerably fewer greenhouse gases required, little to no land could consume waste products rather than you know, needing to have um specific crops grown for them. From what I understand, there's quite a few of them. Oh oh, there's so many of them. What is it like, there's two hundred million insects for every person on earth? Yea, um, there's no there's no problem with supply, so so question

for you Joe, would you eat a bug? Well, I think if you just offered me a whole bug, I would amittedly be grossed out about it. But the other part of me would be I would want to be like, Okay, I want to try this. You know, I've never had a bug. But one thing that does encourage me is the idea that you wouldn't just be necessarily like eating whole bugs. I mean, we're talking about insect protein, which could be processed in the same way that any other

protein is processed. If you have a ground chicken patty, chicken nugget, or you know, or a hamburger made out of ground beef, you could similarly have ground insect protein being put into different food products that healthy protein without you know, the kind of the gross out factor of the bug. If that's a problem for you, Yeah, it would be like a like a cricket meal, like an almond meal or flax meal is sold. Yeah. Yeah, So it wouldn't just like you know, when you're having a hamburger.

It's not like you're walking up to a cow and taking a bite out of it some sort of thing. If you're not Lawrence, I think somebody in here has actually eaten bugs before. Well I have never voluntari eating a bug, but also on the back of motorcycles, I should qualify. I'm pretty sure I eat tons of cockroaches all the time just because they crawl into my mouth

fall asleep. Yeah, there's well, that was lovely. I did want to point out that the f d A UM for for one, has has an allowable amount of bugs that can be contained within given food products UM without being considered adulterated. And I'm going to quote a few things for you here and and all of these I want you to to understand are even going above these levels would be considered non hazardous. It would merely be

considered not for example, frozen raspberries anymore. You would have to label it as frozen raspberries plus larva um the the The only difference would be in an aesthetic purpose UM so frozen raspberries an average of four or more larva poor per five hundred grams, or an average of ten or more whole insects or equivalent per five hundred grams UM macaroni, an average of two D twenty five insect fragments or more per two grams in six or more sub samples tomato pure average of twenty or more

fly eggs per one grams, or ten or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per one hundred grams. Yeah, okay, so here it forward thinking. We think about the future. Yeah, and the future is insect an. I would I would like to uh. I would like to say for the record that I will not be allowing my wife to listen to this podcast because she will never stop screaming. But Lauren, how about you? Like Joe and I haven't

voluntarily eaten any bugs? Have you? Yes? Yes, I have? Well, actually I guess voluntarily was is a contentious term because one of my friends in college, for some kind of some kind of world food class project, made some cookies and uh and brought them along with her one day when a bench of was were hanging out and was like, hey, Lauren, have a cookie. And I was like, yeah, cookies and I ate one and she was like, ha ha, you just ate gets and I was like it was a

delicious cookie. I don't like trying to you were trying to to she was. She was trying to gross She was trying to gross me out, and it did not work at all. Lauren the cal miterer. It takes more than that to gross her out. Let me tell you, not a whole lot more. But no, no, I it was. It was tasty. I mean it was. It was kind

of an oatmeal oatmeal ish texture to the cookie. Um. And you know, I had assumed that it was like an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie and uh, and yeah, it was just made with some some good hearty cricket flower and the cricket, but oatmeal. You know, I think if you can dip it in catchup, people eat, yeah, yeah, or put chocolate chips in it, people will eating, you know, and you're negating some of the nutritional value at that point to be fair, to catch up. It's still not

a vegetable. Let's ask Joe, I got a question for you then. All right, so let's let's say, Uh, let's say that someone has put down a plate in front of you. On the left is an in vitro grown burger. Like it's meat that's made from this in vitro process. So you've got the beef that's been lab grown on the left. On the right, you have a burger that's made from insect protein. Uh. And they ask you they say that you have to choose one, which one do you go for? I guess i'd have to see what

they looked like. I don't know. I assuming no, I have no inherent prejudice, but I well, no, I guess that's not true. I would like to say that I wish I didn't have an inherent prejudice, but I'd probably go for the beef. So you go with the lab grown beef over the insect, but I'd probably probably Then I'd go back and try to talk myself into the insect burger. Okay, Lauren, would you just indulge your voracious

appetite for insects again? Or would you would? I would ask if I could taste them both and see which one. I like to say, I would immediately just cut each of them in half and then smush them together to make a mega burgers of which have never been don't I If like you're about to eat your insect burger and a bug crawled across the plate, would you send it back right right? If you? If you had a soup filled with insect protein and there was a fly

in your soup, would that be garnish? Oh? We're funny, um, you know it's honestly, honestly, I don't have a problem with either either one. If you were to bring me like assuming that the insects have been prepared, I agree with you, Joe. I would have that same sort of initial reaction if someone just handed me a bug and said eat this. I think I would definitely balk at that.

But if you're talking about something that's been prepared in some way, uh, either turned into a kind of meal and then as in as in like corn meal type thing and then cooked, or even if you're talking about something where you've just you know, you removed the legs from the crickets and then done a quick stir fry type stuff. I've seen those two. I'd be willing to try that. I just have never really had the opportunity.

And again, I think I would have to be on my own because if my wife ever saw me do that, I would probably end up being divorced because she has a severe phobia about insects. As for the lab grown beef, I wouldn't hesitate at all for that other than the fact that I can't afford it. I would have to really so, so you wouldn't You wouldn't have a problem with with lab grown beef. Even though you don't eat I would. I would eat that. Yeah, I mean a

lot of the objections. First of all, the biggest, the biggest reason why I don't eat beef is because my wife doesn't eat, so I don't. Again, I don't have an ethical issue with it, although as I learned more and more, because when when I stopped eating beef, it was before I was really knowledgeable at all about what was going on with the meat industry. Once I learned more and more about the environmental impacts, I was like, huh, I guess it's a good thing I don't do it.

I'm not contributing to that. Uh, that's one of the reasons why I, you know, don't just immediately try it again and go back into it. But if it was lab grown, I was thinking, well, you know, this was done in a way that what that didn't kill an animal, it didn't cause a negative environmental impact on the same level as conventionally grown beef, and I'm curious about it.

I'd go and try it now. I'll probably wouldn't feel so great afterwards, just from the fact that I haven't eaten that kind of protein in a really long time. But that's beside the point. According to those estimates I came up with and uh, and of course they are not I came up with the in the paper I found, um and they are just estimates. But I mean, in those predictions the lab culture beef was better even than chicken. Yeah, I mean I would. I'd be willing to try that.

I don't know if my wife would, because again she psychologically associates meat with not feeling good. And even though that happened years, even though that happened when she was in college, I don't know that it necessarily matters where the meat came from from. The the the human drive to not poison yourself as a pretty strong one, fairly strong. It does always make me wonder who was that poor poor caveman who was given the job of all right, eat that and find out if it kills you, Chris,

don't eat it? Yeah, all right, Well, do you have any else you want to talk about the future of protein? Before we wrap up, I'm just gonna say the future of food is gonna be weirder than you can imagine. Yeah, it's gonna be It's gonna be delicious too. I imagine. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Eat all the things, Eat all the things. All Right with that, we're gonna wrap up, guys. If you have any suggestions, I recommend you go to

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