Chapter 136: Cultured Meat (2)

“You’re a scientist at Eat the Green, right?” RYJ asked.

“Yes, I am...” Frederick answered in a trembling voice.

“A-Bio has come here to invest. As a hands-on scientist, what do you think? Are the experiments going well?”

“...”

Frederick thought for a moment. The CEO of Eat the Green wasn’t a bad person, but people were bound to emphasize results and hide failures when trying to attract investments. However, Frederick wanted to give him all the information. It was a courtesy for the best scientist in the field.

“To be honest, it is not very efficient...”

Frederick, the scientist who was on the lowest rung of the ladder, had no right to say this, but he courageously spoke up.

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s far more productive to grow cows and get meat from them. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be... Maybe this whole artificial meat culturing is just too inefficient.”

“No way.”

RYJ shook his head.

“Pardon?”

“We use a lot of unnecessary energy when we get meat from cows, right? It’s not like we eat cow eyes, hair, or hooves.”

“... What?”

“When livestock produces meat, they also produce waste that we don’t need. But cultured meat doesn’t produce any of that waste, and all of its resources go straight to producing meat, right? Of course, cultured meat is more efficient than raising livestock for meat.”

“...”

Baffled, Frederick was at a loss for words.”

It was like someone was telling him that teleportation was a much more efficient technology than airplanes because it’s much faster.

“The methodology is correct. The only thing that is inefficient is the technology,” RYJ said. “And I’m here to solve it. Where is the CEO?”

* * *

Diego Lopez, the founder of Eat the Green, grew up in a small town in Mexico. He had witnessed something shocking when he was eleven; it was the scene of a chicken vendor killing a chicken in his truck. The vendor grabbed a chicken by the beck from the steel cage that was on the back of his truck. The chicken clucked with its legs flailing in the air, which Diego found amusing until then. He knew that the vendor was going to slaughter the chicken, but Diego, who had never seen that process before, did not realize how brutal it would be.

Squirt!

In the blink of an eye, the vendor’s knife pierced through the chicken’s stomach.

“

Gurgle...

”

The chicken made a weird sound. Its flailing legs froze. Then, the chicken vendor threw that into the pot with boiling water. Diego froze as if he met a poisonous snake at a trail.

After a moment, the chicken vendor pulled out the chicken with tongs, plucked its feathers and cleaned out its organs before selling it to Diego’s grandma. That day, Diego did not touch the chicken mole that was on the dinner table.

Diego became a vegetarian a few weeks later. At first, his decision didn’t come from a clear belief that animals also had a right to live; it was just that the scene of killing the chicken was so traumatizing that it had become ingrained in his mind.

Diego learned to supplement his protein intake with dairy products, like cheese and milk, and grains, such as corn and beans. But like many vegetarians, he ran into a problem with vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 was an important nutrient that was used in many important processes including DNA replication, cell division, and blood production. However, there were almost no ways to absorb it on a vegetarian diet. There were reports that plant-based foods like fermented foods and marine algae had B12, but the absorption rate was low.

The easiest and most efficient way to get vitamin B12 was to eat red meat. If that wasn’t possible, they had to at least eat something like fish.

For Diego, it felt like human fate.

‘Humans can only survive by taking the lives of other animals.’

To solve this problem, Diego looked for a lot of different vegetarian groups. He found that many others were struggling with this issue as well.

‘Could there be a more fundamental solution?’

The desire to eat animal flesh without causing pain to animals was completely contradictory. Diego knew that he was making a big deal by refusing to eat meat, and he knew that it could look like a useless complaint from an overly sensitive and frustrating idiot. But what could you do if you were born that way?

And there were quite a lot of people like that in the world. Even if they weren’t actually vegetarians, many people have stood at this crossroads at least once in their lives, maybe during puberty. It was a decision between having compassion for animals and enjoying the pleasure and health of eating meat.

“I chose to be vegetarian, but I do not condemn people who chose the other way,” Diego said.

“Of course, since it is their choice,” RYJ said.

“Yes. But the problem is that if you choose one, you will have to sacrifice the other.”

It seemed like there was no way between the two crossroads. Just like how it was impossible for Shylock to cut off one pound of flesh without spilling blood, there was no way to obtain meat without harming animals. They were like opposites that were incompatible.

“However, science can create paths that don’t exist. The most fascinating part of science is that it can make previously unimaginable and illogical thoughts into reality. For example...”

“For example?”

“Like going to the moon,” Diego said. “Mr. Ryu, think about how ridiculous that desire was before the space age. It was almost psychotic. But we went to the moon. Like that, I believe that science will be able to realize the crazy idea of being able to eat meat without causing pain.”

“Yes, I think so as well.”

“I came to the United States after marrying my American wife who I met in a vegetarian group. And I started studying cultured meat.”

“I see.”

“Yes. And I’m telling you since you’re here to invest in us, but we’re at the top of the world in cultured meat technology,” Diego said with confidence.

“Is that so?”

“We reduced the production cost, and it is three hundred times less compared to the technology fifteen years ago. Of course, the induced pluripotent stem cells you made played a huge part in it. Haha, our companies actually pay a lot of royalties to A=Bio and A-gen, so we were basically already business partners.”

“I think I’ve seen your names in a few reports. I remember.”

“Really? It must have been nothing since A-Bio has a lot of new drug pipelines, but thank you for remembering us. Anyway, we are very grateful to you in many ways,” Diego said. “That’s why we’ve set up a meeting today. We don’t need any investments right now, and we have been refusing any investments. However, we are willing to work with you, Mr. Ryu. How much are you willing to fund us?”

“I am not going to invest money since you say that you have enough. I am here to invest my technology.”

“..”

Diego looked confused. Hadn’t he just said that Eat the Green was the best in the world at cultured meat?

‘He’s investing his technology in our company?’

He was already using RYJ’s iPS cells, and he had never heard of A-Bio doing cultured meat.

“What kind of technology... are you talking about?” Diego asked.

“Cultured meat technology, of course. It costs about three thousand dollars to produce one hamburger patty’s worth of meat right now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I can make that near three dollars.”

“Three dollars!” Mckinney, who was listening to them, shouted. “How can you make it three dollars... Three dollars... Three dollars?”

𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Up until this point, cultured meat had only shown promise as a future technology. At three thousand dollars for one hamburger patty, it was three million dollars for a hamburger. It would be even more expensive if the value of the intermediate distribution process was included. Therefore, people did not think of it as more than being interesting or just merely wanting it to go well.

However, it could make a Big Mac if it became three dollars. It was still more expensive than conventional meat, but there were so many benefits to cultured meat that the price was still competitive.

‘Commercialization is possible.’

Eat the Green would be able to grow from a venture company that relied on technology patents to a medium-sized company with a product.

“And I have more technologies to invest. The meat you’re producing now is just tightly packed muscle fibers, right?” RYJ asked Diego, who was frozen.

“... Yes.”

“How is the texture?”

“A lot of people say that it is tough because it’s one hundred percent muscle fiber. It feels like chewing on hardened Spam.”

“The problem of texture is probably something that the cultured meat technology is going to have to solve over the next few decades. The reason is that real muscle isn’t made up of just muscle fibers. There are fascicles that hold bundles of fibers together, and they are wrapped with the perimysium and the epimysium. There are blood vessels in this, and blood contains a lot of different types of cells. The heme in red blood cells is the main component that makes the taste of blood. The epimysium also holds a lot of moisture, and there are a lot of fatty acids in it as well. Perhaps it’s more familiar to call it marbling? And you have to include nerve trunks as well. It will be challenging to delicately create meat tissue that contains all of these ingredients while controlling the proportions of all of them,” RYJ said.

The meat that was obtained from livestock was like a sandwich with all sorts of toppings. No matter how many slices of bread were made, it still couldn’t make a sandwich. The biggest challenge of cultured meat was cultivating tissue that contained all those components.

“And creating the muscle isn’t just the end of it. It will be hard for artificial meat to match the meaty texture that is created from the process of muscle on bones being pulled apart, destroyed, and regenerated. At the current rate of development in the cultured meat market, it will probably take decades for it to surpass the quality of traditional animal products.”

“...”

There was silence.

Diego cautiously spoke up.

“We haven’t even dreamed of that. Are you trying to say that what you are saying is possible...?”

“We don’t make cultured meat, but we are the best in the world at making organoids for medical purposes. And the inventors of that technology are here.”

RYJ introduced the Life Creation Team. Cheon Ji-Myung and the other scientists laughed awkwardly and introduced themselves as well.

“We have already succeeded in co-culturing tissue. We can show you how to co-culture fat cells and muscle fibers. We will also show you how to grow it so that the gaps between the muscle fibers are hydrated. All the things I mentioned earlier are theoretically attainable.”

“W-wait,” Mckinney interrupted.

Sweat rolled down his neck. He had invested in cultured meat for a long time, but how could things advance so quickly?

“Can that be done overnight? Our company will go bankrupt.”

Tekeyson Foods was a traditional livestock company. They ran the farms they acquired, and they slaughtered and processed the livestock from them and supplied them to a number of restaurants and butchers. Cultured meat, of course, required no slaughtering and very little processing. Since one hamburger was still three thousand dollars, Mckinney was just looking for a way to adapt while slowly building the technology, but it seemed like it was going to become three dollars overnight.

“Mr. Ryu, that technology will make everyone in the livestock industry lose their livelihood. It’s different from pharmaceuticals... People will kill themselves,” Mckinney said.

“Like how more people look for wild products after successfully creating a farmed product, this will result in premiumization of the traditional livestock industry,” RYJ said. “But like you said, Mr. Mckinney, there would be a lot of confusion if a technology like this suddenly came into the market.”

“... Then, what?”

“I met with President Campbell before coming here.”

“The President?” Diego asked in surprise.

“Yes. The United States produces the most beef in the world; about twenty percent of the entire production comes from the United States.”

“And a large portion of that comes from our company,” Mckinney said like it was painful.

RYJ smiled.

“But don’t worry. Technology eliminates jobs, but it also creates them. This will become a huge planned economy project with the cooperation of governments around the world.”