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Welcome to the all Meet and Greet podcast. My name is Jessica Lynn. Today our guest is Jason Writer, former vice president of Research and Development at Hampton Creek, a leading plant based food company. My name is Gershon Madon. Today, we will ask Jason about the cost of producing meat. There's a couple of big problems, I think, facing us as a species.

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And there are around all this things I mentioned energy, materials and food and food in particular caught my interest and a lot of people's interest over the last few years as people started to really think about the way we get our food, how we distribute it and the resources required. And I think it's the biggest one of all of those problems.

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Meat is the most egregious in terms of gaps and mass and energy balance. Animals are incredibly inefficient with respect to taking resources and converting them into a form that we eat them. Cows, I think, are the ones that people talk most about in terms of conversion of protein. That's about a 10 to 1 or worse. Chickens are a bit better at 2 to 1, but I think there's a real opportunity in and sort of, you know, flatlining that conversion, just eating the plants directly, you know, working at Hampton Creek for the last couple of years with these amazing engineers, scientists, food scientists, chefs have taught me a lot about how to do that.

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You mentioned the importance of the energy and mass balance. Can you go a little bit more in depth about why that's so important? Yeah. So, you know, in our current capitalist or economic system, we don't really evaluate everything appropriately or accurately, at least in my view. And whenever we go to the grocery store and we pay, you know, $2 or $4 a pound for ground meat, that for me doesn't reflect the true cost of making it in terms of, you know, the land that was cleared for the cows to graze, all of the water that was used, you know, to help grow them up, the the fuels that were burned to transport them, all of

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the energy that has gone into that process. So so that's the energy piece. The mass balance is, you know, what do you do with all of the other things that are involved there, the other parts of the cow? And we certainly have markets for, you know, for leather and some of those byproducts, but not all of them. Could you talk about what goes into deciding which plant based alternatives really work well and which ones are not as successful?

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Yeah, So I think it starts with, you know, what it is you're trying to do. You know, if you're trying to create a, you know, a nutritious food, a more healthy food, a tasty food or all of the above, you know, a concept. And it's very much what we're teaching in the the plant based meat class is come up with a burning problem, something that people are really interested in and, you know, drill deep, figure out what's really in there and what goes into the process of finding which foods are going to make good alternatives for meat products or animal products.

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I know mung beans were a big one that were used at Hampton Creek. Could you go into a little bit of how you know what's going to work best? Yeah, that's one of the best stories about Hampton Creek has just developed a really incredible functional protein discovery platform where we were looking into all of, you know, not just the ten or 15 plant species from which I think 90% of our calories derive from.

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But the other sort of 380,000 that are out there. So what we were able to do is pull those species in. Break them down into their constituents, characterize them molecularly, and then characterize them functionally and figure out, gosh, does this protein make a good gel? Does that protein, you know, make a good emulsion? You know, could you use, you know, based on its properties of gel Asian?

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Could it be something that cooks well into something that looks like a scrambled egg? That's where it starts. And you don't always know where you'll end up. You just need to characterize this basic science, Right? Curiosity, I think, leads it all. So this podcast, the art meet and greet, is kind of a direct product or kind of a support of our class, The Art Meet Challenge Lab.

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So what's some advice you have for the students involved with that class in regards to having success in this industry and how students in our lab can produce meat alternatives? Yeah, I mean, to build off that term curiosities, just get really curious and get your hands on it. You know, one of the things I love about this class and spending the last 15 years since college industry is it's really a great interface between academe, you know, the fundamentals that you're learning industry, where you're trying to apply those fundamentals in life where we all live.

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And so you can take all three points of that triangle and find a center, you know, through through these classes. What I encourage them to do and I mentioned this before, find a burning problem, you know, something that's important and there's an unmet need for they're all over the place in the food system, not just in plant based meat.

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Now, once you have a concept of some potential solutions, make a prototype, make many prototypes. Fail, fail, fail. Until you don't. Well, thank you so much for joining us here today. We've really enjoyed hearing what you had to say about the plant based meat industry. Thanks for your time and come take the class. Join us next time on all meet and greet to hear from more leaders in plant based meat industry.