So, the Good Food Institute, we're a nonprofit
that works internationally to remove as many
animal-based products on the market and replace
them with plant-based alternatives.
We have operations in the United States, India,
China, Brazil, Israel, and we're looking to
hire in Europe, so if you like what we do,
come talk to me afterwards.
We're all here for the same reason, right?
We want to reduce the impact of the world
on animal agriculture.
I think everyone at EA Global understands
the problems behind animal agriculture.
So the three of us have agreed this is an
issue, so I'm just going to go through them
quickly, because I think most of you know
the problems.
First, animal welfare.
Over 56 billion farmed animals are killed
every year for human consumption, and that
doesn't even include aquaculture, where we
have over trillions of tons of animals killed.
The other issue is global poverty.
Animal agriculture is vastly inefficient in
producing food for human consumption.
You have to feed plants to animals to get
the calories for humans.
One example is it takes nine plant-based calories
to make one calorie of chicken.
That is a huge amount of food waste, and when
we're trying to feed the world population,
what we care about is calories.
Why feed them to a living breathing animal
that has to grow and live before eating it?
Let's just take those calories and give them
directly to humans.
The same with human health.
I'm sure most of you know that antibiotics
are fed towards farmed animals, to either
keep them from being sick or to keep them
growing.
Over 80% of antibiotics are fed to farmed
animals.
That's causing a massive health crisis, that
we are going to have superbugs that are going
to affect humans, and we're not going to be
able to cure them, because antibiotics won't
work.
And finally, environmental degradation.
The UN has said that animal agriculture contributes
to some of the world's most pressing environmental
issues, including deforestation, including
loss of biodiversity, and water and air pollution.
So at the Good Food Institute, we have a theory
of change.
All of us want to change the food system,
but we aren't doing it by talking to consumers.
We're doing it by changing the marketplace.
We believe that if people have access to products
that taste the same or better than animal
products, are around the same price, and are
convenient, so you can actually go into your
local restaurant or grocery store, you don't
have to go to some fancy vegan store to buy
it, that people will buy it, because people
really only want good-tasting food.
So, we're working with governments, and academic
institutions, entrepreneurs, existing companies,
scientists, to try and develop all of these
businesses and science between these new products.
And as you might know, the current products
on the market tend to be soy or wheat based.
That's really the old technology, so now companies
are looking into things like pea protein or
mung bean protein.
Scientists are examining a lot of different
ways that we can use plants to mimic these
animal alternatives.
So, we haven't actually dealt much with insects
before.
Currently, I can tell you what we're thinking.
We think that in order to solve this world
problem, or world problems, caused by animal
agriculture, we think plant-based and clean
meat are more direct, rapid solutions to our
global food problems than insect protein.
So does everyone here know what clean meat
is?
Okay.
You'll hear a little bit more with Kyle later.
I'll just skip over that, then.
In order to make the most change as soon as
possible, we think we should go with plant-based
and clean meat alternatives.
And honestly, we worry about the insects as
well.
I mean, we're talking about trillions of living
beings.
We don't really know if they're sentient or
not, but imagine if they are.
Like, we would be causing massive, massive
amounts of suffering that go far beyond what
exists in the current animal agriculture system.
So, all of us are working towards this goal:
how can we effectively reduce meat consumption?
These are all plant-based products, and I've
had them all, and they're delicious, right?
And omnivores like them.
Like, our entire goal is to produce products
that omnivores would like to eat.
So yes, I am vegan.
I don't care about vegans.
I don't care about vegetarians.
They're choosing these products anyway.
I mean, most of you probably have been vegetarian
and vegan for a very long time.
You've eaten, excuse my language, really crappy
products, right?
Because you're going to eat them, right?
You're not going to eat the meat, right?
It's going to take products that really mimic
traditional animal products for us to get
omnivores to switch, and right now, those
products are on the market.
I had the Moving Mountains Burger for the
first time here.
Has anyone had that yet?
No?
Oh my goodness, you have to try it.
So it's based out of mushroom.
I love mushrooms, but it has a real mushroom
taste, but it's a burger.
It's available in over 500 locations in the
UK, and absolutely delicious.
So, I went out with an omnivore for dinner
to have it, and he was so skeptical, and he
really didn't want to hear about what I did,
and he was talking about his work.
And I was like, "Oh, try a little bit."
And he really, he was shocked.
Like, he really was shocked, because they
don't expect that we can mimic the taste and
create products that they really enjoy.
So, we strongly believe there needs to be
direct substitution.
We don't think that people are going to eat
insects in replace of a burger, or a sausage,
or a piece of fish.
People are going to continue to eat those
products, right?
If they are going to eat products like these,
they tend to be more snacks, or say a novel
food, that's kind of fun, "Oh, let's go eat
some crickets."
It's not, "Okay, let's go out for a burger.
You know, oh, I think I'll have a scoop of
worms instead," right?
Right now, there isn't that direct substitution,
and we've seen that in the plant-based market
as well, right?
If you cannot replicate the animal products
that people are used to eating, then they
aren't going to buy it, so we strongly believe
there needs to be direct substitution.
So right now, with insects, it does tend to
be a lot of indirect substitution, so snacks,
or protein bars, or protein powders.
Now, those might be great for the market.
There might be a huge market for them, but
for us, it's not solving the problem that
we're looking to solve, right?
We want to create substitutes for traditional
animal products.
And there is, and actually, Nick might know
more about this.
I have heard that there was a cricket burger
that just didn't seem to be very tasty, and
people weren't a big fan of it.
There is a bolognese sauce that Nick brought,
that's really tasty, but our position is still
if you're going to...
All of us are effective altruists.
We want to spend our money in the most effective
way.
We want to spend our time in the most effective
way.
These plant-based products and clean meat
products are already proven concepts.
Clean meat isn't on the market yet, but plant-based
products are on the market and successful,
and clean meat, we've proven the concept.
It will be on the market soon, so why put
money and resources into something that hasn't
been proven?
So again, all of us are trying to reduce the
climate impact of animal agriculture.
How do we do that?
So, we all know about food waste, right?
There's massive amounts of food waste.
Right now, insect farming can actually alleviate
some of that issue.
Some of the insect companies will take our
food waste and feed that to insects.
There's a couple issues once you start to
scale.
Again, our goal is to reduce meat consumption,
right?
When we start to reduce meat consumption,
we also start to reduce agricultural waste.
That agricultural waste is a lot of the products
that are going into the insect... into feeding
insects right now, so there will be less of
that, which means there'll be less feed for
insects.
And the waste fed to insects...
Sorry, so part of the issue is we're reducing
that supply anyway, and then a lot of the
insects that we're using for insect protein
can't always survive on all the waste from
agriculture, so they need a more consistent
feed.
So if we go back to that... like, this isn't
consistent types of food, right?
This is just kind of whatever we're throwing
away.
Some insects really do need more consistent
sources of food.
Then the question is how do we feed the world
population, right?
This is that inefficiency of animal agriculture,
and how we should be feeding plants directly
to humans.
We have a couple concerns with that.
Number one, what happens if the insects get
out, right?
I'm obviously from the United States.
We just had massive hurricanes in the South,
and pigs in the agricultural system all escaped...
well, they didn't all escape.
The lucky ones escaped from the barns, and
they were just left wild to get around, because
the hurricanes took down those facilities.
Now, pigs are big.
You can catch pigs, right?
They're also on the ground.
Like, you can round them up.
What happens if there is some sort of natural
disaster, which will continue to occur with
problems in climate change, and the insects
get out?
Like, that's a real concern, not just because
these insects are out and continue breeding,
potentially in areas where they're not native.
They can also be near agricultural systems
where they could destroy nearby agriculture
systems.
Our other worry is just, you know, the natural
change in animals.
These insects are going to be bred very quickly.
They obviously have short lives.
This is what's happened to chickens without
genetic modification.
I don't know if you can see very well, but
going to market in 1957, chickens were 905
grams.
In 2005, they're 4,202 grams, and they even
cut the amount of time it took for them to
grow to that size.
This wasn't through genetic modification.
This was just through selective breeding.
These are very different animals.
Now, I'm not saying that this necessarily
will occur with insects, but when you understand
the agriculture system, people want to make
the most amount of profit.
That's the way all businesses work.
It wouldn't surprise me if this would also
happen within the insect world.
Then how can we create a more humane food
system?
I think this is a really important question,
especially for all of us, who do think about
these philosophical issues.
Like, do insects suffer?
We don't actually have a lot of information
on that right now, but is it really safe to
make the assumption that they don't?
And considering the impact, when we're talking
about trillions of animals, do we want to
make the wrong decision here?
If they can suffer, we really are causing
massive, massive amounts of suffering.
So, I don't know if any of you know Lewis
Bollard from the Open Philanthropy Project.
He's a huge supporter of a lot of EA causes.
So he said, "I'd be hard-pressed to assign
less than a 10% probability to insects being
conscious, and even at that level of 10%,
we really should be concerned."
Thank you so much.
Right.
I've got some products which you can come
have a look at afterwards if you're interested,
and some details about my network.
As I've already been introduced, I won't say
too much on that, because time is limited,
but I guess the things to say is that I personally
have a commitment and interest in sustainable
food systems.
I've formed an organic food-growing cooperative,
and that's what first got me interested in
the excessive amounts of waste and food material
that goes to waste that could be better used.
I then joined a thing in Sheffield called
The Junk Food Project, which again was around
reducing food waste.
And that connection between the need to feed
the community globally and the amount of waste
is what sort of brought me into the area of
insects as an area of interest.
So I formed the Woven Network.
It's there to kind of stimulate and learn
about what opportunities there are, and to
explore this.
I guess my argument isn't that insects are
going to feed the world, but that they can
have a role to play.
They can bring some extra dimension, which
may not be possible through a purely plant-based
approach.
I imagine that many of you will have seen
headlines, news articles about insects, typically
with someone about to put a cricket in their
mouth.
It's very sensationalized, and the media,
you know, has a tendency to kind of dramatize
everything.
But it's a growing and changing landscape,
and I want to give you a bit of a sense of
kind of where things stand at the moment,
so that you can make your own judgment about
kind of your engagement with it now and in
the future.
It started in 2013, with a UN report from
the Food and Agriculture organization, that
consisted of a lot of research looking at
our global food challenges, particularly around
access to protein, many of the points that
Nicole made, and suggested the insects could
have a role, significantly influenced by the
fact that insects have been consumed through
the centuries in many different cultures around
the world, but obviously, they're not currently
in Western, developed country diets.
Again, I think we'd all agree with Nicole's
point about the unsustainability of the current
food system, and that the vegan lifestyle
and diet is recognized as being the basis
for the most sustainable option, because it
cuts down on carbon emissions, it cuts down
on land use, it cuts down on water use, cuts
down on a lot of the negative impacts of sort
of livestock farming.
This is my family.
This is my wife.
There is no way on God's Earth that she's
going to become a vegan, I'm afraid.
So I think my argument is you'll need to have
a number of alternatives, and I think many
of them will be plant-based, and I'm very
interested in that, and I think that's a good
thing, but food choices are made by a whole
range of things.
There's an interesting...
I had the opportunity to go to California
recently, and there's an exhibition in San
Diego Museum about the way in which people's
perception of animals and creatures changes
as they become wild, domesticated, pets, on
their plates, and it's a sort of complex area,
but I think the point I'm making is that choices
are partly about availability, convenience,
what you can get in your stores, partly about
price.
Certainly that's a big issue.
Also about flavor, the experience of eating
it, what you like.
Religious and social issues can have a bearing
on your food choices.
Whoops, that's not supposed to come quite
so quickly.
Oh, they come together.
Issues of right and wrong, I think are increasingly
on people's minds.
I find it a real struggle when I go into a
supermarket or a shop now to determine, "Am
I going for food miles, organic, fair trade?"
There's so many different sort of things which
are seen as right and wrong.
It's a real complex area, and then you've
got the science, and kind of being presented
with hard facts about the nutritional components
that go into food.
And I think there's an interesting thing,
again stepping back a bit, about people's
reaction to science-based messages around
food, because again, coming back to this,
food is eaten in a social context.
It's not really visible is it, there?
Food is typically eaten in a social context.
I would love to go out to more vegan restaurants
and things, but it's very difficult when your
partner doesn't share that view, so we're
very keen to see more restaurants that offer
a range of different products and things,
and I think that need for variety is critical.
I want to make a further point that kind of
builds, again, on Nicole's point about meat
consumption increasing.
What you can see here is the massive increase
in meat consumption.
This is typically most predominant in countries
like China and India.
And this isn't because they've discovered
that they really like the flavor of meat.
It's because they think they want to move
to a Western lifestyle, and they associate
eating meat and having access to meat as being
about being affluent, being wealthy, being
successful.
It's got a lot of connotations in people's
minds.
Sadly, from my point of view, and to some
extent, I think, from the country's point
of view, they are moving away from their more
traditional diets, which often include harvested
insects, which do have much better nutritional
components than going to McDonald's and having
a burger.
But that is the shift that we're seeing.
So I think there's a thing about the challenge
back to the plant-based product developers,
how you create that social association of
having a very expensive steak.
So actually making things expensive is sometimes
important, and an interesting one.
We've been quite interested in how sushi has
come into sort of Western diets, having been
seen as a sort of weird Japanese thing involving
raw fish, and I think it's because it seems
cool.
It's associated with a modern lifestyle nowadays.
So a bit about insects then.
The focus of this is around humans eating
insects in food products, but insects and
food have a much more complex interaction.
So, as I mentioned, about 1,800 species of
insects are edible, and across the world,
people have harvested insects and secured
a lot of nutritional value from that, from
their just harvesting them in the wild.
This is a photo from Thailand, where I think
this is the largest number of insects that
you can buy on any one street.
And some of those are harvested, some of them
are farmed, but equally, insects, if you're
trying to plant and grow crops, are a real
pest, so the killing of insects is a big part
of plant food production, and that's a dynamic
which is quite challenging, and again, the
association that insects have with people,
with poverty, with being pests, is a challenge
for us.
So in Thailand, we also have insect farming,
and I'll come onto more about that.
That's now developing and emerging as an interaction
with insects, and that's for human consumption.
Then you've got the scenario where insects
are bred and farmed for feeding to livestock,
and this is about a way of trying to reduce
livestock's carbon footprint and increase
their sustainability.
So it's a complex web is the message, and
each of these could be a talk in their own
right.
I haven't got time for that.
So I touched on the fact that insects are
killed in the growing of plant products.
Soy is typically a product that is grown a
lot for livestock feed, but also it's consumed
by vegans, and yet huge numbers of insects
and other creatures die in its farming.
I guess I want to make the point that you're
not going to get away from killing insects
somewhere along the line, and they may well
be less sentient than others, but so are mice,
and so are other creatures that suffer through
farming.
I think to some extent, the human population
is the problem.
I don't have a solution for that, I'm afraid.
So, a little bit about where we are with insect
products.
As I said, people traditionally have just
eaten them straight from their natural form,
cooking them up, frying them up often.
We've had this gimmick coming through big
time, and it's still very much part of the
markets, part of the most successful businesses,
you know, "Do you dare to eat this insect?
Do you dare to put it in your mouth?"
You know, lollipops with an insect in, things
like that.
There's certainly good money to be made from
that.
I don't find it at all helpful, for a range
of reasons.
Sadly, on the GCSE curriculum now, you learn
about insects as being a potential part of
the future food, and schools often say, "Okay,
how can we help our kids to experience this?"
So they write to Crunchy Critters, and they
get a box of crazy things to try and pop in
their mouths, which reinforces the view that
they're just weirdness.
This is a chef, and he has produced insect-based
burgers and other very delicious products,
and they're developing that as we speak.
And I think that whole area of dishes in restaurants,
certainly it's very big in California and
elsewhere, so I think there's a growing interest
in this area, in how you create true dishes
which are containing insects and demanded
by customers.
I've brought a range of products that are
produced by our members, and they take many
different forms.
A lot of them, again, I wouldn't disagree
are sort of snacks.
They're gimmicks.
They're part of that sort of protein bar lifestyle.
They're not going to stop people eating meat.
And these guys are producing the material
that goes into One Hop bolognese sauce, and
they discovered a way of taking insect powder
and producing something which is more of a
paste, which is much more versatile, although
it's an insect product.
So I guess part of my argument, again, is
that we haven't seen the end of what insects
can be like.
What's going on?
Insects, and in terms of...
I've got five minutes left.
That's all right, I think I'm on target.
They have a range of nutritional components,
which can be harder to replicate in plants,
and I think there's particular things, such
as the omega-3 and the amino acids, which
are particularly, because they're not plant-based,
are more suitable and useful for humans.
I'm not a biochemist.
I'm not going to claim that plant products
can't include these as well, but I think they
have a role in that kind of debate about how
you offer people the nutrition that they need.
And I should say, of course, I did mention
there's 1,800 different insects, so it's overly
simplified to say we're talking about crickets,
you know?
There's a whole bunch of other insects out
there.
And also, insects have many other components
which can be quite valuable in terms of their
market value.
The products that are on the outer casing
of insects can have a lot more medical value
than their protein content.
The reference has already been made to insects
as waste converters, and this is what first
got me onto this.
And I think this is still very much a sort
of untapped area.
Currently regulation, certainly in the European
Union, are very restrictive of what you can
feed insects if you're going to feed those
insects, then, or use those insects to create
livestock feed, because of the risk averseness
of European regulations, and I understand
that, but I would argue that there's a lot
of value in understanding this better, and
if we do have huge food waste mountains and
insects can be converting those into something
that's valuable, I wouldn't necessarily advocate
what's going on in Durban, where I think 40,000
homes are converting their human fecal waste
into Black Soldier Fly that is fed to chickens,
funded by the Gates Foundation.
I think that illustrates that you can go quite
a long way down there.
The challenge, of course, is that you then
try and sell that to consumers, that's a difficult
sell, you know?
Here's a tasty burger that was fed on something
which you don't really want to think about,
so not easy, some of this stuff.
Another thing that I think has been particularly
exciting, again the mention was made earlier
about antimicrobial resistance as being a
real problem facing humanity, facing our world
collectively.
The use of antibiotics, which are essentially
artificial ways of stimulating a creature's
resistance to these diseases, could potentially
be replaced by...
That's right.
AMPs, antimicrobial peptides.
Again, I'm not a biochemist.
So these are antimicrobial peptides in schematic
form, and studies have been done that found
that if you stimulate insects in the correct
way, they create AMPs, which then when fed
to chickens mean that they are then resistant
to campylobacter, E. coli, and other things,
so they're using a natural system that exists
within nature to build resistance to disease
rather than artificially stimulating that.
So that, I think, could have a role in the
future.
And finally, there are areas, Southern Africa,
the mopane caterpillar is being harvested
to extinction in some areas, so actually farming
it, and encouraging people to farm it, is
a way of creating economic opportunity, and
then putting the creatures back into the habitat.
So trying to protect natural populations could
be another benefit.
One more minute?
Okay.
How many more slides have I got?
So, just a couple of slides about insect farming.
It's a changing area.
Again, as Nicole's pointed out, this is going
to evolve.
It's going to be increasingly intensified.
One of the big challenges with insects is
that they are rather more expensive, because
it's quite a manual process to create them,
so there's a pressure on cost, and big investment
is going into this now, which is going to
try and drive the price down.
So I absolutely understand the pressures that
are on the food system, that will apply here
as much as anywhere else.
And yeah, so the challenging areas.
I think we don't know enough about the suffering
area.
The Dutch have introduced legislation for
insect farming, because it's actually quite
a big business.
It's quite a big sector there, based around
the five freedoms, so they're seeking to create
an understanding and some standards around
insect farming, which would recognize the
need to maintain the welfare of insects.
Resource use.
What was that about?
I think yes, the point about resource use
is that again, typically the argument with
meat production is it uses less land, less
water, and less other products.
The latest studies of insects, and this also
applies to greenhouse gas emissions and yes,
consumer acception, is that it kind of depends
what you feed the insects on.
And again, this comes back to if we could
feed them on waste, then you know, it's a
win-win.
If we're feeding them on cabbages that have
been grown in the fields, then again, we come
back to the point about it's sort of a wasteful
thing to be doing.
So I think there are opportunities to make
better use of insects.
It requires more research to go forward, but
if we believe that there are benefits in having
insects as part of that mix, then I think
we need to be putting more research into looking
at how we can optimize that resource use.
And again, as has been referred to, if you
feed insects different things, you get different
nutritional value coming out the other end,
so there's a lot of science going into that
as well.
Greenhouse gas emissions, again, much lower
than the methane you get from cattle, but
again, it depends what you feed the insects
on.
Consumer acceptance, clearly a challenge.
Is it going to be a meat replacement?
I'm not sure it's going to be in the long
run, but who knows?
And we have these regulatory challenges around
the food safety risks, which again, a different
kind of thing in a plant-based area.
It's more expensive.
So that's me.
It's an interesting area.
I hope this has been useful in terms of your
own sort of understanding a bit more about
the sort of pros and cons of it.
I still think there's something that's worth
exploring, and I think the next speaker is
going to emphasize that.
Thank you.
So, my name is Kyle Fish, and currently, I'm
working as a researcher at Tufts University,
focusing on food system innovation.
So far, we've heard some arguments for and
against the use of whole insect farming as
a tool for pursuing food sustainability, but
now I want to broaden the conversation a little
bit and consider another type of insect farming,
specifically insect cell farming, the basic
idea here being that we might be able to produce
massive amounts of insect cells without growing
whole animals, and then use those cells themselves
to produce different food products.
To understand what's going on here, it's important
to know a little bit about the general framework
of cellular agriculture.
So you can see in this diagram, we're starting
with a cow, but what we're doing is taking
a small sample of cells from the cow, primarily
muscle and fat cells, and then putting them
into a big tank, known as a bioreactor, and
getting them to multiply.
Then, once we've grown lots and lots of these
cells, we can collect them out of the bioreactor
and form them into 3D tissues, to produce
meat products that are identical to the ones
that are traditionally obtained from slaughtered
animals.
The main motivation of this is obviously to
reduce the demand for factory farms and reduce
the demand for other problematic meat production
methods.
Since most meat products are made up primarily
of muscle and fat cells, doing this allows
us to make only the parts of the animal that
people are actually interested in eating,
without the suffering, and environmental issues,
and other concerns associated with whole animal
farming.
Theoretically, this process could be used
to produce any type of meat that's normally
consumed.
The cow here doesn't have to be a cow.
You could start with a pig, or a chicken,
or a turkey, and take cells from those animals,
and then use the same process to create any
of the food products that are normally generated
from those animals.
So one of the things that the group that I
work on is interested in is pushing this a
little bit further, and instead of using a
cow here, actually starting with insects as
the source.
The idea is instead of taking muscle and fat
cells from a cow, we can get them from insects,
and then use the same process to produce insect
cells, that can then function as either a
protein and nutrient supplement in plant-based
or other cultured products, or it could potentially
be used to create standalone insect meats,
or like mimic existing products in other ways.
However, the question remains, "Why would
we want to do this?"
We know that cells from cows and chickens
taste really good, and there's potential for
being able to do this process with those,
so one could reasonably argue that it's not
worth exploring insect cells in this way.
But to answer this question, it's worth knowing
a little bit about the technical challenges
facing clean meat development today, clean
meat being meat that's produced through this
process of cellular agriculture.
So some of those challenges, first of all,
most cell cultures require a really expensive
liquid serum that's derived from fetal calves,
and using this serum in cellular agriculture
is out of the question, both for economic
reasons and for ethical reasons.
It's still an animal product, so even if we're
just growing cells, there's still an animal
cost if this is part of the equation.
Also, most cells have to be grown in single
layers on flat surfaces, and this vastly restricts
the possibilities to scale up production.
If you're having to grow all of your cells
on a flat layer, it's really difficult to
grow the amount of them that you would need
in order to create some sort of food product.
Ideally, you want to be able to grow them
in what's known as suspension culture, which
is where the cells are floating in a liquid
solution, where they can be grown at much
higher density.
Also, lots of cells have to be grown in very
specific environmental conditions.
Lots of cell types have to be grown at right
about 37° celsius with 5% CO2 in their atmosphere.
Otherwise, they will die, or at the very least,
they'll stop growing in the same ways.
So all of these are really serious challenges
that cellular agriculture companies today
are working to address, but if we start to
look at some of the characteristics of insect
cells, these challenges start to seem a little
bit less intimidating.
For example, with insect cells, it's relatively
easy to adapt them to serum-free media.
You don't need that animal-based serum in
the same way that you do with a lot of other
cell types.
Also, it's relatively straightforward to get
them to grow in suspension culture, so with
insect cells, you can grow them in a liquid,
floating around, instead of having to keep
them attached to these flat surfaces.
Also, the insect cells can tolerate lots of
different environmental conditions.
They don't care a whole lot what temperature
they're grown at.
You can even change the pH, the carbon dioxide
concentrations, and the insect cells don't
really care.
They'll keep growing in more or less the same
way.
And all of those characteristics indicate
that insect cells are worth exploring within
the cellular agriculture paradigm, but to
really understand whether or not this is a
viable option, we need some data from the
lab, and we need to explore like how these
insect cells actually behave, and whether
or not the cell types that we're interested
in really display these characteristics.
So the team that I work on has been looking
at five different goals related to insect
cellular agriculture, the first two being
to adapt insect muscle stem cells to grow
on serum-free media, and then also to get
them to grow in single-cell suspension.
Then, we also wanted to look at regulating
how these cells grow, to make sure that we
can grow them quickly and efficiently, and
then also making sure that we can get them
to turn into the specific kinds of cells that
we're interested in, from a food perspective.
We're also interested in growing complex 3D
tissues.
Having lots of cells is great.
They're very nutritious, but it's only really
valuable if we can somehow assemble them into
a format that people are actually interested
in consuming.
Whether that's growing 3D insect tissues on
their own or incorporating them into other
products.
Lastly, we're interested in improving the
nutrition of the cells, and looking at different
ways to modify these cells or modify the conditions
that they're grown in, in order to improve
the nutrition that they offer to humans.
On the right, here, you can see a fruit fly,
which is the cell source that we've been working
with up until now.
We've gotten our cells from these animals,
and then are turning them into insect muscles.
And in the bottom, all of the little green
dots that you can see are muscle stem cells,
so they're cells that are still growing, but
haven't yet turned into actual insect muscle.
Then it's a little bit hard to see with the
light, but there are some red fibers also
running through the slide, and those red fibers
are insect muscle that have started to form
from these cells that were growing in culture,
and those muscle pieces are what we're really
interested in using for food.
I don't have time to take you through all
of our experiments and results, but we've
found some really exciting results from each
of these experiments.
On the left here, you can see with some of
our serum-free media experiments, we've compared
cells that have been grown with the animal-based
serum to cells that have been adapted to grow
without it, and you can see that there are
still a lot of happy green cells growing in
that bottom image.
With suspension culture, on the top, you can
see some of the flasks that we're using to
get these cells to grow in the liquid solution,
and in the bottom, each of those little green
specks is a cell that we've been able to get
to grow in this environment, and are successfully
producing lots and lots of them.
We've also been working with a really interesting
material known as cytosine.
This is a totally edible material, and we're
able to process it in a way to get these really
nice, aligned structures that mimic the striations
in meat.
Then we can actually take these insect muscle
cells and get them to grow on this material
to create different meat-like tissues.
And this is really promising.
All of these findings support our hypothesis
that insect cells are worth exploring in cellular
agriculture.
However, there are still some challenges and
open questions when looking to use this technology.
For one, not a lot of work has been done to
date with insect muscles.
There isn't the same body of background research
about insect muscle growth and development
that we have for cows, chickens, or obviously
humans, and understanding these processes
is really essential for being able to grow
and then use these cells in some sort of food
system.
Also, taste is a pretty open question.
People have eaten whole insects, I'm sure
Nick could tell you a lot about what those
taste like, but nobody has really eaten products
just derived from insect cells, so it's uncertain
how much room we'll have to play around with
different flavors and textures, to see what
sorts of products we can turn these into or
how we can incorporate them to bolster other
products that are currently being generated.
Consumer acceptance is another potential concern.
Consumer acceptance is a challenge in cellular
agriculture in general.
It's still up for debate whether or not people
will actually be willing to eat meat products
that have been grown in some sort of lab or
factory, and as if that wasn't difficult enough,
doing this with insects may add a whole other
layer of complication on top of that.
However, we also think that there is potential
that people will evaluate this favorably relative
to the idea of eating whole insects, so there
are some possibilities in terms of marketing
along those lines.
But even despite these challenges and uncertainties,
we think that this is a very promising area
of investigation for a number of reasons.
One of them is the possibility to create new
food products that people will find interesting
and nutritious, and that will help to relieve
some of the burden currently created by existing
food systems.
However, there are lots of other ways that
this could be valuable.
For example, with the characteristics that
insect cells have, there's a lot of potential
for us to learn from these cells and derive
lessons from working with them that we can
then apply in other cell types.
If we can figure out why it is that insect
cells are fine growing in serum-free media,
and why it's relatively easy to get them to
grow in suspension, then we can apply those
lessons to work more effectively with cow
cells, chicken cells, or turkey cells to make
products that people are more familiar with,
and do some sort of direct substitution.
We can also look at this from a perspective
of global health and food security.
Insect cells are relatively simple and easy
to grow relative to lots of other systems
that have been proposed, which means that
this technology might offer a way for cellular
agriculture to play a role in reducing the
burden of global poverty and food insecurity
in resource-constrained environments around
the world.
This system would be a lot easier to implement
in areas that don't have the same sort of
scientific and industrial infrastructure as
places like elsewhere in the Western world.
So that basically sums up the case for insect
cell farming.
Again, we think that this is a very valuable
technology.
One thing to note in terms of whole insect
farming, there is potential, at least in the
short term, for those efforts to contribute
to the development of this technology.
In the case of aquaculture, a lot of the valuable
research about fish muscle growth and development,
that has been used in the fish cellular agriculture
industry, was initially done as part of aquaculture
programs, so the same thing could be said
here, that if insect farming programs are
helping to contribute to this sort of body
of knowledge that can eventually be exploited
to do insect cellular agriculture in really
impactful ways, then there's a chance that
that could be valuable.
So I think soon here, we're going to open
it up for questions, but before we do, I want
to give a thanks to the rest of the cellular
agriculture team at Tufts University, especially
to Natalie Rubio, who has been leading these
insect projects, and David Kaplan, the director
of our lab, and also a thank you to our funding
partners who have helped to make this work
possible.
Thank you.
Okay, great.
I think we can open up for Q&A.
Maybe if you guys want to come up to the front.
Yeah, great.
I guess a question I had for all three of
you is where do you see the timelines on kind
of what you see as the ideal situation, or
your sort of various areas of interest?
What do you see the timelines on those?
Where do you see timelines in terms of maybe
insects becoming mainstream, or in terms of,
yeah, the developments of your various areas?
I mean, I could talk about plant and clean
meat, but I... do you want to go talk about
insects?
It's not an easy question to answer, because
there are quite a number of challenges.
I think there's obviously work going on to
create new types of product based on insects,
and that's very much a live thing at the moment.
I think one of the things that is interesting
is, again, sort of Kyle kind of touched on,
I guess is not necessarily being ... You know,
the products at the moment are companies that
are saying, "I want to sell insects," or,
"I want to sell burgers that are made with
plants."
I think there's a scope in the future to see
these things becoming more blurred, potentially,
to get the best of different worlds.
I'm sure the purist vegan wouldn't agree with
that, but there could be a market for products
which do have nutritionally perfect composition
for different markets, different audiences,
different types of person, different flavor
compositions, and maybe draw on the insect
cell farming and things, but I'm just seeing
so many different things coming through that
are kind of happening.
I think the regulatory thing is a big hurdle
for us in terms of the insect area, because
the European Union has a novel food regulation,
which means that anything that is deemed to
be a novel food, and insects now are, ironically
they weren't until the beginning of this year,
so people have to prove that the insect products
they're developing are safe and don't have
any risks.
And that's affecting the market quite significantly.
It's meaning that sort of the bigger companies
have got an opportunity to go forward and
smaller ones less so.
So that's something that's going to change
very slowly, I suspect, in practice.
Then the other challenge we've got is the
whole kind of insect farming, the cost of
it, the cost of the raw material that you
get as a result, and therefore the proportion.
A lot of these products have got relatively
small amounts of insect material in them,
because otherwise the costs would be prohibitive.
So that's another pressure that's a bit of
a challenge, in terms of farming technology,
how to manage that within welfare constraints.
So there's a lot of things.
I don't have a time scale, I'm afraid.
And I think that in terms of insect cellular
agriculture, it'll be quite a while before
there's any sort of product available that's
derived exclusively from that technology,
but I don't think it would take too long to
find ways to incorporate insect cells as a
protein or nutrient supplement in plant-based
products or other cultured products.
And also, on our team, like we're working
with a variety of other cell types as well,
and have already started to see ways in which
our work with insect cells can sort of inform
and improve the work that we're doing in other
areas, so even if it's a while before a product
comes out of this technology, it's already
helping to speed up development in other areas.
At least, I mean, there's a lot of plant-based
products on the market right now.
There are companies that claim they can get
clean meat products not based on insect cells
on the market this year.
It'll probably be a mixture, so not 100% clean
meat.
Most clean meat companies say two years to
be on the market and five to 10 to be at price
parity.
Okay.
So will insect cell culture reduce the risk
of disease outbreak versus what we see in
mammal cell culture?
Relative to mammalian cell culture, I don't
think so.
There are already pretty strict controls on
mammalian cell culture, and pretty robust
technologies for determining if there are
potential pathogens in some sort of culture,
and we're able to use those same technologies
with insect cells.
So as with any sort of cell culture, there
is a risk of contamination, but we're able
to identify that pretty quickly, and it wouldn't
be a problem in terms of putting an actual
product on the market.
Then one for you, Kyle.
What about using yeast or bacterial cells?
What's the advantage of insect cells over,
say, yeast or bacteria?
So insect cells are sort of a happy medium
between yeast and bacteria and mammalian cells.
They have a lot of the complexity that mammalian
cells have, in terms of like being able to
turn them into different cell types and create
a complex tissues that you can't get with
bacteria and with yeast, and yet they offer
some of the same growth simplicity that you
see with yeast and bacteria.
So they're a lot easier to grow, while also
maintaining some of the complexity, which
is one of the reasons that they're really
interesting.
There's an Israeli company that's developing
protein alternatives from yeast.
Are you aware of that?
There's lots of interesting things being developed.
I think you touched on, in your talk earlier,
about selective breeding that we've seen in
chickens.
What would be bad about that if we saw that
in insect farming, if you think that would
be bad?
Well, I think there's a lot more information
that we need right now, because the industry
isn't very developed.
It's just concerns that we have, that we hope
the industry would actually take these into
account.
I mean, there's really no way to protect from
ever having some sort of massive exodus of
insects from a facility.
You know, it's bad enough if you have billions,
right say, of black flies getting out into
an area where they shouldn't be.
What if those black flies are different, right?
That they have been bred in a certain way
to maybe have more protein or meat than a
normal black fly.
How will that have an effect on the environment?
We just don't know.
Then I think a science question for you, Kyle.
Okay.
What is used for insect cell growth instead
of animal serum?
There are a lot of different formulations.
Most of the ones that we've experimented with
are commercially available, like proprietary
serum for media formulations, but typically
the growth factor profiles for insects are
a little bit simpler, so they're growth media
that just contain those factors instead of
having them in the serum mixture.
Okay, great, and if you guys could have one
thing on your wishlist in terms of public
perception, what's the one thing that you
would perhaps potentially change?
I mean, I can guess what maybe yours would
be, but-
It's pretty obvious.
Yeah.
Let's eat plants.
Yeah.
I guess I'd like to see things like the bolognese
sauce coming forward as something that people
are more conscious of, rather than just insects
on a stick.
And I think just raising awareness for the
field of cellular agriculture more generally.
A lot of companies and a lot of academic groups
are doing really valuable work in this, and
public support would go a long ways towards
like directing additional funding, additional
talent, and other resources to help accelerate
this technology more generally.
Okay, fantastic.
Can you all join me in thanking Nicole, Nick,
and Kyle?
