 |
|
|
|||||
For the first time ever, you can eat a real fish that was never alive. In early June, Wildtype, a San Francisco-based lab-grown meat company, received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sell its cultivated sushi-grade salmon saku after a yearslong waiting game. The company is only the fourth to receive FDA approval for cultivated meat in the U.S., joining Upside Foods and Good Meat, which both sell laboratory-grown chicken, and Mission Barns, which focuses on pork fat. Wildtype, meanwhile, is the only company of its ilk focusing on replicating seafood. Wildtypes salmon is not a plant-based meat alternative; its actual salmon, derived from Pacific salmon cells that have been fed with nutrients like protein, fat, and salt. The end product is a cut of meat that the company says looks like salmon, tastes like salmon and, nutritionally, is like a fraternal twin to the real thing. This new form of lab-grown meat is debuting just as the budding cultivated meat industry has become a political flashpoint among some conservative dissenters. [Photo: Wildtype] How a former brewery became a lab for growing fish Wildtype was founded in 2017 by Justin Kolbeck, a former diplomat, and Aryé Elfenbein, a cardiologist. Kolbeck says the two shared an interest in entrepreneurship, as well as a desire to pursue new solutions to global food insecurity. At the time, Elfenbein was working on a project that involved the regeneration of damaged human heart tissuea process that led him to wonder how a similar process might be used to create meat products without actually harming any animals. From there, the idea for Wildtype was born. For nearly a decade, Kolbeck and Elfenbein have been working on perfecting their cultivated seafood concept, building out a staff of around 80 employees along the way. Wildtypes cultivation facilitywhich Kolbeck believes to be the only cultivated seafood manufacturing facility anywhere in the worldis located in a former San Francisco brewery. Its an ideal location, Kolbeck says, because, as it turns out, growing fish in a lab is fairly similar to brewing beer. To date, the company has raised $139 million, according to PitchBook, with investments from Maven Ventures, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bezos, and food giant Cargill. Wildtype cofounders Justin Kolbeck and Aryé Elfenbein [Photo: Wildtype] All of the fish that Wildtype is currently making starts with the copies of one set of Pacific salmon cells harvested back in 2018Kolbeck says you can imagine this almost like a sourdough starter, which can be used over and over again for new loaves of bread. The first step of the cultivation process involves growing those cells in increasingly large vessels, starting at the 75-liter size and going up to several thousand liters. To stimulate growth, the salmon cells are fed with a nutrient mix that Kolbeck says is not much more complicated than Gatoradea combination of amino acids, vitamins, proteins, and fats. [Photo: Wildtype] The reason it’s a lot like brewing is because in brewing, you need to keep a nice, contained environment that, in the case of beer, keeps the yeast and other things actively growing and converting the feedstock into beer, Kolbeck says. In our case, we need to keep our salmon cells at a consistent temperaturefish are cold-blooded, so we need to keep them cool. We need to control the oxygen level, because cells need, just like in our body, they need oxygen to keep growing healthy. We need to control the pH, keep it in balance, similar to what you’d find inside the fish. Once the cell-growing process is complete, the cells are rinsed and combined with a mixture of plant-based ingredients to lend them both structure and some additional flavor. Kolbeck says the actual tasting process required countless rounds, which includes himself, Elfenbein, Wildtypes wider staff and, in later stages, outside chefs. When you’re starting to make a food literally from the ground up, there’s just a lot of work to be done, Kolbeck says. Like, where do you even start? How do you build that into a product that looks and tastes like people would expect for a seafood product? That took a long time and, honestly, it was trial and error. I have eaten so many things over the last three years, some of them really delicious . . . a lot of them not. But that’s like any kind of food development space. I imagine the process for developing new Doritos is probably pretty similar. [Photo: Wildtype] Designing an entirely new kind of food Making a new Dorito flavor, though, likely doesnt present quite as many regulatory obstacles as designing an entirely new category of food. Kolbeck says the FDAs approval process was rigorous, often requiring the team to compile data that would take months to collect. From our perspective, it is totally appropriate for a process like this to take a long time. Because we should have our food regulators feeling comfortable, like they can ask us any question they want, and we’ll answer it with data, Kolbeck says. All of the analytical testing that we did was done by third parties, so that takes time. From a startups perspective, that was a really painful process, but a really important one. [Photo: Wildtype] The result of Wildtypes yearslong efforts is a meat product that has the same amount of omega-3s and omega-6s as regular salmon, without any risk of mercury, microplastics, or parasites. (Kolbeck admits, though, that his team is still working on boosting the protein content.) Instead of trying to make the product available commercially, Wildtypelike other cultivated meat companieshas decided to debut it at high-end restaurants. Currently, it is available for around $32 at Kann, a Haitian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, and is coming soon to Otoko, an omakase (chef’s choice) spot in Austin. And, Kolbeck adds, Wildtype is already in the process of perfecting its existing recipe and bringing new and improved products to the market. [Photo: Wildtype] How lab-grown meat became a conservative target Wildtype is making its debut as lab-grown meat has become a point of contention for some conservative lawmakers over the past several months. Last March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved a bill to ban and criminalize the production and sale of cultivated meat in the state. That May, DeSantis said of the bill: Florida is fighting back against the global elites plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, whose state has passed a similar prohibition, described the effort as a way to battle fringe ideas and groups to defend our way of life. Along with Florida and Nebraska, the states of Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, and Wyoming have all either attempted or succeeded in passing legislation banning lab-grown meat. Conservative arguments against lab-grown meat tend to frame the idea as both a woke proposition and a threat to existing meat industries. But even some ranchers are pushing back against the dissent. This February, a group of ranchers and meat industry groups in Nebraska formed a coalition to oppose Pillens ban, arguing that consumers should be the ones to choose whether the product is available. [Photo: Wildtype] Kolbeck tends to agree. I feel like most Americans would not be happy that state governments are trying to tell them what they can and can’t eat because of special interests. It’s just not who we are as a country, he says. The market needs to decide these thingsnot lobbyists in smoky back rooms. Furthermore, while critics might argue against lab-grown meat to protect the poultry and beef industries, about 80% to 90% of seafood is actually imported to the U.S, he adds. In fact, this April, the White House issued an executive order to find new ways to make more seafood domestically. It’s, like, hey, we get it if you want to protect domestic industries. But this is not a domestic industry, Kolbeck says. We import almost all of the seafood in this country. And we are doing exactly what you’re trying to do, which is getting small businesses in this country to create more food domesticallyand it has all these other add-on benefits. Can you imagine the carbon fooprint of overnighting bluefin tuna from Tokyo to San Francisco? . . . Not low.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bill McGowan is the founder and CEO of Clarity Media Group. He is a two-time Emmy Award-winning correspondent who now coaches everyone from CEOs to celebrities on how to captivate audiences. Juliana Silva is a journalist with vast experience in global media brand strategy who acts as a communications specialist at Clarity Media Group. As a media coach, she has transformed experts from a variety of professions into on-air network contributors. Whats the big idea? One of lifes great gifts is to have what we say remembered because, when our words stick with people, we have a golden opportunity to persuade, influence, motivate, or inspire. But every day, in offices all over the world, businesspeople squander those opportunities by speaking in bland, boring, and forgettable ways. Speak, Memorably outlines a host of techniques designed to help you captivate an audience by making your message so distinctive that it rises above the incessant noise swirling all around us these days. Below, coauthors Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva share five key insights from their new book, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience. Listen to the audio versionread by Bill and Julianain the Next Big Idea App. 1. Location, location, location Where you place your big ideas matters in public speaking. This concept is called the primacy/recency effect, and it says that what you communicate at the beginning and end of a learning episode tends to be retained better than information presented in the middle. This theory has been validated in memory experiments. The great filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola uses this concept for making movies. He starts by identifying his three top storytelling points, takes the best one, and puts it at the end. He places the second-best point at the beginning and then finds a place in the middle to insert his third-best point. He may be talking about storytelling, but the same idea can be applied to your presentations at work. Throughout our years of coaching, we frequently see people missing the opportunity to capture the audiences attention. Unfortunately, presenters often resort to the dreaded agenda slide deck. It is the most overused and underwhelming tool in any public speakers arsenal. The scourge of telling people what youre going to tell them is rampant. We call this signposting, meaning warning your audience of what youre about to tell them. This doesnt just happen at the beginning of a presentation. It often happens at the beginning of each and every slide. The strategy you should embrace in public speaking is inform, dont warn. 2. Learning is a laughing matter Humor plays an important role in delivering memorable remarks. There has been extensive research on the power of levity in public speaking. Research from both the University of Pennsylvania and Ohio State University has shown that humor is a key contributor to both virality and retention. When 18- to 34-year-olds were shown both humorous and non-humorous news stories about politics and government policy, the viewers remembered and shared the funny stories more often. There is a wrong way to go about inserting humor into your presentations. If youve ever been told to start with a joke, unfortunately, thats probably the worst piece of advice. Leave the joke telling to professional comedians and instead think of your job as finding a humorous lens through which you want the audience to view your content. If youve ever been told to start with a joke, unfortunately, thats probably the worst piece of advice. Levity is the ultimate high-wire act of public speaking. Its high risk, but its also high reward. There are physiological benefits to using humor in public speaking. Not only does it make the speaker calmer and more confident, but it also boosts the audiences dopamine levels. Dopamine is the hormone in our bodies thats been called the pathway to pleasure. When dopamine hits our brains, it generates pleasure and makes us feel good. Laughter can also minimize stress. Studies at the Mayo Clinic have found that laughter can relieve stress by increasing the release of endorphins. They concluded that laughter stimulates circulation and muscle relaxation, both of which can help reduce stress. Reluctance to be clever or funny in a business setting is completely understandable. Everybody feels anxiety due to the nature of the risk, but research clearly shows that the payoff in terms of being memorable can be enormous. 3. The Magnificent Seven The Magnificent Seven is a series of linguistic devices that you can use to convert your ideas into punchy and memorable messages. 1. Analogy and Metaphor: These make it possible for your audience to understand a complex concept quickly and easily by comparing it to something common to all of us. For example, Sitting is the new smoking. Or, describing the supply chain crisis as a six-lane freeway trying to merge into a one-lane country road. 2. Creative Label: A pithy expression that you coin. The Great Resignation is a creative label. Quiet quitting is also a creative label. Or The Goldilocks Economy. You can see the viral nature of all these. 3. Twisted Cliché: When you take a very common expression and alter it slightly to turn it into something brand new. For instance, in 2023, when there was an oversaturation of startup investors in Silicon Valley, we called it a seating frenzy. 4. Wordplay: Perhaps the most famous example is from Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech when he said, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. 5. Data with Context: Overloading an audience with numbers and statistics is not memorable unless you bring some context and meaning to it. If you tell me that a windmill farm generates over 1,800 megawatts of power, I might not be impressed or interested. But if you tell me that it creates enough energy to power over a million homes, now I sit up and take notice. 6. Original Definitions: A fresh and different way to define certain terms. It is not the definition you find in the dictionary, but rather a complimentary meaning that helps you emphasize one of your points. For instance, you can redefine leadership as where empathy and vision meet. 7. Mathematical Equation: This actually requires no actual math. You could describe ratios in terms like the more you have this, the more you get that, such as the more conversational your tone becomes, the more confidence you exude. Or it could be an actual equation, like Authenticity = Passion + Warmth. 4. Zoomnesia and technostress Nearly all of us have to cope with virtual communication on a daily basis. Zoom fatigue is real. It was validated in a European study titled Technostress in Organizations, which examined the effects of video conferencing on a group of college students attending lectures remotely comparedto those attending in-person classes. Fatigue levels and mood were measured with medical equipment, and researchers found notable differences between the in-person and online students. Fatigue levels grew for the video conference. In contrast, the in-person groups reported feeling more lively, happy, and active. Another strange effect we discovered from our own daily online meetings was something we called Zoomnesia, which is a decreased ability to remember and differentiate between one Zoom call and another. In our own work, virtual meetings were starting to merge in our minds, and we asked ourselves what could be causing this. We realized that the setting for all these meetings was identical. Every day you sit in the same chair at the same desk, staring at the same computer screen, and you have a lack of audio and visual cues to help trigger your memories and distinguish them from one another. In our own work, virtual meetings were starting to merge in our minds. We had to validate our theory. Interestingly, we found a COVID-19-era study in which healthcare workers discovered this same phenomenon. The goal was to compare how well patients remembered medical instructions given during in-person consultations versus once given through telehealth. Participants were asked to recall the instructions immediately after the session, and then a week later. Overall, the number of details both younger and older patients were able to recall was significantly lower when they were provided through telehealth. This was true both immediately after the session and after one week. 5. Theft-tosterone This is such a common problem that it deserves its own creative label. We call it theft-tosterone, which is what happens when a woman shares an idea with her colleagues and then later a man says almost the exact same thing and takes credit for it. It happens in all kinds of workplaces, even at the United States Supreme Court. Recently, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she frequently sees examples of theft-tosterone when court is in session. Despite all the professional gains women have made over the past 20 years, episodes of theft-tosterone have increased 20% over the past several years. The roots of this phenomenon take hold early in life. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Deborah Tannen, notes that research shows how young boys use language to maintain and negotiate status within a group. Boys gain status by taking center stage and holding it. They do this through speech, giving information, telling stories, and maybe even boasting. But according to Tannen, its frowned upon for a girl to seek center stage by acting the exact same way. Equally interesting as theft-tosterones origins are effective ways women can cope with or prevent these episodes. After all, its impossible to be memorable if someone else is taking credit for your ideas. We detail strategies to combat theft-tosterone in the book. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
Tales of turning water into wine or weaving straw into gold are one thing, but a new study shows that scientists can transform trash into . . . Tylenol? Scientists at the University of Edinburgh were able to convert plastic waste into paracetamol, aka acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the pain reliever Tylenol. Stranger yet, they pulled off the alchemical feat using the bacteria E. coli. Were able to transform a prolific environmental and societal waste into such a globally important medication in a way thats completely impossible, using chemistry alone or using biology alone, says study coauthor Stephen Wallace, a chemical biotechnologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The research team began with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic found in food packaging and polyester clothing. Using established chemical methods, they broke down the PET plastic into a precursor molecule and then added it into a cell culture of E. coli that was genetically modified. Enzymes in the modified E. coli bacteria were able to convert the plastic precursor into paracetamol 92% of the time. The transformation relies on a chemical process known as a Lossen rearrangement, which can convert one kind of molecule into a different kind of molecule. Scientists have known about the Lossen rearrangement for more than 100 years, but generally observe the phenomenon in a flask or a test tube. The research group is now working with pharmaceutical makers including AstraZeneca, one of the studys sponsors, to replicate the same chemical transformations on a larger scale. The new research isnt the first to observe the way that bacteria can be deployed to usefully break down plastic. Researchers have previously studied how wastewater bacteria found in urban waterways use a special enzyme to chew up plastic trash and convert it into carbon-based food. As we grapple with the cascading environmental and health effects that decades of proliferating plastics have wrought on the planet, bacteria capable of converting plastic into harmless or even useful molecules is a promising area of research.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||