With help from Derek Robertson

This newsletter is adapted from Marcia Brown’s report on the lobbying frenzy, and race for scientific progress, around lab-grown meat. Read the story in full here.

A sesame seed bun packed with lettuce, tomato, onion and a patty grown in a lab with Washington’s help.

This is the future of American food, according to a nascent industry that’s firing up a network of lobbyists, trade groups and new campaign spending with an eye towards the 2023 farm bill — where they hope to shape policy meant for the traditional meat and agriculture industries, including securing new public financing options and funding for research.

The cell-cultivated meat industry, whose chicken is now on the menu at restaurants in D.C. and San Francisco, say venture capital money won’t be enough. Now, well before it’s clear whether Americans want to give up traditional hamburgers, they’re jumping into Washington’s influence ecosystem and pressing Congress to expand their access to public financing from the Agriculture Department.

“Some country is going to decide to lead the way in creating alternative proteins and creating meat and egg and dairy from plants and precision fermentation and through cultivating cells,” said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, which makes one of the two cultivated meat products greenlit by regulators for public consumption this year.

“We need to ask ourselves whether we want to be buying food from some other country decades from now or would we rather just produce it ourselves.”

Lab-grown — or cell-cultivated and cell-based, as the industry prefers — meat is developed from cells drawn from live animals, combined with a nutrient mixture of proteins and vitamins, and cultivated in large vats that resemble beer breweries.

Although it remains a time-intensive and expensive process, the industry is pitching the technology as a relief for several challenges in American agriculture. Proponents say lab-grown meat can address supply chain and land use problems, alleviate greenhouse gas emissions and improve animal welfare. In reality, their arguments aren’t clear-cut yet.

The product’s carbon footprint may not be as low as proponents advertise, and could even be greater than conventional ranching, according to a new study that’s not yet peer-reviewed. And arguments that the products are vegan are often met with skepticism.

Celebrity chef José Andrés’ China Chilcano, a restaurant about a mile from the Capitol, is the first in the country to offer Good Meat-grown chicken — “marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri” — to patrons. The first round of reservations sold out last month in four minutes, the company said.

But China Chilcano is serving just 3.5 ounces of cell-cultivated chicken for each customer and there’s only enough for eight reservations a week. Producing enough cell-cultivated chicken or beef to supply grocery stores and meet restaurant demand will require scaling up the technology to a whole new level.

“It’s a huge technological challenge. It’s a huge engineering challenge. It’s very capital intensive,” Andrew Noyes, head of global communications at Good Meat, said during an industry briefing for congressional staff this spring. “When it comes to the farm bill, [we’re exploring] whether there are existing programs that help with loan guarantees, that we can potentially, as an industry, leverage to be able to do some of that commercialization work with our vessels and our very expensive manufacturing processes.”

The technology to grow cells has long been used for medical purposes, but on a tiny scale. Constructing the bioreactors — the large steel vats that brew animal cells instead of beer — is costly. One company’s facility for nationwide distribution could cost $450 million, experts say.

To encourage the private-sector financing they need, cell-based meat companies are pushing to expand and make permanent a USDA program that would put a taxpayer guarantee behind loans they take out — and they hope the farm bill can be their vehicle. Tetrick, the CEO of Eat Just, said the farm bill could also boost his industry through funding for more research and development, incentivizing certain crops and offering new financing for facilities.

The industry’s quest to break into a 107-million-lbs. per year U.S. market has plenty of pitfalls.Some critics don’t see how production costs can fall the way the industry is predicting. Others highlight that certain key scientific advances remain unrealized, such as tech to flex and move the cell-based meat in a way that mimics how cows ramble across a pasture — the behavior that gives beef its meaty texture. And perhaps the most comprehensive study of bringing these new meats to scale found that the technology faces serious obstacles.

The industry acknowledges these hurdles, but argues that technologies like solar power and electric vehicles have seen their costs fall with increased production and innovation. “There are no guarantees in an industry that is stepping into uncharted territory, but our team is hard at work on addressing those scale-up challenges,” Noyes said in a statement to POLITICO.

The industry’s pitch to lawmakers can be a persuasive one that ties in morality, sustainability and global food security, explained Ricardo San Martin, a fermentation scientist and director of the University of California, Berkeley’s alternative meat lab. But the science doesn’t show a viable path for scaling up, he said.

“The politicians are going to listen because it’s emotional,” San Martin said. “I don’t know if those guys have very very savvy scientific advisers that tell them, ‘No, no, be careful with this one.’”

Megan R. Wilson contributed to this report. Read the full story at POLITICO here.

The Mozilla Foundation is shaking up its top leadership, as it exclusively shared with DFD in an interview.

Mark Surman, the privacy and data rights-focused nonprofit’s longtime president and executive director, is planning to spin off the latter role and focus full-time as president on ensuring “all the different Mozilla organizations… work in concert and toward a shared goal: making trustworthy AI a reality,” a spokesperson said in an email. I spoke briefly with Surman about the transition, the company’s mission to promote open-source AI, and its search for a full-time executive director. The interview is edited and condensed below:

What does it mean for the work you and Mozilla are doing to break up these roles?

What this is about is us still being us, but retooling ourselves a little bit for the future. That means keeping our nonprofit personality, our movement-building personality, keeping our word in the market, and then adding new capabilities like investing and a deeper R&D piece. How do we have more surface area for us to tackle the challenges of the future like trustworthy AI? There will now be a chance to bring in some new energy on the movement-building, nonprofit side of what we’re doing, with somebody who’s going to have a fresh take on that but continue on the path we’ve built.

How has the AI boom and the growing popularity of open-source tools changed the talent marketplace?

It’s made things easier and it’s made things harder.

I spend a lot of time working with our AI R&D startup, and they get huge interest for what they’re doing even though they’re not offering equity. In terms of competing with either Google or startups who are offering equity, we put out a role and we got 1,000 people, hundreds of qualified people applying overnight in the past couple of weeks. People want to work on something different, and that is on offer. On the other hand, the gold rush for AI talent is huge and it’s much harder to hire, people are getting many more offers. Whether it’s people or GPUs, everybody wants the resources needed to do AI.

What is your ideal relationship to the nascent AI policy community?

Mozilla, both the activist arm and the tech arm together, can make a real difference in bending the open-source generative AI trend in a better direction. It’s not just that the tech is interesting, we need both the tech and people to look at the social dimensions of it. Open source can be a place where we come to play at that intersection in some really interesting ways that aren’t going to happen inside of the big companies.

How will this leadership change impact Mozilla’s work over the next year?

We’ve been working on trustworthy AI for almost five years now. This is our vision of where AI should go, promoting human agency and giving people control over technology, and making sure accountability is built into the technology itself. We’re looking for someone to keep that moving, and up the game.

I’m hoping that somewhere between Q1 and Q2 2024 we have somebody in that role who is aligned with that ship, is going to keep it moving, and then start to build more steam, which for us is about having a deeper set of alliances with the other people who are working on these issues in what right now is a very factional issue space around AI. — Derek Robertson

• San Francisco’s driverless car experiment is featuring some sticky mishaps.
• Tencent is hyping up its forthcoming AI model as China’s best yet.
• Tesla’s endlessly revolving C-suite is causing major headaches.
• Good (?) news: Robots are learning to open doors.
• AI is infiltrating academic journals nearly undetected.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([email protected]); and Steve Heuser ([email protected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.

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