We've always defined meat by where it  came from.

This burger came from a cow,   so it's meat.

But nature complicates  our definitions.

Take, for example,   this spider.

Its legs have muscles, and you can  absolutely eat this, but would you consider it   meat?

And it's not just nature.

Chemistry is  increasingly allowing companies to create products   that challenge our traditional definition of  meat.

This plant-based burger, for example,   or a wooly mammoth meatball, or even human  flesh.

Relax, this is just chicken.

Or is it?

The veggie burger.

Now...   No.

Are you out of your mind?

Off, off.

Let's start with this.

This, the veggie burger.

Commercialized veggie burgers hit the market in   the 1980s.

And the guy who invented these things,  not this literal one, but the whole concept,   he had never eaten a meat burger before,  so they don't taste very much like meat.

And honestly, they're not supposed to.

Even J.  Kenji Lopez-Alt, who had a whole long recipe on   the internet for how to make the perfect veggie  burger, says on his recipe, "They don't taste   anything like a beef burger, nor are they meant  to."

That is a very different approach than the   two largest players in the meatless meat market  are taking: Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.

Now,   both of these companies are trying to save  the planet by getting people to switch away   from resource-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting  animal meat to alternative meat, plant-based meat,   meatless meat, whatever you wanna call it.

The core idea is that this stuff should be   indistinguishable from animal meat.

But color me a little bit skeptical,   because if J. Kenji Lopez-Alt can't do  it, how are these companies doing it?

The answers lie here, in the intellectual  property that these companies have paid   lots of money to protect, their patents.

And  look, we will dig into these, but before we do,   I should mention that the concept of plant-based  foods replacing meat has been around way longer   than either of these two companies, much like this  creepy basement has been around far longer than   the rest of this house.

Vegetarian Buddhist monks  have been cooking meatless meat for centuries,   but they're not trying to commercialize  it like Beyond and Impossible are.

Okay, so here are two patents, one  from each company, each of these filed   relatively early in the company's intellectual  property, I don't know, odyssey, okay?

Now,   the interesting thing here is that the companies  have the same mission, but the patents seem to   indicate that they're going about it in completely  different ways, which is very interesting on a   chemistry level, but also directly impacts  the products that these companies produce.

So let's start with this patent, held  by Beyond Meat, which is very focused   on the texture of meat.

Now, Beyond  claims that meat's meaty texture is   caused by a three-dimensional network  of protein fibers that do two things.

First, it provides lots of chewiness, and it also  traps other stuff like water and fat within it.

So when you cook meat, you get its seemingly  diametrically opposed qualities.

It is both chewy,   but also, if you don't overcook it, it's juicy.

So what Beyond has done here is patented a   specific process that allows them to take a plant  protein and transform it into what they call a   meat structured protein product.

So let's look at  that process.

The first thing you need is a plant   protein.

Let's say pea protein isolate.

To that,  you add some potassium bicarbonate, which is a   base that is very similar chemically to baking  soda.

Then you throw in some calcium sulfate,   cystine, and flavors, blend that all up, and  then run it through what's called an extruder,   which is basically a giant corkscrew, while adding  water, sorbitol, and more potassium bicarbonate.

Now, the extruder exerts a lot of shear forces on  the mixture, and all that friction also heats it   all up.

Incidentally, cheese puffs and a lot of  other foods are also extruded like this.

Anyway,   then you take the stuff that comes out of the  extruder, and you add it to a boiling mixture   of water and some oils, let it simmer for 15 to 25  minutes, and there, you have meat.

“Meat,” right?

Now, I had a couple of reactions when reading this  patent and learning about this process.

And the   first reaction I had was what they're describing  here is fundamentally a chemical reaction.

Now,   this is a very simplified version of that  reaction.

It is pretty wild to me that you   can take a powder made from peas, add a simple  base, throw it in an extruder, and end up with   something that has the texture of ground beef.

I mean, that's just wild.

The second reaction   I had was that the patent says very little about  the chemistry that drives this reaction.

So being   curious about that, I went and did some digging  and found out, not surprisingly, that there is   a 130-year-old subfield of chemistry devoted to,  wait for it, the effects that specific ions can   have on solutions.

Doesn't it just sometimes  seem like everything happened in the 1800s   and that that was the golden age of chemistry?

It's not, but it does sometimes feel that way.

Anyway, one of the first discoveries in this  field was that specific ions are capable   of precipitating proteins out of solution.

Both potassium and bicarbonate can do this,   so it stands to reason that potassium  bicarbonate would also be able to do this   or something like this.

And who knows, maybe  something like this is happening inside the   extruder.

I can't say.

I wasn't there.

I wasn't  in the extruder.

Fundamental rule is that you   should never go inside an extruder while it  is running.

Let's move on to the next scene.

Okay, now let's look at a patent  held by Impossible Foods.

Now,   Impossible's approach with this patent is  to go after flavor.

In fact, the very first   claim says that their product, when cooked,  will produce at least two volatile compounds   which have a beef-associated aroma.

How do you  produce an aroma?

With a chemical reaction.

So two reactants here: magic mix and hemoglobin.

Magic mix is something I wish I had come up with,   but it's actually in the patent, and it is this.

It's a list of molecules that you might find in   a hunk of beef.

There's some amino acids, some  nucleic acids, some salt, some sugars, and some   wild cards.

The second reactant is hemoglobin.

Hemoglobin is an iron-containing protein   whose main job is to transport oxygen.

There's  hemoglobin in blood and a closely related protein   called myoglobin in muscle.

And interestingly,  red meat is red, not because it's full of blood,   but because of the myoglobin in muscle juices.

So  when you cook a hunk of animal meat, what happens   is the myoglobin denatures, and that exposes the  heme co-factor.

Heme has, at its center, an iron   atom.

And transition metals like iron tend to be  really great catalysts.

They're good at making   all kinds of chemical reactions go faster.

So the  naked heme reacts with all the stuff around it,   transforming it into other stuff.

I know, that's  very specific.

But the point is that Impossible   is trying to mimic as closely as they can the  chemical environment that you might find in a   piece of animal muscle.

Hemoglobin mimics the  muscle's myoglobin, and magic mix mimics the   muscle's many chemicals that are sitting around  waiting to react with hemoglobin and myoglobin.

At this point, if you're thinking, "Wait a  second, hemoglobin is in blood, and blood is   not vegetarian," you are absolutely right.

But it  turns out that some plants actually make their own   hemoglobin, among them legumes.

So Impossible uses  hemoglobin from soy.

They call it leghemoglobin,   as in leg, legume, and hemoglobin,  hemoglobin.

Not hemoglobin from my leg.

That would not be vegetarian.

So does it  work?

Well, according to Impossible's patent,   they ran a controlled experiment in which they  compared a meatless meat patty with leghemoglobin   to an identical one without it.

So they had a  panel of tasters, and the tasters found that the   patty with leghemoglobin tasted beefier, bloodier,  and more savory than the one without it.

Now,   I can't replicate that experiment because, well,  I couldn't buy food-grade hemoglobin, for some   reason.

But what I can do is a blind taste test  of Beyond versus Impossible Meat.

So let's do it.

All right, so this is the first burger.

I think  this is a Beyond Burger.

I'm not getting much,   if any meat flavor.

I am getting some good  meat texture.

So on that basis, I'm gonna   go for Beyond.

And this is the other one.

Okay,  now I'm confused.

Hmm.

That one tasted sweeter.

So actually, I'm thinking that's the  Beyond Burger, and that this one was   the Impossible Burger.

Honestly, neither  one tasted particularly meaty.

I mean,   we know how my taste buds are.

Let me try these  without bread.

So this is the one I just tasted.

I think this is Beyond.

Yeah, and this  is impossible.

All right, let's see.

Yes.

Okay, so it was really hard to tell, and  I'm not sure that I would've been able to   really tell the difference if I hadn't taken  the bun off and actually tried the meat by   itself.

The Beyond Burger really did have a more  meat-like texture than the Impossible Burger,   and the Impossible Burger tasted less sweet.

Like,   this tasted sweeter, right, which to me is  less meaty.

So this had a meatier taste,   even though I would never have placed it  as like, oh, it tasted bloody or beefy.

Which one do you want?

So my takeaway from my highly unscientific taste  test here is that we are a long way away from   having plant-based meats that are completely  indistinguishable from animal-based meats.

But look, they're both good.

They're not  bad.

We have arrived at the mammoth meatball.

Well, now some scientists have found a new  source of meat that makes absolutely no sense.

The meatball was created by Australian  cultured meat company Vow, which said it   wanted to get people talking about cultured meat.

They turned the wooly mammoth into a meatball.

Is this meatball actually made  out of mammoth meat?

Yeah?

Now, this meatball is a type of what's called  cultured or cultivated meat.

Cultured meat   is animal flesh.

It is muscle, but it's  grown independently from an animal.

It is   not attached to a cow or a chicken  or any other animal.

In some ways,   cultured meat is actually the oldest of the  commercialized meatless meat technologies.

It can trace its roots back to the early days  of tissue and cell culture in, you guessed it,   the late 1800s.

What'd I say about the 1800s,  right?

Is it not the golden age?

No, it is not.

But a lot of cool stuff did happen,  chemically speaking, in the 1800s.

Scientists wanted to grow cells outside of an  animal, but not for food.

What they were trying   to do was figure out what caused viral diseases.

To study viruses, you need live cells because   viruses don't do anything without live cells to  infect.

And you can't infect a human because that   would be unethical.

These days, tissue culture  is used for vaccine development, drug testing,   cancer research, and all kinds of other stuff.

As  the technology matured, people started using cell   culture techniques to try and make meat for  food.

And the first lab-grown steak ever made   with the intention of being eaten was actually  an art project out of Harvard.

Yeah, Harvard.

These days, cells meant to be eaten are mostly  grown in giant stainless steel fermenting tanks.

Really, the whole operation actually looks kind  of like a brewery.

Back to the wooly mammoth   meatball.

To make it, scientists took wooly  mammoth DNA that encodes for myoglobin.

And since   that DNA was kind of in rough shape after many  years of being extinct, they used African elephant   DNA to reconstruct part of the sequence.

They then  put that DNA into sheep cells and cultured those.

So the wooly mammoth meatball is really only some  tiny percent wooly mammoth.

Let's generously call   it 0.8%.

It's 0.2% African elephant.

And the  rest, 99%, let's say, is sheep.

It's 99% sheep.

Now, notice what I'm doing when I frame it like  that.

I'm defining the meatball culinarily.

It's a   more sophisticated approach of what we did at the  beginning of this video, defining this burger as   meat because it came from a cow.

But meatless meat  companies are defining meat chemically.

And look,   despite humble beginnings, this is not  indistinguishable from animal meat.

I do   see a path forward towards successively better and  better approximations of real meat.

Like, okay,   we start to get better and better at approximating  meat's texture.

And we add one flavor molecule,   and then another, and then another, until we get  very, very close to approximating meat's flavor.

And then one day, you'll be at the grocery store,  and you'll be buying meatless meat, and you'll   take it home and cook it and realize that you will  not be able to tell the difference between that   and animal meat.

You just won't.

Look, it's  like chatbots, okay?

Early AI was terrible.

[Chatbot] I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed.

[Chatbot] It's true, I am unhappy.

But over the course of decades, it got better and  better and better slowly, until the point where   ChatGPT was released.

And it could probably  pass the Turing test at this point, right?

And look, here's the crazy thing, it goes beyond  imitating what already exists.

Imagine a burger   that's half wooly mammoth, half spider meat.

I don't know why anyone would want this, but   it's possible.

Or, for example, let's say we start  producing human flesh for human consumption.

Now,   that is ethically and morally extremely dubious,  but you see how this gets us into very uncharted   waters, right?

At some point, the FDA and the  USDA and other regulatory agencies around the   world will just decide what companies can and  can't claim is meat.

And in some cases, those   decisions will be arbitrary.

Like, what's allowed  to be called peanut butter versus peanut spread?

At the end of the day though, definitions tend  to be socially constructed.

And what that means   is that you, me, all of us, society, we will  collectively decide what counts as meat.

In   the meantime though, I am very much looking  forward to the revitalization of ethical   cannibalism.

You probably know about this  case in Germany.

If you haven't, just Google   Germany legal case cannibalism.

Set  aside an afternoon because it is a ride.