Invasive Species
May 11, 2017Strawberries and Pesticides
May 25, 2017
Food Chain Radio Show #1103
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Fake Food and the Fake Meat of Silicon Valley
Guests: San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writers, Tara Duggan and Jonathan Kauffman
The geography of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley is defined by its money and ideas.
It’s a geography that grows by turning interesting ideas, like transistors, computers and the internet, into big money.
When someone elsewhere has a clever fake food idea– like producing fake fish fillets from animal cells– and goes looking for money to develop that idea, they often find the money in Silicon Valley. So they move there, and the Valley grows.
Fake meat is that produced from vegetable matter and made to resemble meat, or that incubated in a vat from cells taken from a real animal. The Valley is cooking up fake food with fake meat start-ups: Finless Foods with fish fillets from animal cells, Impossible Foods with plant-based burgers, New Wave Foods with plant-based shrimp.
This “meat rush” to Silicon Valley leads us to ask:
What is meat? What opportunities do venture capitalists see in fake meat?
And…
Leave a comment below: Will fake meat grow into a real meat industry?
Tune in here, for the syndicated Food Chain Radio Show #1103 May 20 , 2017 Saturday 9AM Pacific