Hooks consumers produced in the laboratory? : Salt: NPR

High-tech meat substitutes are getting a lot of talk these days. Last month, the Impossible Burger took an important step without meat with its debut as Burger King Whopper. Meanwhile, Lou Cooperhouse was in a San Diego office park, quietly forging plans to disrupt another more fragmented and opaque sector of the food industry: seafood.

His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both sea waves and self-awareness), seeks to market what are known as cell-based seafood – that is, seafood from cells grown in a laboratory and not harvested. the oceans.

BlueNalu aims for serious scalability – a future where cities around the world will have 150,000 square feet of facilities, each capable of producing enough cell-based seafood to meet the consumer needs of over 10 million locals nearby.

But unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu does not create an alternative to herbal seafood such as vegan Toona or shrimp without shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team extract muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, an orange rhizome and a mahi-mahi, from a needle biopsy.

These cells are then carefully cultured and fed with a custom blend of liquid vitamins, amino acids and sugars. Finally, the cells will develop into large sheets of whole muscle tissue that can be cut into fillets and sold fresh, frozen or packaged in other types of seafood dishes.

But unlike fish options caught in the wild or caught in the wild, BlueNalu's version of the seafood will have no head, no tail, no bone, no blood. It's fish, just without swimming and breathing. It's seafood without the sea.

The idea was compelling enough to prompt Cooperhouse, 58, to give up his lucrative consulting business and his role as executive director of the Rutgers Food Innovation Center, where he attended many other start-ups (including Impossible Foods) . In 2017, he formed a partnership with entrepreneurs Chris Somogyi and Chris Dammann. Together, the team made an initial financing of $ 4.5 million.

"Consumers are changing, they are interested in health, they are focused on the planet, it is neither a fashion nor a trend, it is happening," Cooperhouse says. "We will produce real seafood directly from fish cells."

According to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on animal protein alternatives, BlueNalu is one of the few companies trying to do so. Globally, about two dozen companies are involved in growing animal meat from cells, but most of them are interested in traditional beef, such as beef, chicken and poultry. 'lamb. Only six of them focus on cell-based seafood and three of them are based in California: BlueNalu targets various species, but especially those that can not be easily grown; Finless Foods focuses primarily on a bluefin tuna product; The Wild Type team is working on cell salmon. It is likely that all will already have a product on the market in five or ten years.

Jen Lamy, Head of Sustainable Seafood Initiatives at the Good Food Institute, says that few of these cell-based seafood companies are able to offer tasty products at this stage. Indeed, at last week's food and sustainability disruption summit held in Singapore, only three people were able to taste Shiok Meat's laboratory-grown shrimp, served in the form of shrimps. of shumai ravioli of traditional appearance. Michael Selden, co-founder and CEO of Finless Foods, said he was now at the stage where he had enough bluefin tuna grown on cells. for sampling.

Cooperhouse says that BlueNalu is not trying to replace wild-caught or farm-raised seafood, but is aiming to become a third alternative for seafood consumers. For vegans and vegetarians, this is not a substitute for seafood caught in the wild or raised at the farm, but aims to become a third alternative for seafood consumers. Is a product that can blur the lines. After all, in the case of BlueNalu, the cells must be extracted from a fish only once, and not repeatedly, and the fish could theoretically be released. Cultivated without brain, without organs, without skin and without sensitivity, it is a product that will appeal to those who normally opt for herbal proteins and, unlike some companies producing cell meat, Cooperhouse claims that BlueNalu does not rely on fetal calf serum to feed the fish cells.

Despite this, the new seafood industry is starting to point to some of the most sensitive areas of the seafood industry: illegal fishing and overfishing, warming ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, well- to be animals and problems related to food waste.

Cooperhouse notes that cell-based seafood is free of potential contaminants that may be held by their counterparts caught at sea – such as mercury, toxins, pathogens and parasites, and even "plastic microparticles" such as indicates the company's website.

Similarly, the website of Finless Foods boasts that its product will require "no commercial fishing in our precious oceans, no fish farms, no contaminants". And the 39-page Good Food Institute's 39-page seafood products report begins with several pages of alarming warnings of pressing environmental threats and worrying risks for seafood consumers – a goal through which The nonprofit organization advocates for the development of the seafood-based cell market.

This is a market positioning that will probably not match the existing seafood industry.

"If you're working on a breakthrough product in a lab and you're hoping to feed the world with healthy protein, tell your people, do not scare the world, Hyperbole is not transparency," Gavin warns. Gibbons. spokesman for the National Institute of Fisheries, seafood industry trade group. "Starting a marketing war will not sell seafood. It will not be a good way forward."

The exact name of the seafood-based cells will also be taken. A mixture of terms has already been announced: laboratory-grown seafood, farmed seafood, clean seafood, seafood without slaughter. BlueNalu has applied the term "cellular aquaculture" to the brand, but according to Cooperhouse, it is unlikely that it will be approved, the company is changing its application to allow the term to become a brand of design. The CEO of Finless Foods, Selden, prefers the phrase "clean seafood," but says for the moment that his company uses the name used by the FDA: "fish-based cells."

Which government agency will regulate this new type of seafood? It's still a little cloudy. As of March, it appears that the cell-based fish will be under the supervision of the Food and Drug Administration. But the specific details of what this will look like, how the products should be labeled, or how the inspections will be structured have not yet settled.

Chris Somogyi, Cooperhouse's partner in BlueNalu, is confident that the products will not eventually sink into the FDA, such as the genetically modified salmon from AquaBounty, in part because BlueNalu uses no genetic modification.

"We do not use CRISPR technology, we do not introduce new molecules into the diet, we do not introduce a new entity that does not exist in nature," says -he. "The approval will focus on the safety, cleanliness and reliability of manufacturing processes and the reliability of manufacturing processes."

This part of the food industry is still so new that there is no professional association or pressure group in place to defend meat and seafood-based with lawmakers and the public. But Selden says companies in this sector are forming one.

"We are working on its structure, but it's a bit slow and we do not have a name yet," Selden said.

Finding ways to feed the world with fresh, healthy and delicious seafood without harvesting exhausted or depleted stocks of the ocean would seem to go hand in hand with ocean-facing NGOs working on serious problems of illegal fishing and habitat destruction. But until now, these groups are still lukewarm for the cell fish.

Most companies, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, Ocean Foundation, WWF, Greenpeace and others, claim that, for the time being, they are only keeping a close eye on the industry. emerge. And until a real product is available, Aaron A. McNevin, director of sustainable food for the WWF, says that trying to make side-by-side comparisons would be impossible.

"Most alternative protein companies will not share their intellectual property without non-disclosure agreements, which is understandable," said McNevin. "For example, cell culture can be energy intensive, but we do not know the magnitude of the energy needed to cultivate a specific alternative, and there is no equivalence between them. greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of wild fish caught. "

None of the ocean-related NGOs with which NPR has maintained has stated that it is convinced that seafood products based on cells would live up to the promise of reducing pressure on fish stocks. wild. After all, the aquaculture industry sector has presented similar claims several decades ago, but it would be difficult, for example, to prove that farmed salmon relieves pressure on salmon stocks wild. Instead, we have just increased overall salmon consumption.

Tim Fitzgerald, director of impact for Environmental Defense Fund, said the group was also paying close attention to the advent of seafood-based cells. But he stressed that EDF's efforts will remain focused on the recovery of wild fishery resources – stocks on which more than 3.2 billion people depend on more than 3.2 billion people worldwide for at least one year. part of their proteins.

But Cooperhouse insists there is not enough space in the world for all three species – wild caught fish, aquaculture and seafood from cells.

"Catch, grow or do, I'm not even sure we'll be able to meet the demand," he says.