Most of us embrace modern technology. We constantly upgrade our phones, connect with each other through Facebook, pay our bills online, demand the most advanced medical treatments available when we get sick and drive cars that havemore computing power than the system that guided Apollo astronauts to the moon.

But, for many of us, food is another matter. We want our food to be pure, free of artificial additives, dangerous pesticides and natural – a term that, incidentally, is all but meaningless. Genetically-modified foods arouse anxiety. We want, in the words of influential journalist Michael Pollan, to avoid eating anything that our “great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”.

And according to a Pew Research survey, only 20% of Americans would eat meat grown in a lab.

That’s a problem for Andras Forgacs. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn-based startup that intends to use tissue engineering – also known as cell culturing or biofabrication – to create livestock products that require fewer inputs of land, water, energy and chemicals than conventional animal agriculture.

What’s more, Forgacs says, his company’s products will also require no animal slaughter.

Quelling factory fears

Other startup companies worry about consumer resistance to food that seems overly engineered. Beyond Meat,Hampton Creek and Impossible Foods, among others, are developing what they say are environmentally-preferable alternatives to resource-intensive animal products. And, in the process, they’re facing the question of how to deal with customer resistance.

Modern Meadow’s plan is to start out by making cultured leather. As Forgacs explained to me when we met the other day at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, lab-made leather is technically easier to make than meat, faces fewer regulatory hurdles, and – most importantly – is more acceptable to consumers.



“People have really strong opinions about food, especially when it comes to new technologies,” Forgacs has said. “They have less strong opinions around new materials. They love things like Gore-Tex and carbon fiber.”

Like other producers of high-performance materials, Modern Meadow hopes to improve on nature. Cattle, after all, did not evolve to produce shoes, handbags or burgers. “We’re coming up with all kinds of design and performance improvements,” Forgacs says.

From leather to lunch

After it establishes itself in cultured leather, Forgacs says, the company’s next step will be to produce factory-grown meat.

It’s already producing small bits, at a small scale, and not or commercial use. When I met Forgacs, I sampled a sliver of a “steak chip,” a lab-grown snack food developed by Modern Meadow as what he described as a “kitchen hack.” It tasted more like a tortilla chip than a T-bone, but so be it. “We’ve had about 100 people try it so far, and they are all alive and well,” Forgacs joked. Me, too.

The thing is, most of what we eat is a product of technology. Seeds are bred in laboratories, whether through traditional methods or by genetic manipulation. Fields are tilled with GPS-guided tractors, water and fertilizer are applied and measured with precision applicators, and food is distributed through global supply chains.



Some technology does little or no good, manufacturing food that has more salt, sugar, or fat than we need. Some technology will help feed the world’s poor. But – good or bad – we can’t eat without technology. “A kitchen is technology,” says Forgacs. “A microwave is technology. A food processor is technology.”

That said, Forgacs recognizes that Modern Meadow wants to take eaters into new territory – and, with that in mind, he’s proceeding carefully. The startup, which he founded in 2011, is his second partnership with his father, Gabor Forgacs, a physicist-turned-bioengineer who teaches at the University of Missouri. Their previous company, called Organovo, designed and produced human tissues, primarily for medical research.

After Organovo, Andras Forgacs spent time in China, where he saw an emerging middle class with a ravenous appetite for meat. “Meat consumption was going up dramatically. Meat prices were going up dramatically,” he says.

Unfortunately, Forgacs realized, current US-style meat production is a shockingly inefficient way to deliver protein to people – and China’s efforts to imitate it were highly destructive. “The environmental livability of cities like Shanghai and Beijing was declining,” he says. “How do you feed the planet, and not wreck it in the process?”

Modern Meadow’s solution has attracted investments from the Thiel Foundation, run by billionaire libertarian and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Sequoia Capital, which has backed some of the world’s biggest technology companies; Artis Ventures; Iconiq Capital; and, most recently, Horizons Ventures, the venture fund of Li Ka-shing. Horizons has also invested in Hampton Creek and Impossible Foods. “He understands from the perspective of Asia that there is a real supply-demand imbalance,” Forgacs said.

Modern Meadow remains small, with about 15 employees, all in Brooklyn. Eventually, Forgacs hopes to invite customers in “so that people can come and see how the sausage gets made,” he said. “Slaughterhouses don’t invite consumers to come and see what they do.”

“We’re asking for a lot of trust from the consumer,” he says. To obtain it, the company will be as transparent as possible: “The more consumers understand how we do what we do … the more transparency, the more labeling, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

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