Planning a blueprint for the bluefin tuna
FOR SEVERAL years, biotech companies have been promising “clean” meat, “cell-based” meat, “cultured” meat - whatever you want to call it - as a way to enjoy the taste of chicken, pork and beef without the brutality of animal slaughter or the environmental damage of big agriculture.
But what about fish? What about something as prized as buttery bluefin tuna, a delicacy that has become the forbidden fruit of the sea because of the many threats that have landed the fish on threatened and endangered species lists?
Where are the Silicon Valley start-ups promising to free us from the guilt of gobbling down a finger of otoro sushi, the rich bluefin belly meat, without contributing to the decline of the fish or the decline of our own health via mercury that accumulates in the flesh of this apex predator?
Well, there is at least one scientific pilgrim: Brian Wyrwas is the co-founder and chief science officer for Finless Foods, a Bay Area biotech dedicated to growing bluefin tuna in a lab. He can tell you all about the difficulties of his task, starting with the boneweary process of securing bluefin tuna samples, the pristine source material for much of the science that follows in this field known as cellular agriculture.
Unlike scientists who grow chicken or cow cells in a lab, Wyrwas can’t exactly biopsy a living animal for tissue, given that bluefin tuna travel the world’s oceans at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. Nor can he grab a sample from one of the precious few bluefin tuna farms, which would view him as competition. Nor can he walk into a fish processing plant and request a sample. Bluefin tuna die on ship, many miles from shore, their cells slowly decomposing even when frozen or on ice.
No, to get an uncontaminated sample, Wyrwas has to head out to sea. Wyrwas, 26, and his Finless co-founder, Mike Selden, 27, don’t like to talk specifics when it comes to sourcing bluefin tuna samples. Even once he succeeded, Wyrwas and the Finless team had to learn how to culture, or grow, bluefin tuna cells without the actual animal. Without the fish’s natural habitat. And without the fish’s standard diet of squid, mackerel, herring and more. The scientists had few blueprints to follow.
“The cell culture would often die because we were sort of shooting in the dark in the beginning,” says Selden, sitting in a conference room at Finless’s offices in Emeryville, California. “We didn’t know how to culture bluefin tuna cells because basically nobody knows how to culture bluefin tuna cells.”
In a whitewashed room that smells like bleach, Jennifer Tung, a senior cell biologist for Finless Foods, actually does rely on something that looks like a petri dish. It’s called a cell-culture flask, and Tung uses a lot of them to keep bluefin tuna stem cells alive. It’s a standard part of the R&D process. Each flask contains a thin layer of grapefruit-coloured liquid - it’s the food, or “media” as its known in the trade - that allows the cells to grow. The only way to see the cells is under a microscope.
One vital step in culturing meat is to create an “immortalized” cell line, which theoretically can grow forever, meaning you never again need to go out to sea to capture fresh samples.
“We think our bluefin tuna line is immortalised,” Selden says. “We’re pretty sure.”
As important as that development is, however, “it is not the same as being able to make meat,” Wurgaft cautions.
In fact, growing stem cells into something that precisely mimics the fatty flesh of bluefin tuna is not considered possible yet. The technology for such a textured product is still years away from a commercial application, say Selden and others. At present, biotech firms can grow cells in devices called bioreactors, but the resulting meat is more paste than flesh. Which is why Just, the San Francisco company behind a plant-based version of mayonnaise, plans to first release cultured meat products that don’t rely on firm, fleshy textures.
Before the end of the year, Just expects to introduce a chicken product to some still-unnamed restaurants in Asia. It won’t be a cultured chicken breast or thigh, but something closer to the consistency of a nugget, with fried-chicken skin and with plantbased materials serving as binder and flavoring agents.
“If you buy Tyson chicken nuggets, some percentage of the nugget is plant-based,” says Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Just, formerly known as Hampton Creek, a company with almost as many controversies as successes. “A chicken bite is much easier than bluefin tuna.”
Then there’s taste. The flavour of the chicken you now eat occurs naturally, in part, from the animal’s diet. Tetrick and his team at Just say they have found a way to incorporate plant-based material into the food media so that when chicken cells are cultured into paste, they end up tasting like the real thing.
In an experimental kitchen at Just’s headquarters in the Mission District, Chris Jones gets to play around with the plant-based materials and cultured meats that others in the company discover or create. A former chef de cuisine at Moto, the once-celebrated and now-closed restaurant in Chicago, Jones is vice president of product development for Just. Recently, he’s been dehydrating cultured chicken paste so that it resembles skin, presumably for those nuggets.
“I actually think it tastes cleaner, and better, than real chicken skin,” Jones says. He hands me a golden sliver of the lab-based skin. It crackles under tooth, both salty and savoury. Most people would never know it was developed in a lab. — Washington Post
The cell culture would often die because we were sort of shooting in the dark in the beginning. We didn’t know how to culture bluefin tuna cells because basically nobody knows how to culture bluefin tuna cells. — Mike Selden, Finless co-founder