JIM MELLON INTERVIEW

It ’ s meat Jim,

but not as we know it!

Why the meat-alternative food revolution is unstoppable and why British billionaire, Jim Mellon, is ‘in ’!

BY JULIET GELLATLEY, VIVA! FOUNDER & DIRECTOR

Cultured meat recently made its historic debut in Singapore. Eat Just, a US start-up company, launched the lab-grown chicken at the chic 1880 restaurant. It is the first in the world to make cultured meat commercially available and its brand, GOOD Meat, was used in three dishes: bao bun with crispy sesame cultured chicken and spring onion; phyllo puff pastry with cultured chicken and black bean purée; and a crispy maple waffle with cultured chicken with spices and hot sauce.

Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, told Viva!life: “This historic step, the first-ever commercial sale of cultured meat, moves us closer to a world where the majority of meat will not require tearing down a single forest, displacing a single animal’s habitat or using a single drop of antibiotics. ”

Most of the CEOs I’ ve contacted in the cultured meat arena are similarly motivated by ethics. My interest in cultured meat is, of course, for the animals. Seventy-five billion farmed animals were killed last year across the globe and most were intensively farmed in pitiable conditions. Feeding these poor creatures is ravaging the world’s wildernesses as they are ripped up to make way for grazing and animal fodder. Animals from the sea fare no better, with almost all salmon factory farmed and trillions of other fish wrenched from the oceans, which are ecologically collapsing (see page 16).

With meat consumption growing in China and India, cultured meat is an incredibly long lever to pull to quickly reduce the numbers of animals slaughtered worldwide; it may be the only way – and I mean by tens of billions – in our lifetime.

With these thoughts in mind, I attended a webinar Protein Reimagined: Transforming the Global Food System, run by the Good Food Institute in Spring 2021. Within six years, the number of cultured meat companies has grown from two to over 60 worldwide and with investments of over $450 million, they have made huge strides in commercialising not only cultured meat but also fish, prawns and shrimp, foie gras, dairy products (including infant formula), pet food and leather. As the Founder of Vitro Labs, Ingvar Helgason, told me: “A single painless biopsy from one cow can make millions of handbags. ”

Curious to discover how cultured meat is made, I visited Mosa Meat in Maastrict. This was the company co-founded by Dutch scientist Mark Post who unveiled the first cultivated meat burger on live television in London in 2013. A tiny sample of cells is painlessly taken from an animal and are then fed a broth of nutrients, growth factors and water on which they multiply into trillions and are grown into meat or other products using a bioreactor. From start to finish, the process by Eat Just for chicken takes about 14 days. Other companies take up to two months.

One of the stumbling blocks has always been the medium used to grow them – foetal bovine serum (FBS). It contains serum taken from the hearts of living calf foetuses – and yes, it is as horrifically cruel as it sounds.

Mosa Meat, however, say they have developed a medium that does not contain any animal components and Didier Toubia, co-founder at Aleph Farms in Israel, wrote in an email to me: “Our growth medium does not include any component obtained from animals” . Other companies have now achieved this, too.

Who is investing in cultured meats and is it really going to trigger a new Agrarian Revolution? To find out, I wanted to meet someone who truly understands the world of investment and cultured meats and who better than British billionaire Jim Mellon? Jim gained his masters degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford; trained as an investment manager and was a multi-millionaire by the age of 28.

He has set up Agronomics Ltd (agronomics.im), an investment company focussed on cultured animal products and is just about the only way non-rich folk can invest in this sector. I had heard him speak on the urgent need for food reform and wanted to find out what it was that motivated him to champion cultured meats? We set up a Zoom and he told me:

“I’m involved in the biotech industry and my partners and I have created a number of biotech companies for human health. The process by which cell ag. products are produced is largely a biotech process and I could see there was a buzz around the whole cell ag. area that was beginning to get real traction. I looked at the reasons behind it and decided to dive in. ”

But what were those reasons? Jim was refreshingly outspoken:

“Number one is a reduction in the abhorrent industrial slaughter of animals that are so very badly treated. This is something to which you and I completely relate and it is my number one motivating factor. ”

I’ ve seen Jim speak against factory farming – he is passionate, persuasive and articulate – but was there a lightbulb moment?

“No, it was just a gradual realisation that sentient beings are slaughtered in abjectly awful conditions without most of us knowing about it yet eating the products of their artificially-produced bodies. I just couldn’t abide it anymore and gave up meat. I have to admit that it’s a relatively recent conversion, six years now and no meat here! And that’s my number one motivation. ”

And the second reason?

“Food security. Neither of us was around in the Second World War but we all know about the sea convoys and the near-starvation of the British population because of the sinking of supply ships. Britain then imported 40 per cent of its food but now it’s increased to a half. We have to improve food security in these uncertain times and we have to improve its quality so we don’t run the pandemic risks that Viva! quite rightly identifies in its 3 in 4 campaign.

“There are places in the world which are much more food insecure than the UK and where some countries import nearly 100 per cent of their food –Singapore and Hong Kong, for example. This will provide the driving force for the cultured meat sector to grow – and it’s also a motivating factor for me.

“Third, of course, is the environment. The food that’s being produced by plant-based and cell ag. companies is so much better for the planet. There is no excuse for the intensive farming of animals. None! It’s on a declining trajectory and will probably go in the next 20 or 30 years.

”There is no excuse for the intensive farming of animals. None! It ’ s on a declining trajectory

Continued on page 49