Isha Dattar

We could theoretically grow anything that might come from plants or animals from cells instead.

Vanilla doesn't have to be rainforest farmed.

Egg whites don't have to come with a yolk.

Foie gras can be completely cruelty-free.

And leather and silk don't have to come off the back of an animal or the home of a silkworm.

In fact, we already consume cellular agriculture products in our everyday lives just in super small quantities.

Several vitamins, flavors, and enzymes are already made in cell cultures.

In fact, rennet, which is the set of enzymes used to turn milk into curds and whey for cheese-making, used to come from the stomach lining of the fourth stomach of calves, baby cows.

And in 1990, a cell-cultured version hit the market, a version of the key enzyme chymosin.

And today, only 30-ish years later, 90% of rennet used for cheese-making came from a bioreactor instead of a calf.

We're used to transforming food with biotechnology.

It's arguably like the oldest technology we have is when we started fermenting foods and we started making beer and kimchi and pickles and yogurts and cheeses and all that kind of stuff.

Like that was us transforming foods with cell cultures.

We could have never looked at a glass of milk and said we wanted it to be stinky with like veins of mold going through it and hard and it melts.

Would someone have envisioned cheese from scratch?

Had they never had cheese before?

And so similarly, if we looked at milk and couldn't have envisioned cheese, today we're looking at meat.

And we're just trying to make meat again.

But maybe we can make the cheese of meat.

That is such an exciting vision for me, is unlocking the power of cell culture to just increase food culture instead of replicating a culture we already have.