MEAT WITHOUT ANIMALS
UMA VALETI REMEMBERS the first time he really thought about where meat comes from. A cardiologist turned founder, Valeti grew up in Vijayawada, India, where his father was a veterinarian and his mother taught physics. When he was 12, he attended a neighbor’s birthday party. In the front yard, people danced and feasted on chicken tandoori and curried goat. Valeti wandered around to the back of the house, where cooks were hard at work decapitating and gutting animal after animal to keep the loaded platters coming. “It was like, birthday, death day,” he says. “It didn’t make sense.”
Valeti remained a carnivore for more than a decade, until after he had moved to the U.S. for his medical residency. But in time, he found himself increasingly disturbed by food-borne illness. He was especially grossed out by the contamination that happens in slaughterhouses when animal feces get mixed in with meat. “I loved eating meat, but I didn’t like the way it was being produced,” he says. “I thought, there has to be a better way.”
In a tiny R&D suite in a nondescript office building in the unglamorous Silicon Valley exurb of San Leandro, a lanky, red-haired molecular biologist named Eric Schulze is fiddling with a microscope, and I’m about to get a look at that better way. Like the specimen he’ll show me, Schulze is something of a hybrid. Formerly a Food and Drug Administration regulator, he’s now an educator, TV host, and senior scientist at Memphis Meats, the company that Valeti founded in 2016 and whose laboratory he is showing me. Lining one wall is a HEPA-filtered tissue cabinet, to which someone has affixed a “Chicken Crossing” sign, and a meat freezer labeled “Angus.” Along the opposite wall is an incubator dialed to 106 degrees Fahrenheit, the body temperature of Anas platyrhynchos domesticus—the domestic duck.
Schulze plucks a petri dish from the incubator, positions it under the microscope, and then invites me to look into the twin eyepieces. “Do you see those long, skinny things? Those are muscle-forming cells,” he says. “These are from a duck that’s off living its life somewhere.” The cells look like strands of translucent spaghetti, with bright dots—nuclei, Schulze says—sprinkled here and
