Feed the man (alternative) meat: The 25-year-old predicting our future meals

Forget COP26. Forget hydrogen power. Forget emissions targets and farting cows and carbon capture. When, 100 years from now, historians look back on our battle against climate change, chances are they’ll pay special attention to some fancy chicken nuggets and a restaurant in Singapore called 1880.

On December 19, 2020, 1880 became the first place in the world to sell a plate of lab-grown chicken. Called “chicken bites”, the meat was produced in a 1200-litre bioreactor from chicken cells cultured in foetal bovine serum and mixed with plant-based ingredients. While a description like that is unlikely to make you want to eat it, those who did were soon singing chicken bites’ praises, describing it as just like the real thing, only a bit spongier. The dish cost $US23 ($32) but, among environmental campaigners and food futurists, the moment was priceless. (Chicken bites are now also on the menu at Madame Fan, a Cantonese restaurant at the J W Marriott Singapore South Beach.)

“It was a major milestone,” says Thomas King, a social entrepreneur and executive chairman of Food Frontier, an independent think tank based in Melbourne. “In coming years, we’ll need new sustainable ways of feeding a growing population, and alternative proteins like meat cultivated from cells will be a big part of that.”

King, who is 25, has been described as “insanely charismatic”, “a superior intelligence”, an “extreme anti-farmer activist” and, in the words of Simon Hill, host of the Plant Proof podcast, “one of the most impressive humans I have come across.” He also happens to be tall – 1.9 metres – and rudely handsome, with a catwalk-ready jawline and a pair of puppy eyes that would bring a TedX audience to tears.

“It’s like he’s just stepped off the cover of GQ,” says friend and former CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians, Jan Owen AM. “You don’t expect that kind of person to be able to sit down and talk about really serious issues and come up with solutions, but he does.”

Food Frontier, which King set up in 2017, bills itself as the expert body on “future food” issues in Australia and New Zealand. Most particularly, it offers advice to government and industry on ways to reduce our reliance on meat as a central source of protein, supplementing it with plant-based alternatives.

Many groups, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO), and Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, which recently launched a research arm dedicated to plant-based proteins, view this as crucial to combating climate change. “Industrial livestock production is often hugely resource-intensive,” says King. “High meat consumption has impacts on human health, the climate and biodiversity.”

Food production accounts for a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions. According to the UNFAO, meat and dairy alone produces 14.5 per cent. Beef has the largest carbon footprint of all: research from the site Our World in Data found in 2020 that growing a kilogram of beef produced 99.48 kilograms of carbon dioxide. (Rice produced 4.45 kilograms, and bananas just 0.86 kilogram.) Humans are tearing down forests at a record rate in order to breed more and more cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, yet we still can’t make enough meat. By 2050, the world will have 10 billion people in it, with a 74 per cent increase in the demand for protein.

Humans are tearing down forests at a record rate in order to breed more and more cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, yet we still can’t make enough meat.

As the UNFAO has made clear, it’s hard to see the traditional meat and livestock industry meeting that demand, placing increasing importance on finding alternative proteins.

Plenty of outfits are now racing to fill that gap. One is Eat Just, a San Francisco-based company that began in 2011, under the name Beyond Eggs, with the goal of making plant-based alternatives to eggs. (Eat Just produced the “chicken bites” that were eaten at 1880.) An Israeli company, called Supermeat.com, has offered free public tastings of its lab-grown chicken. And a Singaporean start-up called Shiok Meats has produced the first ever cell-cultivated prawn, lobster and crab meat. King became one of the first people to try it, during a trip to Singapore in 2019, when it was served up in dumplings at a press conference. “It was even one of the first times the company’s founders, Ka Yi [Ling] and Sandhya [Sriram], had eaten their own product,” says King.

Some of the world’s largest meat producers, including JBS, Tyson and Cargill, are now investing in plant-based proteins. Singapore is particularly active. The country has no livestock and hardly any agricultural land, and imports more than 90 per cent of its food. The government has poured $S144 million ($150 million) into its food tech industry, including cellular agriculture.

King doesn’t want Australia to miss out. “There are significant business opportunities here,” he says. “At the moment, there are thousands of Australian farmers who produce grains and legumes that are exported in raw form. These crops could be value-added by being turned into the ingredients for plant-based products.”

Much of King’s time is spent on stage at conferences, forums and climate events, talking to farmers, food retailers, agricultural organisations and the biotech community. “A big part of Food Frontier’s success has been Thomas’s ability to engage a wide array of stakeholders,” says Bruce Friedrich, CEO of The Good Food Institute, an American alternative-proteins non-profit organisation. “He has brought the concept of plant-based and cultivated meat to Australia, putting it on the map for people who care about climate change and biodiversity.”

Friedrich describes King as “pretty much impossible not to like”. But that depends on whom you talk to. The Red Meat Advisory Council (RMAC) is certainly not a fan. The council, which represents Australia’s key sheep and beef industry groups, has attacked King several times: in May, the chair, John McKillop, described King as “an extreme activist” whose anti-meat agenda impugned “434,000 proud red meat and livestock workers [who] toil to feed Australian families and many others across the world”.

McKillop was particularly incensed when Food Standards Australia New Zealand, a government body that regulates food labelling, invited King to take part in a Future Foods webinar. (The webinar was later cancelled.) In June, King told Farmonline, an agricultural and rural news site, that the RMAC had attempted to “flagrantly misrepresent our work”.

In August, Queensland Liberal National Party Senator Susan McDonald called a Senate hearing into food labelling at which she argued, among other things, that plant-based proteins should not be called “meat”. For McDonald, who grew up on her family’s cattle property 70 kilometres south of Cloncurry in Queensland, plant-based “meats” are something close to an existential threat. She tells me that Food Frontier has no place promoting alternative proteins. “The companies that are into these plant-based products, like Nestle, Sanitarium, v2food, are multinationals, and are well-equipped in their lobbyists and staff government relations to be able to advocate for their own business interests.”

I asked if she agrees that King is an “anti-meat activist”. “I don’t like talking about people,” she says. “But when Food Frontier’s constitution says it’s about reducing meat consumption, your agenda is pretty clear.”

“There are leaders who frame change as something to be feared and fought, and those who seek to understand, shape and embrace it.”

Similar tensions have arisen in the US, where conservatives have accused President Joe Biden of trying to ban hamburgers. In April 2021, former Trump economic adviser and Fox News host Larry Kudlow suggested that Biden’s climate change policy will limit meat-eating, and that Americans will be reduced to chowing down on “grilled brussels sprouts” on the fourth of July. (Biden’s climate policy makes no effort to block meat production or consumption.) Like their Australian counterparts, US meat industry lobbyists have also been pushing to ban the use of terms like “burger” and “sausage” on the labels of plant-based meat products.

King believes “the discussion should be based on evidence, not ideology. There are leaders who frame change as something to be feared and fought, and those who seek to understand, shape and embrace it. I try my best to embody the latter. I have faith that more upcoming leaders in my generation will do the same.”

Meat alternatives such as these “chicken bites” – made from chicken cells cultured in foetal bovine serum and mixed with plant-based ingredients – are increasingly featuring on food menus. Credit: Courtesy of ju.st

---

King grew up, the youngest of two boys, in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. He describes himself as a “pretty normal kid, binge-watching Harry Potter, buying lollies at the local shop”. He loved animals from a young age, and kept a succession of pets, including dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, a blue tongue lizard and fish. “We shared many family dinners with a bowl of tadpoles on the table, watching them transform into frogs,” says his mother, Katharine. He also had an entrepreneurial streak, and started a business minding his neighbours’ pets when they went away on holiday.

One afternoon, when he was 13, King was watching TV after school when he saw a campaign advertisement, produced by Zoos Victoria, about the damage wrought by the palm oil industry. There were hellish images of injured wildlife and hectares of felled trees. King was shocked. “I jumped on the family computer and started researching it,” he says. “It was not just the land degradation but the displaced populations, and just the injustice of it all.”

The ad called on the government to mandate clearer labelling of products that included palm oil, but King wanted to know what consumers could do. And so he started a website, called “Say NO To Palm Oil”, which provided information about the impacts of the palm oil industry, and encouraged consumers – and food producers – to source their products responsibly. “I’d work on it at lunchtime in the school library, and hand out bits of paper to other kids with the web address on it.” (At its peak, the site was getting 500,000 hits a year.)

King began fundraising for The Orangutan Project (formerly Australian Orangutan Project), running stalls at festivals and shopping centres and selling merchandise, eventually raising some $25,000. He became the group’s national youth ambassador for a while, and he set up and ran its Facebook page, which now has 314,000 followers. He also got in touch with Zoos Victoria.

“We gave him a petition for people to sign,” says Rachel Lowry, who was then working as Zoos Victoria’s Director of Wildlife Conservation and Science. “He took it through his school and neighbourhood. But he was constantly ringing, saying ‘What else can I do?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to unwittingly drive a species to extinction.’ So for him it was a human rights issue: the human right to know what’s in your food. For a teenage boy, that was amazing.”

King began volunteering for the poverty-alleviation charity Oaktree, the sustainability organisation Youth4Planet and the Jane Goodall Institute. His first speaking engagement was in 2011, when Goodall came to Melbourne as part of a national tour. “It was an amazing experience,” he says. “In the years following I had the honour of catching up with Jane on several occasions, including over a whisky!” In 2015 he won the Victorian Young Australian of the Year award for his environmental activism.

“Starting out, I had a really campaigning style of advocacy,” he tells me. “But it didn’t take long to realise that boycotts, lecturing people and painting a gloomy picture of the world wasn’t effective.” When a circus was set up in his local area, he and some other animal rights activists went to picket its use of animals. It was hard, unglamorous work: passers-by abused them, and told King to “get a job”.

At one point the circus owner appeared, stormed over to the fence where King and the others were standing with their signs and confronted them. “It just turned into a shouting match,” King says. “Nobody was listening to anyone, and I realised we weren’t getting anywhere.”

King began to rethink his theory of change, eventually adopting a more empathetic model that took as its starting point a recognition of our shared humanity. “People want safe, happy, fulfilled lives,” he says. “So it’s about saying, ‘Okay, what ideas do you have and what ideas do I have, and where is our common ground?’ ”

Until this time, King had largely addressed the environmental crisis as a series of single issues: palm oil, animal rights, poverty. After a time, however, he realised that the common causal factor behind most of these challenges was food. The world’s insatiable craving for protein had created industrial animal agriculture, a behemoth whose byproducts included deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate chaos. Change the food system, and you change the whole equation. (King, for his part, follows an almost entirely plant-based diet, allowing himself the odd oyster and clam, since bivalves “don’t have brains or an environmental impact”.)

Part of King’s pitch is that plant-based proteins means producing more food, not less. It also subverts consumer behaviour.

Food Frontier is run by a young, tight-knit team of six, and is based in a co-working space in North Melbourne. Funded by grants and donations, it was driven from the outset by a determination to reach across the ideological divide. “I remember in 2018 giving one of my first presentations for Food Frontier in Wodonga at an agricultural conference to 150 farmers,” King says. “I was a little hesitant – they’d see alternative proteins as a threat, but the interest was very strong. They reflected back to me the same respect and openness and curiosity that I tried to bring to that interaction.”

Part of King’s pitch is that plant-based proteins means producing more food, not less. It also subverts consumer behaviour. “Traditionally it’s been thought that attitude change leads to behaviour change, but often it’s the other way around,” he said during a recent interview on ABC TV. “When people have options to make better choices, then they come around to it in their thinking.”

Of course, this depends on having plant-based options that people actually want to eat, which is where “chicken bites” come in. Precision fermentation offers similar promise. Precision fermentation is the engineering of microorganisms like yeast and bacteria to produce complex organic molecules, like protein. The CSIRO is using precision fermentation to produce the same caseins and whey proteins that are found in cow’s milk, without the need for milking facilities and huge herds of gassy bovines. Together with venture capital funding, the CSIRO has created a start-up called Eden Brew, which hopes to be selling the first batch of animal-free dairy by late 2022.

The CSIRO is fast becoming one of the driving forces behind meat alternatives. In 2019, the CSIRO and Jack Cowin, founder of the Hungry Jack’s burger chain, were among the chief financial backers of v2food, an Australian start-up, which is developing plant-based products made from legumes. “The last taste test I had, I thought they were tricking me,” Cowin told The Sydney Morning Herald at the time. “Over the decades I’ve eaten probably as many hamburgers as anyone has in this country. When you taste it, people won’t be able to tell the difference.”

The meat alternative created by v2food is now used in Hungry Jack’s Rebel Whopper burgers and sold in supermarkets across Australia. v2food, which recently expanded into China and Europe, has a number of projects on the go with the CSIRO, spanning nutrition, protein-extraction technology and flavour and structure work.

---

When he was younger, King hid his age, fearing that people wouldn’t take him seriously. “People have this idea that young people’s ideas are less worthy because they have less life experience,” he told the ABC. “But that’s silly because almost all of the problems we face come back to inherited thinking. Young people aren’t conditioned by structures, so they are more able to challenge the status quo.”

But thinking differently comes with risks, especially if you’re only 25. “It’s sometimes called the entrepreneurial trap,” says Jan Owen, who met King in 2016, when she was CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians. “It’s very lonely when you’re doing something at the bleeding edge.”

Future foods and alternative proteins have gone ahead in “leaps and bounds” in the past five years, says Owen. “And leading that is terrifying because you’re way out in front, saying stuff no one wants to hear or believe.”

You can even upset your allies, as when King suggested to Bob Geldof at the EAT Stockholm Food Forum in 2017 that at least some of the answers to climate change might lie in science. “Business and science won’t fix this!” Geldof yelled. “They are the problem!”

Climate change is an urgent issue, but King is cognisant of keeping a cool head. It was Winston Churchill, he reminds me, who first predicted lab-grown meat in a 1931 essay. Within 50 years, and under the right conditions, wrote Churchill, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”.

Churchill was out by 40 years. But King has a prediction of his own. “By the time I’m in my 40s, what we consider today to be ‘alternative proteins’ will not be called alternative,” he says. “It’ll just be called food.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

The best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up here.