ICYMI: #NewHarvest2019 Recap
By: New Harvest
Tags: Future Of Food, Cellular Agriculture, Cell Based Meat, Cultured Meat, New Harvest 2019

ICYMI: #NewHarvest2019 Recap

Conference volunteer Kevin Melman reflects on his very first New Harvest cellular agriculture conference

Say “meeeaattt”

While a heatwave had struck the northeast United States and most were seeking shelter in air-conditioned havens, I was en route to meet with top scientists, brilliant entrepreneurs, and numerous others like myself who were all excited about one burgeoning technology that could not only bring comfort, but also change the world: cellular agriculture.

I hoped anxiously during my four-hour trip from Vermont to Cambridge, Massachusetts that there would be AC at my destination. Yet, as important as it was, it was still near the bottom of what I was eager to discover at the 2019 New Harvest Conference.

As I walked up the stairs of the MIT Media Lab on the conference’s first day, I was in awe of the sleek, modern, aesthetic of the structure. The floors gleaming, students were busy at work, and guests of New Harvest were crowding around a registration table. All were excited to see what sort of exhibitions, talks, and people awaited them on the sixth floor. Everyone donned purple wristbands — not unlike those you would receive at a music festival — and while the subject matter of this event was of the less boisterous kind, I felt a similar level of excitement.

As we all sat awaiting the first presentations, I scanned the audience and saw a sea of enthusiastic faces. Soon, the audience collectively began to simmer down as Isha Datar, Executive Director, gave her opening statements.

The first few talks were given by New Harvest Fellows, a group of students who study cellular agriculture with the help of New Harvest funding. Santiago Campuzano’s research had him playing a version of laboratory Grocery Games. He tested several items from the produce aisle to find the vegetable which best allowed the formation of aligned muscle tissue when used as a scaffold and could potentially create the tender, fibrous, texture we seek in meat. He settled on celery, even imploring the audience to admire it a little more (though ironically, he dislikes its flavor) during his closing remarks.

Following him was Scott Allan, who has been working on bioreactor technology. He showed the audience how much more efficient hollow-fiber bioreactors are than traditional stirred-tanks, at least for the purposes of mammalian cell culture. Allan mentioned that part of his project regards end-of-life of materials that go into cellular agriculture. A focus on sustainability is part of why we need cellular agriculture in the first place, and I am glad that researchers like him prioritize it in their work.

The final New Harvest Fellow was Natalie Rubio, who threw a curveball into the conference: entomoculture. This term — which she coined — is defined as the growth of insect cells in lab conditions and, eventually, for consumption by humans. Her intuition quickly led her to address the first concern on people’s minds: If so many Westerners are already disgusted by eating insects, and some might even be opposed to eating cell-based meat, why would anyone eat cell-based insect meat? Rubio stated that we don’t need to think about eating a pile of insect cells, but that we can potentially replace the bovine tissue in a steak with insect-based equivalents. Perhaps one day we will be buying bug-based T-bones at the supermarket!

After the first round of presentations finished up, conference goers were on a cell-ag high and excited to peruse the various exhibitions during the first coffee break. Among the exhibitors were the 3D bioprinting companies Cellink and 3D Cultures, biotechnology firms Hyasynth Bio and C16 Biosciences, which focused on fermentation to ‘brew’ cannabinoids and palm oil, respectively, and a particularly pungent yet intriguing display of living fungi by Smallhold. Newly caffeinated, everyone began to shuffle back into the presentation hall.