Meat substitutes are on the curriculum at UC Berkeley

Most UC Berkeley students will tell you that they’re shooting for an A. But the 45 young men and women packing a Barrows Hall classroom this Monday were pursuing more ambitious goals: saving the world, and perhaps winning $5,000 in the process.

The students are enrolled in a four-credit Challenge Lab at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, a practicum that pits teams against one another to develop the most innovative plant-based meat.

At the lab’s second gathering, there were no Tofurky samples on hand. Instead, Christie Lagally, a senior scientist with the Good Food Institute, gave the students a PowerPoint crash course on the reasons the world needs more meat substitutes.

“Factory farming allows us to have an affluence of meat,” she told them, then clicked through several dozen charts illustrating the downside of our omnivorous appetites. According to her figures, animal agriculture produces up to 24 percent of greenhouse gases, uses water and energy more intensively than plant agriculture, and kills 9 billion land animals and 47 billion sea animals (including a lot of shrimp) each year just to satisfy American omnivores.

Lagally’s lecture veered at times from the technical into the televangelical. The Washington think tank she works for, she said, promotes alternatives to factory farming.

Ricardo San Martin, a chemical engineering professor who leads the class, says that the ethical complexity of the subject made it ideal for a Challenge Lab. In last semester’s exercise, students came up with ways to bring economic vitality back to the Greek island of Lesbos, which has thousands of refugees.

San Martin is quite familiar with the emotions the topic of plant-based meats evokes: Two of his children are vegans, a third a devoted carnivore.

Issues alone don’t drive an exercise in entrepreneurship. Until the last few years, vegans and Silicon Valley venture capitalists formed a Venn diagram whose circles seemed to overlap only around Steve Jobs. While sales of almond, soy and hemp milk have soared, the market for plant-based meats currently represents 0.25 percent of total meat sales in this country. According to market analysis firm Spins, it grew only 3.8 percent between 2015 and 2016.

When it comes to investments, however, the numbers are much more impressive. In 2014, Pinnacle Foods bought meat-substitute producer Gardein for $154 million. Last year, Monde Nissin of the Philippines purchased Quorn, whose fungus-derived mycoprotein tastes like chicken nuggets, for $831 million.

High-profile startups include Redwood City’s Impossible Foods, which has raised $183 million, and Beyond Meat in El Segundo (Los Angeles County), which counts both Bill Gates and Tyson Foods as investors. Both companies recently released plant-based hamburger patties whose flavors attempt to shrink the gap between wheat gluten and USDA Prime.

The Berkeley students certainly know about the Impossible Burger. That doesn’t mean they want to replicate its buzz.

“I’m really interested in how to make a plant-based diet accessible to working-class people and people from underserved communities,” said Etisha Lewis, a business major who has been a vegetarian for 14 years. Social entrepreneurship is needed, she says, to help people who shop at corner stores and small groceries find inexpensive, healthful meat substitutes.

Hailey Zhou, a nutrition major, said she signed up for the lab as a practical counterpoint to her science coursework. She’s an omnivore who is more interested in ancient grains and fermented foods than pseudo-beef. “Ideally, I’d like to develop a product line that will make a bigger impact than Impossible Burger, which only displaces a segment of the public demand,” she said.

If the students want to rethink plant-based meats, Lagally told the class, they will have to learn about the structure of meat proteins, as well as the machinery that manipulates plant proteins into meat-like forms. Then, of course, there’s the problem of how to make their product taste good.

It’s a lot of information for the teams of undergrads to absorb. To San Martin, that was another reason the Sutardja Center settled on the topic. “We try to learn at the same time other people are learning, so there are no clear answers,” he said.

Through early May, the students will attend four hours a week of lectures from experts, then spend eight hours weekly developing their team projects. At the end of the semester, San Martin says, a panel of plant-based meat experts will judge the business proposals and pick a winner.

“Like ‘Shark Tank?’” the reporter asks.

More educational, the professor suggests. “It’s a course they will remember,” he says.