A conventionally sourced sea bass from a fishery.
Ever wonder why you've never heard of wild-caught organic fish? It's because there's no way to certify a food that has a mysterious history. Mike Selden, a 26-year-old biochemist with an animal lover's heart and an entrepreneur's mind, decided there must be better way to consume one of our planet's primary sources of animal protein. A way that would eliminate the need to kill billions of fish per year while also producing toxin-free, cheap, delicious fish meat for your dinner table. Enter Finless Foods, a young startup with a bold vision. Selden took time out of chauffeuring fish carcasses around San Francisco (no joke!) to share his journey with LeapsMag.
What is the biggest problem with the way fish is consumed today?
There are a lot of problems ranging from metals to animal welfare to human health. Technology is solving those problems at the same time. You've got extreme over fishing, which is collapsing ocean ecosystems and removing populations of fish that are traditionally used as food sources in developing nations.
In terms of animal welfare, fish are killed in massive numbers, billions a year. Even if people don't care too much about that, we want to give them another option.
In terms of health, which I think for most people is the most convincing argument, current fish have mercury and plastic in them. And if you're getting that fish from a farm, you will also have high levels of antibiotics and growth hormones if you're getting it from outside the U.S. What we're doing is producing fish that doesn't have any of those contaminants.
What gave you the idea to start a company around lab-grown fish?
I studied biochemistry and molecular biology at UMass Amherst, traditionally an agricultural school out in the woods of Massachusetts. I have always been an environmental activist and cared about animals. I thought, animal agriculture is so incredibly inefficient, what could be done to change it?
"The worst way you can possibly make a hamburger is with a cow."
Agriculture is a system of inputs and outputs, the inputs being feed and the outputs being meat – so why are we wasting all of this input on outputs we don't care about? Why are we creating these animals that waste all this energy through sitting around, moving around, having a heartbeat, blinking? All of this uses energy and that's valuable input.
The worst way you can possibly make a hamburger is with a cow. It's an awful transfer of energy: you have to feed it many times its own weight in food that could have fed other people or other things.
In February, I got funding from Indie Bio, a startup accelerator for synthetic biology, and moved out to San Francisco with my co-founder Brian Wyrwas. We started working in our lab in March. We're the newest company in the space.
Walk me through the process of creating edible fish in the lab. Do you have to catch a real live fish first and get their cells?
We have a deal with the Aquarium of the Bay, and whenever a fish dies, they call me, I get in a zip car, drive over, and bring the fish back to the lab, where Brian cultures it up into a cell culture. We do use real, high-quality fish stock. From there, we get the cells going in a bioreactor in a suspension culture, grow them into large quantities, and then bring them out to differentiate them into the cells people want to eat—the muscle and fat tissue. Then we formulate it and bring it to people's tables.
How long does the whole process take from the phone call about the fish dying to the food on the table?
There are two different processes: One is a research process, getting the initial cells and engineering them to be what we're looking for.
The other is a production process – we have a cell line ready and need to grow it out. That timing depends on how big of a facility we have. Since we're working with cell division: If you have 1 cell, in 24 hours, you'll have two cells. Let's say you have 1 ton of cells, in 24 hours you'll have two tons of cells.
"We want to give people the wholesome food they are used to in a healthier setting."
How are you looking to scale this process?
We're trying to find a middle ground between efficiency and local distribution. Organic farming is hilariously bad for the environment and horrifyingly inefficient, but on the other hand, industrial agriculture requires lots of transport, which is also bad for the environment. We're looking to create regionally distributed facilities which don't require a lot of transit, so people can have fresh fish even extremely far inland.
What kinds of fish are you "cooking"?
Our first product will be Bluefin tuna. It's a high-quality fish with high demand and it's also a conservation issue. We also currently have a culture going with Branzino, European sea bass, that we're really happy with.
There's a concept in science called a model organism – one that is extremely well studied and understood. Like the fruit fly, for example. For fish, it's the zebra fish, which is used for genetic research, but no one eats it. It's tiny, so we started by thinking: what fish do people eat that is also close evolutionarily to the zebra fish? We came up with carp, even though it's not too widely eaten.
But our process is very species agnostic. We've done work in trout, salmon, goldfish. Any fish with a dorsal fin works with our process. We tried a wolf eel but it didn't work. Eels are pretty far evolutionarily from fish, so we dropped that one.
From left to right, Ron Shigeta (IndieBio), Brian Wyrwas (Finless Foods), Amy Fleming (The Guardian), and Jihyun Kim (Finless Foods) tasting the first ever clean carp croquettes.
(Courtesy Mike Selden)
Why fish as opposed to, say, a cow?
Scientifically, there are a lot of advantages. Fish have a simpler structure than land animals. A fillet from a cow has complex marbling going on between the fat and muscle. When it's fish, like sashimi, it's in layers of muscle and fat. So it's simpler to build, plus fish are cold-blooded, so because they breathe underwater, our equipment needs less complexity. We don't need a CO2 line and we don't need to culture our cells at 37 degrees Celsius. We culture them at room temperature.
It's also easier to get to market since there's much higher value. Chicken in the last year was $3.84 per pound in America, whereas Bluefin tuna is between $100 and $1200 a pound. Because this is about dropping cost, we can get to market faster and give investors a better value proposition.
What's also cool is that something like Bluefin tuna is something many people haven't had the opportunity to eat. We can get these down in cost until there is price parity with any cheap conventional fish. We want to give people a choice between buying something like albacore tuna in a can –with mercury and plastic– or high-quality tuna without any contaminants for the same price.
Do you shape them like fish fillets to help the consumer overcome whatever discomfort they might feel about eating a bunch of lab-grown cells?
Yeah, people want to continue eating food they are eating, and that's fine. We want to give people a better option. We don't want to give them something weird and out there. We want to give them the wholesome food they are used to in a healthier setting that also solves some environmental issues.
How about the taste? Have you done any blind side-by-side tests with the real thing and your version?
Not blind taste tests. But we have been tasting it, and it is firmly fish. I even tried leaving it outside of the fridge – and man, that tasted like spoiled fish.
We want it to have the exact same properties as real fish. We don't want people to have to learn how to cook with it. We want them to just bring it into their homes and eat it exactly like they were doing before, but better.
What you're growing isn't the whole fish, right? It is not an actual organism?
Right, we're only growing muscle cells. It doesn't know where it is. There is no brain, nervous system, or pain receptors.
Are you the only people in this lab-grown food space working on fish?
We're the only ones doing fish so far. Other companies are doing chicken, duck, egg white, milk, gelatin, leather, and beef.
Are people generally weirded out by sci-fi lab food, or intrigued?
It's been very positive. When people sit down and talk to us, they realize it's not some crazed money grab or some weird Ted talk, it's real activists using real science trying to solve real problems. Sure, there will be some pushback from people who don't understand it, and that's fine.
When can I expect to see Finless Food at my local Whole Foods?
We plan on being in restaurants in two years, and grocery stores in four years.
What about people who aren't big fans of fish in the first place? Like those who don't eat sushi, because consuming something raw with an unknown history isn't very appetizing.
There are too many examples of food poisoning because fish are in a less clean environment than they should be, swimming around in their own fecal matter, and being doused in antibiotics so their diseases don't transmit. It's a bit of a mess. That's why as an industry, we're calling this clean meat. Fish is a healthy thing, or at least it should be, with Omega 3 and 6, and DHA. This is a way for people to continue getting those nutrients without any of the questions of where it came from. For people who are skeptical of fish, we invite you to dive in.
Brian Wyrwas, Co-Founder & CSO, and Mike Selden, Co-Founder & CEO
(Courtesy Mike Selden)
In the U.S., hospitals generate an estimated 6,000 tons of waste per day. A few clinics are leading the way in transitioning to clean energy sources.
She decided to research alternatives for plastic in the medical sector and learned that cups could be reused and easily disinfected. All dentists routinely disinfect their tools anyway and, Stroetzel reasoned, it wouldn’t be too hard to extend that practice to cups.
It's a good example for how often plastic is used unnecessarily in medical practice, she says. The health care sector is the fifth biggest source of pollution and trash in industrialized countries. In the U.S., hospitals generate an estimated 6,000 tons of waste per day, including an average of 400 grams of plastic per patient per day, and this sector produces 8.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.
“Sustainable alternatives exist,” Stroetzel says, “but you have to painstakingly look for them; they are often not offered by the big manufacturers, and all of this takes way too much time [that] medical staff simply does not have during their hectic days.”
When Stroetzel spoke with medical staff in Germany, she found they were often frustrated by all of this waste, especially as they took care to avoid single-use plastic at home. Doctors in other countries share this frustration. In a recent poll, nine out of ten doctors in Germany said they’re aware of the urgency to find sustainable solutions in the health industry but don’t know how to achieve this goal.
After a year of researching more sustainable alternatives, Stroetzel founded a social enterprise startup called POP, short for Practice Without Plastic, together with IT expert Nicolai Niethe, to offer well-researched solutions. “Sustainable alternatives exist,” she says, “but you have to painstakingly look for them; they are often not offered by the big manufacturers, and all of this takes way too much time [that] medical staff simply does not have during their hectic days.”
In addition to reusable dentist cups, other good options for the heath care sector include washable N95 face masks and gloves made from nitrile, which waste less water and energy in their production. But Stroetzel admits that truly making a medical facility more sustainable is a complex task. “This includes negotiating with manufacturers who often package medical materials in double and triple layers of extra plastic.”
While initiatives such as Stroetzel’s provide much needed information, other experts reason that a wholesale rethinking of healthcare is needed. Voluntary action won’t be enough, and government should set the right example. Kari Nadeau, a Stanford physician who has spent 30 years researching the effects of environmental pollution on the immune system, and Kenneth Kizer, the former undersecretary for health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote in JAMA last year that the medical industry and federal agencies that provide health care should be required to measure and make public their carbon footprints. “Government health systems do not disclose these data (and very rarely do private health care organizations), unlike more than 90% of the Standard & Poor’s top 500 companies and many nongovernment entities," they explained. "This could constitute a substantial step toward better equipping health professionals to confront climate change and other planetary health problems.”
Compared to the U.K., the U.S. healthcare industry lags behind in terms of measuring and managing its carbon footprint, and hospitals are the second highest energy user of any sector in the U.S.
Kizer and Nadeau look to the U.K. National Health Service (NHS), which created a Sustainable Development Unit in 2008 and began that year to conduct assessments of the NHS’s carbon footprint. The NHS also identified its biggest culprits: Of the 2019 footprint, with emissions totaling 25 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent, 62 percent came from the supply chain, 24 percent from the direct delivery of care, 10 percent from staff commute and patient and visitor travel, and 4 percent from private health and care services commissioned by the NHS. From 1990 to 2019, the NHS has reduced its emission of carbon dioxide equivalents by 26 percent, mostly due to the switch to renewable energy for heat and power. Meanwhile, the NHS has encouraged health clinics in the U.K. to install wind generators or photovoltaics that convert light to electricity -- relatively quick ways to decarbonize buildings in the health sector.
Compared to the U.K., the U.S. healthcare industry lags behind in terms of measuring and managing its carbon footprint, and hospitals are the second highest energy user of any sector in the U.S. “We are already seeing patients with symptoms from climate change, such as worsened respiratory symptoms from increased wildfires and poor air quality in California,” write Thomas B. Newman, a pediatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and UCSF clinical research coordinator Daisy Valdivieso. “Because of the enormous health threat posed by climate change, health professionals should mobilize support for climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.” They believe “the most direct place to start is to approach the low-lying fruit: reducing healthcare waste and overuse.”
In addition to resulting in waste, the plastic in hospitals ultimately harms patients, who may be even more vulnerable to the effects due to their health conditions. Microplastics have been detected in most humans, and on average, a human ingests five grams of microplastic per week. Newman and Valdivieso refer to the American Board of Internal Medicine's Choosing Wisely program as one of many initiatives that identify and publicize options for “safely doing less” as a strategy to reduce unnecessary healthcare practices, and in turn, reduce cost, resource use, and ultimately reduce medical harm.
A few U.S. clinics are pioneers in transitioning to clean energy sources. In Wisconsin, the nonprofit Gundersen Health network became the first hospital to cut its reliance on petroleum by switching to locally produced green energy in 2015, and it saved $1.2 million per year in the process. Kaiser Permanente eliminated its 800,000 ton carbon footprint through energy efficiency and purchasing carbon offsets, reaching a balance between carbon emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere in 2020, the first U.S. health system to do so.
Cleveland Clinic has pledged to join Kaiser in becoming carbon neutral by 2027. Realizing that 80 percent of its 2008 carbon emissions came from electricity consumption, the Clinic started switching to renewable energy and installing solar panels, and it has invested in researching recyclable products and packaging. The Clinic’s sustainability report outlines several strategies for producing less waste, such as reusing cases for sterilizing instruments, cutting back on materials that can’t be recycled, and putting pressure on vendors to reduce product packaging.
The Charité Berlin, Europe’s biggest university hospital, has also announced its goal to become carbon neutral. Its sustainability managers have begun to identify the biggest carbon culprits in its operations. “We’ve already reduced CO2 emissions by 21 percent since 2016,” says Simon Batt-Nauerz, the director of infrastructure and sustainability.
The hospital still emits 100,000 tons of CO2 every year, as much as a city with 10,000 residents, but it’s making progress through ride share and bicycle programs for its staff of 20,000 employees, who can get their bikes repaired for free in one of the Charité-operated bike workshops. Another program targets doctors’ and nurses’ scrubs, which cause more than 200 tons of CO2 during manufacturing and cleaning. The staff is currently testing lighter, more sustainable scrubs made from recycled cellulose that is grown regionally and requires 80 percent less land use and 30 percent less water.
The Charité hospital in Berlin still emits 100,000 tons of CO2 every year, but it’s making progress through ride share and bicycle programs for its staff of 20,000 employees.
Wiebke Peitz | Specific to Charité
Anesthesiologist Susanne Koch spearheads sustainability efforts in anesthesiology at the Charité. She says that up to a third of hospital waste comes from surgery rooms. To reduce medical waste, she recommends what she calls the 5 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rethink, Research. “In medicine, people don’t question the use of plastic because of safety concerns,” she says. “Nobody wants to be sued because something is reused. However, it is possible to reduce plastic and other materials safely.”
For instance, she says, typical surgery kits are single-use and contain more supplies than are actually needed, and the entire kit is routinely thrown out after the surgery. “Up to 20 percent of materials in a surgery room aren’t used but will be discarded,” Koch says. One solution could be smaller kits, she explains, and another would be to recycle the plastic. Another example is breathing tubes. “When they became scarce during the pandemic, studies showed that they can be used seven days instead of 24 hours without increased bacteria load when we change the filters regularly,” Koch says, and wonders, “What else can we reuse?”
In the Netherlands, TU Delft researchers Tim Horeman and Bart van Straten designed a method to melt down the blue polypropylene wrapping paper that keeps medical instruments sterile, so that the material can be turned it into new medical devices. Currently, more than a million kilos of the blue paper are used in Dutch hospitals every year. A growing number of Dutch hospitals are adopting this approach.
Another common practice that’s ripe for improvement is the use of a certain plastic, called PVC, in hospital equipment such as blood bags, tubes and masks. Because of its toxic components, PVC is almost never recycled in the U.S., but University of Michigan researchers Danielle Fagnani and Anne McNeil have discovered a chemical process that can break it down into material that could be incorporated back into production. This could be a step toward a circular economy “that accounts for resource inputs and emissions throughout a product’s life cycle, including extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transport, use and reuse, and disposal,” as medical experts have proposed. “It’s a failure of humanity to have created these amazing materials which have improved our lives in many ways, but at the same time to be so shortsighted that we didn’t think about what to do with the waste,” McNeil said in a press release.
Susanne Koch puts it more succinctly: “What’s the point if we save patients while killing the planet?”
