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)
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, costing $182 billion per year, partly because its antiquated data systems often fail to identify people who should be released. A tech nonprofit is trying to change that.
Recidiviz has built a platform that connects the different databases, with the goal of identifying people who are already qualified for release but remain behind bars or on supervision. “Think of Recidiviz like Google Maps,” says Jacoby, who worked on Maps when she was at the tech giant. Google Maps takes in data from different sources – satellite images, street maps, local business data — and organizes it into one easy view. “Recidiviz does something similar with criminal justice data,” Jacoby explains, “making it easy to identify people eligible to come home or to move to less intensive levels of supervision.”
People like Jacoby’s uncle. His experience with incarceration is what inspired her passion for criminal justice reform in the first place.
The problems are vast
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world — 2 million people according to the watchdog group, Prison Policy Initiative — at a cost of $182 billion a year. The numbers could be a lot lower if not for an array of problems including inaccurate sentencing calculations, flawed algorithms and parole violations laws.
Sentencing miscalculations
To determine eligibility for release, the current system requires corrections officers to check 21 different requirements spread across five different databases for each of the 90 to 100 people under their supervision. These manual calculations are time prohibitive, says Jacoby, and fall victim to human error.
In addition, Recidiviz found that policies aimed at helping to reduce the prison population don’t always work correctly. A key example is time off for good behavior laws that allow inmates to earn one day off for every 30 days of good behavior. Some states' data systems are built to calculate time off as one day per month of good behavior, rather than per day. Over the course of a decade-long sentence, Jacoby says these miscalculations can lead to a huge discrepancy in the calculated release data and the actual release date.
Algorithms
Commercial algorithm-based software systems for risk assessment continue to be widely used in the criminal justice system, even though a 2018 study published in Science Advances exposed their limitations. After the study went viral, it took three years for the Justice Department to issue a report on their own flawed algorithms used to reduce the federal prison population as part of the 2018 First Step Act. The program, it was determined, overestimated the risk of putting inmates of color into early-release programs.
Despite its name, Recidiviz does not build these types of algorithms for predicting recidivism, or whether someone will commit another crime after being released from prison. Rather, Jacoby says the company’s "descriptive analytics” approach is specifically intended to weed out incarceration inequalities and avoid algorithmic pitfalls.
Parole violation laws
Research shows that 350,000 people a year — about a quarter of the total prison population — are sent back not because they’ve committed another crime, but because they’ve broken a specific rule of their probation. “Things that wouldn't send you or I to prison, but would send someone on parole,” such as crossing county lines or being in the presence of alcohol when they shouldn’t be, are inflating the prison population, says Jacoby.
It’s personal for the co-founder and CEO
“I grew up with an uncle who went into the prison system,” Jacoby says. At 19, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for a non-violent crime. A few months after being released from jail, he was sent back for a non-violent parole violation.
“For my family, the fact that one in four prison admissions are driven not by a crime but by someone who's broken a rule on probation and parole was really profound because that happened to my uncle,” Jacoby says. The experience led her to begin studying criminal justice in high school, then college. She continued her dive into how the criminal justice system works as part of her Passion Project while at Google, a program that allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time on pro-bono work. Two colleagues whose family members had also been stuck in the system joined her.
As part of the project, Jacoby interviewed hundreds of people involved in the criminal justice system. “Those on the right, those on the left, agreed that bad data was slowing down reform,” she says. Their research brought them to North Dakota where they began to understand the root of the problem. The corrections department is making “huge, consequential decisions every day [without] … the data,” Jacoby says. In a new video by Recidiviz not yet released, Jacoby recounts her exchange with the state’s director of corrections who told her, “‘It’s not that we have the data and we just don’t know how to make it public; we don’t have the information you think we have.'"
A mock-up (with fake data) of the types of dashboards and insights that Recidiviz provides to state governments.
Recidiviz
As a software engineer, Jacoby says the comment made no sense to her — until she witnessed it first-hand. “We spent a lot of time driving around in cars with corrections directors and parole officers watching them use these incredibly taxing, frankly terrible, old data systems,” Jacoby says.
As they weeded through thousands of files — some computerized, some on paper — they unearthed the consequences of bad data: Hundreds of people in prison well past their release date and thousands more whose release from parole was delayed because of minor paperwork issues. They found individuals stuck in parole because they hadn’t checked one last item off their eligibility list — like simply failing to provide their parole officer with a paystub. And, even when parolees advocated for themselves, the archaic system made it difficult for their parole officers to confirm their eligibility, so they remained in the system. Jacoby and her team also unpacked specific policies that drive racial disparities — such as fines and fees.
The Solution
It’s more than a trivial technical challenge to bring the incomplete, fragmented data onto a 21st century data platform. It takes months for Recidiviz to sift through a state’s information systems to connect databases “with the goal of tracking a person all the way through their journey and find out what’s working for 18- to 25-year-old men, what’s working for new mothers,” explains Jacoby in the video.
TED Talk: How bad data traps people in the U.S. justice system
TED Fellow Clementine Jacoby's TED Talk went live on Jan. 13. It describes how we can fix bad data in the criminal justice system, "bringing thousands of people home, reducing costs and improving public safety along the way."
Clementine Jacoby • TED2022
Ojmarrh Mitchell, an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, who is not involved with the company, says what Recidiviz is doing is “remarkable.” His perspective goes beyond academic analysis. In his pre-academic years, Mitchell was a probation officer, working within the framework of the “well known, but invisible” information sharing issues that plague criminal justice departments. The flexibility of Recidiviz’s approach is what makes it especially innovative, he says. “They identify the specific gaps in each jurisdiction and tailor a solution for that jurisdiction.”
On the downside, the process used by Recidiviz is “a bit opaque,” Mitchell says, with few details available on how Recidiviz designs its tools and tracks outcomes. By sharing more information about how its actions lead to progress in a given jurisdiction, Recidiviz could help reformers in other places figure out which programs have the best potential to work well.
The eleven states in which Recidiviz is working include California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. And a pilot program launched last year in Idaho, if scaled nationally, with could reduce the number of people in the criminal justice system by a quarter of a million people, Jacoby says. As part of the pilot, rather than relying on manual calculations, Recidiviz is equipping leaders and the probation officers with actionable information with a few clicks of an app that Recidiviz built.
Mitchell is disappointed that there’s even the need for Recidiviz. “This is a problem that government agencies have a responsibility to address,” he says. “But they haven’t.” For one company to come along and fill such a large gap is “remarkable.”
