Featuring one of the more eye-rolling puns in recent memory, Liz Marshall’s clean-meat documentary “Meat the Future’‘ plays out both as a swift introduction to the growing industry of cultivated meat and a feature-length advertisement for Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) and its founder/CEO Dr. Uma Valeti. Despite such a compelling subject, the film is ultimately more interested in championing Valeti’s start-up then turning a critical eye on the practicalities, or lack thereof, of clean-meat production. This Jane Goodall-narrated, Moby-produced doc is too often embedded within Valeti’s point of view, unwilling to zoom out and show the larger clean-meat movement and the roadblocks that come with such a call to radically rethink our food supply.
Beginning in 2016 as Valeti, a former Mayo Clinic cardiologist, attempts to bootstrap his company, Marshall’s film — through Goodall’s narration — succinctly introduces the movement towards clean meat, or meat derived from animal cells. As meat consumption rapidly grows, with predictions doubling by 2050, Valeti’s company feels that it can offset growing production with their clean meat. The film begins as Valeti and his company create and cook an animal-free meatball. From there, Memphis Meats attracted investors including Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Cargill, and even Tyson foods, leading to an influx of cash and almost meteoric expansion as the company moved into creating clean chicken, beef, and even duck.
“Meat the Future” is almost wholly attached to Memphis Meats, and Valeti. Introducing the venture capitalists, scientists, and cooks who help run the company, Marshall moves from year to year as they perfect their growth process, and slowly get their price-per-pound — an indicator of how affordable this type of product is for consumers — down. The film takes a few detours, rapidly exploring the relationship between meat consumption, wealth inequality, and climate change within the span of a few minutes, before jumping back to Memphis. Further, Goodall’s narration hammers home the central thesis that our consumption practices are unsustainable, but even her voice-over disappears after the first few minutes.
Instead, Marshall is seemingly enamored with Valeti and his company. Such adulation isn’t a bad thing, especially considering how compelling a presence Valeti is and the possibility for complete and total change within an ingrained industry. But it also limits the scope of film considerably. When Valeti shows up to a sustainable food conference, and we are finally introduced to others within the field — including discussions about the so-called ‘father of clean-meat’ Mark Post — one wonders why we aren’t given proper historical background into cultured-meat production. “Meat the Future” is less about the clean-meat movement and more about how a single company is attempting to act as a disrupter to the food industry.
Despite beginning in 2016, if you haven’t heard of Valeti, or his now-named Upside Foods, that wouldn’t exactly be surprising, as clean-meat is still not sold within the United States. Despite the mass amounts of money put into Upside Foods, the price per pound is still unaffordable. Questions of when, or even if, clean-meat can ever come to market — and solve the production issues this documentary brings up — are important, but almost wholly ignored by “Meat the Future.” Instead of diving into the granular issues that come with such change, we are given platitudes about how this industry can forever alter our food supply chain, without a critical eye towards how that change can come about.
What Marshall is less interested in is explaining the challenges that come with a movement towards cultivated meat. The film shows the cattle-ranching and meat-packing industry lobbying against labeling this type of cultivated food as ‘meat,’ a distinction that Valeti, and his team, aggressively push against with the FDA and USDA. While this is an understandable semantic argument, the film also reduces ranchers to people who are unwilling or unable to see the possibilities of scientific innovation. When a rancher gets up to speak at a co-sponsored FDA/USDA meeting, pleading for some type of middle ground — or even an explanation about how cultured meat works — the film, and its protagonists, falls back on us vs. them distinctions.
The growth of the clean-meat industry and its possibilities are fascinating, as ethical questions about the distinctions between animal-derived meat and cultured-meat can, and should, be discussed. Further, what Upside Foods is attempting is nothing less than a complete and total disruption of a deep-rooted system. Unfortunately, as its title implies, “Meat the Future” is more glorified advertisement than deep-dive into the clean-meat movement. [C]