Frankenfood | The Mistakes Series

Summary

Revisionist History: "Frankenfood" | The Mistakes Series (June 25, 2026)

Episode Overview

In the final installment of The Mistakes Series, Malcolm Gladwell and producer Ben Nadifafrey revisit a turning point in food innovation: the failed public acceptance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the looming risk that lab-grown (now "cultivated") meat might repeat the same communication blunders. Through interviews with industry insiders at Matson—the food industry’s go-to R&D lab—the episode explores the power of words, public perception, and storytelling in shaping the future of what we eat. Ultimately, it’s about whether "cultivated meat" can avoid being branded as the next "Frankenfood."

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origin and Mission at Matson (Food Science Lab)

• [01:28] Malcolm sends producer Ben Nadifaffrey to Matson, the Bay Area food innovation lab, because it's one of Gladwell’s "favorite places in America." It's an epicenter for developing new food products, many of which line grocery shelves across the country.
  • Malcolm: "My diet is basically Matson." [02:48]
  • Ben describes Matson’s walls as a walk through food history, lined with familiar products, some under NDA.

2. The Two Mistakes: GMOs and Lab-Grown Meat

Ben frames the episode as revolving around two parallel mistakes:

• The 1990s misbranding of GMOs ("Frankenfood").
• The current risk of repeating that pattern with what was being called "lab-grown meat."

First Mistake: The GMO Tomato and "Frankenfood"

A. The Innovation

• In the late 1990s/early 2000s, Zeneca (now AstraZeneca) brought Matson a genetically modified tomato—the "Flavor Saver"—meant to solve tomato shipping/harvesting issues. [10:42]
  • Steve Gundrum: "It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing." [10:42]

B. Societal Fears and Language

• There was immediate public suspicion; GMO sounded like "science fiction" to most people in 1994. [12:58–13:58]
• The term "Frankenfood" was coined (initially by a Boston College professor, picked up by The New York Times) and became a "banner that nobody could really get past." [16:30]
  • Ben: "If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches, and head to the castle." [16:46]
• Positive analogies (like comparing it to apple grafting) could not overcome the negative associations created by language and media.

C. Backlash and Market Effects

• Despite good initial sales, the negative narrative prevailed—sales of GMO tomatoes plummeted, ultimately disappearing from the market. [18:52–19:28]
• Even decades later, "non-GMO" is a badge of pride on food packaging, even for products consumers never questioned.

3. The Second Mistake: Naming "Lab-Grown Meat"

The Technology

• In 2018, Matson’s Barbara Stuckey is at a conference where cultured or "lab-grown" meat is first being demoed.
  • Barbara: "It just seemed like magic. It just felt like something's happening here." [06:56]
  • Ben notes the major upsides: environmental, ethical (no animal suffering), and practical.

The Communication Crisis

• The raw images (petri dish meat) and names ("lab-grown meat," "cell-based meat") triggered instinctive disgust and fear. [08:21–08:45]

  • Barbara: "I kept hearing these terms, cell based meat, lab grown meat. And it just...I was so horrified by the language." [08:45]

• Barbara identifies the parallels with the GMO fiasco—"we're about to do it again": If they don’t fix the messaging now, public opinion could doom the technology before it starts.

The Naming Process

• Matson conducts brainstorming—suggestions range from the unappetizing ("Slaughter-free propagated minimalist agriculture") to the abstract ("Nanopastured meat") to the eventual winner: "cultivated meat." [24:03–25:15]

  • Malcolm: "Minimalist meat" is his favorite, for how it "captures the kind of virtue of this."

• Discussion on what makes for a good food term:

  • Must avoid making the innovation too explicit ("lab-grown" foregrounds the sci-fi aspect).
  • Should evoke normalcy, tradition, and even sophistication. ("Cultivated" suggests both growth and refinement.)

• Ben: "Cultivated meat, I think, is obscuring that in an—you know, it signals that it's different, it's not misrepresenting, but it's also not like throwing the petri dish in your face, which is kind of crucial..." [26:40]

The Broader Cultural/Political Reaction

• Pushback against cultivated meat is already political; some states (Florida, Alabama) have banned it, and opposition overlaps with other culture war topics. [23:11–23:36]
  • Barbara: "The Venn diagram of people who are anti-abortion are going to be anti cultivated meat, too." [23:36]

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On public skepticism and language:

  • Steve Gundrum: "Words are very powerful. And for whatever reason, I think it was a hard stop." [20:36]
  • Barbara Stuckey: "I think that we need to work on the naming and the communication around this technology. That if we don't do it now and we don't explain it right and we don't bring the consumer along from the beginning, we're going to end up like GMOs." [08:45]

• On public perception and sci-fi horror:

  • Ben: "The flavor savor tomato is 1994. Jurassic Park comes out in 1993. So ... it's like dinosaurs who are going to eat you alive." [13:58]
  • Malcolm: "It has the appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign...There's a huge category of sci-fi movies that are just about this thing." [18:43]

• On the psychology of food naming:

  • Malcolm: "Nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made. That the sausage becomes less appetizing if you know how it gets made." [26:22]
  • Ben: "Cultivated meat, I think, is...not misrepresenting, but it's also not like throwing the petri dish in your face, which I think is kind of crucial." [26:40]

---

Experiencing Cultivated Meat (Ben’s Tasting at Upside Foods)

• [27:59–30:44] Ben visits Upside Foods in Emeryville, CA, where he tastes cultivated chicken, prepared as a samosa and a fried chicken sandwich.
  • Erin Santee (Upside Foods): "People ask us all the time, what does it taste like? ... The most common thing someone says after they try it... It tastes like chicken. And we say, funny thing that, because it is chicken." [28:52]
  • Ben: "It tasted exactly like normal chicken. Granted, they have a very excellent chef on staff, but...if I didn't know the whole story, I would have had no questions." [30:16]

---

Future and Takeaways

• Upside Foods and the Industry Approach:

  • Focused on getting cultivated meat into restaurants first, to let tasting experience lead the adoption.
  • Cultivated meat avoids antibiotics, salmonella, and can potentially be made healthier (e.g., low-cholesterol beef). [31:49–31:53]

• The Stakes of Storytelling:

  • The outcome for cultivated meat rests on avoiding GMO’s communication failures: “Can we get the story right? Can we get the communication right?” [32:20]
  • Malcolm: "I am so down for this. I wish Barb every good luck in her campaign. And I, for one, will be lining up to have my cultivated steak." [32:27]

---

Notable Timestamps

• 01:28 — Ben's introduction to Matson, mission context.
• 06:12–08:45 — Barbara Stuckey at cultivated meat conference, initial public reaction.
• 10:42–19:28 — The GMO tomato case study, focus groups, "Frankenfood" backlash.
• 22:16–27:14 — Naming process: from "lab-grown" to "cultivated" meat.
• 27:59–31:43 — Ben visits Upside Foods, tastes cultivated chicken, industry perspective.
• 32:27–32:38 — Final takeaways and Gladwell's endorsement.

---

Conclusion

"Frankenfood" is a vivid exploration of how public perceptions around food innovation are shaped (and warped) by language, history, and cultural anxieties. By interweaving the story of GMO tomatoes with the present debate over cultivated meat, Gladwell and his team warn listeners: getting the narrative wrong can doom even the most beneficial technology. The hope is that with a better story—and a better name—cultivated meat can offer a second chance at changing the future of food.

Transcript

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We spend hours deciding what to buy. But there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally and the benefit of purchase and seller protection, all of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends. With trust built for payments growth and agentic PayPal open built for all business, visit PayPalOpen.com purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions. Only terms apply. See paypal.com risk management for details.

[Tony Ayo]

This is Tony Ayo from the Real Report with Tony Ayo and Uncle Murder. You ever notice how everything keeps going up? Rent, streaming, even extra Sosa at your favorite burrito spot? But with Boost Mobile, you don't have to play the Willis go up soon game. Boost Mobile offers offers an unlimited talk, text and data plan at a price that'll never go up. It's the same price you'll pay for Life. Switch now for unlimited wireless at a price that'll never go up. Only at boost mobile. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So I, I went to California at your behest.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Did I wish.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

First of all, I know you wish that you had been there yourself because this is your favorite place.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This one really hurt. And I'm.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

We should just say where we're talking about.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Okay, so I sent you Ben on a mission because I couldn't go because my wife would leave me if I took one more trip, basically. And so with a heavy heart, I handed the reins to one of my favorite places in America, which is the Food Lab at Matson. Mattson is like Mattson's like the R and D. If you, if you're a food company in America and you want to do something new or cool, you maybe you try it in your own lab. But mostly what you do is you pick up the phone and you call Matson out in the Bay Area and you say, can you make me? And fill in the blanks. The most delicious potato chip that also prices, you know, is priced under X.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Or they've got like the walls. The walls are lined with like a pantry shelf of just like every product you've ever had and enjoyed. And like, they're like Franzias on there. It's just like all the hits, things that I can't even mention because they're NDA'd are on the walls.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, my God. It's like if you walk through a grocery store after going to Madsen, you're like, oh, that's Matson. Oh, that's Matson. Oh. And you realize my diet is basically Mattson.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

I interviewed two people out there who, you know, of course, from other Revisionist history episodes. Steve Gundrum, their chief AI Officer, who was, at the time of our first mistake, the CEO and knows everything about why we like what we do.

[Steve Gundrum]

And carrot cake became a phenomena at first because of the airlines.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And Barbara Stuckey, their chief new Product strategy officer, who's an old hand on revisionist and is just a font of amazing tales from the Matson archives.

[Barbara Stuckey]

In the case of this, the challenge was if you've ever opened a pomegranate, it's not exactly. You can't squeeze the pomegranate like, I. I've rare you.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I've really met someone who is clearly so psyched to go to work every morning. Do you get that sense of her? She's.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

She was so pumped. It was. I found it so, so delightful. She's so excited and like a. And a true believer in. In this amazing sense and what they do.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I want. I wanted to take my. When they're old enough, take my two daughters out to the Bay Area, and I want Barb to do a version of take your daughter to work day, only we take my daughters to work day, and I want my daughters to observe what it means to be psyched about your job. So I sent you out there. Now, why, Ben, you tell us what was. Why did I send you out there?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So you sent me out there because you had reached out to Barb about a mistake that has loomed very large over the entire food industry that she wanted to tell us about. And so the story is basically Barb, who's more excited than anyone you've ever met, to go to work every day, is going to work in 2018, 2018, 2019 area, and is at a conference where she comes face to face with the future of the food industry and then realizes that the food industry is about to commit Harry Cary on a. On a much broader scale than even McDonald's, and she has to try and stop it. And so it is the story of two mistakes. The first one, a mistake that we made in the 90s, and the second one, a mistake that Barb is trying to stop us from making today. Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Nadifafry, and in this, our final episode of the mistake Series, Malcolm sends me out to California to the pantheon of food science, the hallowed halls of Matson. It's a place you may remember from way back in. Season two, episode nine, McDonald's broke my heart all about McDonald's french fries. But my mission wasn't as greasy. I was sent to Madsen for a more cultivated reason. Okay, so our story begins in 2018. Barb's at this conference for an amazing new technology that everyone's calling Lab Grown Meat. And she starts to get this pit in her stomach.

[Barbara Stuckey]

It was really the year where this technology was starting to happen and companies were figuring out how they were going to isolate the cells that they wanted to use to make the type of meat that they wanted to use. And it was just mind blowing. So the idea here is very simple. It is to be able to make meat by using cells of meat to make more meat. And that idea just. To me, it was just brilliance.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And also, no animals will suffer. And there's not factory farming. Things like this.

[Barbara Stuckey]

You won't have so many things that we don't have to worry about anymore. It can be done inside. So it just seemed. It seemed like magic. It just felt like something's happening here.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

This would be, like, huge for me because my wife is an ethical vegetarian, and if I could tell her that there was nothing killed in producing meat that we were eating, I would suddenly be eating meat again at home, which would be thrilling.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Steak would return today.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Steak would return, and not just when Julia's out. Um, but there's like. There are all sorts of. There are all sorts of potential upsides to this technology, and Barb's just sitting there thinking about them.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's like 10 different environmental reasons why

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

we would want to.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Cattle farming is one of the single greatest contributors to global warming. It sucks up enormous amounts of water.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Methane emissions.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Methane emissions. But you could. You could make a case that replacing the cattle industry with something that comes out of a lab would be one of the single biggest things we could do in favor of, Of. Of the environment. I mean, there's no.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

There's like, there's obviously there's like, runoff to. Runoff from cattle farms, fertilizer. I mean, so there's. There are all these, like, huge upsides. And Barb, who's, you know, the person who's most excited to go to work, is just thrilled about this. However, there was a problem.

[Barbara Stuckey]

It started with an image. And I'm going to show you the image.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So we're looking at a petri dish of what looks like A perfectly round patty of raw ground beef.

[Barbara Stuckey]

Yes. And to me, having it in a petri dish, not good, not at all appealing, delicious or anything I want to put in my body.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And already, like, raw meat is not something I see and think not super appealing.

[Barbara Stuckey]

So sexy. So I sat through the conference and it was probably three or four days and I kept hearing these terms, cell based meat, lab grown meat. And it just. I was so horrified by the language that I grabbed the executive director and I just, you know, pulled on his jacket and I said, can we talk? I think that we need to work on the naming and the communication around this technology. That if we don't do it now and we don't explain it right and we don't bring the consumer along from the beginning, we're going to end up like GMOs, and nobody's going to want to use GMOs in their formulations and consumers are not going to want to eat it and we're going to lose this possibility of progress in terms of feeding the world. I have tasted meat made this way and I was shocked at how much

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

it tastes like real meat, but it's not. No one's going to get there if it's called lab grown meat.

[Barbara Stuckey]

Exactly.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Going to end up like GMOs, which is our first mistake. That's after the break. So the first mistake, we had to talk to Steve, who was the CEO at the time. And it starts in the 1990s, late 90s, early 2000s, when a company called Zeneca, now known as AstraZeneca, so of the COVID vaccine fame, approaches Matson and says, we have created a genetically modified tomato and we need your help. We're here to talk about the story of the tomato. I mean, what, what. Why did the. Why did this GMO tomato exist? What problem? What problem was it solving?

[Steve Gundrum]

It was all about harvesting and transportation and processing.

[Tony Ayo]

So

[Steve Gundrum]

tomatoes by their very nature are delicate. So the most optimum tomatoes for the hedonics and the organoleptics and how it tastes and, you know, all those criteria were very difficult to harvest economically because you had.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

If you let it ripen on the vine, you had too long. It was a very short window in which you could ship it or if. And it was easier to puncture.

[Steve Gundrum]

Yes, exactly. They became delicate, they were harder to harvest.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Basically. It's like tomatoes are a really difficult crop because if you pick them ripe, then they're very soft. You have lower yields because you're using these huge combines to harvest them. And so you're likely to lose a lot of tomatoes, which then drives up the price of the tomatoes that you do ship. And then you're shipping these ripened tomatoes, which means they have a very short time to get to wherever they're going to be sold and then used. So the way they would handle this. There are a few ways people handled this, but one way was that you would literally pick a tomato green, ship it green because it was firmer and not yet ripe, and then gas it with ethylene gas before it hit the market shelves, which gave it the sort of red look that you expect from a tomato. So it was like, overall, a suboptimal situation for tomato lovers. And GMOs, which are genetically modified organisms, first developed to make human insulin, and then in 1994, it's applied to foodstuffs. And the first thing that gets approved by the FDA is a tomato. It's called the Flavor Saver tomato, which is basically trying to solve this basic problem of how you, like, pick and ship tomatoes. So there's an. This is one of those first GMO products that Zeneca brings to Matson. And what they're asking Matson to do is not develop the tomato, which they've designed basically with the end use of purees, soups, things like that, but basically solve this crucial problem of GMOs, which is how do you get consumers on board? How do you get people to, like, buy into this thing?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's funny because I was in the early 90s covering the FDA for the NIH, for the Washington Post. So I was writing about all these early things in that period, and I feel like the. It was. There was predictable. It was predictable in the sense that there was always going to be people suspicious of. Of genetic modification on all levels. Right. Because it was so new back then. I mean, uterus, and it's now we've had 30 years of this, but in 94, it was like science fiction. That's the sort of problem they're grappling with, that. I mean, people don't even. Can't even really wrap their mind around what it means to genetically modify something. And so I feel like the backlash has shifted over time. But the initial backlash, a lot of the initial backlash is simply a kind of mystification.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Well, there's also. I was. I was thinking about the flavor savor. Tomato is 1994. Jurassic park comes out in 1993. So it's like if you have a cultural reference point for what the scientists are doing, it's like dinosaurs who are going to eat you alive. You're kind of like, we're not supposed to be doing that. Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It fits in with, you know, there's a kind of moral element which we don't see as much today, that we should not be disrupting God's creation in this way.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So Steve talks about this, actually. They begin to bring people in to actually encounter the tomato, the zenica tomato, and study how they respond to it in these focus groups. Would people try the tomato? Do you recall how people would react when they tasted it?

[Steve Gundrum]

Yeah, yeah. This is a great tomato. I remember especially cutting them open there. There was one thing, you know, people handle them. And so you.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

You put a tomato in front of a consumer and you say, one of these is genetically modified.

[Steve Gundrum]

No, not that way. You just start talking about how are they grown, where are they grown? Are they good for you? What makes a bad tomato? What makes a good tomato? You kind of build up to the aha moment. You do a slow reveal. You know, what if the best pasta sauce you ever had was made with a hybrid tomato that had never been grown before? You kind of start off with baby

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

steps, and then you're like, this is a tomato.

[Steve Gundrum]

This is a new hybrid tomato. Then we just kept going deeper and deeper into the story until we found the point where they pushed back that, okay, now you've crossed a line.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Where was that?

[Steve Gundrum]

You've got scientists who are not just breeding. These aren't agronomists and agricultural specialists. This is like stuff in the lab where you're modifying the seed genetically. I mean, these were words that were not, um. Genetics was not a common word back then. The word modified organism sounded like, I remember consumer science sounded like bugs, you know, or bacteria or mole. You know, there were all kinds of three words.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Genetically modified organism.

[Steve Gundrum]

And you had like a nuclear frankenfood, right? It came from professor at Boston College and then got picked up by the New York Times and end up in an op ed and off it went.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Lewis wrote, quote, if they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches, and head to the castle. Steve basically finds that everybody has already been freaked out by the name genetically modified organisms, and they call it Frankenfood. And so, like, what they try to do at Mattson is come up with a story that says, like, this is not really that different than what we've already done for centuries. Like, think about the way we make apples by grafting parts of one apple tree onto another apple tree. And they come up with these analogies. And the thing is like, it just, it doesn't really stick because they've got this name, GMOs, that hangs over everything. And he even talks about how people just shorten the acronym, like pronounced it by the acronym, like they called them GMOs. And it was like this banner that nobody could really get past. And what the banner meant to people is science is involved in this. There's like some sort of like hubris. We're treading in a place where we shouldn't tread. Like what they were eating may look and taste like a tomato, but it's, it's just like in some fundamental way, it's not.

[Steve Gundrum]

There was some kind of line. What they wanted to be sure was that what they were still eating was truly a tomato, that it somehow was not so synthetically bred that it kind of crossed the line that it was no longer truly a tomato, but some kind of red delicious fruit.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's a zombie.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

It's a zombie tomato.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, it is, it is. They have attached one of the most kind of elemental, dystopian human fantasies.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Right, right. This thing looks like what I'm familiar with, but actually, yes, it has the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

appearance of normalcy, but inside there is something foreign. And I mean every, you know, there's a huge category of sci fi movies that are just about this thing.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Yes. Everyone's worried that they made the zombie tomato. And I think basically it's like, however good the analogy is, it's like Zeneca's tomato loses out. Like at one point it has a 60 something percent, it sells way better than like the average tomato puree in UK supermarkets. And then after some of the backlash to the flavor saver tomato, Zeneca like vastly loses market share. It plummets. And now you can't get Zeneca GMO tomato on the market. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons, but like a big one is that there's this huge resistance to GMOs. Frankenfood, GMOs.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Wait, so when I buy tomatoes in the, in the supermarket today, are none of them gmo?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

I don't think that none of them are gmo, but I suspect that the vast majority are not gmo, which honestly I get. I think if you gave me a choice, I would prefer a naturally occurring tomato, which is not something I'm proud of. But there is something about the intensity of the anti GMO thing that I relate less to. This morning I opened up my morning yogurt and when I opened the lid on the lid, it says, made from milk from non GMO cows. It's like. And it's sort of like screaming this thing at me that I like. It was a question. I wasn't even asking. I was just like, oh. Or I had. I had, like, I made my friend mutter paneer the other night, and I used this. These, like, this chili spice I had, and it says, like, non GMO chili. And I was like, that's. It didn't even occur to me that this might be GMO Chile. It's become this rallying cry where whatever Matson wanted to happen, whatever Zeneca wanted to happen with the way people would respond to GMOs, the exact opposite happened. And it's because I think, like, they never could change the name.

[Steve Gundrum]

The first time I heard Frankenfood, I was like, okay, this is bad. Words are very powerful. And for whatever reason, I think it was a hard stop.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So all of this brings us to our second mistake, the one that Barb is trying to stop us from making again, which is, it's 2018. She goes to this conference, and it's all about this thing called lab grown meat. And she's sitting there getting all excited about this technology and. And then hearing this word thrown around, and she's just like, oh, no, we're about to do it again.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Whiplash.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Whiplash. Maybe this is a. This is a good time for a commercial break.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Okay, we'll be right back.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

All right, so back with Barb at the Lab Grown Meat conference. And she keeps hearing these names for it. Lab grown meat Cell based meat. And she's like, it's happening again. So how did you go about trying to solve this problem? Because you basically, let's not make the GMO mistake twice.

[Barbara Stuckey]

That's right. It was really a rallying cry for everyone on the team.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Imagine if it were lab grown organisms.

[Barbara Stuckey]

That makes my stomach not so happy.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So she starts doing the Matson thing. She gets a bunch of people together in a room, she starts testing. How do you feel about this? What do you think? How does it look to you?

[Barbara Stuckey]

It was one of my friends that I was trying to explain the technology to her, and she said, oh, no, I don't think God wants us to eat that.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Interesting.

[Barbara Stuckey]

Yes. One of my friends, I don't even know how to explain it, but it did occur to me that there could be some very different opinions. And turns out that even to this day, there is a very political skew for whether or not you're interested in this kind Of a product.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Florida in fact has banned this product and Alabama and.

[Barbara Stuckey]

Yes. So yeah, but it's now become a political issue. So it was like a religious thing

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

that has become political somehow in a weird way, it's like it plays in the cluster of neurons that has something to do with abortion also. Like there's like in vitro is a word that applies to both of these, to, to the gray areas of both of these universes.

[Barbara Stuckey]

I would say, you know, the, the Venn diagram of people who are anti abortion are going to be anti cultivated meat too.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

That's really interesting. Anti lab grown mean.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So what does she do? Does she have a term that she wants to use?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

She gets these people together to start thinking about the story and what name can emerge from the story. Some were better than others.

[Barbara Stuckey]

Okay, well, here's.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

I'm sorry, Nanopastured meat got five votes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What?

[Barbara Stuckey]

Unbounded meat, Slaughter free propagated minimalist agriculture. I don't remember these celebration. No, no, definitely not.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

You know, we went through this huge list of names. I think she had something like a hundred. And it is a really hard problem to solve. Like what to name this thing. Because the whole challenge is you have to come up with a new name for a thing that doesn't foreground the fact that this is a new thing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And, and, and, and there's just this, that paradox inherent in the project. Right. So then, so then the question is meet, like what is, how do you package it such that it's not like they're lying to me. This was grown in a lab. You're like, this is slightly different, but they do land on this one name. That splits the difference, I think pretty well. Do you remember when you hit on the one that you landed on?

[Barbara Stuckey]

We had a short list and I think once we got to the shortlist, it seemed like a no brainer.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And what was it?

[Barbara Stuckey]

And that was cultivated meat.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

How does that name strike you?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, on the list of names that she was considering, the one I liked the most was minimalist meat.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Because it's the claim about, it's more about, it's foregrounding the benefits and also

[Malcolm Gladwell]

it's capturing the kind of virtue of this, which is this is meat that's leaving a much smaller footprint on everything. And minimalists suggest a kind of clarity and elegance and simplicity in the way it's produced. I mean, the bit about cattle farming is insanely messy and convoluted. I don't know. I like that, but I'm not, you know, I would be I'm not, I'm not the typical consumer here. I'm, I was already pro this before I even needed a new name.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Same. Yeah, But I think, like, minimalist, I would all. I like Minimalist. I like cultivated.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You like cultivated?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

I like cultivated.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, I like it. Well, there is a lovely play on a cultivated person as a sophisticated, you know, as a kind of person of elegance.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Well, and I think also, like, there's, there's the old truism about lawmaking and food, you know, how the sausage gets made. The lesson of which is that nobody, Nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made. That the sausage becomes less appetizing if you know how it gets made.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And so there's something like genetically modified organism really spells out how the sausage gets made. Lab grown meat spells out how the sausage gets made. Cultivated meat, I think, is obscuring that in an. You know, it signals that it's different. It's not misrepresenting, but it's also not like throwing the petri dish in your face, which I think is kind of crucial, because at the end of the day, people basically don't want to know a lot about how their food gets to them. But that is why she's trying to change the name.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Exactly.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Because it's, it's like, can you obscure. Is there a way to, like, hide the words that make it clear that this is an innovation and not just, like, the way things should be?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

She's absolutely right.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And I agree. I remember being really excited and being like, I can't wait to try that. Um, and so, obviously, because Matson has the necessary connections, I went to try it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, you tried it?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

I tried it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, my God. I didn't know that. And now I feel even more bummed about letting you go.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So I did. I, I, I, I had to try. I had to try. Lab grown meat. Sorry, Cultivated meat, Ben.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Cultivated meat.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

So the, I would say the cultivated meat industry is somewhat downtrodden these days, but there are still people doing this and figuring out how to scale it. And, and the big one is a place called Upside Foods. So they are conveniently located in Emeryville, so also in the Bay Area. And I went there, and they have these, like, huge tanks. I think they're like stainless steel tanks, basically, on, on an industrial floor. And in these tanks, they are using cells taken from a chicken egg years ago to brew cultivate this meat at scale. Chicken and chicken in this case. And so I met with a woman there named Erin Santee, vice president of PR and Communications at Upside Foods.

[Erin Santee]

Honestly, I think the number one thing to me is tasting is believing. Right? People ask us all the time, what does it taste like? And the most common thing someone says after they try it, we'll see. I'm preempting this before you try it.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

It tastes like chicken.

[Erin Santee]

Tastes like chicken. And we say, funny thing that, because it is chicken. Right? And I think that's a big part of it. I mean, at the end of the day, what we do and the innovation that has led to us being able to do this has tons of science and technology at its core. But ultimately, we make food. It's something you eat. And so what better way to have you connect with that than have the opportunity to try it?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So you go in there and they prepare in front of you. They take their meat, and it looks just like chicken.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Tell me. Tell me what I'm looking at.

[Erin Santee]

Yes. Okay, so we have a little appetizer, which is a butter chicken samosa, and then this is a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Both look like the normal version of the product.

[Erin Santee]

And it's got a little mint chutney on top.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Okay. That is delicious.

[Erin Santee]

Did I call it? Does it taste like chicken?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

That is seriously delicious. It's really good.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Mm.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

It was incredible. It tasted exactly like normal chicken. Granted, they have a very excellent chef on staff, but if. If you had not told me, if I were not in this pristine, futuristic place where they're making this thing, if I didn't know the whole story, I would have had no questions. I. I would not have wondered, was this chicken produced differently than the chicken I get at a fast food place that comes from God knows where?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Or what did the people at Upside say about the name in question? What do they call it?

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

They call it cultivated meat.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So Barb has won the day.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Barb was able to basically get, like, a coalition of people together through the people who are hosting that conference and, like, get a lot of buy in from the people in this space to, like, use this term, cultivated meat. And so we'll see what happens in the future if they. If that can actually. That plus the storytelling around it can actually overcome people's anxieties. But to me, I think, like, what Upside seemed committed to is the idea that, like, tasting is believing that where they want to start here is not in packaged goods that you get off the shelf, but basically like with restaurants. So you will go to a restaurant, you'll try this, you'll know you're trying something different, and you'll have the experience that I had, which is like, okay, this is like, it's, it's quite good. And, and like, in no way does it taste different to me.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Do they think they'll be safer? Do you get. Do you get salmonella outbreaks? And there's no antibiotics, obviously in it.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

You don't get salmonella outbreaks from, from cultivated meat.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And, and in fact, there are, like, in the future, you could imagine things like low cholesterol beef. So if you, like, for, if your doctor says, like, cut down your cholesterol if you want to keep eating beef, like, there are ways to handle this process such that you make a healthier piece of meat. So they're now doing this at scale, a greater scale than they've ever done before. And then it'll be a question of can we get the story right? Can we get the communication right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

And I think cultivated meat, we'll see. But at least it's an attempt to not make the same mistake twice.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I am so down for this. I wish Barb every good luck in her campaign. And I. I for one, will be lining up to have my cultivated steak.

[Ben Nadifaffrey]

Yeah. Let's just hope that when that steak hits the market, there's a name in this story that makes you want to eat it. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Verde Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Angeli Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo d'. Oliveira. Special thanks to Justin Shimek. I'm Ben Nadifaffrey.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of purchase and seller protection. All of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments growth and agentic PayPal open built for all business, visit PayPalOpen.com purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions. Only terms apply. See paypal.com risk management for details.