Man Who Is Shaping Our Food Of The Future

A cardiologist from the US might just change the way we consume food in the future.

- Anjuly Mathai

For two months, when Dr Uma Valeti was studying medicine at JIPMER in Puducherry, he had to run the college cafeteria with two of his friends. One day, when he went to the market to buy meat, he witnessed for the first time industrialised meat production. He decided then that he would become a vegetarian, even though he hailed from a meat-eating family and had always loved its taste. He ate meat again more than 20 years later. But this time, it was ‘clean meat’ produced in his research space in San Francisco using the stem cells of animals. “I had forgotten how meat tasted,” he says. “Now, I don’t miss it anymore because we are producing it.”

Clean or cultured meat is a revolutionary concept that might, in future, radically change the way you eat. At Memphis Meats, the company that Valeti cofounded in 2015, the meat is produced by identifying high quality animal cells that are self-renewing. Then, the cells are fed nutrients similar to what farm animals consume. The cells ultimately develop into three-dimensional tissues in three to five weeks. This is not as easy as it sounds. Cells are the building blocks of the meat we eat and the company has spent years learning to produce the taste, texture and mouthfeel that consumers expect from conventional meat.