【美国电台节目】你能分辨的出来人造肉吗？

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: I'm soglad you're here. I have so many questions. I guess the big one is, how do youmake meat without involving animals?

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Yes,I get it. It's sort of mind-bending. So let me just say from the start, whatthis is, is the idea that you don't have to grow meat inside an animal's body.You can actually take cells from an animal and grow their tissue outside theirbody. Now, let's just be clear. This is not the veggie burger. It's not theImpossible burger. This is completely different, OK? So this company wasfounded by Dr. Uma Valeti. He's a cardiologist. And about a decade ago, he toldme that he had kind of a eureka moment. He realized that it might be possibleto extract cells from an animal and grow meat directly from these cells. Now,he got this idea while he was working with heart attack patients at the MayoClinic.

UMA VALETI: We were workingon stem cells. We were taking stem cells from patients who had a very largeheart attack. We would isolate the types of cells that'll grow into heartmuscle, and I would re-inject them into the patient's heart again.

AUBREY: You know, he figuredif it was possible to use cells to help grow muscle in the human heart, itwould also be possible to use animal cells to grow meat.

VALETI: Once it got into myhead, it was nearly impossible to get it out.

AUBREY: Now, there were twobig motivations for him. He grew up eating meat. But during medical school, heworked at a campus dining hall, and he was sent to a slaughterhouse. And herecalls the smell and the scene of the production line.

VALETI: These were hundredsof chickens in minutes. They were literally moving past, like, at blazingspeed. And they would be hanging upside down with blood dripping everywhere.That was an image that was - like, it just stayed in my head.

AUBREY: So this really kindof bothered him. And the other big motivating factor for him was learning moreabout the environmental footprint of meat. It turns out that food production isresponsible for one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. And much of this islinked to animals. For instance, cattle create a lot of methane, a potentgreenhouse gas. There's also land use. There's water use. There's energy use.And a global panel of scientists has also concluded that it's going to benearly impossible to meet climate goals if agriculture doesn't change.

MARTIN: So did he end upleaving his career in medicine?

AUBREY: That's exactly whathe did. He started fundraising. He hired a bunch of scientists to really dig inand help him figure out how to do this. And there were lots of skeptics.

VALETI: Everybody thoughtthis was just science fiction.

AUBREY: But a decade later,he's actually producing the meat. The company is worth a billion dollars.

MARTIN: I mean, that is justunbelievable. Did you try it?

AUBREY: Yep. I tasted it.

MARTIN: So tell me, really. How doesit taste?

AUBREY: You know, chicken isa bit of a blank slate. So I kind of think it does depend on how it's prepared,how it's served. But really, what I think they've nailed here, Rachel, is thatwhen we eat meat, it's that texture that we really notice. It's like, do thelittle bits get stuck in your teeth? You know, is it that chewy texture we'reused to?

MARTIN: Yeah.

AUBREY: And that's where Ithink they've gotten really close.

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