Praise cheeses: AI-generated grub is now on the menu

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First, AI came for the writers. Then it came for the artists, musicians, coders, and filmmakers. 

Now it's coming for the cows.

The next time you bite into a delicious vegan cheeseburger and think, I swear I just heard this thing go 'Moo,' you can thank AI for fooling your taste buds.

Let's start with the cheese. Climax Foods in Berkeley, California, has been using AI to explore different combinations of plants to mimic the taste, smell, texture, and overall gooeyness of brie, feta, chevre, and blue cheeses. And the cheesemaker has gotten pretty damned good at it. So good, in fact, that its cheeses are on the menu in Michelin star restaurants.

Just last week, Climax Blue Cheese was on the verge of winning the top award at a prestigious food contest — besting its bovine-based competition — only to have the prize snatched away at the last possible moment, after an anonymous informant lodged a complaint about one of the ingredients used by Climax. Washington Post food reporter Emily Heil wrote about the controversy here. 

This week, the foundation quietly removed the Climax Blue from the list of finalists on its website but didn’t make public what had disqualified the cheese....  Climax CEO Oliver Zahn accused the foundation of caving to pressure from dairy cheesemakers in revoking the award. And then he spilled the curds: Climax, it turns out, wasn’t just a finalist — it was set to win the award. 

As Heil notes, Climax winning the Good Foods Award could have been the equivalent of the 1976 Judgement of Paris — when California wines defeated their French forebears in a blind taste competition, forever altering the perception of American wines and creating what is now an $88 billion industry [1]. The deeply suspicious way this went down suggests the dairy industry is pretty nervous about competing against lab-grown foods. You might even say they're a bit cheesed off. [2]

Blessed are the cheesemakers

Climax Foods founder Oliver Zahn is literally a rocket scientist. In a previous life, the Bavarian-born astrophysicist was one of the top data scientists at Google and SpaceX. So he and his team bring that kind of scientific rigor to experimenting with different ingredients.

MIT Technology Review writer Andrew Rosenblum recently detailed how Climax manages to reverse-engineer the taste and texture of cheese in its food science lab. 

It starts with running 'real' cheese through a range of sophisticated lab tests to generate a 'cheese model' — a blue cheese blueprint, if you will — the AI can use to identify plant substitutes with the necessary qualities.

There’s a machine that uses ion chromatography to show the precise balance of different acids after bacterial strains break down lactose. A mass spectrometer acts like an “electronic nose” to reveal which volatile compounds generate our olfactory response to food. A device called a rheometer tracks how a cheese responds to physical deformation; part of our response to cheese is based on how it reacts to slicing or chewing. The cheese data creates target baselines of performance that an AI can try to reach with different combinations of plant ingredients. 

Out of 100,000 possible plant combinations, the AI came up with an (almost) award-winning formula for blue cheese in a little less than three years – a few thousand years faster than if they'd done all of this experimentation by hand. The main ingredients: pumpkin seeds, coconut oil, lima beans, and hemp protein powder.

Ummm, delicious? [3]

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We have the (not) meat!

On the other side of the cheeseburger are companies like Chilean-based The Not Company (NotCo), which uses an AI engine named Giuseppe [4] to generate vegan formulas for milk [5], mayonnaise, ice cream, burgers, and chicken patties. NotCo supplies (not) meat alternatives for Burger King, Shake Shack, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, and Papa Johns. 

Probably the most impressive thing about NotCo, besides the big-name franchises it has signed on, is how rapidly its AI food development is accelerating. It took the company 18 months to unlock the secrets of NotMayo, but just two months to hatch a NotChicken.

Climax and NotCo are hardly the only two food-tech companies using machine learning to develop lab-grown products that taste like the real deal. Given the rapid acceleration of the AI models these companies and others are generating, I expect we are about to experience an explosion of plant-based meats and other animal-free food items you actually want to eat.

And that's a good thing. Regardless of how you feel about eating animals, it's terrible for the planet. Globally, farming generates a third of all greenhouse gases, with animal agriculture accounting for half of that amount. I love me a good burger, but I can see the end of widespread livestock farming coming. It's just too land, water, and energy intensive. 

All things being equal, I'd rather eat a lab-grown AI-generated Big Mac than one made from ground-up mealworms or Soylent Green. Your taste buds may vary.

Does the idea of eating insects bug you? Post your favorite vegan recipes in the comments below or email me: [email protected].

[1] Also the plotline for Bottle Shock, a highly entertaining 2008 film starring the late great Alan Rickman.

[2] Big Dairy is also extremely tetchy about calling the vegan version "cheese," just as it was about calling Soy/Almond/Oat extracts "milk." They lost that battle. I'm guessing they'll lose this one too.

[3] I hate the taste of blue cheese, so I'm very curious to see whether I'd dislike the Climax vegan version as much as I despise the real deal.

[4] Giuseppe is named for 16th century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who composed portraits of people composed entirely of fruits and vegetables, and not (sadly) the minor character from Super Mario Bros known for saying "Too much? It's-a perfect! Wahoo!"

[5] Two of the key ingredients in NotMilk: Pineapple and cabbage juice concentrate. I know. WTF?