Cheryl Martinez: Veginner Cooking

"If we fast forward, let's say to 2025, I think you're going to see a lot of companies in the marketplace using mushroom-based products to create alternatives to things like meat and chicken and within food. And then also alternatives within textiles to things like silk, leather and packaging for things like Styrofoam and plastic and so on. So, I'm very much a… what do you call it? Maybe, a fungo fanatic. I don't know if there's a phrase for that, but I am totally a believer in all things fungi." -Michael Pellman Rowland Michael Pellman Rowland is a financial advisor. He's made many appearances on Species Unite - this was his fourth time coming on the show. He and I spoke about the Oatley IPO - amongst many other enormous wins in the plant, cell, and mushroom-based worlds. Swedish vegan company, Oatly went public on May 20th. The company's initial public offering (IPO) raised $1.4 billion and its share prices (which were initially set at $17 per share) spiked by 30 percent on the first day of trading. This is the second milestone for plant-based companies going public, after Beyond Meat a few years ago. The future of food is already here and fortunately, it's happening much faster than many predicted. Michael is our go-to guru when it comes to the big wins for meat and dairy alternatives. He's a wealth of knowledge and information and he's a stellar human being. I learned a ton in this conversation, I hope that you do too.

3 Kesä 202142min

"During the time he was on the run, Stark did this Facebook live where he railed against the judges, officials, animal rights, activists. He claimed that together, all of these people had conspired to deny him the right to own and breed exotic animals. He taunted law enforcement. He waved a hand grenade in front of his phone. Keep in mind, he's driving down the highway during this hour-long Facebook live. And he was also saying that he was willing to die for what he believed in." – Sharon Guynup Sharon Guynup is a journalist, author and a National Geographic Explorer. Her most recent article in National Geographic, 'Tiger King' stars' legal woes could transform cub-petting industry, focuses on the five stars of the docu-series, The Tiger King and what's happened to them since the show premiered last March. Sharon's been on the podcast before, the last time was a couple of months before the pandemic and before the Tiger King took over the world. She and her partner, photographer, Steve Winter had spent two years investigating tigers in the United States, for a 30 page piece called, The Tiger Next Door, for December 2019's issue of National Geographic. It involves the criminal underworld, wildlife trafficking, murder, and thousands of captive tigers living sad pathetic lives all over the USA. America has a serious problem with captive wildlife, and what we've done to tigers is cruel, dangerous, and absolutely unnecessary. Since then, and since the Tiger King, much has changed, not only for tigers in the US, but for the majority of the stars of the show. Most of them are either in court, prison, or have had their animals seized or are dealing with a combination of all three. Sharon is a hero for tigers. She has been reporting on them for years, mostly tigers in the wild, until 2016, when her investigation into the famed Thai Tiger Temple for National Geographic published strong allegations of illegal wildlife trade, causing Thai officials to confiscate the 147 tigers living at the temple and shut the operation down. From there, she moved onto to the tiger disaster in the US. Every time one of these owners of roadside zoos and tiger petting attractions go down, the future looks better for tigers, but it's not over. There are ways to combat the crisis right now. The first is to not participate in any wildlife tourism that includes selfies with wildlife or any type of handling of wild animals, and the second is to get behind and support The Big Cat Safety Act.

26 Touko 202140min

"There isn't going to be chicken farming on the moon or on Mars, but there could be cellular agriculture. And, so if people are going to eat meat in space, it's going to be produced like this…" – Michael Selden Michael Selden is the CEO and co-founder of Finless Foods, the world's first cellular agriculture company. Meaning they make fish without the fish and without the mercury, plastic, herbicides, ocean habitat destruction and cruelty. Finless Foods grows fish and other seafood products from cells. In 2017 they produced the first fish ever that was grown outside of a fish and eaten. Since then, they have produced 13 other types of fish, including bluefin tuna - with the goal to make bluefin that's healthier, better tasting, more affordable, more sustainable, much more ethical and will allow the bluefin to stay in the ocean and not go extinct. The goings on at Finless are astonishing. They are creating the future of seafood, and it's a future that will be better for the animals, for the planet and for all of us.

20 Touko 202134min

"I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has; and then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn't to say being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers. I think we're a little ways off from doing that, but boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures. And of course, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs… It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, were we kind of get to use them sort of, for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals." – Alexandra Horowitz If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She's spent much of her life researching and writing about what it's like to be a dog. She is the #1 New York times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves, Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking. She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. I wish this conversation had lasted all day long as I had about 5 thousand more questions for Alexandra - mostly, everything I've ever wanted to ask my dog. Although, the time we did have together was pretty amazing and felt like an absolute gift.

13 Touko 202142min

"…there's this disconnect between our beliefs and our behavior and part of what can be useful for overcoming that is to change the behavior first, which sounds really counterintuitive." - Jo Anderson Jo Anderson is the Research Director at Faunalytics, an organization that empower animal advocates with access to research, analysis, strategies, and messages that maximize their effectiveness to reduce animal suffering. Jo is an advocate for animals and empirical research. For over ten years, Jo has investigated key social psychological issues such as persuasion, judgment, and decision-making, exploring how these concepts can be used to make the world a better place for humans and animals. That is what happens at Faunalytics, they do the research and enable real change. I learned a lot from Jo – mostly, that research changes the story and so often, reveals that the opposite of what seems obvious is in fact the truth.

6 Touko 202129min

"We see 84% of moms in the U S convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms express extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children. And, we continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways on parents wanting to do what's best for their child, but really not having better options and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child." Michelle Egger Michelle Egger is a food scientist and the CEO and co-founder of BIOMILQ, a woman-owned, science-led, mother-centered startup that is creating human breast milk in a lab, by culturing mammary cells. This has the potential for disrupting the infant formula industry forever; and will give families a more nutritious option for feeding their babies. Michelle founded BIOMILQ with cell biologist Lelia Strickland in January 2020, and soon after they received $3.5 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' investment firm. I'm beyond excited that BIOMILQ exists. They are creating a revolutionary product that will one day be on grocery store shelves across the world. It will be a game changer for mothers who struggle with breastfeeding, for the planet and for a whole lot of cows.

29 Huhti 202133min

"…gazing up to the night sky saying, 'are we alone?' …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet… there's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with, if we can." - Jonathan Balcombe Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is the author of four books on the inner lives of animals, including the New York Times bestseller, What a Fish Knows. He has published over 60 scientific papers and book chapters on animal behavior and animal protection. Jonathan has spent his life studying animals, how they think and feel and why they matter. Quite often, he focuses on the ones that most of us tend not to think about very much, like fish and in his newest book, Super Fly, flies – it comes out in May. I thought I knew a little bit about fish, but after reading Jonathan's book and after this time spent with him, I realized that I knew very little. There are 33,000 species of fish and what many of them are capable of is absolutely mind blowing . For eons, we have categorized species by who we deem worthy and who we don't. Fish are almost always very near or at the bottom of that list. Clearly, that is because most of us know so little about them. Jonathan knows a lot. If you haven't read his book, read it. It will astonish you. Jonathan can most recently be seen in the Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy.

22 Huhti 202140min

"A friend of mine in Germany is called Dr. Tofu. He was the first who did tofu on a commercial scale, in the eighties. They arrested him… for cooking something suspicious… He was arrested a couple of times. So, when it started in Nigeria and we opened the first vegan restaurant and there were also no vegetarian restaurants, people were saying, that's crazy. Why do you do that? But I knew kind of that time was on our side. - Hakeem Jimo Hakeem Jimo is the co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria's first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju also founded V Café, Nigeria's first vegan restaurant in 2013. V Café is in Lagos and serves veganized Nigerian culinary delicacies to vegans, meat eaters and everyone in between. A few years after opening the restaurant, Hakeem and Bola began producing VChunks, a seitan-based meat alternative that was created to pair beautifully with most Nigerian cuisine. VChunks are dehydrated so that they can be kept on shelves for months and do not need refrigeration, which is not an option for many in parts of Nigeria. Hakeem is Nigerian-German, was born and raised in Germany and has lived in West Africa for the past 27 years. Before becoming a vegan food and tech entrepreneur, he worked in journalism and public relations.

15 Huhti 202137min