I found Air Protein online after hearing “fake” meat — specifically air-grown meat — was highlighted at the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum, and I think it’s a total scam.
Image grabbed from AirPortein.com
I’m a little skeptical of a new, innovative startup. I’m positive this is because I binged watched Inventing Anna (the story of Anna Sorokin) and The Dropout (the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos) in the span of a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love to give people the benefit of the doubt and arguably, I do this too often — but today, I am weary of the company called “Air Protein.”
I found Air Protein online after hearing “fake” meat — specifically air-grown meat — was highlighted at the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum. Air Protein Founder and CEO Lisa Dyson presented to the forum’s crowd alongside Beyond Meat Founder, CEO, and President Ethan Brown and addressed “Alternative Protein’s Inflection Point.” Per the Wall Street Journal, this presentation focused in on the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on alternative protein.
“Driven by concerns about health and the environment, investors and consumers have poured money into alternatives to animal-based proteins in recent years. During the pandemic, though, some companies in the sector have been challenged by weaker demand. Can the alt-meat trend catch on globally?” the Journal penned as the presentation’s overview.
First and foremost, let’s address the fact that alternative proteins were a hot topic at WSJ’s forum in the first place. Am I surprised? No. Am I disappointed? Also no, surprisingly.
I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again: if it takes fake meat to feed starving children, I’m all for it — what I am not for, however, is supporting companies who blatantly discredit animal agriculture and falsify research to support their “ag is evil” claims. It doesn’t so much bother me that alternative proteins were discussed at the Forum, they should be, they’re technological advances in the food system. It DOES bother me that Ethan Brown was a headline-speaker as he is on the record saying he wants to abolish animal ag. At the moment, I can’t find any out-of-line, animal-ag condemning quotes from Lisa Dyson online. In fact, I can barely find anything about Dyson online, which makes me suspicious.
Based on my research, Dyson has a immaculate educational pedigree: PhD in Physics from MIT; MS in Physics and a Fulbright Scholar from the University of London; on projects in Bioengineering and Physics at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of California, San Francisco, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.
Dyson wanted to “find a way to feed us sustainably” after working as a volunteer in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and seeing the devastation caused by such a natural disaster, ultimately leading her to fight for climate change, thus Air Protein was born.
According to airprotein.com, Air Protein is made in a simple fermentation process and is comparable to the way yogurt, cheese, and wine are made. The protein that the cultures produce is harvested and purified, then dried to remove water and culinary techniques are applied to said flour to create textures and flavors to mimic traditional meat. Read more about this at airprotein.com.
“We have reimagined and are redesigning how meat can be made - delicious, nutritionally advanced, and guilt-free. Air Protein is creating the most sustainable meat on the planet. This is the future of meat,” the website boasts.
All of that sounds well and good; I mean, who wouldn’t want to get behind this? Feeding the world out of thin air sounds pretty great. However, just as I can’t find much information online about Lisa Dyson, I can’t find much about air meat either — in fact, Google Scholar has ZERO published research papers on this subject.
Isn’t that funny? Something so groundbreaking; something so food-system changing; something so remarkable in science, and not a single shred of research turns up to support this earth-shattering discovery?
AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE AIR-GROWN CAKE: Lisa Dyson sports a plain, black turtleneck in her headshot on the Air Protein website, much like infamous scammer Elizabeth Holmes. Is this enough to deem Dyson a scammer as well? No, but in my opinion, it’s a hilarious coincidence.
I hope I’m wrong, but as of July 2022, I firmly believe Air Protein is the next big scam. I mean, if Dyson is hitching her wagon to Ethan Brown, a man notorious for referencing false ag statistics, as well as not producing solid, reliable, public research to back up Air Protein, I don’t know how it CAN’T be a scam.
But what do I know? I’m just a journalist who’s *maybe* watched a little too much TV lately but dedicated her entire professional career to sharing agriculture’s truth and is more than capable of doing a simple Google search to find research to backup too-good-to-be-true claims.
I guess I’ll just stick to being curious…