Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast · Alex Shirazi

Isha Datar of New Harvest (NH@20)

·1 hr 7 min

1. Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast marks New Harvest’s 20th birthday with Isha Datar and a reference to the Cultured Meat Symposium returning to the San Francisco Bay Area on September 12th and 13th, 2024. 2. Alex hosts Isha Datar, New Harvest’s executive director, and she matters because she joined the organization in 2013 and later helped define its direction. 3. The episode asks what New Harvest has become after 20 years and why its work now reaches beyond a narrow cultured-meat frame. 4. Datar says New Harvest was incorporated in 2004 by Jason Matheny and Vladimir Mironov to advance “in vitro meat” and the idea of growing food from cells. 5. She traces her own entry to a 2008 or 2009 meat science class, where a professor’s discussion made her think meat could be grown from cells. 6. She says she later worked in policy and public affairs at GlaxoSmithKline after the H1N1 virus and vaccine manufactured by GSK. 7. Datar describes hating that pharma job after about three months and checking the New Harvest website repeatedly while it was still “a one page website with links on it.” 8. She recounts an online conversation, possibly with Nick Genovese, where someone told her, “why don’t you just apply?” for the executive director role. 9. She says a TEDx Toronto slot in 2012, a substitution for Andrew Hessel’s canceled talk, and Jason’s interview in Washington, DC all lined up so her TED talk went live the morning of the interview. 10. Datar frames New Harvest as a nonprofit and a “field building organization” supported by “over a thousand donors,” many of them monthly donors giving one to a couple hundred dollars a month. 11. She says the organization has tried to name and shape the field by calling it cellular agriculture, even while recognizing that the term remains “wishy-washy” beside precision fermentation and cultured meat. 12. Datar says New Harvest is increasingly thinking in terms of “biomanufacturing,” “bioprocessing,” and “value-added agriculture” rather than only pharma-scale biotech. 13. She states that New Harvest stays focused on food rather than health, because food-grade facilities and food-grade research are the most neglected parts of the space. 14. She describes an early culture built on “we need to make something happen,” followed by a shift toward “less hype more scientific basis” as the field started to emerge. 15. Datar says New Harvest tries to be facilitative rather than top-down, helping other people do the work while staying “on your own” enough to handle ambiguity. 16. She tells a story about a 2018 Boston livestream, a newly created Future Food Show Twitter account, and a “jerry-rigged” setup that helped people tune in remotely. 17. She says one of the most important achievements was helping convene academic researchers in Europe and the Netherlands and supporting early work such as Hana Tuomisto’s first life-cycle assessment of cultured meat. 18. Datar says New Harvest funded 60 researchers at 37 institutions in nine countries, produced more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, and helped create a safety publication built from input from 87 individuals at 50 competing cultured-meat companies. 19. The conversation is interview-based, reflective, and detailed, with Datar mixing institutional history, personal memory, and concrete examples. 20. People interested in cellular agriculture, research funding, and field building would likely want this; listeners seeking a short, purely technical update might skip it.

As heard by us

A 20-year marker that makes cellular agriculture feel less abstract.

New Harvest's 20-year marker gives the episode a clear shape. Isha Dattar looks back at the nonprofit early years, the Facebook-group phase, and the point where building community started to look like the actual job.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story behind New Harvest turning 20 and how the cellular agriculture field got organized.

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