Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast · Alex Shirazi

Miguel Neumann of Eternal: Transforming The Future of Proteins

·33 min·1 clip

Miguel says Eternal is a research powerhouse trying to replace more than half of today’s production with biology.

1. Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast features Miguel Neumann discussing Eternal’s MycoFood and the future of protein. 2. Miguel Neumann is Eternal’s interim CEO, and Alex hosts the Future Food Show while introducing the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion series. 3. The episode asks how Eternal can use fungi, fermentation, and biology to make food, materials, and even space-related products. 4. Miguel says he learned coding at age five, then moved through internet projects, a design agency, fintech, blockchain, biotechnology, and engineering. 5. He says he met Eternal founder Horacio five, six, or seven years earlier through a mutual friend before joining a project that became his first biotech role. 6. Eternal is described as a research powerhouse focused on real problems, and Miguel says more than half of what gets produced today could be replaced by biological processes. 7. He says Eternal’s first food product, MycoFood, uses advanced fermentation with sensors, optimization, strain selection, and quality control. 8. Miguel says the ingredient is designed so high-quality nutrition can be produced without dependence on arable land or abundant water. 9. He says Eternal is also testing the product for production in space, which he connects to resource scarcity on Earth. 10. Beyond food, Miguel says Eternal is working on materials, construction binders, insulation, adhesives, medical implants, dyes, and leather. 11. He says the company received Martian soil and lunar soil, or regolith, to test whether biological binders can support habitats on the Moon. 12. Miguel explains that “Myco” refers to mushroom and says “Mycoprotein” is incomplete because MycoFood includes fiber, healthy fats, and a full amino acid profile. 13. He says MycoFood can be used as a complete meal and even put into a protein shake without needing anything else for the day. 14. Miguel traces the company’s origin to the founder’s belief that nutrition in the first five years of life shapes cognitive capacity and poverty outcomes. 15. He says the founder found a fungi developed in Britain in the 1960s or 1970s and asked whether AI and other tools could make it cheap to produce. 16. Miguel says the team initially imagined growing the organism in a plant pot, then learned it had to be grown in bioreactors under specific conditions. 17. He says a line from Eternal’s site sums up the work: “think out of the box and inside a bioreactor.” 18. Miguel describes the tone as practical and reflective, with many technical explanations, side remarks, and a recurring focus on affordability. 19. People interested in alternative proteins, fermentation, and food security will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a quick celebrity-style interview or short entertainment segment may skip it.

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