I was reporting an article on synthetic biology when I heard a story about artificial ice. We were in the tasting kitchen at Wildtype, a San Francisco startup that grows sushi-grade salmon from stem cells. A sushi chef had prepared several different samples for me to taste – the dishes tasted like salmon sushi, because that’s what they were – and we were discussing why consumers might prefer vat-grown cultivated salmon to the kind that comes with blood and guts.
'This is the cleanest salmon you will ever have in your life', boasted company co-founder Aryé Elfenbein. Vat-grown salmon contains no mercury, no arsenic, no microplastics, no parasites – nothing but fish cells. The precisely controlled environment of the cell culture ensures that the raw salmon is free of contaminants. Wild or farmed fish intended as sushi, by contrast, must be frozen to kill parasites. Nature isn’t clean.
Wildtype’s salmon is pure because it’s artificial, I suggested. Elfenbein bristled, preferring to emphasize transparency. The company can provide much more labeling information than you usually get on fish, he suggested, citing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids. But when you’re dealing with animals, I responded, every fish is different. To label their contents you’d have to test each individual salmon. Here, you control what’s in the fish. It’s that artifice that makes labeling possible. 'So maybe there’s less variability in this process', Elfenbein acknowledged.
That’s when Dalton Thomas, a sushi chef who works as a food service sales lead for Wildtype, brought up artificial ice. He’d heard the story in How We Got to Now, a TV series based on Steven Johnson’s book by that name. An ice baron who’d made a fortune shipping ice south from lakes and streams in New England found his business threatened when technology was developed to freeze water commercially around 1850. So he sowed fear of “artificial ice,” hurting the new technology’s prospect. I watched the episode on Amazon and, sure enough, Bernard Nagengast from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and AC Engineers told the story just as Thomas remembered it.
'They saw a threat to their business by a machine that could actually make the ice,” he said. “And of course, they were the ones who came up with the term ‘artificial ice.’ In other words, fake ice. It’s not real ice'. The ice industry even claimed that artificial ice was likely to carry disease. As Johnson writes, “It was a classic case of a dominant industry disparaging a much more powerful new technology.” Unable to raise money, inventor John Gorrie died broke, without selling any of his refrigeration machines.