Cows are easy to love. Their eyes are a liquid brown, their noses inquisitive, their udders homely; small children thrill to their moo.
Most people like them even better dead. Americans eat three hamburgers a week, so serving beef at your cookout is as patriotic as buying a gun. When progressive Democrats proposed a Green New Deal, earlier this year, leading Republicans labelled it a plot to “take away your hamburgers.” The former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka characterized this plunder as “what Stalin dreamt about,” and Trump himself accused the Green New Deal of proposing to “permanently eliminate” cows. In fact, of course, its authors were merely advocating a sensible reduction in meat eating. Who would want to take away your hamburgers and eliminate cows?
Well, Pat Brown does, and pronto. A sixty-five-year-old emeritus professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, Brown is the founder and C.E.O. of Impossible Foods. By developing plant-based beef, chicken, pork, lamb, dairy, and fish, he intends to wipe out all animal agriculture and deep-sea fishing by 2035. His first product, the Impossible Burger, made chiefly of soy and potato proteins and coconut and sunflower oils, is now in seventeen thousand restaurants. When we met, he arrived not in Silicon Valley’s obligatory silver Tesla but in an orange Chevy Bolt that resembled a crouching troll. He emerged wearing a T-shirt depicting a cow with a red slash through it, and immediately declared, “The use of animals in food production is by far the most destructive technology on earth. We see our mission as the last chance to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.”
Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.
Brown began paying attention to this planetary overdraft during the late two-thousands, even as his lab was publishing on topics ranging from ovarian-cancer detection to how babies acquire their gut microbiome. In 2008, he had lunch with Michael Eisen, a geneticist and a computational scientist. Over rice bowls, Brown asked, “What’s the biggest problem we could work on?”
“Climate change,” Eisen said. Duh.
“And what’s the biggest thing we could do to affect it?” Brown said, a glint in his eye. Eisen threw out a few trendy notions: biofuels, a carbon tax. “Unh-unh,” Brown said. “It’s cows!”
When the world’s one and a half billion beef and dairy cows ruminate, the microbes in their bathtub-size stomachs generate methane as a by-product. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. emissions. (In the popular imagination, the culprit is cow farts, but it’s mostly cow burps.) Steven Chu, a former Secretary of Energy who often gives talks on climate change, tells audiences that if cows were a country their emissions “would be greater than all of the E.U., and behind only China and America.” Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.
“So how do we do it?” Eisen asked.
“Legal economic sabotage!” Brown said. He understood that the facts didn’t compel people as strongly as their craving for meat, and that shame was counterproductive. So he’d use the power of the free market to disseminate a better, cheaper replacement. And, because sixty per cent of America’s beef gets ground up, he’d start with burgers.
A lean marathon runner with the air of a wading stork, Brown was an unlikely food entrepreneur. His older brother, Jim, said, “The idea of Pat running a company was a real surprise. The mission had always been gene mapping and finding cures for aids and cancer.” Brown, a vegan who ate his last burger in 1976, had never spared a thought to food, considering it “just stuff to shove in your mouth.” Free-rangingly curious, he lacked a C.E.O.’s veal-penned focus. “Pat gave some of the best science talks I’ve ever seen,” Eisen told me, “and also some of the worst, because the slides wouldn’t match after he started talking about something different from what he had planned.”
The existing plant-based armory was unpromising; veggie burgers went down like a dull sermon. But, Brown reasoned, this was because they were designed for the wrong audience—vegetarians, the five per cent of the population who had accustomed themselves to the pallid satisfactions of bean sprouts and quinoa. “The other veggie-burger companies were just trying to be as good as the next plant-based replacement for meat, which meant they were making something no meat lover would ever put in his mouth,” Brown said. To get meat-eaters to love meat made from plants, he had to resolve a scientific question, one that he decided was the most important in the world: What makes meat so delicious?
Brown assembled a team of scientists, who approached simulating a hamburger as if it were the Apollo program. They made their burger sustainable: the Impossible Burger requires eighty-seven per cent less water and ninety-six per cent less land than a cowburger, and its production generates eighty-nine per cent less G.H.G. emissions. They made it nutritionally equal to or superior to beef. And they made it look, smell, and taste very different from the customary veggie replacement. Impossible’s breakthrough involves a molecule called heme, which the company produces in tanks of genetically modified yeast. Heme helps an Impossible Burger remain pink in the middle as it cooks, and it replicates how heme in cow muscle catalyzes the conversion of simple nutrients into the molecules that give beef its yeasty, bloody, savory flavor. To my palate, at least, the Impossible Burger still lacks a beef burger’s amplitude, that crisp initial crunch followed by shreds of beef falling apart on your tongue. But, in taste tests, half the respondents can’t distinguish Impossible’s patty from a Safeway burger.
Eighteen months ago, White Castle, the nation’s oldest burger chain, started selling the Impossible Slider, and sales exceeded expectations by more than thirty per cent. Lisa Ingram, White Castle’s C.E.O., said, “We’ve often had customers return to the counter to say, ‘You gave us the wrong order, the real burger.’ ” In August, Burger King rolled out the Impossible Whopper in all of its seventy-two hundred locations. Fernando Machado, the company’s chief marketing officer, said, “Burger King skews male and older, but Impossible brings in young people and women, and puts us in a different spectrum of quality, freshness, and health.”
Ninety-five per cent of those who buy the Impossible Burger are meat-eaters. The radio host Glenn Beck, who breeds cattle when he’s not leading the “They’re taking away your hamburgers!” caucus, recently tried the Impossible Burger on his show, in a blind taste test against a beef burger—and guessed wrong. “That is insane!” he marvelled. “I could go vegan
Meat producers don’t seem too worried that Brown will rid the earth of livestock by 2035. The three largest meatpacking companies in America have combined annual revenues of more than two hundred billion dollars. Mark Dopp, a senior executive at the North American Meat Institute, a lobbying group, told me, “I just don’t think it’s possible to wipe out animal agriculture in sixteen years. The tentacles that flow from the meat industry—the leather and the pharmaceuticals made from its by-products, the millions of jobs in America, the infrastructure—I don’t see that being displaced over even fifty years.”
A number of alternative-protein entrepreneurs share Brown’s mission but believe he’s going about it the wrong way. The plant-based producer Beyond Meat is in fifty-three thousand outlets, including Carl’s Jr., A&W, and Dunkin’, and has a foothold in some fifty countries. Its I.P.O., in May, was the most successful offering of the year, with the stock up more than five hundred per cent; though the company is losing money, investors have noticed that sales of plant-based meat in restaurants nearly quadrupled last year. While Impossible depends on the patented ingredient heme, Beyond builds its burgers and sausages without genetically modified components, touting that approach as healthier. Ethan Brown, Beyond’s founder and C.E.O. (and no relation to Pat Brown), told me, jocularly, “I have an agreement with my staff that if I have a heart attack they have to make it look like an accident.”
Several dozen other startups have taken an entirely different approach: growing meat from animal cells. Yet even Pat Brown’s competitors often end up following his lead. Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless Foods, a startup working on cell-based bluefin tuna, said, “Pat and Impossible made it seem like there’s a real industry here. He stopped using the words ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ and set the rules for the industry: ‘If our product can’t compete on regular metrics like taste, price, convenience, and nutrition, then all we’re doing is virtue signalling for rich people.’ And he incorporated biotechnology in a way that’s interesting to meat-eaters—Pat made alternative meat sexy.”
What’s striking about Brown is his aggression. He is a David eager to head-butt Goliath. “If you could do two things of equal value for the world, and in one of them someone is trying to stop you, I would do that one,” he told me. Brown doesn’t care that plant-based meat amounts to less than 0.1 per cent of the $1.7-trillion global market for meat, fish, and dairy, or that meat contributes to the livelihoods of some 1.3 billion people. His motto, enshrined on the wall of Impossible’s office, is “Blast ahead!” During the six months that I was reporting this story, the company’s head count grew sixty per cent, to five hundred and fifty-two, and its total funding nearly doubled, to more than seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Brown laid out the math: to meet his 2035 goal, Impossible just has to double its production every year, on average, for the next 14.87 years. This means that it has to scale up more than thirty thousandfold. When I observed that no company has ever grown anywhere near that fast for that long, he shrugged and said, “We will be the most impactful company in the history of the world.”
America’s first commercial mock meat came out of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, in Michigan, at the turn of the twentieth century. The sanitarium was run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a member of the vegetarian Seventh-day Adventist Church, who proselytized for sexual abstinence and made his eponymous cornflakes superbly bland, hoping that their ingestion would dampen lust. When Kellogg began to sell cans of Protose, an insipid mixture of nuts and gluten, he claimed that it “resembles potted veal or chicken”—meat in general, rather than any specific one.
In the seventies and eighties, soy burgers developed by MorningStar Farms and Gardenburger epitomized a peaceful life style, indicating that “no animals were harmed in the making of this patty.” In 2001, Bruce Friedrich, who ran vegan campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, led a “Murder King” protest, trying to get Burger King to change its ways. The chain tweaked its animal-welfare policies, but kept on selling beef. Friedrich, who is now the executive director of the Good Food Institute, which advocates for meat replacements, told me, “If you’re asking fast-food restaurants to pay more to compete, and to use a veggie burger that isn’t very good, that’s a colossal fail.”
In the past decade, venture capitalists have begun funding companies that view animal meat not as inflammatory, or as emblematic of the Man, but as a problematic technology. For one thing, it’s dangerous. Eating meat increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer; a recent Finnish study found that, across a twenty-two-year span, devoted meat-eaters were twenty-three per cent more likely to die. Because antibiotics are routinely mixed into pig and cattle and poultry feed to protect and fatten the animals, animal ag promotes antibiotic resistance, which is projected to cause ten million deaths a year by 2050. And avian and swine flus, the most likely vectors of the next pandemic, pass easily to humans, including via the aerosolized feces widely present in slaughterhouses. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found fecal matter in sixty-nine per cent of pork and ninety-two per cent of poultry; Consumer Reports found it in a hundred per cent of ground beef.
For another thing, meat is wildly inefficient. Because cattle use their feed not only to grow muscle but also to grow bones and a tail and to trot around and to think their mysterious thoughts, their energy-conversion efficiency—the number of calories their meat contains compared with the number they take in to make it—is a woeful one per cent.
It’s easy enough to replicate some animal products (egg whites are basically just nine proteins and water), but mimicking cooked ground beef is a real undertaking. Broadly speaking, a burger is sixty per cent water, twenty-five per cent protein, and fifteen per cent fat, but, broadly speaking, if you assembled forty-two litres of water you’d be sixty per cent of the way to a human being. Cooked beef contains at least four thousand different molecules, of which about a hundred contribute to its aroma and flavor and two dozen contribute to its appearance and texture. When you heat plant parts, they get softer, or they wilt. When you heat a burger, its amino acids react with simple sugars and unsaturated fats to form flavor compounds. The proteins also change shape to form protein gels and insoluble protein aggregates—chewy bits—as the patty browns and its juices caramelize. This transformation gives cooked meat its nuanced complexity: its yummy umami.
Mimicking these qualities was the task Pat Brown undertook in 2011, when he decided, after organizing a workshop on animal agriculture that accomplished nothing, that he’d have to solve the problem himself. He worked up a pitch, then bicycled down the road from Stanford to three venture-capital firms. His pitch had everything V.C.s like to fund: a huge market, a novel way to attack it, and a passionate founder who already talked the talk. Brown’s habit of referring to “the technology that provides us with meat” made plant burgers sound like an iterative efficiency rather than like a threat to a beloved way of life. All he was doing was disintermediating the cow.
Impossible ended up taking three million dollars in seed funding from Khosla Ventures. Then Brown started hiring scientists, most of whom had no food expertise. His wife, Sue Klapholz, who trained as a psychiatrist and worked as a geneticist, became the company’s nutritionist. “I had been making jewelry and doing nature photography, having this great retirement,” she told me, still surprised by this turn in their lives. No one quite knew what they were doing, including Brown, who’d announce projects such as “We need every single plant-based ingredient in the world. Go!”
For alternative-protein companies, the first challenge is often producing a protein that’s utterly tasteless. A flavor packet can then make it delicious. A startup called Spira, for instance, is attempting to develop algae called spirulina as a food source. “The problem is that it’s a slimy goop,” Surjan Singh, the company’s C.T.O., told me. “And when you dry it and powderize it, it tends to biodegrade, so it tastes terrible. We’re hoping to break even, eventually, where we can extract a protein isolate that’s really good for you, but that tastes like as close to nothing as possible.”
Impossible’s first prototype burgers contained the “off-flavors” characteristic of their foundational protein, soy or wheat or pea. (Pea protein is sometimes said to evoke cat urine.) So the company’s scientists had to learn how to erase those flavors, even as they were learning the subtleties of the aroma and taste they were trying to emulate.
One morning in Impossible’s lab, Brown showed me a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer, which is used to identify the molecules that appear in meat as it’s cooked and to link those molecules to odors. “Some poor schmuck has their nose stuck in here for forty-five minutes,” Brown said, indicating a plastic nose mold that protruded from the machine. “You have to bunny-sniff at a very high rate, often trying to characterize molecules you’ve never smelled before.” He looked at a handwritten list from the last assay: “You might say, ‘We’ve got to get rid of “Band-Aid,” or “skunk,” or “diaper pail” ’—but don’t judge, because all of those together make up ‘burger taste.’ ”
Most veggie burgers are formed by an extruder, a machine that operates like a big pressure cooker, using heat and compression to replicate meat’s fibrous morphology. Brown suspected that the key to a truly meaty plant burger was an ingredient. He had a hunch about heme, an iron-carrying molecule in hemoglobin (which makes your blood red), whose structure is similar to that of chlorophyll (which enables plants to photosynthesize). David Botstein, a geneticist who sat on Impossible’s board, told me, “If you understand biochemistry, you understand that heme, more than anything else, is a central molecule of animal and plant life.” As Brown was beginning to experiment, he pulled up clover from behind his house and dissected its root nodules, to see if there was enough heme inside to make them pink. (There was.)
In Impossible’s microbiology lab, Brown told me, “An interesting, extremely speculative idea is that there’s an evolutionary advantage to human beings in seeking out heme. It’s a cue that means ‘There’s a dense source of protein and iron nearby.’ ” The first time that Impossible made a burger with heme, he said, “it tasted like meat, and within six months we had compelling evidence that it was the magic ingredient that gives meat its flavor.”
Even those sympathetic to Brown’s mission fret that taste and mouthfeel won’t matter if the desire for meat is hardwired by evolution. Maple Leaf Foods, a Canadian company, is building a three-hundred-million-dollar facility in Indiana to make alternative proteins. But its C.E.O., Michael McCain, told me, “The human body has been consuming animal protein for a hundred and fifty thousand years, and I honestly think that’s going to continue for a really long time.”
Climate change, which now drives our hunt for meat substitutes, originally drove hominids to turn to meat, about two and a half million years ago, by making our usual herbivorean foodstuffs scarce. Eating animals added so much nutrition to our diets that we no longer had to spend all our time foraging, and we developed smaller stomachs and larger brains. Some scientists believe that this transformation created a powerful instinctive craving. Hanna Tuomisto, a Finnish professor of agricultural science, recently wrote, “This evolutionary predilection explains why eating meat provides more satisfaction compared to plant-based food and why so many people find it difficult to adopt a vegetarian diet.”
An inborn meat hunger remains a hypothesis; meat is the object of many human urges, including the urge to construct all-encompassing theories. In the book “Meathooked,” Marta Zaraska writes, “We crave meat because it stands for wealth and for power over other humans and nature. We relish meat because history has taught us to think of vegetarians as weaklings, weirdos, and prudes.” The anthropologist Nick Fiddes goes further, declaring, in “Meat: A Natural Symbol,” that we value meat not in spite of the fact that it requires killing animals but because it does. It’s the killing that establishes us as kings of the jungle.
Ethan Brown, of Beyond Meat, suspects that nibbling plant patties doesn’t exude the same macho vibe. A bearded, gregarious, six-foot-five man who played basketball at Connecticut College, he has retained a squad of athlete “ambassadors” to help dispel that perception. When I visited Ethan at the company’s offices, in El Segundo, California, he pointed me to a 2009 study of Ivory Coast chimpanzees which suggested that males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success. “Men usually give women the meat first, at dinner, before the sex—you want to be a protein provider,” he said. “Do you think if you take a woman out and buy her a salad you get the same reaction?”
It’s worth noting that the Neanderthals, who subsisted almost entirely on meat, were outcompeted by our omnivorous ancestors. In any case, Ethan told me, meat no longer serves its original purpose, and “we can use the expanded brain that meat gave us to get us off of it.” Like many alternative-protein entrepreneurs, he is a vegan; when he taste-tests Beyond’s burgers, he occasionally chews a beef burger to orient his palate, then spits it out and wipes his tongue with a napkin. He has a potbellied pig named Wilbur at home that knows how to open the refrigerator: “Wilbur lives in our house to teach my kids that, from the perspective of science, the moral circle is poorly defined.”