Trinity Kubassek
If you love meat, keep reading.
If one of the things you love about it is knowing it comes from a slaughtered animal, feel free to stop.
You are still here! The folks at the Good Food Institute are banking on that.
In early September, the group held a Good Food Conference in Berkeley, California, bringing together the major players producing meat that is either plant-based or cell grown, so no slaughter necessary.
Pat Brown, maker of the impossibly trendy, entirely plant-based, Impossible Burger, told attendees to mark their calendars: By 2035, he predicted, all meat will be produced without slaughter.
By 2035 all meat will be produced without slaughter, predicts founder of Impossible Burger.
Impossible Foods, like its main competitor Beyond Meat, is creating plant-based burgers aimed at the meat-loving market. Both companies, founded by unrelated Browns, Pat and Ethan respectively, are mission based. They hope, in Pat Brown’s words, “to save the world from the biggest environmental catastrophe that it faces, which is the insanely destructive impact of the meat industry.”
Neither company is trying to make people into vegetarians or change their behavior in any significant way. They are working to reduce the destructive impact of the ingrained behavior.
Pat Brown says: “Give them meat, give them milk, just make it out of plants. Make it delicious and cheap and they will buy it.”
He has reason to be optimistic. The Impossible Burger has just been added at White Castles nationwide.
Driving to the Berkeley conference up California’s Highway 101, I stopped in Santa Barbara at a new hip pub on State Street called Finney’s. Every table sported a card enthusiastically promoting the plant-based Impossible burger. A number of people around me had ordered it. My carnivorous but veg-curious friend Charles gave it a try and said if he hadn’t known better he would have been fooled.
The Impossible Burger’s not-so-secret weapon is heme—the compound in blood’s hemoglobin. This is what gives meat its red color and, according to Impossible Foods, its meaty taste. The Impossible team has isolated heme from plants and added it to their burgers.
Diet guru Dean Ornish expressed his fear, based on three different meta-analyses, that heme may also impart meat’s downside, its correlation with colorectal cancer. But he conceded that the Impossible Burger is healthier than meat-based burgers. It omits the saturated fat linked to heart disease and the animal protein correlated with a wider range of cancers. Ornish asked the Impossible Food representatives if the use of heme could be reconsidered. The company’s director of research, Celeste Holz-Schietinger, responded by noting that heme is “the most bio-available iron, and essential to all forms of life.”
We are in a brave new world when plant-based food makers sound like cattle industry reps!
Beyond Burger, Impossible’s competitor, which is sold in supermarkets while Impossible is only sold in restaurants, does not contain heme. Beyond Burgers mimic blood in the sensory experience but not the molecular constitution; the burgers leak beet juice as they fry. But I have yet to find anybody—vegetarian, flexitarian, or committed carnivore—who, having tasted both Impossible and Beyond burgers, thinks the Impossible is meatier.
We are in a brave new world when plant-based food makers sound like cattle industry reps.
So yes, Dr. Ornish, an impossibly meaty taste can be recreated without heme—which explains why Beyond Burger is commonly out of stock at Whole Foods stores across the nation, with producers unable to keep up with demand.
Day One of the conference focused entirely on plant-based meat. Day two took us to the world of cell-grown meat. Incredibly, Winston Churchill envisioned that world back in 1931. In a piece titled “Fifty Years Hence,” he predicted: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing.”
We are behind time but on track. Meat grown from cells is currently being produced by Memphis Meats, and by all accounts the burgers and fish fillets are indistinguishable from those that come from slaughterhouses and environmentally catastrophic fishing nets.
One problem: The burgers produced by Memphis Meats currently cost about $1,000 a pop. But company founder Uma Valeti is a glass-half-full kind of guy, who cheerfully noted that the first serving of his meat cost a million dollars to produce; in just six years the price per serving was “one thousand fold lower!”
Josh Tetrick of the plant-based food company JUST gives a timeline of ten to fifteen years for the new meats to be “the only thing on the menu rather than an option.” To make that happen, he urges producers to focus on two vital areas: taste and price. Tetrick has a good record on both. JUST mayonnaise, entirely plant based, is now in supermarkets from Safeway through Walmart, and has replaced a household name in mayonnaise at Compass, the largest food-service company in the United States.
Now Tetrick is moving into the cell-grown meat space.
In response to the burgeoning clean-meat movement, the animal agricultural industry is trying to claim ownership, through legislation, of the word “meat.” Groups, including not just alternative producers but also the ACLU, are fighting the effort.
But perhaps the animal ag industry should be careful what it asks for. If cell-grown meat producers are expected to clearly identify the source of their meat, a judge’s attempt at parity could make all meat face the same rigor.
Should traditional meat be labeled as having come from a slaughtered animal? Imagine if all sausage had to come with a detailed list of ingredients!
“Clean meat” was the term commonly used at the conference to describe meat grown from cells. The term is literal, referring to the absence of bacteria that gets spread at the slaughterhouse. Given recent revelations about the shocking rate of banned drugs in tested meat, many of them used to treat animals pre slaughter, an absence of pathogens and drugs could be a strong selling point.
The term “clean meat” is also a nod to the astronomically smaller environmental footprint of the new industry. But some producers noted wariness of calling attention to that benefit, fearful of giving their product a hippie tinge. They figure that people who care about the environment will gravitate to their products without much marketing, so they are focusing their efforts on those who care less.
Children are now growing up in a world where veggie burgers taste just like meat, and true meat burgers, grown from cells, are soon to be on supermarket shelves.
These brave new companies are trying to market their products in a society inured to eating animals. But thanks to their work, children alive now are growing up in a world where veggie burgers taste just like meat, and true meat burgers, grown from cells, are soon to be on supermarket shelves.
That brings us back to our opening thought. It is hard to imagine that kids growing up with those choices will go for meat made from dead animals. So 2035 seems a reasonable timeline for Pat Brown’s impossible dream—a world without animal farming. I’m going to take his challenge and mark my calendar.