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Speaker 2 (01:00):
[00:01:00] Let's begin with a few basic facts. Fact number one, a lot of people all over the world really
like to eat meat, especially beef, pork, and chicken.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
If you add them all together, we're actually higher than we've been in recent history.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
That's Jason Lusk.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
I'm a professor and head of the agricultural economics Department at Purdue University. I study what
[00:01:30] we eat and why we eat it.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
And then in terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the us, how do we rank worldwide?

Speaker 3 (01:37):
We're the king of meat eaters, so compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat
per capita.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Even Brazil, Argentina. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yes. And part of that difference is income-based. So if you took Argentina, Brazil and adjusted for
income, they would probably be consuming more than us, but we happen to be richer, so we eat a little
more.

Speaker 2 (01:58):

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The average American consumes roughly 200 [00:02:00] pounds of meat a year. That's an average. So
let's say you are a meat eater and someone in your family is vegetarian. You might be putting away 400
pounds a year, but in America at least there aren't that many vegetarians.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Really why

Speaker 3 (02:20):
I've been doing a survey of US food consumers every month for about five years, and one of the
questions I ask is, are you a vegan or a vegetarian? So over five years time [00:02:30] and about a
thousand people a month, I've got about 60,000 observations.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Wow. Is this a nationwide data survey?

Speaker 3 (02:37):
It is representative in terms of age and income and education. I'd say on average you're looking at about
three to 5% of people say yes to that question. Let's say there's a very slight uptick over the last five
years.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
So again, a lot of meat eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat?
Australia and New Zealand, [00:03:00] Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries and increasingly
China.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
One of the things we know is that when consumers get a little more income in their pocket, one of the
first things they do is want to add high value proteins to their diets.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
What is the relationship generally between GDP and meat consumption?

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Positive, although sort of diminishing returns. So as you get to really high income levels, it might even
tail off a little bit, but certainly at the lower end of that spectrum, as a country grows and adds
[00:03:30] more GDP start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Meat consumption is of course driven by social and religious factors as well by health concerns and
animal welfare, not everyone agrees that humans should be eating animals at all. That said, we should
probably assume that the demand for meat will continue to rise as more of the world keeps getting

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richer. How's the supply side doing with this increased demand? Quite well. [00:04:00] The meat
industry is massive and complicated and often heavily subsidised, but long story short, if you go by the
availability of meat and especially what consumers pay, this is an economic success story.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to a
hundred years, and the reason is that we have become so much more productive at producing meat. If
you look at most of the statistics like the [00:04:30] amount of pork produced per sow, and we've taken
out a lot of the seasonal variation that we used to see as these animals have been brought indoors, and
you look at poultry production, broiler production, the amount of meat that's produced per broiler has
risen dramatically, almost doubled, say over the last 50 to a hundred years, while also consuming slightly
less feed.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
That's due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. The same goes for [00:05:00] beef
production.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
As you can imagine, people concerned with animal welfare may not celebrate these efficiency
improvements. And then there's the argument that despite these efficiency improvements, turning
animals into food is wildly inefficient

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Because the cow didn't evolve to be meat. That's the thing.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
That's Pat Brown. He is a longtime Stanford biomedical [00:05:30] researcher who's done
groundbreaking work in genetics.

Speaker 4 (05:33):
The cow evolved to be a cow and make more cows and not to be eaten by humans, and it's not very
good at making meat,

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Meaning it takes an enormous amount of food and water and other resources to turn a cow or a pig into
dinner much more than plant-based foods. And as Pat Brown sees it, that is not even the worst of it.

Speaker 4 (05:55):
The most environmentally technology on earth using animals [00:06:00] in food production, nothing else
even comes close.

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Speaker 2 (06:08):
Not everyone agrees that meat production is the environment's biggest enemy. What's not in dispute is
that global demand for meat is high and rising and that the production of meat is resource intensive and
at the very least, an environmental challenge with implications for climate change. Pat Brown thinks he
has a solution [00:06:30] to these problems. He has started a company,

Speaker 4 (06:33):
A company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas.

Speaker 5 (06:44):
We want to keep the term meat to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Today on Freakonomics radio, everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat
and where meat meets the future

Speaker 6 (07:00):
[00:07:00] From Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores
the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Steven Dubner.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
[00:07:30] What determines which food you put in your mouth every day? There are plainly a lot of
factors, personal preference, tradition, geography, on and on.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
So take something like horse consumption that it's almost unheard of to even think about consuming a
horse in the United States.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Jason Lusk, again, the agricultural economist,

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Whereas you go to Belgium or France, [00:08:00] it would be a commonly consumed dish,

Speaker 2 (08:02):
But there's another big factor that determines who eats what technology. Technology related to how
food is grown, preserved, transported, but also technology that isn't even related to the food itself.
Consider the case of mutton. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep. The mito young sheep is called lamb.
I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last [00:08:30] six months, probably the last six
years, maybe never. But if we were talking a hundred years ago, different story.

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Speaker 3 (08:38):
It's certainly the case back in the 1920s and thirties that that mutton was a much more commonly
consumed product.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Mutton was a staple of the American diet. One of the standard items shipped to soldiers during World
War II was canned mutton. But shortly after the war, muttons started to disappear. What happened?

Speaker 3 (08:59):
A sheep is [00:09:00] not just meat.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Okay? A sheep is not just meat.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
These are multi-product species and they're valuable not just for their meat, but for their wool. Oh,

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, wool. And unlike leather, which can be harvested only once from an animal, you can shear wool
from one sheep many times over many years.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of
the underlying animal

Speaker 2 (09:28):
And what might affect [00:09:30] the demand for wool. How about synthetic substitutes? Nylon, for
instance, was created by DuPont in 1935 and became available to the public in 1940. A year later,
polyester was invented,

Speaker 3 (09:44):
So anytime you had new clothing technologies come along that's going to affect the underlying demand
for sheep and make them less valuable than they would've been otherwise.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
So an increase in synthetic fabrics led to a shrinking demand [00:10:00] for wool, which meant that all
those sheep that had been kept around for shearing no longer needed to be kept around. Also, wool's
subsidies were repealed, and America's sheep flock drastically shrank from a high of 56 million in 1942
to barely 5 million today.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
It is amazing. I've worked at several agricultural universities across the US now and often the largest
sheep herds in those states are at the university research farms

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Speaker 2 (10:27):
And fewer sheep meant less mutton [00:10:30] for dinner. Is it possible Americans would've stopped
eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely. If you ask a room full of meat eaters to
name their favourite meat, I doubt one of them will say mutton still. This is just one example of how
technology can have a big effect on the meat we eat, and if you talk to certain people, it's easy to
believe that we're on the verge of a similar but much larger technological shift. Okay,

Speaker 4 (11:00):
[00:11:00] My name is Pat Brown. I am currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, whose
mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Brown grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC as well as Paris and Taipei. His father worked for the
CIA. He studied to be a paediatrician and in fact completed his medical residency, but he switched to
biochemistry research.

Speaker 4 (11:29):
I had the best job [00:11:30] in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things
and follow my curiosity.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Brown did this for many years and was considered a world-class researcher. One of his breakthroughs
was a new tool for genetic mapping. It's called the DNA microarray

Speaker 4 (11:49):
That lets you read all the words that the cell is using and kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how
the genome writes the life story of a [00:12:00] cell or something like that. It also has practical
applications because what it's doing in a sort of a deterministic way specifies the potential of that cell, or
if it's a cancer cell,

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Some people think the DNA microarray will win. Pat Brown, a Nobel Prize when I bring this up, he just
shakes his head and smiles. It's clear that his research was a deep passion

Speaker 4 (12:25):
For me. This was the dream job. It was like in the Renaissance having the me [00:12:30] cheese as
patrons or something like that.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
But after many years, brown wanted a change. He was in his mid fifties. He took a sabbatical figure out
his next move.

Speaker 4 (12:41):

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It started out with stepping back from the work I was doing and asking myself what's the most
important thing I could do? What could I do that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?
And looking at what are the biggest unsolved problems in the world. I came relatively quickly to the
conclusion [00:13:00] that the use of animals of food production technology is by far, and I could give
you endless reasons why that's true, but it is absolutely true by far the most environmentally destructive
thing that humans do.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
There is indeed a great deal of evidence for this argument across the entire environmental spectrum.
The agricultural historian James McWilliams in a book called Just Food Argues that every environmental
problem related to contemporary agriculture ends up having its [00:13:30] deepest roots in meat
production, monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen, fertiliser addiction to insecticides,
rainforest depletion, land degradation, top soil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming. All
these problems McWilliams writes, would be considerably less severe if people ate meat. Rarely, if ever.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
There's no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Jason Lusk, again,

Speaker 3 (13:59):
To suggest that [00:14:00] it's the most damaging environmental thing we do, as I think a pretty extreme
overstatement.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
But what about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising meat, especially in the us, which is
the world's largest beef producer?

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Our own EPA Environmental Protection Agency suggests that all of livestock contributes about 3% of our
total greenhouse gas emissions. So I mean 3% is not nothing, but it's not the major contributor that we
see. That number, I should say, [00:14:30] is much higher in many other parts of the world. So the
carbon impacts per pound produced are so much smaller here than a lot of the other world, but when
you tell people the way to reduce carbon emissions is to intensify animal production, that's not a story a
lot of people like to hear

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Because why not? It sounds like it's against animal welfare.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Well, two reasons exactly. One is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you're
talking about broiler chickens or hogs, less so about cattle. And the other one is there are concerns
[00:15:00] about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place and you get all this waste in a

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location that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don't have some significant
environmental problems.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
So the EPA number livestock contributing 3%. Does that include the entire production chain though?
Because some of the numbers that I see from environmental activists is much, much higher than that.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
The UN estimate that you often hear from originally was created in this report called Livestock Long
Shadow is something around 19%, [00:15:30] but that 19% roughly number is a global number. Actually,
there was a study that came out pointing out some flaws in that, so they reduced it somewhat.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Over the last five to 10 years. There's been a lot of negative publicity stories about environmental
impacts, about carbon [00:16:00] emissions, about animal welfare, and if you just look at the news
stories, you would think, boy, people must be really cutting back given the sort of frightful stories that
you see on the front pages of the newspapers. But if you look at the data itself, demand looks fairly
stable. And so that suggests to me it's hard to change people's preferences on this. There's something
about meat consumption. Some people would argue that we're evolved to like meat, that it's a protein
vitamin packed, [00:16:30] tasty punch that we've grown to enjoy as a species. There are some people
that even argue that it's one of the reasons we became as smart as we did. The vitamins and nutrients
that were in that meat allowed our brains to develop in certain ways that it might have not otherwise.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number one scientific
problem to solve was replacing animals [00:17:00] as food.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
And it's a problem that nobody was working on in any serious way because everybody recognised that
most people in the world, including most environmental scientists and people who care about this stuff,
love the foods we get from animals so much that they can't imagine giving those up.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
Brown himself was a longtime vegan,

Speaker 4 (17:22):
So I haven't eaten meat for decades, and that's just a personal choice that I made [00:17:30] long before
I realised the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons, and it
wasn't something that I felt like I was in a position to tell other people to do, and I still don't feel like
there's any value in doing that.

Speaker 2 (17:47):

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Brown makes an interesting point here. Many of us, when we feel strongly about something, an
environmental issue or a social or economic issue, we're inclined to put forth a moral argument.
[00:18:00] A moral argument would appear to be persuasive evidence of the highest order You should
do this thing because it's the right thing to do. But there is a tonne of research showing that moral
arguments are generally ineffective. People may smile at you and nod, but they won't change their
behaviour. That's what Brown realised about meat.

Speaker 4 (18:27):
The basic problem is that people are not going to stop wanting [00:18:30] these foods, and the only way
you're going to solve it is not by asking to meet you halfway and give 'em a substandard product that
doesn't deliver what they know they want from meat or fish or anything like that. The only way to do it
is you have to say, we're going to do the much harder thing, which is we're going to figure out how to
make meat that's not just as delicious as the meat we get from animals. It's more delicious and better
nutritionally and more affordable and so forth.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
In other words, a marginal improvement [00:19:00] on the standard veggie burger would not do.

Speaker 4 (19:03):
It's been tried, it just doesn't work. It's a waste of effort.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
So Brown started fooling around in his lab

Speaker 4 (19:10):
Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

Speaker 4 (19:19):
I felt like, okay, there's a bunch of things I thought could be useful, and then I felt like I could just go in
with a little bit more confidence to talk to the investors.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
The [00:19:30] investors meaning venture capitalists. Remember, brown is at Stanford, which is next
door to the biggest pile of venture capital in the history of the world.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
And basically my pitch to them was it was very naive from a fundraising standpoint in the sense that
basically I mostly just told 'em about how there's this absolutely critical environmental disaster that
needs to be solved, and

Speaker 2 (20:00):

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[00:20:00] They're probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture or needs.

Speaker 4 (20:04):
Well, yeah, that's the thing. And most people still are. So anyway, blah, blah, blah. So I just told these
guys, look, this is an environmental disaster. No one's doing anything about it. I'm going to solve it for
you.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
So how does the almost paediatrician who became a freewheeling biochemist build a better meat from
the ground up that amazing story after the break?

Speaker 4 (20:27):
Okay, bingo. This is how we're going to do it.

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Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture
comes from cows,

Speaker 3 (21:47):
And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
The Purdue Economist Jason Lusk, again,

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back end as a lot of people think.
And [00:22:00] as a consequence, we look at carbon consequences. It's mainly beef that people focus
on, not pork or chicken because they don't have the same kind of digestive systems.

Speaker 2 (22:11):

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There has been progress in this area. For instance, it turns out that adding seaweed to cattle feed
drastically reduces their methane output. But the scientist, pat Brown is looking for a much bigger
change to the animal agriculture industry.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now, [00:22:30] which I would do if I
could, and it would be a great thing for the world,

Speaker 2 (22:35):
It is very unlikely to disappear anytime soon. It is a trillion dollar global industry supported in many
places by government subsidies selling a product that billions of people consume once, twice, even
three times a day. Pat Brown's desire would seem to be an impossible one. The company he founded is
called Impossible Foods. [00:23:00] It's essentially a tech startup and it's raised nearly $400 million to
date in venture capital.

Speaker 4 (23:07):
So we've only been in existence for about seven years, and we have about 300 people. We started by
basically building a team of some of the best scientists in the world to study how meat works basically.
And by that I mean to really understand at a basic level the way in my previous life [00:23:30] when I
was a biomedical scientist, we might be studying how a normal cell of this particular kind becomes a
cancer cell, understanding the basic biochemical mechanisms. In this case, what we wanted to
understand was what are the basic biochemical mechanisms that account for the unique flavour
chemistry and the flavour behaviour and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities
[00:24:00] that consumers value in meat? And we spent about two and a half years just doing basic
research, trying to answer that question before we really started working on a product and then decided
for strategic reasons that our first product would be raw ground beef made entirely from plants

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Because burger is what people want or

Speaker 4 (24:22):
Well, there's a lot of reasons why I think there was a good strategic choice, the largest single category of
meat in the us, it's probably the most iconic kind of meat [00:24:30] in the us. It seemed like the ideal
vehicle for communicating to consumers that delicious meat doesn't have to come from animals
because it's sort of the Uber meat for a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Uber, lowercase U.

Speaker 4 (24:47):
Well, the lowercase

Speaker 2 (24:48):
U people are not pale and burgers

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Speaker 4 (24:49):
Riding them up, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the
animal agriculture industry. So from an impact standpoint, [00:25:00] it made sense as a choice.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
So Pat Brown said about repurposing the scientific wisdom he'd accrued over a long, fruitful career in
biomedicine, a career that may improve the health and wellbeing of countless millions. And now he got
to work on a truly earthshaking project building a better burger, a burger that doesn't come from a
[00:25:30] cow, an impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an
impossible burger?

Speaker 4 (25:39):
That's an interesting aspect about the science, which is that we didn't look for what are the precisely
specific choices of ingredients that would work. We studied what are the biochemical properties we
need from the set of ingredients, and then we did a survey of things available [00:26:00] from the plant
world that matched those biophysical properties and so forth, of which there were choices.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
So what are the main components of this burger?

Speaker 4 (26:10):
I can tell you what it's made of right now. What it's made of right now is different from how it was made
two years ago, and that was different from how it was made two and a half years ago. And the next
version we're going to launch is a quite different set of ingredients.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients [00:26:30] at the time included a
protein, a protein from

Speaker 4 (26:32):
Wheat, a protein from potatoes, not a starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, a byproduct of
starch production

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Among the other ingredients,

Speaker 4 (26:41):
Coconut oil is the major fat source. And then we have a bunch of other small molecules, but they're all
familiar things, amino acids, vitamins, sugars, nutrients.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
But all these ingredients did not make Pat Brown's plant-based hamburger meat taste or act or look like
hamburger meat. It was still missing [00:27:00] a critical component, a component called heme.

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Speaker 4 (27:04):
Okay, so heme is found in essentially every living thing and heme in plants and heme in animals is the
exact same molecule. Okay? It's just one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental molecules in life on
earth, period. The system that burns calories to produce energy uses heme as an essential component,
and it's what carries oxygen in your blood and it's what makes your blood red. And none of this, we
discovered this has been known for a long time, and [00:27:30] so animals have a lot more heme than
plants, and it's that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavours of meat that
you would recognise something as meat. It's the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique
taste of meat and

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Fish. Is it involved in texture and mouth feel and all that as well, or just taste?

Speaker 4 (27:53):
Just taste

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (27:53):
Just taste, texture and mouth feel are really important. And there's a whole nother set of research
around that. Super important. [00:28:00] It kind of gets short shrift because people think of the flavour
as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat, but you have to get that other stuff right too.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple of years of research and experimentation, we're getting
a lot of that stuff, but without heme, a lot of heme, their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

Speaker 4 (28:21):
So there is one component of a certain kind of plant that has a high concentration of heme, and that is
in plants that fix nitrogen, take nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertiliser. [00:28:30] They have a
structure called the root nodule where nitrogen fixation takes place. And for reasons that are too
complicated to explain right now, that has a high concentration of heme, and I just happened to know
this from way back,

Speaker 2 (28:43):
And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants,

Speaker 4 (28:47):
They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak. And I did a
calculation about the concentration of that stuff. So haemoglobin is the protein which is virtually
identical to the heme protein and muscle [00:29:00] tissue, which is called myoglobin, that there was
enough leg haemoglobin in the root nodules of the US soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the
meat consumed in the us. Okay? So I thought, genius, okay, we'll just go out and harvest all these root

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nodules from the US soybean crop and we'll get this stuff practically for free. Well, so I raised money for
the company and then we spent half the money trying to figure out how to harvest [00:29:30] these
root nodules from soybean plants only basically to finally convince ourselves that it was a terrible idea.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
But if you are a veteran scientist like brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

Speaker 4 (29:44):
You're going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things, and a lot of
'em are going to fail. And if you don't have a high tolerance for that and realise that basically the way
you do really, really important cool stuff is [00:30:00] by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself
for the failures, but just celebrating the successes you're not going to accomplish as much.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the US soybean crop wasn't a complete failure.

Speaker 4 (30:16):
I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that really was a magic ingredient from
flavour and so forth. But then we had to start all over. And then what we did was we said, okay, we're
going to have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. [00:30:30] And since
now we weren't bound by any natural source, we looked at like three dozen different heme proteins,
everything from paramecium to barley to Hell's Gate bacteria, which is like this.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
That's a plant Hell's Gate.

Speaker 4 (30:49):
It's a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survives temperatures above the
boiling point of water that we mostly just looked at for fun. But the funny [00:31:00] thing about that,
and the reason we rejected it is that it's so heat stable that you can cook a burger to cooking
temperature and it still stays bright red because it doesn't unfold. But anyway, and then we picked the
best one, which turned out to be just coincidentally soy like haemoglobin, which was the one we were
going after.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Oh, so your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
It wasn't really a brilliant idea. It accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Through the magic of modern plant engineering, pat Brown's [00:31:30] team began creating massive
stocks of heme, and that heme would help catapult the impossible Burger well beyond the realm of the
standard veggie burger, the mostly unloved veggie burger, we should say, the Impossible Burger looks

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like hamburger meat when it's raw and when it's cooked, it behaves like hamburger meat. Most
important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

Speaker 7 (31:55):
I would like the American with an Impossible Burger. And how would you like that cooked? [00:32:00]
Oh, I have it medium. Medium.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
Is it pink in the middle when it's, it is. The Freakonomics radio team recently ate some impossible
burgers in a restaurant near Times Square. I mean, I actually can't taste it. It tastes like a burger.

Speaker 7 (32:20):
Good

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Day

Speaker 3 (32:21):
If had the Impossible Burger approved by Freakonomics,

Speaker 2 (32:24):
That's Zach Lipinski Als and Craig Low, Ryan Kelly and Greg Ripen. Their meal happened to coincide
[00:32:30] with the release of Impossible Burger 2.0, an updated recipe that uses a soy protein instead
of a wheat protein and has a few more tweaks, less salt, sunflower oil to cut the coconut oil and no
more Xantham gum or Conjun gum in my own tasting experience. Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good,
but a little slushy 2.0 was burgert. I did not record my burger tasting, [00:33:00] but if I did, it would've
sounded like this. These are of course, our subjective observations. Here's some actual evidence.
Impossible Burgers are already being served in roughly 5,000 locations, primarily in the us, but also Hong
Kong and Macau. These include very high end restaurants in New York and California, as well as fast
food chains like Umami Burger and even White Castle. This year. Impossible plans to start [00:33:30]
selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

Speaker 4 (33:32):
We've grown in terms of our sales and revenue and so forth about 30 fold in the past year, and our goal
is to completely replace animal's food technology by 2035. That means we have to approximately
double in size and impact every year for the next 18 years.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Are we'd understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

Speaker 4 (33:55):
Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology [00:34:00] platform and
sort of the know-how about how meat works in general. We were working on understanding dairy

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products and cheeses and stuff like that, and then we decide, okay, we have to pick one product to
launch with, and then we have to, from a commercialisation standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
As the scientist or as a scientist, were you reluctant to kind of narrow yourself for that commercial
interest, or did you appreciate that this is the way in this world things actually [00:34:30] happen?

Speaker 4 (34:30):
Both. I mean, let's put it this way. I would like to be able to pursue all these things in parallel, and if I had
the resources I would, but if we launched another product right now, we'd just be competing against
ourselves for resources for commercialisation, so it just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
We put out an episode not long ago called Two Totally Opposite Ways to Save the Planet. It featured the
science journalist, Charles Mann,

Speaker 8 (35:00):
[00:35:00] How are we going to deal with climate change? There have been two ways that have been
suggested, overarching ways that represent, if you like, polls on a continuum, and they've been fighting
with each other for decades.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
The two polls are represented by what man calls in his latest book, the Wizard and the Prophet. The
prophet sees environmental destruction as a problem best addressed by restoring nature to its natural
state. The wizard meanwhile believes that technology can address environmental dangers. [00:35:30]
This is of course, a typology, a shorthand, a prophet doesn't necessarily fear technology any more than a
wizard fears nature. That said, if there were ever an embodiment of the Wizard Prophet Hybrid, a
person driven by idealism and pragmatism in equal measure, I'd say it's Pat Brown, which means his
invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum, [00:36:00] the consumers and
activists who might cheer a meatless meat are often the same sort of people who are anti GMO
genetically modified organisms. And the Impossible Burger would not have been possible without its
genetically modified heme, which by the way, the FDA recently declared safe after challenges from
environmental groups like Friends of the Earth, another group that might object to [00:36:30] impossible
foods, the meat industry, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

Speaker 5 (36:36):
My name is Kelly Fogerty, and I serve as the Executive Vice President for the United States Cattlemen's
Association, and I am a fifth generation beef cattle rancher here in Oakdale, California.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I'm just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the US Cattlemen's Association would
change their name or you okay with it?

Speaker 5 (37:00):

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[00:37:00] It's funny you mentioned that. There's always a little bit of a notion there. In the back of my
mind, of course, being in the industry for so long, I take it as representing all of the livestock industry,
but definitely having a special nod to all the female ranchers out there would be nice to have as well.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
And what is the primary difference between the US Cattlemen's Association and the National
Cattlemen's Beef Association?

Speaker 5 (37:25):
As the United States Cattlemen's Association, we are made up primarily [00:37:30] of cattle producers.
So your family ranches, cow calf operations run by producers and for producers is what USCA was built
on, whereas National Cattleman's Beef Association does include some more of Packer influences as well
as some of the processing facilities as well.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Can you just talk generally for a moment, how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative
quote meat?

Speaker 5 (38:00):
[00:38:00] So from our end, in looking at the quote meat and appreciate you using those quotes around
that term. From our end, we're not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we are really
looking at is not a limit on consumer choice or trying to back one product out of the market. It's really to
make sure that we're keeping the information out there accurate and that what is available to
consumers and what is being shown to consumers on labels is [00:38:30] accurate to what the product
actually is.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
In 2018, Fogerty organisation filed a petition with the USDA to prevent products from being labelled as
beef or meat unless they come from a cow. I mean, does that mean that your organisation thinks that
consumers are confused by labelling? Is that the primary objection?

Speaker 5 (38:58):
So the primary objection from [00:39:00] the United States Cattlemen's Association is that we want to
keep the term meat to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner. And so when
we see the term meat being put on these products, that is not derived from that definition. What our
producers came to us and really wanted us to act on was what we saw happened in other industries,
specifically when you look at the dairy industry and where the term milk has now been [00:39:30] used.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Almond milk, for instance, which comes from almonds, not animals, which led the National Milk
Producers Federation to argue that it should not be sold as almond milk. The FDA agreed, its
commissioner pointed out that an almond doesn't lactate. There are important differences between so-
called milk that doesn't come from animals and so-called meat that doesn't come from animals. Almond
[00:40:00] milk has very different nutritional content than cow's milk. The Impossible Burger meanwhile
has a similar nutritional profile to hamburger, including the iron content, which vegans can have trouble

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getting enough of. That's another reason why Kelly Fogerty and the US Cattleman's Association might
not want the impossible burger to be labelled meat. I am just curious about the kind of, I guess, mental
state of your [00:40:30] industry because I was looking at your Facebook page and one post the other
day led with the following, eat or be eaten, be at the table or on the menu, fight or be forgotten. So that
sounds, it would make me believe that the future of meat is one in which cattle ranchers feel a little bit
like an endangered species, or at least under assault.

Speaker 5 (40:54):
I think that speaks to a lot of, I think misconceptions that are out there regarding [00:41:00] the US beef
industry, whether it be in terms of nutrition environment, animal welfare. We've really been hit from a
lot of different angles over the years.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Okay. Well, according to some scientific research, meat production and or cattle ranching are among the
most environmentally damaging activities on earth between the resource intensiveness land, but
especially water and the externalities, [00:41:30] the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

Speaker 5 (41:34):
I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are really, they're defined as what is termed as up
cyclers. And so cattle today, they're turning plants that have little to no nutritional value, just as is into a
high quality and a highly high dense protein. And so when you look at where cattle are grazing in the US
[00:42:00] and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they're grazing on or land that is not
suitable for crops or would be kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land and the ability of
livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Fogerty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned. That has [00:42:30] come to be seen as a
target for environmentalist groups and causes.

Speaker 5 (42:34):
I would absolutely say the livestock industry and to that matter, the agriculture industry as a whole, I
think has really been at the brunt of a lot of disinformation campaigns.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Fogerty points to that UN report claiming that the global livestock industry's greenhouse gas emissions
were shockingly high, A report that was found to be built on faulty calculations.

Speaker 5 (42:58):
So it was really [00:43:00] an inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a
conversation.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
The inflated percentage of around 18% was really around 14.5%. So grossly inflated may be in the eye of
the aggrieved. Fogerty says that even though the error was acknowledged and a revised report was
issued,

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Speaker 5 (43:23):
Folks have not forgotten it as much as we wish. It's still something that it's hard to have [00:43:30] folks
unread or unknow something that they initially saw.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
The fact is that the agricultural industry is massive and massively complex without question. It exacts
costs on the environment. It also provides benefits that are literally the stuff of life, delicious, abundant,
affordable food. As with any industry, there are trade-offs and there's friction. Activists [00:44:00] tend
to overstate their claims in order to encourage reform. Industry defenders tend to paper over legitimate
concerns, but in the food industry especially, it's clear that a revolution is underway, a revolution to
have our food be not just delicious and abundant and affordable, but sustainable too with fewer
negative externalities. Some startups like Impossible Foods focus on cleverly engineering plant matter,
to taste [00:44:30] like the animal flesh. So many people love. Other startups are working on what's
called lab grown meat using animal stem cells to grow food without animals. This is still quite young
technology, but it's very well funded. I was curious to hear Kelly Fogarty view of this, one of the
investors in the lab meat company, Memphis Meats, is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big
meat industry. [00:45:00] I mean, another investor for what it's worth is Bill Gates. But I'm curious,
what's your position on that? Because the way I think about this long-term, presumably a firm like Cargill
can win the future with alternative meat in a way that a cattle rancher. So I'm curious what the position
is of ranchers on this kind of investment from a firm like Cargill or other firms that are sort of hedging
their bets on the future of meat.

Speaker 5 (45:30):
[00:45:30] And it's a really interesting point, and it's been a bit of a tough pill for producers to swallow.
The fact that some of the big three, some of these big processing plants that have been so obviously
heavily focused and have been livestock dominant, are now kind of going into this alternative. And in
sometimes a cell cultured lab meets alternative proteins, and it really has been a point of contention
among a lot of producers who are [00:46:00] kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit, trying to think of
the right term here, but I don't want to say betrayed by the industry, but a little bit. So

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Others may soon feel betrayed as well. A company called Modern Meadows is using similar technology
to grow leather in the lab without the need for cattle. The Israeli company, super Meat [00:46:30] is
focused on growing chicken, and then there's a company called Finless Foods.

Speaker 7 (46:36):
Finless Foods is taking seafood back to basics and creating real fish meat entirely without mercury
plastic, without the need for antibiotics or growth hormones, and also without the need for fishing or
the killing of animals because we grow the fish directly from stem cells.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
It's Mike Selden, the co-founder and CEO of Finless. He's 27 years old. [00:47:00] He started out as a
cancer researcher like Pat Brown. You could call him a wizard prophet hybrid. He does take issue with
the idea of lab grown food.

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Speaker 7 (47:11):
The reality is labs are by definition experimental and are not scalable. So this won't be grown in a lab at
all. It's prototyped in a lab in the same way that snacks are prototyped in a lab. Doritos are prototyped in
a lab by material scientists looking at different dimensions of crunch and torsion [00:47:30] and all these
other sort of mechanical properties. So what our facility will look like when we're actually at production
scale is something really a lot closer to a brewery. Big steel tanks that are sort of allowing these cells
space in order to divide and grow into large quantities of themselves while accessing all of the nutrients
that we put inside of this nutritional broth.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exact its share of environmental costs, but like Pat Brown,
Mike [00:48:00] Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

Speaker 7 (48:04):
So the goal of Finless Foods is not to create something that competes on ethics or morals or
environmental goals. It's something that will compete on taste, price and nutrition, the things that
people actually care about right now, everybody really loves whales, and people hate when whales are
killed. What changed because we used to kill whales for their blubber in order to light lamps. It wasn't
an ethical movement. It [00:48:30] wasn't that people woke up one day and decided, oh, killing whales
is wrong. It was that we ended up using kerosene instead. We found another technological solution, a
supply side change that didn't play on people's morals in order to win. We see ourselves as something
like that. Why work with an animal at all if you don't need to?

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Indeed, you could imagine in the not so distant future, a scenario in which you could instantly summon
any food imaginable, new [00:49:00] foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of
favour. How much fun would that be? I asked the agricultural economist, Jason Lusk about this. If we
had a 3D printer and it let's say had just, we'll will be conserved about a hundred buttons of different
foods that it could make me, does anyone press the button button?

Speaker 3 (49:26):
Well, one of the great things about our food system is that it's a food system that [00:49:30] yes, makes
food affordable, but also has a whole awful lot of choice for people who are willing to pay it. And I bet
there's probably at least one or two people out there that'll push that button button.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
I also asked Lusk for his economic views on the future of meat, especially the sort of projects that
inventors like Mike Selden and Pat Brown are working on.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
I have no problems with what that Dr. Brown's trying to do there. And indeed, I think it's very exciting,
this technology, [00:50:00] and I think ultimately it'll come down to whether this lab grown meat can
compete on the merit. So there's no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger, I've seen it on
menus. It's almost always higher price than the traditional beef burger. Now, as an economist, I look at
that and say, those prices to me should be signalling something about resource use. Maybe it's

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imperfect. Maybe there's some externalities, but they should reflect all the resources that were used
[00:50:30] to go into produce that product. It's one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than say
chicken. It takes more time, more inputs to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken. So why is
it that the Impossible Burger is more expensive than the regular burger?
(50:43):
Now, it could be that this is just a startup and they're not working at scale, and once they really scale
this thing up, it'll really bring the price down. It could be they're also marketing to a particular higher
income consumer who's willing to pay a little more. But I think if the claims about The Impossible Burger
are true over time, [00:51:00] one would expect these products to come down significantly in price and
be much less expensive than beef production. And this is not going to make my beef friends happy, but
if they can do that, good for 'em. And consumers want to pay for this product. They like the way it
tastes, and it saves some money, which means it's saving some resources. I think in that sense, it's a
great technology

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Whether or not you eat meat, whether or not you're interested in eating these alternative meats from
plant matter or animal stem cells, it's hard [00:51:30] to not admire the creativity that someone like Pat
Brown has exercised. The deep curiosity, the ability to come back from failure, the sheer cleverness of
putting together disparate ideas into a coherent scientific plan. So coming up next time on Freakonomics
Radio, we get back to our series on creativity. We ask scientists, artists, and others, where do those
ideas come from?

Speaker 8 (52:00):
[00:52:00] Some, sometimes they come out of nowhere you think, and then it turns out that they came
from the future. So the question was, are there patterns

Speaker 7 (52:10):
In the universe? Are there features? Is there some geometry?

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. How to Be Creative idea
generation. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. [00:52:30] Freakonomics Radio is produced by
Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zach Lapinski. Our staff also includes
Alison Craigo, Greg Rippin and Harry Huggins. We had help this week from Nelly Osborne. Our theme
song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Garra. You can
subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. The entire
archive is available on the Stitcher app [email protected], where we also publish transcripts, show
[00:53:00] notes, and much more. If you want the entire archive ad free plus lots of bonus episodes, go
to stitcher premium.com/freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or via
[email protected]. Freakonomics radio also plays on many NPR stations. If we're not on
yours, call them. Tell them to change their ways. As always, thanks for listening.

Speaker 9 (53:30):
[00:53:30] Stitcher

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