367. The Future of Meat

Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible™?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  If you add them all together, we're actually higher than we've been in recent history.

• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jason Lusk.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I'm a professor and head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University. I study what we eat and why we eat it.

• 3:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then in terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the US, how do we rank worldwide?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  We're the king of meat eaters. So compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat per capita.

• 3:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year. That's an average. So let's say you're 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.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

• 3:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? Why?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  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, and about 1,000 people a month, I've got about 60,000 observations.

• 4:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. And is this a nationwide data survey?

• 4:06Speaker 01

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

• 4:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So again, a lot of meat eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat? Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries, and increasingly, China.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is the relationship generally between GDP and meat consumption?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  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 more GDP, you start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

• 5:03Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to 100 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 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 100 years, while also consuming slightly less feed.

• 6:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. Same goes for beef production.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

• 6:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Because the cow didn't evolve to be meat. That's the thing.

• 6:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Pat Brown. He is a longtime Stanford biomedical researcher who's done groundbreaking work in genetics.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  The most environmentally destructive technology on earth, using animals in food production. Nothing else even comes close.

• 7:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 to these problems. He has started a company.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  A company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

• 8:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  We want to keep the term meat to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner.

• 8:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat, and where meat meets the future.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 9:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  So take something like horse consumption, that it's almost unheard of to even think about consuming a horse in the United States.

• 9:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jason Lusk again, the agricultural economist.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Whereas you go to Belgium or France, it would be a commonly consumed dish.

• 9:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 meat of a young sheep is called lamb. I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last six months, probably the last six years, maybe never. But if we were talking 100 years ago, different story.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  It's certainly the case that back in the 1920s and 30s, that mutton was a much more commonly consumed product.

• 10:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  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, mutton started to disappear. What happened?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  A sheep is not just meat.

• 10:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, a sheep is not just meat.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  These are multi-product species, and they're valuable not just for their meat, but for their wool.

• 10:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, 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.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of the underlying animal.

• 10:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what might affect 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.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  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 have been otherwise.

• 11:24Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 11:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And fewer sheep meant less mutton for dinner. Is it possible Americans would have stopped eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely. If you ask a room full of meat eaters to name their favorite 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.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Okay. 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.

• 12:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 pediatrician and, in fact, completed his medical residency, but he switched to biochemistry research.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I had the best job in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things and follow my curiosity.

• 13:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  That lets you read all the words that the cell is using and effectively kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how the genome writes the life story of a 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.

• 13:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  For me, this was the dream job. It was like in the Renaissance, you know, having the magis as patrons or something like that.

• 14:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  But after many years, Brown wanted a change. He was in his mid 50s. He took a sabbatical, figure out his next move.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  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, you know, came relatively quickly to the conclusion 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.

• 14:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  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, quote, "Every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture ends up having its deepest roots in meat production. Monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rainforest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming. All these problems," McWilliams writes, "would be considerably less severe if people ate meat rarely, if ever."

• 15:21Speaker 01

  You know, there's no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences.

• 15:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jason Lusk again.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  To suggest that it's the most damaging environmental thing we do is, I think, a pretty extreme overstatement.

• 15:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising meat, especially in the US, which is the world's largest beef producer?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  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, it's not the major contributor that we see. That that number, I should say, 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.

• 16:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why not? It sounds like it's against animal welfare?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Well, two reasons exactly. One is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you're talking about broiler chickens or or hogs, less so about cattle. And the other one is there are concerns about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place and get all this waste in in a location that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don't have some significant environmental problems.

• 16:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  The UN estimate that you often hear from originally was created in this report called Livestock Long Shadow was something around 19%. 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.

• 17:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Over the last five to 10 years, there's been a lot of negative publicity of stories about environmental impacts, about carbon 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 there it's 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, you know, tasty punch that we've grown to enjoy as a species.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  There are some people that even are 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.

• 18:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number one scientific problem to solve was replacing animals as food.

• 18:29Speaker 02

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

• 18:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brown himself was a longtime vegan.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  So I, yeah, I haven't eaten, you know, meat for decades and that's just a personal choice that I made long before I realized the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons. And it wasn't something that I felt like, you know, I was in a position to tell other people to do.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And I still don't feel like there's any value in doing that.

• 19:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. 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 ton of research showing that moral arguments are generally ineffective. People may smile at you and nod, but they won't change their behavior. That's what Brown realized about meat.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  The basic problem is that, that people are not going to stop wanting these foods. And the only way you're going to solve it is not by asking them to meet you halfway and give them 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.

• 20:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, a marginal improvement on the standard veggie burger would not do.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  It's been tried. It just doesn't work. It's a waste of effort.

• 20:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Brown started fooling around in his lab.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

• 20:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  I felt like, OK, 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.

• 20:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  The 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.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And basically, my pitch to them was, you know, it was very naive from a fundraising standpoint in the sense that basically I mostly just told them about how there's this absolutely critical environmental disaster that needs to be solved and.

• 21:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  And they're probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how does the almost pediatrician who became a freewheeling biochemist build a better meat from the ground up? That amazing story after the break.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  OK, bingo. This is how we're going to do it.

• 22:02Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring, great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 24:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture comes from cows.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

• 24:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Purdue economist Jason Lusk again.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back end, as a lot of people think. And 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.

• 24:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 much bigger change to the animal agriculture industry.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now, which I would do if I could, and it would be a great thing for the world.

• 25:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. It's essentially a tech startup, and it's raised nearly $400 million to date in venture capital.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  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, 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

• 26:18Speaker 02

  that account for the unique flavor chemistry and the flavor behavior and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities that consumers value in meat?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because burger is what people want, or?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot of reasons why I think it was a good strategic choice. The largest single category of meat in the US. It's probably the most iconic kind of meat 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 it's sort of the uber meat for a lot of people.

• 27:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uber lowercase u.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  With a lowercase u.

• 27:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  People are not paling burgers.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  No, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the animal agriculture industry. So from an impact standpoint, it made sense as a choice.

• 27:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Pat Brown set about repurposing the scientific wisdom he'd accrued over a long fruitful career in biomedicine, a career that may improve the health and well being of countless millions. And now he got to work on a truly earth shaking project, building a better burger. A burger that doesn't come from a cow, an impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an impossible burger?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  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 we studied what are the biochemical properties we need from the set of ingredients? And then we did a survey of things available from the plant world that match those biophysical properties and so forth, of which there were choices.

• 28:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what are the main components of this burger?

• 28:39Speaker 02

  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 has a quite different set of ingredients.

• 28:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients at the time included-

• 29:00Speaker 02

  A protein from wheat, a protein from potatoes, not starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, a byproduct of starch production.

• 29:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among the other ingredients?

• 29:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 a critical component, a component called heme.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  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 so animals have a lot more heme than plants. And it's that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavors of meat that you would recognize something as meat. It's the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique taste of meat and fish.

• 30:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it involved in texture and mouthfeel and all that as well, or just taste?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  No, just taste. Just taste. Texture and mouthfeel are really important, and there's a whole nother set of research around that. Super important. It kind of gets short shrift because people think of the flavor as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat, but you have to get that other stuff right, too.

• 30:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple of years of research and experimentation, were getting a lot of that stuff right. But without heme, a lot of heme, their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  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, they're taking nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer, they have a structure called the root nodule where the 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.

• 31:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants...

• 31:16Speaker 02

  They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak. Okay. And I did a calculation about the concentration of that stuff, something like hemoglobin is the protein, which is virtually identical to the heme protein in muscle tissue, which is called myoglobin, that there was enough leg hemoglobin 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 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 like half the money trying to figure out how to

• 31:58Speaker 02

  harvest these root nodules from soybean plants, only basically to finally convince ourselves that it was a terrible idea.

• 32:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you are a veteran scientist like Brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  You know you're going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things, and a lot of them are going to fail. And if you don't have a high tolerance for that and realize that basically the way you do really, really important, cool stuff is by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself for the failures, but just celebrating the successes, you know, you're not going to accomplish as much.

• 32:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the US soybean crop wasn't a complete failure.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that it really was a magic ingredient from flavor and so forth. But then we had to start all over. And then what we did was, we said, okay, we're gonna have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. Okay. And since now we weren't bound by any natural source, we looked at like, three dozen different heme proteins. Everything from, you know, paramesum, to barley, to Hell's Gate bacteria, which is like this.

• 33:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a plant?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  It's a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survives temperatures above the boiling point of water. And we mostly just looked at for fun. But the funny 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 leg heme globin, which was the one we were going after.

• 33:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  It wasn't really a brilliant idea. It accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

• 33:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Through the magic of modern plant engineering, Pat Brown's 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 like hamburger meat, when it's raw and when it's cooked. It behaves like hamburger meat. Most important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  I would like the American with an Impossible Burger. And how would you like that? Oh, I love it medium. Medium. Is it pink in the middle when it's?

• 34:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Freakonomics Radio team recently ate some Impossible Burgers in a restaurant near Times Square.

• 34:43Speaker 06

  I mean, I actually can taste it.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  It tastes like a burger.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Good day for the Impossible Burger. Yeah, approved by economics.

• 34:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Zach Lepinski, Alison Kreglo, Ryan Kelly, and Greg Rippon. Their meal happened to coincide 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 xanthum gum or conch gum. In my own tasting experience, Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good, but a little slushy. 2.0 was burger-tastic. I did not record my burger tasting, but if I did, it would have sounded like this.

• 35:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  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, you know, 18 years.

• 36:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are we to understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology platform and sort of the know-how about how meat works in general. We were working on understanding dairy products and cheeses and stuff like that. And then we decided, OK, we have to pick one product to launch with. And then we have to, from a commercialization standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

• 36:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 happen?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  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 commercialization. So it just doesn't make any sense.

• 37:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  We put out an episode not long ago called "Two Totally Opposite Ways to Save the Planet." It featured the science journalist Charles Mann.

• 37:29Speaker 07

  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, poles in a continuum, and they've been fighting with each other for decades.

• 37:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  The two poles are represented by what Mann 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. 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

• 38:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum. 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 Impossible Foods? The meat industry. You know, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  My name is Kelly Fogarty, 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.

• 39:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the US Cattlemen's Association would change their name, or are you okay with it?

• 39:28Speaker 03

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

• 39:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what is the primary difference between the US Cattlemen's Association and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association?

• 39:54Speaker 03

  As the United States Cattlemen's Association, we are made up primarily of cattle producers. So your family ranches, you know, cow-calf operations run by producers and kind of for producers is what USDA was built on, whereas National Cattlemen's Beef Association does include some more of Packer influences as well as, you know, some of the processing facilities as well.

• 40:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you just talk generally for a moment, how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative quote meat?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  So from our end, you know, and looking at the quote unquote meat, and appreciate you, you know, using those quotes around that term. From our end, we're not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we're 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 accurate to what the product actually is.

• 41:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 2018, Fogarty's organization filed a petition with the USDA to prevent products from being labeled as beef or meat unless they come from a cow.

• 41:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, does that mean that your organization thinks that consumers are confused by labeling? Is that the primary objection?

• 41:26Speaker 03

  So the primary objection from 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 used.

• 42:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  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, quote, "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 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 getting enough of. That's another reason why Kelly Fogarty and the US Cattlemen's Association might

• 42:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  not want the Impossible Burger to be labeled meat.

• 42:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  I am just curious about the kind of, I guess, mental state of your 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.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  I think that speaks to a lot of, I think, misconceptions that are out there regarding 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.

• 43:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  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, the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are really, they're defined as what is termed as upcyclers. 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, and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they are grazing on are land that is not suitable for crops, or would be kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  And the ability of livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

• 44:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fogarty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned, that it's come to be seen as a target for environmentalist groups and causes.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  I would absolutely say, you know, 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.

• 45:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fogarty 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.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was a really inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a conversation.

• 45:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  The inflated percentage of around 18% was really around 14.5%. So grossly inflated, maybe in the eye of the aggrieved. Fogarty says that even though the error was acknowledged and a revised report was issued.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Folks have not forgotten it. As much as we wish, it's still something that it's hard to have folks kind of unread or unknow something that they initially saw.

• 46:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 is friction. Activists 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,

• 46:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  but sustainable too, with fewer negative externalities. Some startups, like Impossible Foods, focus on cleverly engineering plant matter to taste like the animal flesh that 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's view of this. One of the investors in the lab meat quote company Memphis Meats is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big meat industry. I mean, another investor, for what it's worth, is Bill Gates.

• 47:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 quote meat in a way that a cattle rancher can't. 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?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  You know, and it's a really interesting point and it's 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 and sometimes a cell cultured lab meets alternative proteins. And it really has been a point of contention among a lot of producers who are kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit, you know, kind of, oh, you know, trying to think of the right term here, but I don't want to say betrayed by by the industry,

• 48:43Speaker 03

  but but a little bit so.

• 48:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 is focused on growing chicken. And then there's a company called Finless Foods.

• 49:04Speaker 08

  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.

• 49:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's Mike Selden, the co-founder and CEO of Finless. He's 27 years old. 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.

• 49:40Speaker 08

  The reality is like 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 like crunch and torsion 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.

• 50:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exact its share of environmental costs. But like Pat Brown, Mike Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

• 50:33Speaker 08

  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. You know, 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 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. You know, why work with an animal at all if you don't need to?

• 51:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indeed, you could imagine, in the not-so-distant future, a scenario in which you could instantly summon any food imaginable, new foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of favor. 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 be conservative, 100 buttons of different foods that it could make me, does anyone press the mutton button?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one of the great things about our food system is that it's a food system that, 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 mutton button.

• 52:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  You know, I have no problems with what, you know, Dr. Brown's trying to do there. And indeed, I think it's very exciting, this technology. And I think, you know, ultimately, it'll come down to whether this lab-grown meat can compete on the merits. So there's no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger, I've seen it on menus, it's almost always a higher price than the traditional beef burger. Now, as an economist, I look at that and say, those prices, to me, should be signaling something about resource use. Maybe it's imperfect, maybe there's some externalities, but they should reflect all the resources that were used to go into produce that product. It's one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than, say, chicken.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  It takes more time, more inputs to get, 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? 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, you know, if the claims about the Impossible Burger are true, over time, 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 them. 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.

• 53:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 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?

• 54:29Speaker 09

  Sometimes they come out of nowhere, you think, and then it turns out that they came from the future.

• 54:36Speaker 10

  So the question was, are there patterns in the universe? Are there features? Is there some geometry?

• 54:42Speaker 11

  Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.

• 54:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  How to be creative, idea generation. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 54:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zach Lepinski. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, and Harry Huggins. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts, show notes, and much more. If you want the entire archive ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter,

• 55:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Facebook, and LinkedIn, or via email at [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.

• 56:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 56:50Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 57:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 57:58Speaker 12

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