![]() ![]() Heme helps an Impossible Burger remain pink in the middle as it cooks, and it replicates how heme in cow muscle catalyzes the conversion of simple nutrients into the molecules that give beef its yeasty, bloody, savory flavor. Impossible’s breakthrough involves a molecule called heme, which the company produces in tanks of genetically modified yeast. And they made it look, smell, and taste very different from the customary veggie replacement. They made it nutritionally equal to or superior to beef. They made their burger sustainable: the Impossible Burger requires eighty-seven per cent less water and ninety-six per cent less land than a cowburger, and its production generates eighty-nine per cent less G.H.G. “Pat gave some of the best science talks I’ve ever seen,” Eisen told me, “and also some of the worst, because the slides wouldn’t match after he started talking about something different from what he had planned.”īrown assembled a team of scientists, who approached simulating a hamburger as if it were the Apollo program. The mission had always been gene mapping and finding cures for AIDS and cancer.” Brown, a vegan who ate his last burger in 1976, had never spared a thought to food, considering it “just stuff to shove in your mouth.” Free-rangingly curious, he lacked a C.E.O.’s veal-penned focus. His older brother, Jim, said, “The idea of Pat running a company was a real surprise. And, because sixty per cent of America’s beef gets ground up, he’d start with burgers.Ī lean marathon runner with the air of a wading stork, Brown was an unlikely food entrepreneur. #Tad friend wife freeSo he’d use the power of the free market to disseminate a better, cheaper replacement. He understood that the facts didn’t compel people as strongly as their craving for meat, and that shame was counterproductive. (In the popular imagination, the culprit is cow farts, but it’s mostly cow burps.) Steven Chu, a former Secretary of Energy who often gives talks on climate change, tells audiences that if cows were a country their emissions “would be greater than all of the E.U., and behind only China and America.” Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London-and the average American eats that much each month. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. ![]() When the world’s one and a half billion beef and dairy cows ruminate, the microbes in their bathtub-size stomachs generate methane as a by-product. Eisen threw out a few trendy notions: biofuels, a carbon tax. “And what’s the biggest thing we could do to affect it?” Brown said, a glint in his eye. Over rice bowls, Brown asked, “What’s the biggest problem we could work on?” In 2008, he had lunch with Michael Eisen, a geneticist and a computational scientist. Razing forests to graze cattle-an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century-turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.īrown began paying attention to this planetary overdraft during the late two-thousands, even as his lab was publishing on topics ranging from ovarian-cancer detection to how babies acquire their gut microbiome. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. We see our mission as the last chance to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.” He emerged wearing a T-shirt depicting a cow with a red slash through it, and immediately declared, “The use of animals in food production is by far the most destructive technology on earth. When we met, he arrived not in Silicon Valley’s obligatory silver Tesla but in an orange Chevy Bolt that resembled a crouching troll. His first product, the Impossible Burger, made chiefly of soy and potato proteins and coconut and sunflower oils, is now in seventeen thousand restaurants. By developing plant-based beef, chicken, pork, lamb, dairy, and fish, he intends to wipe out all animal agriculture and deep-sea fishing by 2035. A sixty-five-year-old emeritus professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, Brown is the founder and C.E.O. ![]()
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