CAN THIS BURGER SAVE THE WORLD?
Meat is the biggest cause of greenhouse gasses. Hence Bill Gates and Google’s latest big idea: a meat-free burger made from plants in a laboratory, but which bleeds and sizzles, writes Nick Rufford
THERE was definitely something odd about the burger van. For one thing, it was parked only outside building supplies shops. For another, it carried no markings to show who it belonged to. This should have prompted questions, but as it was handing out free burgers to grateful construction workers, stopping to pick up tools and materials, none were asked.
In fact, the van was carrying out undercover research for Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley-based bio-engineering company. The burgers were made not from beef, but from protein and synthetic blood derived from plants.
The “stealth” van was unmarked because the company didn’t want to arouse curiosity – or give away who was behind the project to disrupt the world’s $1,5-trillion (R20,25-trillion) meat industry. For Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Larry Page of Google and Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong-based billionaire, the stakes (or possibly steaks) were high.
Before showing its hand the company wanted to test the product on hardcore meat eaters – and they don’t come much more hardcore than ironworkers, pipefitters and welders – hence the location of the van in American cities. If these people could be persuaded to switch from eating meat, then millions of others could too.
And the plan worked: the workers believed the plump, meaty-tasting burgers were made from beef. Some even claimed they could tell it was from grassfed cattle.
Like other Silicon Valley ventures, the idea was based on the principle of removing the middle man – or, in this case, the middle cow. Why use animals to convert plant protein to meat when it could be done in the lab more cheaply and in ways that are kinder to animals and to the planet? Producing meat has, for decades, remained stubbornly low-tech – and expensive.
Livestock needs huge amounts of land and water, and produces huge amounts of greenhouse gas.
Could Impossible Foods do for meat what Amazon had for book sales, or
Apple for music, by making a substitute that was cheaper and, in this case, less polluting?
To Gates, who gave up running Microsoft to tackle global problems, the commercial and environmental arguments are self-evident. As tens of millions of people in the developing world move into the middle classes, demand for meat will eventually reach unsustainable levels.
“The richer the world gets, the more meat it eats; the more meat it eats, the bigger the threat to the planet,” Gates says. “Clearing forests to make more farmland contributes to climate change, as do the greenhouse gases produced by all those animals.”
The burger is so far sold at 11 restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York (though not through supermarkets), with promising results.
Paul McCartney, a longtime campaigner for vegetarianism, and Mick Jagger are among those who’ve been served it at Crossroads Kitchen, a trendy LA restaurant that caters for some of the world’s fussiest diners.
Both rock legends were reportedly impressed.
With nearly $200 million (R2,7 billion) of venture capital, Impossible Foods is starting work on a new plant in Oakland, California, to produce enough meat for four million burgers a month using industrial quantities of blood made from “haem”, a key molecule in haemoglobin, without slaughtering a single animal.
Instead, the blood is produced by genetically engineered yeast. And burgers will soon be exported to other parts of the world.
Because it cuts out the middle cow, the company claims it will be able to mass- produce its burgers more cheaply than the meat variety.
Not bad for a company that started with a chance remark.
THE popular image of Silicon Valley is that it’s a place where inventions are hatched by computer geeks in bedrooms or garages, living on beer and pizza. It’s refreshing then that Patrick “Doc” Brown fits more the stereotype of the eccentric inventor.
We meet at his laboratory in Redwood City, near Palo Alto. For two decades he was a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, with a special interest in livestock farming and its problems. Then in 2009, aged 54, he had a lightbulb moment.
“A friend mentioned to me that if you could make a burger that McDonald’s would serve instead of a burger from a cow, then that would be the fastest way to solve the problem. It was a throwaway comment, but I realised that was exactly it. And because of my scientific background I knew it was completely doable.
“I found to my surprise that no one was treating it as a solvable problem. I think people just figured we have this insanely destructive system and it’s just never going to go away. They thought, ‘Bummer, but there you are’.”
The first phase of Brown’s plan, he says, was so simple it bordered on the naive. “To test out my idea I went to a little hill behind my house and started digging up clover plants. It really was as ridiculous as it sounds. Clover roots contain a high level of a protein that’s virtually identical to the haem protein in muscle tissue.
“I dissected them with a razor blade then blended them up just to see what I could extract. I was just poking around, feasibility-testing some ideas. I got to a point where, though I didn’t have much data, I’d enough to go and talk to some venture-capital companies – of which there are a ridiculous number in Silicon Valley – and hit them for some money.”
With a sales pitch that Brown says, in hindsight, didn’t deserve to succeed, he raised $9 million (R121,5 million).
“I talked to three different venture firms. In each case I gave a pitch that a scientist who had no business experience would give, but they were all willing to invest very quickly.”
After laboratory trials big investors
Producing meat has remained stubbornly low-tech ‒ and expensive
quickly arrived, including Gate and Google. Brown found himself the accidental CEO of a $200 million (R2,7-billion) company. He’s since turned down the offer of a $300 million (R4 billion) buyout.
Apart from a haircut, his lifestyle is unchanged. He drives a Nissan and lives in the same modest flat on Stanford’s university campus, close to his laboratory, but now he has 140 staff including 80 eager young scientists.
Rachel Konrad came from Tesla to help run Impossible Foods (so-called because of the challenge it’s taken on).
“For eight years I’d been selling electric cars to people so that they could reduce their carbon footprint. Yet the easiest thing you can do [to reduce that footprint] is to change what you eat. I realised greenhouse gases from the meat industry dwarf all the carbon dioxide produced by cars: in fact, more than all transport – vehicles, aircraft, ships – put together.”
Chris Davis, a British-born, Oxford-trained biotechnologist, is the company’s chief scientist.
His job is to engineer a burger that matches exactly the taste, texture and aroma of its animal-derived counterpart. In his lab, Davis is working on “sizzle” – the way the burger reacts to cooking – and mouth-coating: the aftertaste that’s crucial to meat eaters’ satisfaction.
Meat samples are fed through a mass spectrometer so they can be “reverse engineered”. Human “noses” – experts in food smells and taste – help identify what makes the aroma and flavour distinctive. There have been some surprises. Alongside “buttery” and “burnt” were “skunk” and “smelly diaper”.
Then the taste, texture and, this being California, the barbecuing properties are replicated with plant ingredients.
Davis uses fibre from wheat and potatoes as a substitute for muscle fibre; coconut oil in place of animal fat; konjac (an east Asian plant) instead of gelatine.
The result is a burger which he claims has more protein than the real thing, but with less fat and no cholesterol. With a nod to software updates, each improved generation of burger is named after a bird species (the latest version is Niltava, or flycatcher).
“It’s like the iPhone,” Davis says. “The burger tastes fantastic, but we’ll make a next generation that will be even better because it has better proteins, better raw materials.”
The company has proved it can create other types of meat, including pork and chicken, but to avoid overreaching itself, it’s restricting itself to beef, and specifically the ground beef used in burgers.
One reason is that burger meat is consumed in huge quantities – at least half a million tons a year are bought by McDonald’s (whose burgers are 100 percent beef) in the US alone – offering a potentially huge market for a substitute.
Another reason is that, compared to many burgers served in fast-food restaurants, the Impossible burger looks like a wholesome alternative.
Even in countries where food laws are tight burger ingredients often include fillers and binders as well as mechanically recovered meat, made by treating scraps left on animal carcasses with chemicals to get rid of bacteria (unpalatably dubbed “pink slime” by the industry).
Problems such as the horsemeat debacle in Britain four years ago, which began when a supermarket burger was found to contain nearly 30 percent horsemeat, haven’t helped the animal burger’s reputation.
Will some customers be put off by the fact that the Impossible burger is bioengineered? Konrad points out that the genetically engineered yeast used to make the haem doesn’t end up in the product – though it’s harmless, in any case. “It’s delicious and nutritious,” she insists.
If it all sounds a little evangelistic, it is. The company has big ambitions – can it succeed? With only a handful of restaurants selling the burger, the critics haven’t had a chance yet to get their teeth into it – but they almost certainly will.
THE strongest opposition Brown is likely to face isn’t from restaurants (which can see the attraction of selling “meat” to vegetarians), but from the livestock industry. The United States Cattlemen’s Association is as protective of farmers as the National Rifle Association is of gun owners. It covers all 50 states and
has lobbyists in Washington, as well as supporting local contests to find America’s best-tasting beef burger.
Jess Peterson is the straight-talking executive vice-president. An amiable Stetson-toting cattle rancher from Custer, Montana, he’s got no time for meat made in a “petri dish”.
“I wouldn’t say it’s never going to happen with the list of players involved. Bill Gates has a good track record of accomplishing things. But beef is king when it comes to taste and texture, and I don’t know how Mr Gates and his colleagues can replicate that. You can already get a soya burger – they’re not overcoming the beef burger anytime soon.”
He dismisses the claimed environmental benefits, saying that actually the opposite is true.
“Raising cattle is incredible for the environment when done with the proper range-management practices. If you remove a lot of cattle from the United States, and the management that goes along with [it], you’d severely undermine the environmental positives.”
His views are likely to reflect those of millions of contented meat eaters for whom there’ll never be a substitute for a real steak. Indeed, America is home to a growing “whole-animal movement”, which celebrates using every part of the carcass. It’s been popularised by celebrity chefs such as Chris Cosentino, America’s answer to Gordon Ramsay.
Like Peterson, Cosentino knows a thing or two about meat. He’s famous for hog roasts and steaks so big they flop over the edge of the plate.
At Cockscomb, his restaurant in San Francisco, customers don’t flinch from tucking into pigs’ ears, beef heart and “butcher’s choice” leftovers.
You’d expect therefore that the $19 (R256) gourmet burger he serves would appeal to hardcore meat eaters, and it does. The odd thing is that vegetarians enjoy it too.
On the day I visit his restaurant, 85 of the 145 lunch orders are for burgers made by Impossible Foods. There’s nothing on the menu to say it’s not meat.
“The only complaints I get are when we don’t serve it for one reason or another,” Cosentino says.
“I have these hardcore meat-eater dudes who come in here all the time. And they’re like, ‘You tricked me the first three times I had it. I totally thought it was burger meat.’
“But most people who are coming here, they know it’s here. They’re asking for it. We get requests in advance: a lot of meat-eaters wanting to try it. People come the first time, they have it, they come back and bring friends.”
McDonald’s, the world’s biggest buyer of beef, is said to have sent tasters to Cosentino’s restaurant. Impossible Foods won’t confirm rumours that it’s in talks with the fast-food giant.
Cosentino acknowledges that while he’ll never give up meat, the next generation is different.
“My son is 12, and he’s, like, ‘I’m going to have an Impossible burger today; I don’t want a regular burger.’ “
Younger customers at his restaurant seem to confirm his views. Anna Molinski (24) and her fiancé, Dev Saha (26), a researcher and a horticulturalist from New Jersey, are trying the burger for the first time. They ordered it medium rare: it came pink in the middle with blood. Molinski is a vegetarian, but Saha is a meat eater. “I couldn’t tell. I wanted to, but honestly, it felt and tasted exactly like meat,” Saha says.
Molinski is delighted. “What did I tell you?” she says, adding: “I think people will look back and wonder why we ate animals when we didn’t need to.”
‘I couldn’t tell. Honestly, it felt and tasted exactly like meat'