A burger that could save the world
Global meat consumption is soaring – and with it, environmental destruction and the threat of serious food insecurity. Now, a former professor of biochemistry has invented a burger that might just reverse the trend. Ben Hoyle went to meet him. “If I found
Sitting on the square white plate in front of me is a burger that inspires wonder, confusion and an undertow of dread. At present, you can buy it in about 40 restaurants in America. In this upmarket chain restaurant in San Francisco, the Impossible Burger comes in a brioche bun with caramelised onions, American cheese, dill pickles, lettuce, tomato, “house spread”, “miso-mustard” and an exotic dash of mystery. I peer closely at it, hold it up and sniff it warily.
This thing I’m clutching in my hands was built entirely from plants and genetically modified yeast in a Silicon Valley laboratory, where a crack team of international scientists labour day and night to save the planet. It was dreamt up by a biochemist called the “Gandalf of Stanford”, and paid for by investors who have pumped in more than £148m in funding, including Bill Gates, the billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Sir Ka-shing Li, the richest man in Hong Kong. Its creators think of it as more than mere food. It is a “technology platform” that will change the way humankind eats, and could even reverse global warming. There’s just one problem, and the thought of it has been spoiling my appetite: a few weeks ago it emerged that the US Food and Drug Administration is not sure if the Impossible Burger is safe for humans to eat.
I take a bite. The first impression is promising. There’s a caramelised crunchiness to the outside and a bounce to the texture of the fake muscle tissue on the inside. The “meat” itself looks indistinguishable from the real thing. There are alluring fatty and salty notes to the flavour at first, although they seem to fade as the initial impact wears off. By the time I’m halfway through it, I’m noticing everything that’s not quite there yet with the burger: the inside is actually mushy enough to grind down with your tongue; it smells more of beans than of meat now it’s colder. I’m starting to pick up an inoffensive but pronounced vegetable flavour. Still, it’s not at all bad. It occurs to me that I’ve never expended so much thought and emotional energy on a burger before.
An estimated 30%-45% of the world’s ice-free land mass is now taken up with feeding and raising domestic animals and livestock (tasks that also provide income for 1.3 billion people). That’s because, while vegetarianism might be increasing among FirstWorld millennials, the global trend is in the opposite direction. As rising incomes lift more people in the Developing World into the middle class, demand for meat is increasing at a formidable rate. Meat production has quadrupled in the past five decades,
according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, and is projected to grow by 60%-70% over the next 30 years. It is not hard to see how this could provoke a major sustainability crisis. Sara Menker, a former Wall Street commodities broker who now works with governments and businesses on food-supply problems, says that the “tipping point in global food and agriculture” may be only ten years away. “At that point, supply can no longer keep up with demand despite exploding food prices. People may starve. Governments may fall.”
This is the crisis that the Impossible Burger was invented to solve. Pat Brown, the founder and chief executive of Impossible Foods, has not eaten meat for more than 40 years, but retains a “pretty strong, I wouldn’t necessarily say accurate, memory of what it tasted like”. Why did he give it up? Because he thought it was cruel, he says after some prodding. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “It’s just kind of alienating when people say that.” Brown is not fussed about catering for vegetarians. Carnivores are the only people he is interested in. If they can’t be convinced that his plant-based meat is actually meatier and tastier than meat from animals, “then it’s back to the drawing board”, he says. “If we had a super-successful burger company and that was it, that would be an egregious failure. And it’s not going to happen.”
We’re in a meeting room at the company’s modestly sized headquarters in Redwood City, about ten miles south of San Francisco International Airport. Brown, 63, is tall and lean, with cropped grey hair and a slightly high-pitched voice. He’s wearing dad jeans, chunky blue trainers and a purple hooded top over a black T-shirt that says “IMPOSSIBLE” in white lettering. He retains the sincere, slightly vulnerable air of someone who is more comfortable with scientific equations than the salesmanship required from the CEO of a $200m start-up. Before he started Impossible Foods, Brown was professor of biochemistry at Stanford University. His friend, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus, later tells me that Brown is “revered” by his scientific peers. His work on HIV, on cancer and on opening up the free publishing of scientific research has established a global reputation that will endure whatever happens with the burgers. Impossible Foods sprang out of an idea that hit Brown almost a decade ago. “What I came to realise is that if I found a cure for lung cancer, it would do less good for the world than if I improved the environmental sustainability of the food system
by, you know, 10%. Food insecurity in terms of overall global life expectancy and quality of life is a much bigger problem than cancer. The potential for reducing the environmental impact of the food system is humongous.”
Brown looks straight at me and says, “We will change the way Earth looks from space.” You’ll do what? “Almost anywhere you go, if you drive more than a few miles, you’re going to see cows and sheep and goats and, in fact, not much else.” Animal agriculture has a “huge greenhouse gas footprint” – around 15% of total global emissions. It is “by far the biggest driver of a meltdown in wildlife populations that has taken place over the past 40 years… and by far the biggest consumer of water”. Across Latin America and sub-saharan Africa, forests are being torn down “at an insane rate” to plant crops to feed livestock, particularly soybeans for pigs to meet China’s demand for pork. If you stopped that process and let the land recover, the change would be so obvious that “you could just look at a Google Earth view and see it”, Brown says. The planet “will be greener, and will not be chopped into little circles and squares growing corn and soybeans”. New forests could begin to reverse climate change.
The key to making Impossible Burgers taste like meat is something called “heme” – an iron-containing molecule that delivers oxygen through the bloodstream to mammals and can also be found in all plants. It is abundant in the root nodules of soybeans, where it is carried by a protein called soy leghemoglobin. Impossible Foods decided that growing vast fields of soybeans was an environmental non-starter, so instead it produces heme artificially, growing it in vats with a bespoke genetically modified yeast. Heme is what makes red meat red. It looks like filtered blood. When I taste a few drops, the effect in my mouth is eerie – it’s as if I’ve just cut my lip. Blending heme with a handful of other ingredients including water, some fibrous-looking wheat protein, a snot-coloured, gloopy potato derivative, salt, various nutrients and a little coconut oil to give the “sizzle” on the griddle, produces something that looks uncannily like ground beef.
But heme has also inflicted Impossible Foods’ first serious setback. Earlier this year, The New York Times published a 2015 memo leaked from the US Food and Drug Administration, which included the apparently damning line: “FDA believes the arguments presented, individually and collectively, do not establish the safety of soy leghemoglobin for consumption.” Brown and his colleagues seethed. Their only mistake, they argued, was to have aspired to a much higher standard of transparency than they were required to meet. While the FDA oversees drugs and food additives, there is no approval requirement for flask-grown foods. Companies such as Impossible Foods are only expected to conduct “self-affirming” safety tests. “It was a very misleading article that misrepresented the facts,” Brown says at a specially convened Facebook Live Q&A the day that I’m there. “We are incredibly focused on safety, above and beyond any legal requirements.” The company is currently preparing to resubmit its testing results to the FDA.
Impossible Foods is arguably the most technologically ambitious company in its space, but it does not have the market to itself. One close rival is Beyond Meat, which also has investment from Gates and sells products that have no genetic modification. Its burgers are made from peas, potato starch and beetroot, which provides the “blood”. There’s also Sweet Earth Natural Foods, a Californian business selling a range of “plant-based meats” that was founded by Brian Swette, a previous chairman of Burger King. Then there are the companies like Memphis Meats and Finless Foods that are growing non-vegetarian artificial meat from animal and fish cells. How will Brown, the novice businessman, navigate these choppy commercial waters?
He does not seem to be financially motivated in the least. “I have such a good life, it’s not going to be made better by having a lot of money,” he tells me. “I’m not kidding. There are so many rich people around Palo Alto, and I’m happier, and have been for the entire time I’ve been here, than 99% of them, I think. It’s because I love what I’m doing, I get to live in a nice place and I can walk out my door and go for a long run.” He earned more at Stanford than he does now, he says. He and his wife still live in the same house where they raised their three grown-up children. What he has is an all-consuming belief in his mission. “If the business fails, the mission fails,” he says. But if the business succeeds, then long before he hits his real goals he will find himself running Silicon Valley’s latest “unicorn” – that elusive start-up that reaches a $1bn valuation.
Along with the Facebook Live team and a handful of other journalists, I am handed a dark-blue lab coat and plastic goggles to take a tour of Impossible Foods’ state-of-the-art laboratory and kitchen. A few dozen white-coated scientists glide through a white-floored space dominated by long tables full of chemistry equipment and computer monitors. “This is the coolest thing,” says David Lipman, the chief science officer, leading us towards a room screened off by plastic walls. Lipman, who has a global reputation himself as a genomics pioneer and expert in foodborne disease, is the son and grandson of butchers. He bristles with enthusiasm.
In the room, a robot is cooking a tiny fragment of food hooked up to a large white machine; this breaks down the aromas into separate compounds. These separate smells are then sampled and classified by a scientist via a large yellow plastic nose trumpet. This is how Impossible Foods works out how to build the full depth and richness of a real “meaty” flavour. At a bench nearby, other scientists are wrestling with the tensile properties of meat. A researcher is stretching some beef tendon in a vice and monitoring the results on a graph, while a colleague is trying to work out how much force is required to smash a piece of fat. We advance into the sparkling kitchen area where there are stoves, shelves crowded with spices, cheese, mushrooms and olives, and hacksaws and carving knives hanging on the wall. This is where the tasting is done. Celeste Holz-schietinger, the principal scientist for flavour, explains that unlike Brown and Lipman, who have both been vegetarian for decades, she has to eat a lot of meat for her job. “I need to know how meat cooks. I need to know those flavours.”
The burger is only the start. The company now has “fundamental knowledge that can be transferred to make something much larger”. Holz-schietinger mentions “whole steaks, chicken, pork, lamb, even fish, cheeses, milk and eggs”. For now, though, there is a laser focus on the burger, which Brown calls a “proof of concept for us”. Like an iphone, its burger is constantly being updated. The one I had is the 15th version. In blind tastings, 46% of consumers preferred it to a real burger. In Brown’s mind it is simply a matter of time before they eliminate that gap. “The thing is that we’re just getting better. And the cow is not.”