Billion Dollar Burger

Description

The riveting story of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring lab-grown meat to the world.

The trillion-dollar meat industry is one of our greatest environmental hazards; it pollutes more than all the world’s fossil-fuel-powered cars. Global animal agriculture is responsible for deforestation, soil erosion, and more emissions than air travel, paper mills, and coal mining combined. It also, of course, depends on the slaughter of more than 60 billion animals per year, a number that is only increasing as the global appetite for meat swells.

But a band of doctors, scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs have been racing to end animal agriculture as we know it, hoping to fulfill a dream of creating meat without ever having to kill an animal. In the laboratories of Silicon Valley companies, Dutch universities, and Israeli startups, visionaries are growing burgers and steaks from microscopic animal cells and inventing systems to do so at scale–allowing us to feed the world without slaughter and environmental devastation.

Drawing from exclusive and unprecedented access to the main players, from polarizing activist-turned-tech CEO Josh Tetrick to lobbyists and regulators on both sides of the issue, Billion Dollar Burger follows the people fighting to upend our food system as they butt up against the entrenched interests fighting viciously to stop them.

The stakes are monumentally high: cell-cultured meat is the best hope for sustainable food production, a key to fighting climate change, a gold mine for the companies that make it happen, and an existential threat for the farmers and meatpackers that make our meat today.

Are we ready?“A thorough, thoughtful dive into the revolution coming for our plates. I learned so much.”—Bianca Bosker, author of Cork Dork

“A wild ride to the far horizon of our food system. Chase Purdy breaks important new ground in this gripping account about the innovators, activists, and big-money investors who are reinventing meat as we know it. Not only are they changing the world—they’re doing it a lot faster than you think.” –Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland

 “This is a fast-paced, early peek into what will soon be the topic at dinner for the next two decades: lab-grown meat. What do we call it, is it good, should I eat it? Read this and get ahead of the curve.” —Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at Wired and author of The Inevitable

 “Billion Dollar Burger is a journalistic feat, offering us the first real, behind-the-scenes look at the wild world of vegans, scientists and venture capitalists racing to upend our plates. A thoughtful, entertaining, well-researched, and essential book.”—Helena Bottemiller Evich, James Beard Award-winning food and agriculture reporter at Politico 

“Can humanity move beyond the slaughterhouse? Billion Dollar Burger is a compulsive and well-researched account of the scientists, entrepreneurs, and activists trying to save the world through high-tech meat.”—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human

“A deeply reported account of the science, politics, and personalities behind cell-cultured meat that every eater needs to read. Chase Purdy brings the stuff of science fiction to life in this fascinating book.” —John Mackey, Founder and CEO Whole Foods Market

“Someday, humans will look back today’s industrial meat production with horror. Chase Purdy brilliantly chronicles the emergence of a new industry poised to set us on the path to a more humane future, with dramatic implications for agriculture, the environment and the way we think about food.”– Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots and Architects of IntelligenceChase Purdy is a journalist exploring the business, politics, and technologies that are changing the landscape of food and how people interact with it. He has worked at Quartz and Politico, as well as in newsrooms across the American South, including The Roanoke Times, The Ledger, and The News Virginian. He is a National Fellow at New America. He lives in New York City.

1

 

Digging In

 

I slide my pen and notepad to the side. It’s a sunny afternoon in 2018. Scooting my metal stool up to the edge of a tabletop in JUST’s impressive food laboratory, I peer around me. This thing I’m waiting to see is supposed to be the powder keg that sets off a culinary shift-much talked about, rarely seen, and almost never tasted.

 

The company’s headquarters sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, at the corner of Sixteenth and Folsom streets. It’s two stories tall and sprawls across 98,000 square feet of space-all enclosed behind thick, pinkish-beige walls that once housed the Joseph Schmidt Confections chocolate factory and later a Disney Pixar studio. JUST has married the building’s food and technology pasts. Each day more than one hundred employees show up to work here. They enter through a front door of frosted glass, covered with the blemishes of bygone years and surrounded by a smudged golden frame. The entryway leads up a flight of black stairs, down a carpeted hallway, past a company break room-well stocked, of course, with avocados and La Croix flavored seltzers-and then finally into the company’s cavernous nerve center. The floors are made of slick concrete, the walls are white, and dozens of long wooden desks stretch across the center of a room that’s bathed in natural light pouring through a wall of tall windows.

 

All around me, teams of scientists are using expensive lab equipment to dive deep into the inner lives of plants, exploring the tiny components that make them unique in an effort to figure out how they can be used to make new types of food. What plant proteins can work as emulsifiers? Which ones can withstand stovetop heat? In a corner of the lab, a half dozen robotic arms sit in big clear boxes, a few of them swiveling to and fro, analyzing all manner of foodstuff; testing and cataloging the different aspects of plants that have been collected by JUST from all across the world in hopes they’ll prove beneficial.

 

In the center of the room, not far from where I’m sitting, several sofas are clustered together, occupied by one of the many dogs that regularly lope throughout the company’s headquarters on a given day. If anything is certain about JUST, it is that you can always count on seeing a dog.

 

I’d heard about this food before, of course, the stuff I’ve come to taste. It was only five years earlier that Mark Post had unveiled his burger. In those years between, pictures of early renditions of cell-cultured meat haven’t been too tough to find, but even as a reporter charged with covering the global meat industry, I still hadn’t seen any cell-cultured meat up close for myself, let alone had the opportunity to taste the stuff.

 

When it does arrive, it’s on a small white plate, artfully wreathed by a fan of toasted sourdough and a distracting sprig of greenery. A lab technician slides the plate in front of me and I let it sit there for a moment.

 

“More people have gone into outer space than have tried clean meat,” he tells me. More than five hundred people had been in space at that point. Only dozens could say they had tasted meat grown from animal cells. I was about to be inducted into an exclusive club.

 

I repeated the line to myself as I stared curiously at my plate.

 

“More people have gone into outer space. More people have gone into outer space . . . outer space.”

 

I reached for a slice of toast, took a small butter knife, and dipped it into the main attraction: a dollop of golden-beige paste. P‰tŽ had never appeared on any kitchen table during my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, and I’d never acquired a taste for it.

 

Am I ready for this? I wondered, scraping the p‰tŽ across the bread. Until this moment, probably like you, every bit of meat I’d ever tasted had come from a once-sentient creature.

 

This particular dish was grown from duck cells. A lot of the companies growing cell-cultured meat chose to tackle meat from birds first. Avian cells often grow better in cultured settings than mammalian cells do. For starters, it’s easier to tinker with them and get them to do what you want-they have better plasticity. Mammal cells are harder to coax into compliance; source animals must be young because they have healthier muscle stem cells, for instance. By contrast, scientists have learned that muscle stem cells, sometimes even from older birds, are still efficient for proliferation in a laboratory setting.

 

I bring the toast up to my mouth and take a bite, chewing for a moment, savoring-and judging-the pate’s silky texture and rich aftertaste. My eyes, mouth, and nose instinctively registered what I was eating as meat-but crackling across the buzzing synapses of my brain was only one thought: Cells!

 

One of the men in cream-colored lab coats, a professional chef who had been hired as a product engineer, searches my face for a reaction. His name is Thomas Bowman, he’s been recognized by Michelin and, at the time, was leading product development in JUST’s test kitchen. That’s a long-winded way of saying that he took what the company’s cell-cultured meat lab produced and tested it in the kitchen, providing a model for how real consumers might prepare and cook it.

 

I leaned forward for another helping, smearing more pate onto a second slice of bread. As I chewed, a competitive game of tug-of-war between cold logic and cautious emotion unfolded in my mind. Of course, everything we eat is ultimately just a bunch of cells-the bananas we peel, the steaks we marinate, the potatoes we boil and simmer-and yet in that moment the thing I was swallowing seemed somehow alien. The pate placed before me was the result of decades of scientific tinkering and the subject of science fiction; a dream product in the eyes of scientists and activists-foie gras grown not inside the tortured liver of a duck, but inside the walls of a Silicon Valley laboratory.

 

It was surreal but deeply compelling. As I would find out over the course of the following year, that pasty clump of cells spread over toast represented something much bigger and more globally significant: a preface to a growing food movement that’s seeking to provide an ethical solution to the many unethical problems of the modern food system. By harvesting animal cells and quite literally growing them into fat and muscle tissue inside industrial bioreactors, humans have figured out how to create the exact same meats we’ve eaten for more than half a million years.

 

In doing so, those scientists hope to enable us to sidestep the need to slaughter billions of animals annually, and theoretically, in time, eliminate the need for an industrial farming system that pumps an alarming amount of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s warming atmosphere each year. Scientists agree that animal agriculture is responsible for about 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Fully wrapping our heads around the impact of the animal agriculture system we’ve always known is mind-bogglingly difficult. Lots of scientists attempt to measure the full environmental footprint of animal agriculture, and almost all of them have run into fierce sets of critics who challenge their methodologies and motives. Did the scientist measure the life cycle of a single animal and then multiply those data to represent its specific sector? Did they include data on the energy used to grow, manage, and transport the feed grain for cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals? How about factoring in deforestation to make room for grazing? Or the long impact of water pollution from nitrous oxide in manure?

 

Those working on cell-cultured meat understand that by addressing these issues, they’ll be helping to bring that number down; they’ll be pushing back against the planet’s march toward a full-blown climate crisis, one that already promises to reshape where and how humans live.

 

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a landmark report that estimated animal farming is the source of some 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the cars, ships, trains, and planes that crisscross the globe belching smoke. The report said 9 percent of the globe’s human-related carbon dioxide emissions could be tied back to animal agriculture, 37 percent of methane emissions, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide (mostly from cow manure).

 

The report got a lot of attention and triggered a wave of people-activists and entrepreneurs alike-to take action. But it didn’t go unchallenged, and since then scientists have produced more nuanced findings.

 

The beef and dairy industries get most of the attention, as they contribute 41 percent and 20 percent of the sector’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, respectively. The pork industry creates about 9 percent of emissions, and the broiler chicken and egg industries collectively contribute about 8 percent. Cows do more damage because of their digestive process, which, through fermentation in their four stomachs, creates a lot of methane gas. Once released into the atmosphere, methane has about twenty times the heat-trapping power as carbon.

 

Just how much methane a single, 1,200-pound cow produces each year depends entirely on what the animal is fed, but scientists often cite about 100 kilograms of methane, about the same as a car burning through more than 230 gallons of gasoline.

 

Suddenly, the prospect of finding an alternative way to create real meat becomes even more enticing.

 

Then there’s the inherent wastefulness of animal agriculture. It takes about 6 pounds of animal feed to produce 1 pound of beef, 3.5 pounds of feed for 1 pound of pork, and 2 pounds for a single pound of chicken. Animal agriculture relies on growing plant protein-vast fields of corn and soybeans-only to cycle it through an animal that has to be killed to yield less weight in food than the plants it ate. Of course, plant protein doesn’t have the same nutritional profile as animal protein. But these numbers are the foundation of the compelling case for reducing consumption of meat in order to be better stewards of the planet, especially as estimates show the number of mouths to feed on earth-10 billion by 2050-is steadily rising.

 

Environmental sustainability is a compelling reason to consider giving up meat, but there are other reasons, too, especially animal welfare. The farms that raise chickens and pigs have gotten bigger and more opaque, not smaller and more transparent. Data collected by the US Department of Agriculture show the number of total farms in America has declined from 6.8 million in 1935 to fewer than 2.06 million in 2016, the result of a jaw-dropping amount of consolidation that has wiped out family farms. That’s nearly a 70 percent decline. USDA data show the American dairy herd shrank by about 60 percent in the last ninety years, but only because humans figured out how to jury-rig individual cows to produce more than 400 percent more pounds of milk fat per head, according to data compiled by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. And the fishing industry remains one of the world’s murkiest, with little oversight. We have depleted vast stores of the planet’s fish population (we kill an estimated 1 trillion fish a year); meanwhile, the fishing industry has relied on slave labor.

 

Bowman sets another plate before me, this time bearing a more familiar sight: tacos. In front of me are two corn tortillas topped with cilantro and postage stamp-size bits of duck chorizo. It was grown from the same batch of cells used to make the p‰tŽ. I tilt my head, peering at the plate at tabletop level and playing inspector, as if I might discover something amiss. I imagine throwing a finger into the air to say, “This is close, but the meat looks a bit rubbery.”

 

But of course I don’t. Any restaurant could have served the same dish to me and I would have been fooled. The seasoned chorizo tasted and felt just as I might expect, as moist and richly flavored as anything I’d get from the myriad taco stands outside JUST’s office in the historically Latino Mission District. And on a biological level, there was no difference between my lab-concocted taco and the chorizo I could get at the taco stand outside.

US

Additional information

Imprint	Portfolio
ISBN-13	09780593853863
ISBN-10	0593853865
Author	Chase Purdy
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SOC055000, TEC012000
Subjects	business books, strategy, TEC012000, money, culinary, economics books, plant based diet, SOC055000, technology books, environmental science, food science, sociology books, food industry, vegan gifts, vegan books, engineering books, food politics, agriculture books, burger book, vegetarian books, engineering, farming, business, science, technology, Sociology, Food, climate change, economics, healthy eating, history, agriculture, economy, history books, natural history, science books, cooking gifts, gifts for foodies, food books, food history
Format	General Trade