Meatspace
PORTION OF GLOBAL AGRICULTURE
→62% EMISSIONS GENERATED BY CATTLE
BYVirginia Heffernan ILLUSTRATION BYAlvaro DominguezPAT BROWN, THE STANFORD BIOCHEMIST
who founded Impossible Foods, was try-
ing to be patient, as if he were addressing
a dim sophomore. This was five years ago,
and his company’s signature product—a
bona fide burger made from plants and ani-
mated by a molecule from soy plants that’s
bio-equivalent to mammal blood—hadn’t
yet found its way to Burger King and White
Castle. I’d come to his office in Redwood
City, California, to talk to him about whether
consumers really would start eating a beef
simulacrum.
Now this was a startup. In identifying
heme, that blood-like molecule, Brown
had a galvanizing innovation. And his com-
pany had a crystal-clear reason for being:
to meaningfully reduce livestock farm-
ing, the industry that produces 14.5 per-
cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Yet
Brown seemed to invert the priorities of
other CEOs. He was a reticent marketer
and eschewed the founder showbiz rou-
tine, which sometimes seems to represent
the whole enchilada at other startups.
But Impossible was going to need finesse.
People are very weird about meat. I had a
question I considered urgent: “What do you
think consumers, who are panicked about
GMOs, will make of the genetic modification
required to transform plants into meat?”
There was silence. Brown didn’t quite say
mmkay, but he looked weary, so weary, as
if I’d asked him about the opinions of flat-_Implementing radical climate solutions is less a
technological project than an anthropological one.