earthers and chupacabra hunters.
Brown, who is a vegan, seemed to find the
peculiar human folkways involving meat
enervating. He pointed me to a study by
Oklahoma State University that showed that
82 percent of Americans said they’d support
“mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.”
I let that sink in. What’s edible that’s free
of DNA? I wondered. Maybe salt. Maybe
Starbursts. “Does that leave gravel?” I asked.
“Ordinary consumers don’t know very
much about genetic material,” he said, dryly.
True. Likewise, it seems, we don’t know
much about Crispr, nuclear power, or geo-
engineering. No wonder it’s hell marketing
big solutions for the climate crisis to us;
many of us think DNA in food is cause for
alarm. Then we worry about the destruc-
tion of DNA by nuclear waste, though an
expanded nuclear program is a way to pro-
long the life of the planet. Like supersti-
tious yokels from the dawn of time, we just
know what we like and what we don’t. And
we don’t like things that sound ... hinky or
creepy. Or, worse, things that sound like
something someone who’s not in our tribe
might be excited about.
This is why implementing the next phase
of radical climate solutions is less a tech-
nological project than an anthropologi-
cal one. The field of anthropology, which
thrived in the last century, has deteriorated
in recent years; this is a loss. Franz Boas,
who is considered the father of American
cultural anthropology, devised the field in
part to counter the sophistry of scientific
racism. Anthropologists who followed him
(including his students Zora Neale Hur-
ston and Margaret Mead) continued in this
liberal tradition, focusing on how people
come by superstitions—including, in the
West, “scientific racism”—the better to rec-
ognize, and correct for, their own.
Ventures devoted to reducing livestock
farming, including Impossible Foods, could
use these minds and methodologies now.
Dietary laws around the globe exist chiefly
to express anxiety about meat. There are
vegetarian religions like Jainism; tribes like
the Maasai, who largely reject the meat of
wild animals in favor of the blood and milk
of cows; Muslim and Jewish adherents to
the laws of halal or kashrut; and many
modern cultures that eat meat with such
relish that they aim bitter resentment at
anyone who would curb their zeal. “Every-
one calls what is not their own custom bar-
barism,” as Montaigne put it.
A seminal book from the heyday of
anthropology touches explicitly on meat,
flesh, and irrationality: The Raw and the
Cooked (1964). Author Claude Lévi-Strauss
investigated how cultures structure experi-
ence around contrived binary oppositions.
The raw and the cooked is a tenacious one.
Think about foodies’ obsession with the
preparation of meat. Where cooked meat—
fire, ovens, stoves—would seem to be more
adaptive than raw, it’s meat prepared closer
to raw that represents haute cuisine in the
West, and the temperature one prefers for
meat is a vital class signifier. To order meat
well done might be to lose status in Paris;
elsewhere, to order it raw, as steak tartare,
might be deadly.
Anyone working to address climate
change should be mindful of the anthro-
pological notion of taboos. To scientists, the
idea of ginning up a super race of mice or
suffusing Earth’s atmosphere with aerosol-
ized mirrors might seem promising; to many
of the rest of us, these ideas trip bad wires.
Most of the wildest, reverse-the-polarities
ways that figures like Brown have proposed
to forestall catastrophe tread on sensitive
spots in the brain: flinch reflexes, squea-
mishness, areas of dizzying ignorance.
Kirsty Gogan, who advocates for expand-
ing the use of nuclear power at Energy for
Humanity, her NGO, has even identified
gut revulsion from solutions perceived as
taboos as a culprit in the climate crisis.
In tandem, Herbert Lin, a senior research
scholar for cyber policy and security at
Stanford, believes the planet is imperiled
in part because we’re starting to leave a
shared idea of reason behind and retreat-
ing into what Lin describes as “fantasy and
rage.” To claim to be “paleo” or “anti-vax”
is less to make an observation about real-
ity and more to claim a personal and tribal
affiliation, grounded in fantasy and rage,
totem and taboo.
All of the most promising routes to decar-
bonization, every last one of them, require
that humans change beliefs and behaviors
with which they may identify. The modern
imperative, if humans and our habitat are
to survive, is to interrogate cultural idées
fixes—about food, freedom, tribal identity,
the body, water, even evidence and truth.
Marketing, while useful for promoting cozi-ness and self-indulgence, is crap at getting
people to question their cherished beliefs.
Because of the force of human super-
stitions, more mighty than petroleum and
more central to our survival than the inter-
net, Gogan has also written, “All of our cli-
mate solutions must be impossible burgers.”
She means we need to think like Brown,
whose research ultimately showed him that
most fast-food consumers don’t think about
the origin of their burgers, or the halo of eat-
ing plants, or even about health value. They
care about taste, price, familiarity, and—to
a lesser extent—novelty. Impossible and its
rival, Beyond Meat, nailed these qualities,
and neither bothered to hold symposia on
DNA; lessons in biochemistry tend to kill the
burger buzz—the highly ritualized consump-
tion of cheap protein, generally in a colorful
and sociable setting. Like Burger King. Last
year, the sale of plant-based burgers went
up 10 percent. Most importantly, the meat-
from-plants was bought and consumed in
richly appointed tribal settings that give
comfort: Applebee’s, Hardee’s, TGI Fridays,
Hard Rock Café, and Dunkin’.
Brown’s burger has won over consum-
ers, in other words, without setting off
alarms about altering DNA or eliminating
cattle ranches. These days, Impossible’s site
doesn’t mince words: “Genetic engineering
is an essential part of our mission and our
product. We’ve always embraced the respon-
sible, constructive use of genetic engineering
to solve critical environmental, health, safety,
and food security problems.” In five years,
the stigma on GMOs has lifted; roving panic
about DNA moved on. Now that fake meat is
everywhere and scientists have extolled its
adoption, people tabled the GMO question,
much the way we tabled “test tube baby”
concerns when IVF became commonplace.
As a common noun, impossible burger
may come to mean the thing that human
systems of thought and practice would never
accommodate—until they did. For her part,
Gogan, in her quest to spread nuclear power
against quasi-religious objections from all
quarters, has closely tracked Brown’s audac-
ity and success in introducing his burgers on
a large scale—and, more astonishing still,
getting the GMO- and even DNA-shy to rel-
ish them. This is the way the planet is saved.VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a
regular contributor to wired.