44 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
cent less land than a cowburger, and its
production generates eighty-nine per
cent less G.H.G. emissions. They made
it nutritionally equal to or superior to
beef. And they made it look, smell, and
taste very different from the customary
veggie replacement. Impossible’s break-
through involves a molecule called heme,
which the company produces in tanks
of genetically modified yeast. Heme helps
an Impossible Burger remain pink in
the middle as it cooks, and it replicates
how heme in cow muscle catalyzes the
conversion of simple nutrients into the
molecules that give beef its yeasty, bloody,
savory flavor. To my palate, at least, the
Impossible Burger still lacks a beef burg-
er’s amplitude, that crisp initial crunch
followed by shreds of beef falling apart
on your tongue. But, in taste tests, half
the respondents can’t distinguish Im-
possible’s patty from a Safeway burger.
Eighteen months ago, White Cas-
tle, the nation’s oldest burger chain,
started selling the Impossible Slider,
and sales exceeded expectations by more
than thirty per cent. Lisa Ingram, White
Castle’s C.E.O., said, “We’ve often had
customers return to the counter to say,
‘You gave us the wrong order, the real
burger.’” In August, Burger King rolled
out the Impossible Whopper in all of
its seventy-two hundred locations. Fer-
nando Machado, the company’s chief
marketing officer, said, “Burger King
skews male and older, but Impossible
brings in young people and women, and
puts us in a different spectrum of qual-
ity, freshness, and health.”
Ninety-five per cent of those who buy
the Impossible Burger are meat-eaters.
The radio host Glenn Beck, who breeds
cattle when he’s not leading the “They’re
taking away your hamburgers!” caucus,
recently tried the Impossible Burger on
his show, in a blind taste test against a
beef burger—and guessed wrong. “That
is insane!” he marvelled. “I could go vegan!”
Pat Brown had built a better mouth-
trap. But would that be enough?
T
he working title of Impossible Foods’
2019 impact report was “Fuck the
Meat Industry.” “I never seriously con-
sidered using it,” Brown told me, “but it
helps frame the mojo.” Brown has a light
voice, a tolerant smile, and an engaging
habit of absorption; he often remarks that
some scientific conundrum is “too arcane
to get into,” then plunges into it regard-
less, surfacing minutes later with a sheep-
ish “Anyway, anyway!” as he tries to re-
call the topic at hand. But the mojo is
conquest. “We plan to take a double-digit
portion of the beef market within five
years, and then we can push that indus-
try, which is fragile and has low margins,
into a death spiral,” he said. “Then we
can just point to the pork industry and
the chicken industry and say ‘You’re next!’
and they’ll go bankrupt even faster.”
Meat producers don’t seem too wor-
ried that Brown will rid the earth of
livestock by 2035. The three largest meat-
packing companies in America have
combined annual revenues of more than
two hundred billion dollars. Mark Dopp,
a senior executive at the North Amer-
ican Meat Institute, a lobbying group,
told me, “I just don’t think it’s possible
to wipe out animal agriculture in six-
teen years. The tentacles that flow from
the meat industry—the leather and
the pharmaceuticals made from its by-
products, the millions of jobs in Amer-
ica, the infrastructure—I don’t see that
being displaced over even fifty years.”
A number of alternative-protein en-
trepreneurs share Brown’s mission but
believe he’s going about it the wrong way.
The plant-based producer Beyond Meat
is in fifty-three thousand outlets, includ-
ing Carl’s Jr., A&W, and Dunkin’, and
has a foothold in some fifty countries.
Its I.P.O., in May, was the most success-
ful offering of the year, with the stock
up more than five hundred per cent;
though the company is losing money, in-
vestors have noticed that sales of plant-
based meat in restaurants nearly quadru-
pled last year. While Impossible depends
on the patented ingredient heme, Be-
yond builds its burgers and sausages with-
out genetically modified components,
touting that approach as healthier. Ethan
Brown, Beyond’s founder and C.E.O.
(and no relation to Pat Brown), told me,
jocularly, “I have an agreement with my
staff that if I have a heart attack they
have to make it look like an accident.”
Several dozen other startups have
taken an entirely different approach:
growing meat from animal cells. Yet
even Pat Brown’s competitors often end
up following his lead. Mike Selden, the
co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless Foods,
a startup working on cell-based bluefin
tuna, said, “Pat and Impossible made itseem like there’s a real industry here.
He stopped using the words ‘vegan’ and
‘vegetarian’ and set the rules for the in-
dustry: ‘If our product can’t compete on
regular metrics like taste, price, conve-
nience, and nutrition, then all we’re doing
is virtue signalling for rich people.’ And
he incorporated biotechnology in a way
that’s interesting to meat-eaters—Pat
made alternative meat sexy.”
What’s striking about Brown is his
aggression. He is a David eager to head-
butt Goliath. “If you could do two things
of equal value for the world, and in one
of them someone is trying to stop you,
I would do that one,” he told me. Brown
doesn’t care that plant-based meat
amounts to less than 0.1 per cent of the
$1.7-trillion global market for meat, fish,
and dairy, or that meat contributes to
the livelihoods of some 1.3 billion peo-
ple. His motto, enshrined on the wall
of Impossible’s office, is “Blast ahead!”
During the six months that I was re-
porting this story, the company’s head
count grew sixty per cent, to five hun-
dred and fifty-two, and its total fund-
ing nearly doubled, to more than seven
hundred and fifty million dollars. Brown
laid out the math: to meet his 2035 goal,
Impossible just has to double its pro-
duction every year, on average, for the
next 14.87 years. This means that it has
to scale up more than thirty thousand-
fold. When I observed that no company
has ever grown anywhere near that fast
for that long, he shrugged and said, “We
will be the most impactful company in
the history of the world.”A
merica’s first commercial mock
meat came out of the Battle Creek
Sanitarium, in Michigan, at the turn of
the twentieth century. The sanitarium
was run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a
member of the vegetarian Seventh-day
Adventist Church, who proselytized for
sexual abstinence and made his epony-
mous cornflakes superbly bland, hop-
ing that their ingestion would dampen
lust. When Kellogg began to sell cans
of Protose, an insipid mixture of nuts
and gluten, he claimed that it “resem-
bles potted veal or chicken”—meat in
general, rather than any specific one.
In the seventies and eighties, soy
burgers developed by MorningStar
Farms and Gardenburger epitomized a
peaceful life style, indicating that “no