48 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
3-D printer (and also surmount issues
with vascularization and oxygen diffu-
sion), they’ll have solved the defining
challenge for meat replacements: build-
ing a sturdy approximation of muscle,
fat, and connective tissue to produce full
cuts of meat and fish. Mike Selden, of
Finless Foods, told me, “Where Impos-
sible stops is where Finless starts. They’re
limited to ground products, and we’ll be
able to make sashimi and fillets.”
But cell-based meat remains a fledg-
ling field. The Good Food Institute has
calculated that the entire group of start-
ups has raised only seventy-three mil-
lion dollars. There are notable difficul-
ties even getting started: it’s challenging
to identify the right cells to culture; the
serum typically used to grow cells for
medical research costs a thousand dol-
lars a litre; rapid cell growth is frustrat-
ingly elusive; and the traditional best
kick-starter for that growth is fetal bo-
vine serum, taken from dead calves. So
costs remain extremely high and yields
extremely low. The founders of Wild
Type told me that their salmon had be-
come more than fifty times cheaper to
manufacture: it’s now less than four
thousand dollars a pound, and they can
make a pound every six weeks. Kate
Krueger, the research director at New
Harvest, an institute devoted to cellu-
lar agriculture, said, “A nugget or a burger
could be five to ten years away. For a
structured product, like steak, it’s at least
ten years—and that may be optimistic.”
Just originally announced that it
would introduce cell-based meat by
2018; Tetrick told me he now hoped to
have his chicken in a few restaurants by
the end of this year. His production cost
for a single chicken nugget is still fifty
dollars. “The natural reaction to that
price,” he admitted, “is ‘You gotta be
effin’ kidding me.’”
It’s hard to predict whether custom-
ers will adjust more easily to meat made
from plants or meat grown in enormous
vats. In a recent survey by the invest-
ment bank Barclays, plant-based meats
have a tiny edge among American, In-
dian, and Chinese consumers. Tetrick
believes this will shift in time, as peo-
ple in the developing world eat more
meat. “If the objective is to get to a bil-
lion dollars in sales in seven years, I
would do plant-based meat,” he told
me. “And every time I’m in San Fran-
cisco, L.A., or New York I think, Why
aren’t we doing plant-based? But every
time I’m in Shanghai, where meat is all
about cultural arrival, I think, We can
only change the world’s system of ani-
mal agriculture by doing cultured meat.
So I think Pat Brown is wrong. Of
course,” he added, “I could also be wrong.
Or, guess what, we could both be wrong!”S
ince 1961, global meat production has
grown more than four hundred per
cent. Not only is meat delicious; it’s nu-
tritious—a great source of protein, iron,
and Vitamin A. In areas such as sub-
Saharan Africa, where one person in five
is malnourished, meat is the quickest fix.
Its consumption also demonstrates to
the neighbors that you can afford some-
thing other than rice, yams, or cassava.
The barrier to that emblem of arrival
keeps getting lower: in most places, meat
is cheaper than it’s ever been.
By 2050, as the world’s population
grows to nearly ten billion, demand for
meat is expected to nearly double again.
In the global-management world, this
predicates what is known as “the 2050
Challenge”: how do we feed all those
people without hastening climate change?
A five-hundred-page report, “Creating a
Sustainable Food Future,” released in July
by the World Resources Institute, the
World Bank, and the United Nations,
declared that, if we stay on our present
course through 2050, feeding the planet
will “entail clearing most of the world’sremaining forests, wiping out thousands
more species, and releasing enough GHG
emissions to exceed the 1.5° C and 2° C
warming targets enshrined in the Paris
Agreement—even if emissions from all
other human activities were entirely elim-
inated.” The chance that ten billion peo-
ple will suddenly stop driving, cooling
their homes, and manufacturing anything
at all is, of course, zero. The report’s lead
author, a droopy-eyed research scholar at
Princeton University named Tim Search-inger, told me, “There were times writ-
ing it when I thought, Euthanize your
children—we’re all doomed.”
In April, Searchinger visited Impos-
sible’s Silicon Valley headquarters, in
Redwood City, hoping for better news.
He tossed a notepad on a conference
table, across from half a dozen Impos-
sible executives, and looked probingly
at Pat Brown. Searchinger was the fox
who knows many things; Brown the
hedgehog convinced of one. I’d men-
tioned to him that Searchinger’s report
detailed a raft of initiatives that human-
ity needed to implement to solve the
2050 Challenge, from wiser manure
stewardship to increasing the global fish
supply and drastically lowering the birth
rate: twenty-two changes in all. “One
change!” Brown had cried. “If we can
just get everyone to eat plants, you don’t
have to disrupt everything else.”
“What’s the increase in your produc-
tion going to be the day Burger King
goes national?” Searchinger asked.
“Humongous,” Brown said. He fid-
dled with a piece of paper, folding it into
a rectangle. Impossible’s rapid growth
had led to a supply crunch. The company
was holding meetings to determine which
distributors would get less product, and
had postponed launching in supermar-
kets. (The Impossible Burger débuts in
a hundred and twenty-nine stores this
fall, beginning with Gelson’s locations in
Los Angeles.) He went on, “That’s why
half the population of this building has
volunteered to work in our Oakland
plant.” In a call-for-volunteers e-mail,
Brown wrote that while the supply prob-
lem was “the biggest risk not only to our
vital relationship with Burger King, [but]
to our business as a whole,” it was also
“an epic opportunity for heroism.” I’d just
visited the plant—a former industrial
bakery—and seen dozens of office work-
ers in hairnets and steel-toed galoshes
shadowing line workers, eager to step in.
Searchinger had brought a list of de-
tailed questions about the company’s
costs and its supply chain, which the
execs met with assured generalities.
Brown said, “Another advantage we have
over the incumbent technology is that
we keep improving our product every
week. The cow can’t.”
“How close are you on the texture
issues to being able to make steak and
cubed beef ?”