THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 49
“The level of confidence in the R.&D.
team is very high,” Brown replied evenly.
At the moment, Impossible’s steak pro-
totypes are squishy and homogeneous,
far too easy to eat. Brown announced a
steak project earlier this year, then put it
on hold to address the supply crunch.
Searchinger studied his list and said,
“One thing that will be critical is accep-
tance in the developing world—finding
local agricultural associations that make
precursor products for you, before the
local beef guys put you out of business.”
“I completely agree,” Brown said.
North America makes up only twelve per
cent of the global market for meat; he
needed to wipe out livestock everywhere.
Searchinger said, “Our baseline es-
timate is that by 2050, to produce the
beef to meet demand, we’ll see a hun-
dred and fifty-eight million hectares
more pastureland in Africa alone. And
the even bigger threat is from China.”
Brown made a face. “To head that off,
we have to be seen as successful in the
U.S. and developed countries first,” he
said. “If we’re seen as a cheap substitute,
we won’t get any traction in Africa.”
Searchinger looked wistful. “If you
could just reforest all the grazing land,
1.2 billion hectares!” he said. “Giving up
all beef would be the most effective thing
we could do for the planet.” He has cal-
culated that if you reduced beef con-
sumption by three-fourths (allowing for
some pastoral nomadism and dairy cows
later used for beef ) and reforested ac-
cordingly it would reduce global G.H.G.
emissions by about twenty per cent.
“We’ll take care of getting rid of all
beef for you,” Brown said. They smiled
and shook hands.
Searchinger later told me, “Innova-
tion from places like Impossible is the
one thing that allows me to have a tiny
bit of optimism.” But he still believed
too many complicating, countervailing
things. A week after his visit, he co-wrote
an op-ed for CNN that called Impossi-
ble’s deals with fast-food restaurants “his-
toric,” but said that “eliminating beef is
neither the goal nor realistically at stake.
The point is to hold down its growth.”
I
n June, more than a thousand people
descended on the Quality Hotel
Globe, in Stockholm, to discuss how to
feed the world without destroying it.
The annual conference of EAT, a Scan-
dinavian nonprofit dedicated to making
our food system sustainable, showcased
backpacks and business beards, talk of
the Global South and the Global North,
and the AirDropping of dire bar graphs.
There was an atmosphere of acerbic
self-satisfaction, a sense that only those
present understood both what it would
take to save humanity and that it was
probably too late. At dinner, after the
chef Claus Meyer, who co-founded
Noma, extolled the rhubarb on his menu
for “plunging from the earth like a cold
frozen fist,” Pat Brown surveyed the
throng and said, “If I were cynical, which
of course I’m not, I’d say conferences like
this are an excuse for these guys to bop
around the world meeting each other.”
Yet when Brown was interviewed on
the main stage, wearing the outfit his
comms team had specified—“NO COW
T-shirt, blazer and jeans”—he was up-
beat. He’s become a more confident, less
academic public speaker of late, having
mostly learned not to point with his
middle finger or end refutations with
“Q.E.D.” He now distilled his message
to a congenial set of propositions: Lec-
turing people doesn’t work. This is a tech-
nology problem. And we’ve solved it. He
left his provocative “I ♥ GMO” water
bottle in his backpack.
Offstage, however, he couldn’t resist
disputation. Watching a panel discus-
sion in which a British cattle rancher
lauded “regenerative grazing,” Brown
stuck out his tongue and murmured, “I
am so tempted to shout out, ‘This is
bullshit!’” The rancher’s ideas were pre-
mised on the increasingly popular prac-
tice of “grass-feeding” cattle, and further
shaped by the theories of the Zimba-
bwean rancher Allan Savory, who be-
lieves that herds of livestock that are ush-
ered to a new pasture as soon as they’ve
cropped the grass can reverse desertifi-
cation and make grasslands a carbon
sink. To Brown’s chagrin, the EAT crowd
seemed more receptive to this dream of
Eden than to his unrepentant bovicide.
While all cattle graze on grass for
much of their lives, at least ninety-five
per cent of American beef cattle spend
their last four to six months being fat-
tened on grain at feedlots. Because cat-
tle “finished” on grass gain weight half
as fast as they do on grain, they are kept
alive longer; for that reason, and because
the microbes in their bellies process grass
more thoroughly, the cows belch out
“A hug? I thought you needed tech support.”
• •
