“I suppose, stranger, that flying for a major airline makes
you think you’re something special.”burger—had they tried it? Frank and
Beck shook their heads and looked away.
Meanwhile, local ranchers’ groups
have convinced twelve state legislatures
to pass laws that prohibit words such as
“meat” and “burger” from being used on
labels for anything that’s not “harvested”
from carcasses. In July, a law went into
effect in Arkansas that forbids the mak-
ers of plant-based meat even to use the
term “veggie burger.” The laws’ alleged
intent is to avoid “customer confusion,”
but most people have no trouble grasp-
ing that almond milk doesn’t gush from
an almond’s udders. The laws’ actual in-
tent, of course, is competitive hindrance.
Mark Dopp, of the North American
Meat Institute, told me that when Im-
possible Foods has to put “bioengi-
neered” on its labels, in 2022, once a fed-
eral labelling law takes effect, “that will
be a challenge for them. I’m sure they’ll
try to escape it.”
In fact, Impossible will label itself as
bioengineered this fall, when it goes on
sale in supermarkets. “We’re totally trans-
parent,” Pat Brown said, adding, “I’d love
to have them have to put labels on their
meat that say ‘Processed in a slaughter-
house,’ with a symbol of a friendly bac-
terial cell smiling and saying, ‘Contains
aerosolized fecal bacteria!’ ”
While the lobbyists at the N.C.B.A.
acknowledged that beef has some en-
vironmental liabilities, they said that
those concerns would soon be mitigated
by the same American ingenuity that
has “productized” every inch of the cow.
After sixty-four per cent of the animal
is turned into meat, including beef hearts
sold to the Middle East, tongues to
Asia, and tripe to Mexico, eighteen vol-
leyballs can be made from the hide, and
other remnants are used to produce
bone china, gelatine, dog food, ink,
nail-polish remover, laundry pre-treat-
ments, and antifreeze.
I observed that, despite all these
efficiencies, the magazine Science had re-
cently identified giving up meat and dairy
as the most powerful environmental act
any individual could make. “There are
more reports like that than we care to
see,” Colin Woodall, the N.C.B.A.’s se-
nior vice-president of government affairs,
said ruefully. “We just go back to the
two-per-cent number from the E.P.A.”
By the association’s reading of a 2019
E.P.A. report, only 2.1 per cent of Amer-
ica’s greenhouse gases come directly from
beef production. “Is two per cent really
going to change climate change?” Wood-
all said. “No. A lot of people like to throw
rocks at us, but they do so while driving
down the road at seventy miles per hour
in an air-conditioned car.”
The N.C.B.A.’s math doesn’t account
for nitrous-oxide emissions from ma-
nure-covered pastures or emissions from
producing crops for feed and from man-
ufacturing the beef itself, all of which
raise the figure to 3.8 per cent. More
significantly, the E.P.A.’s accounting, like
many such assessments, fails to factor in
the G.H.G. impact of animal agricul-
ture’s land use. According to the World
Resources Institute, if Americans re-
placed a third of the beef in their diets
with legumes, it would free up a land
area larger than California, much of
which could be reforested (at great ex-
pense, and if the owners of the land were
so inclined).
In most of the world, beef produc-
tion is vastly less efficient than it is in
America. Frank Mitloehner, a profes-
sor in the department of animal science
at the University of California, Davis,
who is often cited by pro-meat forces,
acknowledged, “We have way too much
livestock in the world—it poses a seri-
ous risk to our ecosystems.” By incor-porating American know-how abroad,
he added, “we could feed everyone in
the developing world with one-quarter
of the current global herds and flocks.”
Sciencing the cow to make this pos-
sible, the N.C.B.A. suggested, was
where everyone should be focussing
their efforts. Colin Woodall proudly
reported, “Since 1977, we can produce
the same amount of beef with one-
third fewer cattle.” In the past two de-
cades, the dressed weight of a cow—
the amount of beef that ends up for
sale—has increased ten per cent. Wood-
all noted that agronomists are working
on new corn varieties and seed addi-
tives to reduce methane, as well as ni-
trification inhibitors to diminish the
nitrous oxide given off by manure. How-
ever, he said, “we’re never taking cattle
completely off of grass, so it really comes
down to: what are the new tools to put
more meat on that animal?”W
hile the Impossible Burger is still
trying to match the flavor of beef,
in certain respects it’s begun to improve
upon the original. Celeste Holz-Schie-
tinger, one of the company’s top scien-
tists, told me, “Our burger is already
more savory and umami than beef, and
in our next version”—a 3.0 burger will
be released in a few months—“we want