Time - USA (2019-06-17)

68 Time June 17, 2019

8 Questions

‘

IT DAWNED ON

ME THAT IF WE

WANT TO SOLVE

CLIMATE, WE

HAVE TO SOLVE

LIVESTOCK

’

How do you persuade them not to?

You don’t build a business telling people

not to eat what they love. You build a

business helping people to eat what they

love, and more of it. It’s about separating

meat from animals. When you think of

meat in terms of its composition, it’s

five things—amino acids, lipids, trace

minerals, vitamins and water. None of

that is exclusive to animals. Animals

spend massive amounts of energy

consuming plants to make protein. We

start directly with the plant material

[pea protein] and build from that.

How do you describe your own eat-

ing habits? I’ve been vegan for at least

16 years. But I routinely test meat [from

animals] for taste and spit it out.

There has been some backlash

against claims that locally grown

foods and plant-based products have

a smaller environmental footprint.

Do they? We commissioned a study

with the University of Michigan, and the

numbers were staggering. There were

90% fewer greenhouse- gas emissions

from producing one of our burgers com-

pared with a beef burger from livestock.

And one Beyond Meat burger uses 93%

less land than a beef burger. I view that

as something that could have a powerful

impact on the world economy.

Some scientists are building syn-

thetic versions of meat. Do you see

them as competitors? I think it’s a

good thing. I didn’t get into lab-grown

meat because coming from the energy

field, where we were trying to cost

down fuel cells and couldn’t get the

economics right, I feared getting in-

volved in another big science where

we couldn’t see a commercial end.

What is your favorite way of

eating plant-based meat? I’m

thrilled about our breakfast sau-

sage. I love making Bolognese.

But hands down, a great burger is

my favorite. —alice park

H

ow did spending time on a

farm as a child shape your

views about animals and

meat? I grew up in the city, in Washing-

ton, D.C., and College Park, Md. But my

dad grew up in the country and bought a

farm to start a weekend dairy operation

with less than 100 Holstein cows. I fell in

love with life outdoors and the animals

that surrounded us. I began to question

the difference between animals in the ag-

ricultural system and the ones we kept as

pets. And as I became an adult, I under-

stood that it was a cultural, and not bio-

logical, justification for the difference.

You began your career in renewable

energy around the time of the Cali-

fornia energy crisis in 2000. What

brought you from fuel cells to meat?

For me it wasn’t wildly different to think

about how we create food to fuel our

body that has less impact on the earth—

it was simply a question of energy use. I

began to understand the role livestock

plays in climate. It’s not necessarily just

the car you drive or the light bulb you

screw in. It’s also very much the protein

you put in the center of your plate. It

dawned on me that if we want to solve

climate, we have to solve livestock. And

we were having these discussions over

steak.

Why is it so important to move

away from animal meat? It’s four

major issues. There is a global

problem that we can’t support the

number of livestock. There are the

human health issues around eating

red and processed meat, which is

associated with heart disease, dia-

betes and cancer. Then you have to

look at the effect on climate, natu-

ral resources and the sheer volume

of water it takes to keep livestock.

Lastly, there’s animal welfare.

Your products replicate the

taste and texture of meat. But

eating animal meat is almost a

visceral need for many people.

Ethan Brown The founder of Beyond Meat,

the plant-based-meat company that recently

went public, on a future without eating animals

BE

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