THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 47
for wealth and for power over other hu-
mans and nature. We relish meat because
history has taught us to think of vege-
tarians as weaklings, weirdos, and prudes.”
The anthropologist Nick Fiddes goes
further, declaring, in “Meat: A Natural
Symbol,” that we value meat not in spite
of the fact that it requires killing animals
but because it does. It’s the killing that
establishes us as kings of the jungle.
Ethan Brown, of Beyond Meat, sus-
pects that nibbling plant patties doesn’t
exude the same macho vibe. A bearded,
gregarious, six-foot-five man who played
basketball at Connecticut College, he
has retained a squad of athlete “ambas-
sadors” to help dispel that perception.
When I visited Ethan at the company’s
offices, in El Segundo, California, he
pointed me to a 2009 study of Ivory
Coast chimpanzees which suggested
that males who shared meat with fe-
males doubled their mating success.
“Men usually give women the meat first,
at dinner, before the sex—you want to
be a protein provider,” he said. “Do you
think if you take a woman out and buy
her a salad you get the same reaction?”
It’s worth noting that the Neander-
thals, who subsisted almost entirely on
meat, were outcompeted by our omniv-
orous ancestors. In any case, Ethan told
me, meat no longer serves its original
purpose, and “we can use the expanded
brain that meat gave us to get us off of
it.” Like many alternative-protein en-
trepreneurs, he is a vegan; when he taste-
tests Beyond’s burgers, he occasionally
chews a beef burger to orient his pal-
ate, then spits it out and wipes his tongue
with a napkin. He has a potbellied pig
named Wilbur at home that knows how
to open the refrigerator: “Wilbur lives
in our house to teach my kids that, from
the perspective of science, the moral cir-
cle is poorly defined.”
Ethan said that he launched Beyond
Meat to mitigate meat’s effects on “hu-
man health, climate change, natural re-
sources, and animal welfare—we call
them ‘the four horsemen.’” One conse-
quence of this compendious mission,
with its attention to people’s health—
and to their concerns about health, war-
ranted or not—is that Beyond, unlike
Impossible, uses only ingredients taken
more or less directly from nature.
For lunch, Ethan and I ate the latest
Beyond Burger. Built around proteins
derived from peas, mung beans, and brown
rice, it was enriched with coconut oil and
cocoa butter. Ethan, a self-described tough
grader, rated it a 7.5 out of 10. “We’ve had
great progress in texture and juiciness,”
he said, but added that the company’s
scientists were still working on “color
transition.” My burger was brown on the
outside and purple in the middle, with a
bloody affect encouraged by beet juice—
but the fading between the two tones
seemed faintly amiss. While savory, and
possessed of a plausible mouthfeel, the
patty was also curiously dense.
Pea protein’s off-flavor was another
problem to solve. Ethan said that he
planned to expand his supply chain to
include proteins from such plants as flax
and lupine. He added, reflexively, “The
best thing about pea is that it’s not soy”—
Impossible’s chief ingredient. “I learned
early on that consumers don’t want a lot
of soy, because they’re worried about
phytoestrogen, the concern being that it
disrupts hormones and gives you ‘man
boobs.’” I observed that there was no ev-
idence that this ever happens unless you
consume soy in gigantic amounts. “I don’t
believe in the man-boobs theory,” he said,
“but who am I to question our customers?”
Ethan’s scientists are skeptical of
heme’s efficacy. Dariush Ajami, who
runs Beyond’s lab, told me that he viewed
it as a mere colorant, because, in collab-
orating with companies specializing
in food chemistry, “we’ve never seen
any flavor houses using heme as a flavorcatalyzer.” Ethan told me that even if
heme proved to be a catalytic dynamo
he wouldn’t use it, or any genetically
modified ingredient: “There’s an evolu-
tionary instinct, deep within us, to avoid
things we don’t understand.” When I
noted that consumers already accept
many G.M.O. products—more than
half the rennet used to make cheese is
genetically modified, and ninety-two
per cent of America’s corn is G.M.O.—
he conceded, “People will get used to itin the Impossible Burger.” He grinned.
“But will they get used to it before the
burn rate gobbles the company?”M
eat producers like to point out
that meat has a “clean deck”: its
components are few. One ag-business
executive told me that consumers would,
or anyway should, be alarmed by the
long list of ingredients in Impossible’s
and Beyond’s burgers: “A lot of custom-
ers think of an animal that has been
around for more than a thousand years”—
cows were domesticated from aurochs
about ten thousand years ago—“and is
just one ingredient as a natural product,
versus a chemistry project of twenty-five
or thirty ingredients you can’t even pro-
nounce.” (Pat Brown noted, tartly, “If I
gave you a poisonous mushroom, well,
that’s one ingredient.”)
Thirty-three companies are working
on a single-ingredient approach: using
animal cells to grow meat in vats. The
management consultants at A.T. Kear-
ney predict that by 2040 the technique
will produce thirty-five per cent of all
meat. Josh Tetrick, the C.E.O. of Just,
Inc., which is developing cell-based
chicken nuggets and ground wagyu beef,
told me that the problem with plant-
based meat is that it feels ersatz: “The
Silicon Valley approach of Impossible
Foods and Beyond Meat is ‘If we can
nail taste and cost, we’ll win.’ But meat
is about identity and authenticity. Like,
I hope Tesla comes out with a pickup
truck, but if they have to call it Tesla’s
Electric Mobility Transport Unit my
friends in Alabama would never buy it.”
This spring, Tetrick watched closely
as I ate his chicken nugget. It tasted
weirdly healthy—I missed the creamy
crappiness you expect from a fast-food
nugget. That’s because it was mostly
composed of chicken muscle cells grown
in Just’s lab, one floor down at the com-
pany’s San Francisco headquarters. Tet-
rick, a charismatic vegan who started
Just to save chickens’ lives, knew that he
had work to do: “We need to cultivate
a second strain of cells, ramp up the fat
program downstairs.”
The cell-based approach may even-
tually provide meat using a tiny fraction
of the land and water that livestock use.
And, if companies can figure out how
to grow cells on a scaffolding of mush-
room or celery, or arrange them using a