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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Hello and welcome to Slate Money Food. And welcome, Tad Friend. You are here to talk to us about plant based meats. As anyone who has been following the Beyond Meat share price knows, this is something which a lot of people care a lot about and they're making a lot of money on. Who are you and how do you know about this?
- [00:33]
A
I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker and I know about it because I spent about six months writing about the world of plant based meats and focusing particularly on the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, Pat Brown, who's a former Stanford University biochemist who started the company with the idea that if they were successful in originally just making a plant based burger and they could grow it, that eventually, if they grew really, really fast, they could get rid of all animal food products across the globe by 2035.
- [01:05]
B
It's a huge ambition which we're going to talk about Pat Brown's ambitions. We're going to talk about the Beyond Meat share price. We're going to talk about grass fed versus grain fed beef. We're going to talk a little bit about your friend and mine, Mr. Dan Barber, and we're going to talk about how to cook an impossible burger and how it differs perhaps from cooking a regular burger. All that coming up on Slate Money Food. So Tad, how often do you eat fake meat?
- [01:36]
A
That's one of those questions that immediately begs the question of whether the question is correct. Because the people who make what they call plant based meat would object strenuously to the idea that it's fake meat. But putting that aside for the moment, actually when I started reporting about the world of plant based meats and cell based meats, I ate it never. And now I find myself eating it a lot just because every time I eat a cow based burger, I kind of can't help but think of clouds of methane going up into the atmosphere, which is not a very savory prospect. Just the other weekend my daughter, who's just declared that she's a vegetarian, demanded an impossible burger. So I was cooking both cow and impossible burgers at the same time in the oven and I had the sort of interesting weird thing of trying to eat them side by side as a taste test, which I hadn't done in a while. And unfortunately the cow burger still tastes a little better to me. I wish it didn't. And also the Impossible burger. My wife is the chef in the family. I'm pretty good with burgers, but it's very easy to go from having it be look still Sort of pink and then suddenly it's like crispy. It's very hard to get it. Exactly. Medium rare, at least in my attempts. But that's a long winded answer. But I guess I'm not eating many burgers at all these days. And then when I do, I'm sort of thinking, gee, it should probably be a plant based one.
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B
Would you say that the main use case for plant based meats is as a burger substitute?
- [03:09]
A
Right now it is both beyond meats and Impossible Foods started in North America, they're starting there and then kind of branching out into the world. Even though they know that North America only consumes about 12% of the world's meat, it's obviously a great place to start. And In North America, 60% of beef is ground. So it makes sense to start with the burger. That's the thing where you're going to, if you can convince consumers to change, you drive a wedge in to a lot of the market right away.
- [03:39]
B
So this is something I didn't know, being someone who has never actually cooked an Impossible burger at home. I mean, I like you maybe even less than you. I'm not much of a burger person to begin with. And when I do eat them, it's normally lamb burgers. You're saying that Impossible burgers are similar to beef burgers in that the doneness increases over the time that you cook it. And so you can have like a less well done or a more well done Impossible burger. And, and that affects the taste rather than just the crispiness.
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A
The whole idea. When Pat Brown, the CEO and founder of Impossible, started the company, he was thinking like in order. We are not convincing people to give up meat through arguments about animal welfare or even about the planet. We have to do it by basically making a better product. And the way to make a better product is, the way to get there is you have to make a similar product. It has to taste like meat and it has to cook like meat so that it recapitulates the whole sort of savory sensation of eating meat. And their 1.0 product was not that great. I mean, it was fine. But their 2.0, if you do it right, and I'm not sure I've quite done it right, and it helps if you're a chef kind of experimenting a lot. But the idea is that actually that it will release juices, it will tenderize, it will caramelize, it'll create a sort of savory umami as you cook it. Whereas if you just take a traditional vegetarian Burger that you would find in the freezer case 10 years ago, it basically just kind of heats up and sort of wilts. I mean, it doesn't chemically transform, it just sort of warms up as you heat it. But this actually chemically transforms. And the main thing is a molecule called heme for the impossible burger. That is the thing that's in our bloodstream that makes our blood red and also is in cows bloodstreams. And that is sort of, they think of as the catalyst for a lot of these sort of meaty chemical transformations.
- [05:40]
B
And we should jump in here to note that when people talk about their burgers being bloody, that's not actually blood, that red stuff that comes out of a burger.
- [05:48]
A
It's not. It's actually a molecule that you find in blood, but in this case happens to be made from genetically modified yeast in 50,000 gallon tanks that are sort of weirdly pink colored, sort of like a Dairy Queen type of soft serve almost. Yeast is traditionally white, but because heme is pink, it turns it kind of pink.
- [06:10]
B
And color is very important in foods and in burgers. The other question I have for you, just because it's a genuine question, I haven't cooked an impossible burger, is that my general technique of cooking burgers is I throw a bunch of ground lamb in a skillet and then it cooks in its own fat. As it warms up, the fat melts and that creates the, the caramelization because you wind up basically frying the lamb burger in its own lamb fat. Do impossible burgers and beyond meat burgers, do they have fat in them that sort of leaks out and then cooks them?
- [06:45]
A
They, they have to recreate it because it's not animal fat. But they, they both have, they both use sort of coconut oil to marbleize and give you that sort of marble texture that ground beef has and also just create a sense it is a fat, but it's a different kind of fat. And I'm not enough of a chemist to exactly know how to explain the seven chemical steps along the way, but my general sense is that, yes, it's a simulacrum of that and to the extent you find it pleasing is just about your taste and also your sense of moral outrage. And I think the higher the moral outrage, the lower the bar for taste.
- [07:18]
B
And your sense of outrage is it's quasi moral in that you're not caring about the cows themselves so much as you're caring about the environment and the carbon emissions.
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A
Well, so you think morality can only apply to cows and not to welfare the entire plant. That's a very interesting.
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B
Maybe the planet counts. You're talking about Gaia. You hear about like the, the big morality here.
- [07:46]
A
Yeah, I like that formulation of the question a little better. I actually grew up on a dairy farm, so I do care about cows. But I would say my sense of moral outrage was heightened during the reporting of the piece in a way. I mean, I almost always start a piece without having much of an idea of where I'm going to end up because I think if you know that you end up sort of finding your way there no matter what. And I didn't really think much of it. I thought it was an interesting topic. But I found as I reported that my sense of the injury to the planet that I was totally unaware of from the agricultural sector and particularly from growing animals for meat was so much greater than I had thought and ramifies in so many directions that even setting aside the question of animal welfare and whether we should be using animals for meat, the consequences of using them for meat seem to be bad for all of us.
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B
Using the N equals one of your daughter, is that like, was that the. A primary reason why she became a vegetarian?
- [08:49]
A
No, she's been agitating for a while and I think finally she was just like, she just threw down and was like, I'm a vegetarian. And I was sort of secretly thinking, well, good for you. That's great that you're determining your course of life. And my wife, who's a chef and who runs a food website, was outraged. The interesting thing was this is slightly separate from the topic, but maybe it's related is that after a few weeks of being a vegetarian, she started to miss some of the things that we like about eating meat, many of us. So she's now what she calls a baco pescatarian. She will eat bacon and fish just because they're, you know, she can sort of get the tastes and the proteins that she was missing without feeling like she's eating a kind of yucky steak.
- [09:40]
B
I do believe that every vegetarian should have like one pork product that they kind of can cheat with. In Spain, of course, it's jamon.
- [09:48]
A
Well, I think it's hard to just go totally cold turkey, which itself is a phrase, I guess. I guess there's a turkey somewhere about, you know, the interesting thing is about, to me, one of the interesting things about so many of the people who've started either plant based meat companies or cell based meat companies, in which you. Cell based meat is a sort of different approach to the same problem where you basically trying to recapitulate the growth of meat in a lab, starting with an animal cell and then multiplying it billions of times to create a burger or a chicken nugget or steak eventually. And it's a very embryonic industry. But the people who started a lot of these companies are vegans and they've realized that actually the way like both. Pat Brown is a vegan. Ethan Brown, who started Beyond Burgers Beyond Meats is a vegan. Josh Tetrick, who started just which makes the kind of mayonnaise and egg substitutes and is trying to get into cell based meat, is a vegan. And they all realize that people are not receptive to people, meaning like the vast swath of population is not receptive to that message because it's again about animal welfare. They are more receptive to ideas of taste and to sort of saving the planet. That seems to be a better way to go in terms of lowering people's anxieties and hackles about what they're eating.
- [11:03]
B
We had Dan Barber on this show and he was very, very adamant that he is by no means vegetarian, but that he very much believes in having plant scented food and you know, just having occasional proteins from here. And there's as and when as a kind of in a sort of supporting role. And I kind of get the same message in a different flavor, I guess from the kind of people that you're talking to in the, in the alternative meat industry. That's basically saying that the effect on the planet is much bigger if a lot of people eat less meat than if a minority of people eat no meat.
- [11:45]
A
Right. I think most of the sort of thoughtful, responsible people are simply trying to kind of essentially, to take a phrase from the COVID industry, flatten the curve and try to prevent China and India and very fast growing countries that have traditionally eaten less meat from adopting that meat. It's what they call a 2050 problem, that by the year 2050, our planet, which now has 7.8 billion people, will have 10 billion people. If meat growth continues to grow and it's grown 400 times in China since 1961. If it continues to grow at that rate, basically there will be no forest left, there will be greenhouse gases everywhere. They're trying to just responsibly taper it off. The interesting thing about Pat Brown, who started Impossible is he is like, no tapering. We are going to replace all animal food, fish, chicken, pork, Turkey, everything by 2035. And everyone, even his own board members, even people who work at his company are his most devoted disciples. No one I spoke to thinks that's feasible. It's 15 years away right now. Plant based food is still way less than 1% of the world's intake. And Pat actually told me that he still thinks, he actually thinks he can do it before 2035. He just thought it sounded so crazy he had to sort of push it back a couple of years.
- [13:08]
B
What's the future in China? As you say, China is the big one, with this massively growing middle class with much more disposable income to be buying meat. And presumably on some level, it's a lot easier to show people a pathway that involves less meat eating in the future than it is to try and get them to reverse habits of many decades of eating meat every day.
- [13:34]
A
Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's why these companies are all trying to as quickly as possible leap from America to places like China and India. In China, there's an interesting complicated set of factors that go into the calculus and I wrote about some of them in the piece. One factor is that famously, China has often hijacked intellectual property. There's a concern about, you take your process in there, you have a relationship with a company where you work on something together and suddenly they just take it from you and then go from their own and make it. That's actually fine with Pat Brown. He's like, I don't care. Almost like if we make a profit there, I just want to get the idea introduced there. It's not so fine with his shareholders. So there's a little bit of attention there. One of Pat's major arguments, and it's really interesting given what's happening now, he's trying to argue to the central government, this is actually a national security issue for you. You import a lot of your meat, you're dependent on foreign supply, and if you can make plant based meat and that satisfies your nation's hunger for meat, you're no longer dependent on that. Also, another points, which I don't know whether or not he was making to China, but he certainly made it to me, was that so many pandemics start, and potential pandemics start from avian and swine flus and for meat markets like the one in Wuhan that ultimately led to the coronavirus, if you could, you know, if he's right and if he's successful and he somehow miraculously manages to rid the world of meat markets by 2035, there wouldn't be this, you know, zoonotic Transmission chain from bats or monkeys through domestic meat animals to us.
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B
I feel like on some level, if we are told a vegetarian diet will prevent a global pandemic like this one, having just lived through, or as we're living through this one. That is an incredibly powerful argument to put to people, at least right now, before they forget how bad it is.
- [15:37]
A
Right now it seems like it. I haven't actually seen anyone make it and so I'm going to defer to Pat, who if he chose to make it, could make it much better than me. But I totally agree with you that it would be a powerful one. Reverting for a second to a point you're making about Dan Barber earlier, Dan is a friend of mine and we agreed to talk around a central issue around plant based meats, which is, yes, he's totally, he's obviously Mr. Farm to Table. He's totally about locally sourced plants and meats. The thing that I found that he, he probably would disagree with this, but that was interesting and surprising to me was that one naturally thinks of grass fed beef as somehow more organic and lovely and good in some vague, glowy way. And it turns out that actually because grass fed beef is not finished for the last four to six months of its life on grain at feedlots, it grows much more slowly and therefore produces much more methane. And also grass is harder to digest and therefore produces more methane than grain is. So the grain which is, you know, yes, it's an American factory system. Yes, it's unsavory in a certain sense. Yes, it's sort of mechanized and awful and probably cows are not as happy, but it actually is better for the planet in a weird way than grass fed beef.
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B
Assuming that the total number of cows you are raising stays constant, which I think is probably not a fair assumption. You can't move from grain fed beef raising to grass fed beef raising and keep on raising the same number of cows.
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A
You'd actually have to raise more cows. Yeah.
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B
Or what I'm saying is that just less capacity that you, you know, if you, if you converted all of US beef industry to grass fed, the total capacity of the industry would go down a lot and the price would go up.
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A
Well, not clear on how you're using the word capacity. The total number of cows you would need to produce the same amount of meat would go up or else you would have to have them eating more food for longer.
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I guess what I'm saying that the total amount of sheer acreage that you would need would be so enormous to Keep the current volumes that there would just be no physical way to produce that much.
- [17:58]
A
Yes, right now, 5% or so of cows in North America are grass fed. So we'd be multiplying that by 20, essentially. And in terms of the. To get to 100% of grass fed. And that would mean a lot more munching of grass and a lot more methane. So. And there are theories that counter this and there's a, you know, there's sort of the idea, Alan Savory, the idea of regenerative grazing and that if you graze very carefully and you have the cattle marching as a kind of very carefully confined herd and treading down the grass in certain ways it regenerates. The science I've seen on that seems at best uncertain. But there are definitely people who believe and who like the idea of a virtuous cycle of the cattle that tramp down the grass and then the manure that restores the grass and so forth. It's all, you know, one happy circle of life and a kind of Disney ish way. But it weirdly seems like the actual way for the meat industry, if you believe in the meat industry to try to tamp down the curve would be to apply American scientific methods broadly across the globe and to have more factory farms.
- [19:07]
B
And if we don't want that, then we go back to the plant based meats. And I want to come back to something you were saying about China stealing ip the plant based meats that are really catching the popular imagination right now. Beyond meat, impossible burgers are made by private for profit companies with patents and share prices. If the future is plant based meats, is the future also by necessity, one where, you know, a large chunk of the protein that we ingest is, is basically a patented corporate for profit thing where we're sending money to a big global company?
- [19:55]
A
Yes, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the way America we figured out how to build a better mousetrap tends to be privately rather than the government building mousetraps. And the government has no interest whatsoever in building a better burger, better for the planet. In fact, quite the opposite. You could argue that the power of the meat industry and its lobbyists has had a significant influence, let's put it that way, on the USDA and the laws that have been passed in the last few years. This is slightly off the topic perhaps, but in states that prevent impossible and beyond from even describing their product as a burger, the nomenclature, laws, this sort of legislative thicket trying to convince customers that these things are not even Vegetarian burgers. You can't call it in Arkansas. You can't call impossible a vegetarian burger.
- [20:50]
B
What do they have to call it?
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A
I don't even know. Something else, probably fake meat or something. That sounds unappetizing. But getting back to your earlier question, Pat Brown, because he's a missionary and a zealot and an evangelist, his plan is within a few years, and again his shareholders might hem and haw about this, but his plan is to, not in China, at least at the beginning, but eventually across the globe, including China, give away the formula to all these different, not just meat, but also pork and sausage and chicken as he rolls those out to other companies and say, go, have at it, improve this, tweak it, and as soon as you start to make more than a million dollars from your company, give us some royalties on it. But the idea is he's thinking that's the way we can grow really fast and we won't own the entire market. We won't be this big hated Mega Corp. We'll be the friendly, nurturing, almost quasi governmental institution that's trying to build up companies around the globe.
- [21:52]
B
Are you hopeful on that front? Do you think this vision might come to pass?
- [21:56]
A
Well, it's one of those classic heart head things where I would like him to be correct in how he sees the world working and in the success of his own products. I think it would be good for all of us. And I also, in some kind of meta sense think it's great when a scientist using actual science can develop a product that seems to improve things. And I think that has a sort of ramifying effect on our belief in science. I would say my head sort of thinks it's, gee, it's, you know, it's still, you're still 10. They started in 2011 and it took them a while to get a product to market in 2016. But so five years after getting their product to market, you know, all of plant based food is, you know, meats are still less than 1% of the market. And he's done the calculations on a napkin for me. And it's more convincing than the later curve, but not much, which is that they have to grow, they have to double production every year to get there, to take over the entire meat supply for the next 15 years, which is growing more than 30,000 fold, which is huge and impossible. So I kind of think the only way to do that probably is by outsourcing it to other companies and having them be part of that growth. And I also think he doesn't really care about money. He doesn't care about world domination. He really wants this idea to work for the good of all. So I believe his heart is totally in the right place. And then the question is whether they can execute on division.
- [23:21]
B
I mean on some level I'd buy it. It's becoming the sort of dominant operating system for a post meet world. You become a little bit like Microsoft. You just sort of install your Windows software on every computer that's sold and take some small slice of the price of that computer and then you can make a lot of money that way. If you kind of install the impossible operating system in a bunch of food factories around the planet and they all pay you a little license for that software, even though it's not really software, that could be a huge business. And on some level the shareholders would love to have a smaller slice of something global than 100% of something which isn't really getting traction.
- [24:06]
A
Oh yeah, I think he can make that argument. And he will make that argument and say, look, it's going to be not just good for the world, but it's also good for the bottom line. The tricky thing is to get back to the China point is if and when they get in there and scale. I was talking to the vice president there who's in charge of heading that up and he was saying we won't give them the formula, but we'll do is the same thing that Coca Cola does. We'll send in the buckets, maybe they can re engineer it, but we won't even be sending in the buckets. With the most recent upgrade, we'll be sending in the version from a couple of years back because they're just a little still worried that for purely capitalist reasons at the moment, as they're growing, as they keep having to raise money, they just raised another $500 million. They've now raised $1.3 billion. They need to pay back their investors. They can't just throw it open and say, well here's the formula, everyone go at it.
- [25:04]
B
Final question about the Beyond Meat share price, which is one of these stocks a bit like Zoom or Tesla or Virgin Galactic that just kind of goes parabolic and is crazy volatile and people have made a lot of money on it and presumably lost a lot of money on it too. Do you understand the sort of volatility there? I mean, I think what the market is telling us is that no one has a clue what whether these things are going to be successful or not. And the range of outcomes is so enormous that you can tweak your assumptions just a little bit and the value of the company whipsaws all over the place.
- [25:42]
A
I think it's exactly what you said. I think it's the plant based meats. In North America alone, sales grew 18% just in grocery stores. And Impossible joined beyond in grocery stores only in September. So this year it'll be a lot more, particularly because people are getting their food from grocery stores now and not from restaurants at the moment as much across America. So you can see that growth and you can think, you can look at that trajectory and think, wow. And then you can also look at the other thing, which is you look at meat and think, yeah, but meat is still traditional. Meat is still 99.5% of the global market and they're very entrenched and those people kind of know what they're doing. And when they eventually just come along and kind of do some crappy version of it, which they've already started to do, they've already started to make things called Incognito. It's possibly the worst all time name for a product.
- [26:37]
B
What is Incognito? I need to know.
- [26:40]
A
Incognito is a meat substitute made by Keller. And then clearly, I think Nestle has made the Amazing Burger and the Incredible Burger. And I may be getting those names slightly wrong, but they're clearly trying to, you know, confuse people about what's the impossible, what's the incredible, what's the amazing.
- [26:59]
B
But this is all good for the broader.
- [27:02]
A
It is. They're often sort of these water. Yes, in a general sense, except if you're disappointed by the knockoff. And a lot of the knockoffs are weird, kind of like mixtures of chicken and pea protein or these sort of kind of flexitarian mashups that satisfy no one and just dissatisfy everyone. But to your earlier original question about Beyond Burger, if you're investing in it, you're investing in the story, you're investing in the belief that this can, you know, eventually this whole way of engaging with animals and plants is going to change.
- [27:38]
B
Well, as a storyteller, I suppose you've done your part for the Beyond Meat share price, although that was not the intent of your piece.
- [27:46]
A
Well, I bought a lot right before I got on the phone with you.
- [27:52]
B
And then, okay, you can sell it all three days after this podcast comes out.
- [27:56]
A
It'll be a great flip. There's just going to be a series of complex trades taking place right before and right after the podcast.
- [28:03]
B
Tabran, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure to have you.
- [28:06]
A
Thanks so much for having me, Sam.