Silicon Valley Frankenmeat to Save the World from Global Warming?
Silicon Valley Frankenmeat to Save the World from Global
Warming
By Eric Worrall / 18 hours ago December 20, 2017
If Silicon Valley green tech giants have their way, real
meat will become an unaffordable carbon taxed luxury item eaten by the very
rich. The rest of us will have to eat “meatless meat” – meat flavoured mashed
vegetables and lab grown tissue cultures.
Silicon Valley and the Search for Meatless Meat
By BETH KOWITT
December 19, 2017
In August one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups closed
a $17 million round of funding. The Series A had attracted some of the biggest
names in tech. “I got closed out because of Richard Branson and Bill Gates,”
bemoaned Jody Rasch, the managing trustee of an angel fund that wasn’t able to
buy in. Venture capital firm DFJ—which has backed the likes of Tesla and
SpaceX—led the round, with one of its then-partners calling the nascent
company’s work an “enormous technological shift.”
The cutting-edge product the startup was trying to
develop? Meat—the food whose more than $200 billion in U.S. sales has come to
be the defining element of the Western diet. But what made this company’s work
so revolutionary was not what it was trying to make so much as how it was
attempting to do it. Memphis Meats, the brainchild that had the
startup-investor class salivating, was aiming to remove animals from the
process of meat production altogether.
It’s the type of world-saving vision that has oft
captured the imagination of Silicon Valley—the kind of entrenched problem that
technologists believe only technology can solve: feeding a fast-growing,
protein-hungry global population in a way that doesn’t blow up the planet.
Conjuring up meat without livestock—whose emissions are responsible for 14.5%
of global greenhouse gases—is core to that effort. Just listen to how the
progenitor of Googleyness itself describes the prospect of animal-free meat:
“It has the capability to transform how we view our world,” Google cofounder
Sergey Brin has said. “I like to look at technology opportunities where the
technology seems like it’s on the cusp of viability, and if it succeeds there,
it can be really transformative.”
As a sign of the market’s potential, alternative meat
producers point to the explosive growth plant-based milk has made in the dairy
aisle, now capturing almost 10% of U.S. retail sales by volume. “I want to be
able to say you don’t have to make a choice in what you’re eating,” Memphis CEO
and cofounder Uma Valeti says, “but you can make a choice on the process of how
it goes to the table.”
Hoping to make that choice easier, the new agripreneurs
are tackling semantics first—redefining what “meat” means. Beyond Meat CEO
Ethan Brown says he’d like to get people to think about meat “in terms of its
composition” rather than its origin. The reframing isn’t just an
epistemological one, but also a scientific one, reducing meat to its molecules.
That won’t be an easy sell, and the movement has its
detractors—some of whom seem miffed by the notion that anyone would try to mess
with Mother Nature. “They want to make up their own dictionary version of what
meat is, and these are people who do not eat meat,” says Suzanne Strassburger,
whose family has been in the meat business for more than 150 years. “The real
question is, are they feeding people or are they feeding egos.”
There will be a market for this product. While I
understand some people drink soy milk because of allergies or cost, many of
those 10% of people who drink Soy milk do so for idealogical reasons – they
also try to avoid other cattle products, buying veggie burgers and suchlike,
and will likely be ready in many cases to buy lab grown cultured meat
(guaranteed cruelty free).
For people who genuinely can’t afford meat at current
prices, a cheap substitute which helped them and their children get the protein
they require wouldn’t be a bad thing – though cutting red tape to help reduce
the cost of real meat would likely achieve the same goal.
I doubt most of the remaining 90% of us would willingly
embrace highly processed artificial meat tasting substitutes when we can buy
the real thing.
Discouraging ordinary people from buying real meat will
have to be a business goal of these high tech entrepreneurs. No doubt they
would justify such efforts in terms of saving the planet from climate change.
It is easy to see how discouraging real meat consumption
could happen – advertisements flooding the airwaves with messages emphasising
the “cruelty” of cattle farming, adding Vegan messages to elementary school
lessons, imposing carbon taxes and animal welfare regulations to make cattle
farming impossibly expensive, lots of donated cash for politicians who pass
laws which favour well funded artificial meat producers. Though I suspect real
meat would still be available at climate conferences and UN events, at least
for important attendees.
Coming soon to a supermarket shelf near you.
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