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Chase Purdy

Auteur van Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food

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Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for… door Chase Purdy
This book is all about how the hunt for the replacement for meat is going, from the perspective of a handful of modern-day companies, based on the premise that vegetables and other items of yore wouldn’t exist. Almost, anyway.

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a landmark report that estimated animal farming is the source of some 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the cars, ships, trains, and planes that crisscross the globe belching smoke. The report said 9 percent of the globe’s human-related carbon dioxide emissions could be tied back to animal agriculture, 37 percent of methane emissions, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide (mostly from cow manure). The report got a lot of attention and triggered a wave of people—activists and entrepreneurs alike—to take action. But it didn’t go unchallenged, and since then scientists have produced more nuanced findings. The beef and dairy industries get most of the attention, as they contribute 41 percent and 20 percent of the sector’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, respectively. The pork industry creates about 9 percent of emissions, and the broiler chicken and egg industries collectively contribute about 8 percent. Cows do more damage because of their digestive process, which, through fermentation in their four stomachs, creates a lot of methane gas. Once released into the atmosphere, methane has about twenty times the heat-trapping power as carbon. Just how much methane a single, 1,200-pound cow produces each year depends entirely on what the animal is fed, but scientists often cite about 100 kilograms of methane, about the same as a car burning through more than 230 gallons of gasoline. Suddenly, the prospect of finding an alternative way to create real meat becomes even more enticing.


This author buys into the premise that cell-cultured meat—his term of choice used for chemically- and biologically-made meats—will help humanity. It will aid us to both stop destroying all life on the planet and end animal suffering.

In his 1984 novel The Neuromancer, William Gibson lays out a scene in which one of his futuristic cyborgs, Molly, unceremoniously snatches a cut of conventionally grown steak off someone else’s plate. “Gimme that,” she says, grabbing the dish. “You know what this costs? They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.” In Margaret Atwood’s 2003 work Oryx and Crake, she introduced readers to a truly macabre future food, ChickieNob: a live chicken engineered without any sort of typical head or even a beak; a freakish avian creation designed to grow up to twenty breasts at the same time. Only time will reveal whether Gibson’s or Atwood’s fictional visions will be far off the mark of what cell-cultured meat companies will offer us in real life. “Vat stuff” isn’t so different from what today’s earnest young collection of start-ups are hoping to usher into reality.


Naturally, most carnivores won’t eat meat if they’d have to kill it themselves. Also, if philosophy and empathy were to come into play, we wouldn’t allow animals to be killed en masse, as though it’s a must to keep humanity alive.

Purdy touches on ethics and philosophy at times during this book, mainly when quoting CEOs and other big shots that run nouvelle faux-cuisine business, but not in questioning the ethics that permeate the lovely words about the best for humanity, etc.

In just a few years, JUST had risen in prominence from a garage-bound vegan mayonnaise producer to become a fully operational food company. “It was that moment where it moved from being a company controlled by venture capitalists to—and I’ll say what it is—a company controlled by activists. Truly,” Tetrick says. The following year, in spring 2017, the company closed a Series E round of funding, which put it at a valuation of about $1.1 billion, making it Silicon Valley’s only food technology unicorn.


The protagonists in this book are capitalist companies (that are run via fascist method). Just look at the list of investing parties:

It’s not just vegans looking to fuel this nascent industry, though. Seeing the potential, plant-based and cell-cultured meat companies have garnered the attention of some of the biggest names in both food and finance. Goldman Sachs Group in January 2018 pitched money into what ultimately wound up being a $65 million investment round for Ripple Foods, which makes a milk alternative with yellow peas. Impossible Foods, the maker of the plant-based Impossible Burger, has funding from UBS, Bill Gates, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and one of JUST’s initial investors, Khosla Ventures. Tyson Foods, Cargill, and Richard Branson have invested in Memphis Meats, in which Kerr’s group had already invested.


What is interesting is to see grassroots movements cause ruckus against the corporate establishment:

The company asked Andrew Zimmern, a restaurateur and food critic, to create, sign, and endorse a petition on Change.org. It was called “Stop Bullying Sustainable Food Companies,” and eventually drew more than 111,000 signatures. “When a $60 billion company flexes its muscles to prevent a good-for-the-world startup company from succeeding, there are only two words for that: corporate bullying,” the petition read.

A swell of interest in the petition drew the attention of the media, and before long the San Francisco–based CBS affiliate, KPIX, ran a short story on JUST and its battle against the larger forces within the world of food. “For some fucking reason, the Drudge Report picks it up,” Tetrick exclaimed, still stupefied by the event years later. The story on the Drudge Report linked directly to the CBS news story, which then went viral.

At the same time, food bloggers were homing in on the fight. Michele Simon, the future executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, said she wrote and posted about the Unilever lawsuit about a month after it was filed. She sent a link to her post on EatDrinkPolitics.com to The New York Times food business reporter Stephanie Strom. Just one day later, on November 10, the American newspaper of record published a story detailing to its wide audience the beef between Unilever and JUST. And a week after that, the Associated Press wrote a story of its own, followed by another story in The New York Times.

“I have The New York Times stories framed in my office,” said Simon. “It was the most fun I’d had in my activist career.” As Tetrick remembers, for the next thirty or so days, people visited Unilever’s official Facebook page to leave dozens of posts complaining about how the company was going after a much smaller one. “I don’t think they’d seen anything like this,” Tetrick said. “We started this campaign, and thirty-three or thirty-four days later Unilever drops the lawsuit.” It was a stunning and important win for the people working at JUST.


However, let’s look at that clearly: JUST is a company that is driven by money. The people who were helping JUST to regale against Unilever did so while pushing a company that might simply get bought by Unilever or push an agenda similar to theirs in a minute. We’ll see.

Ultimately, this book was a quick read. The author is good at managing paragraphs that are easily read but the book didn’t make for rapacious reading. If I were forced to concatenate what this book is about, I’d say it’s a simple-minded, drawn-out marketing blurb for the mechanics behind trying to create food that looks like it’s animals or made by animals; eating animals and what they create is mainly bad and, yes, the world will go under if some of us don’t find alternatives, but I miss the answers to my many whys, which is somewhere that the book 'Eat Like You Care: An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals', by Gary L. Francione and Anna Charlton, went a long way with. I’ll remember this book like reading innocuous and glib ads.… (meer)
 
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pivic | Jun 23, 2020 |
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1
Leden
28
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#471,397
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½ 2.7
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1
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7