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Are we eating our own way into climate catastrophe?
The global food system is responsible to between 21 and 37 percent annual emissionsof greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. Roughly half of the world’s land surface is used for agriculture, and 96 percent of the world’s mammalian biomass is either human or livestockMostly, it is pigs and cattle. The global appetite for meat is expected to increase.
Bruce Friedrich believes there is a better way of making and eating meat. He founded the Good Food Institute to advance the future of alternative meats, including plant-based meat made from—duh—plants (like pea protein and coconut oil), and cultivated meats, which are grown from animal cells.
This interview is with Bulletin associate editor Jessica McKenzie, Friedrich elaborates on Good Food Institute’s theory of change, why it is working with—not against—meat companies, how alternative meats could help prevent the next pandemic, and how they can achieve taste, texture, and price parity with meat. He also responds on the criticisms that alternative meats amount to corporate greenwashing.
(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)
Jessica McKenzie: Could you briefly introduce the Good Food Institute—what you do and what your goals are, and how it was started?
Bruce Friedrich: We were founded in response to the observation that while industrial meat production is expensive, consumers do not consider these external costs when purchasing meat.
Gross meat consumption and per capita are on the rise. The United Nations says we’re going to have to produce 70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050. And there is not any plausible scenario wherein we don’t consume 70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050. Rather than trying to convince the world that what is inevitable shouldn’t happen, we are focused on eliminating or mitigating the external costs of the way that meat is produced. This is a good analogy for electric vehicles and renewable energy. In 2050, the world will consume no less energy than it does now. As they develop, countries consume more energy. We can make this energy renewable. We’re not going to convince the world to ride bikes and walk everywhere. People will continue to drive, but we can electrify transport. People will also eat more meat. However, we can make that meat from plants. We can reduce the emissions and land-use requirements and produce meat with less antibiotics and risk.
GFI is a company that focuses on making meat more delicious. Our inspiration was companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat—of making plant-based meat for meat eaters and competing with the meat industry. There are also cultivated meat companies such as Upside Foods and Mosa Meat. With all those companies, the founders would have an idea, and then they’d have a company. The first thing GFI did was hire scientists and say, “Let’s figure out the technological readiness and open source what the world knows about making meat from plants and cultivating meat from cells.” The plurality of GFI’s team members around the world are still scientists. Globally, our battle cry is that governments should fund and encourage research on alternative proteins, just as they do for renewable energy and electrification.
McKenzie: How do you try to level the playing fields with meat companies? Does government subsidizing animal products make it more difficult for companies to compete on cost? It seems like you’re more interested in research and development than making meat more expensive.
Friedrich:Yes, our focus is on research and developing, as well as lobbying governments to, among other things, fund the research. USDA will invest $10 million in the Center for Excellence at Tufts. And we focus on private sector incentives for R&D and private sector incentives for manufacturing and infrastructure scale up. We don’t do any of the punitive work at all. We do some work in this area, fighting against label censorship. We’ve sued three states so far with the ACLU for passing laws to make it illegal to call a veggie burger, a veggie burger. First Amendment lawsuits are available to allow clear labels on plant-based food that clearly state, “This is plant-based beef.”
We’re not trying to make meat more expensive. We’re not fighting against subsidies, in part, because every president of the United States since Ronald Reagan has—except maybe Donald Trump, tough to know—but Ronald Reagan, and both George Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—Obama campaigned on getting rid of agricultural subsidies. And agricultural subsidies have not fallen at all. There are thousands or hundreds of NGOs working against agricultural subsidies. They are making no progress. What are the feasible solutions? We think we can make huge progress with open access R&D, and huge progress with private sector incentives, but probably no progress beating our head against the subsidy wall.
McKenzie: But you do think it’s possible to eventually compete on both cost and similarity to meat?
Friedrich: Oh, absolutely.
McKenzie: Even if people aren’t paying the true cost of meat?
Friedrich: You know, it’s interesting. It’s a strong talking point, the idea that agricultural subsidies are depressing the price of meat, but they’re not depressing the price of meat that much. They’re big numbers, in terms of gross dollar terms, but spread across the amount of meat that Americans eat, it’s a couple cents per pound. Multiple studies have examined the impact of subsidies on costs. They are often confused with the idea of including the health and environmental cost of meat. The price of meat would rise if the environmental and health costs were included. But there’s even less chance of that happening, at least in the United States, than getting rid of subsidies. However, the subsidies have a very insignificant impact on the price of meat.
Nine calories are required to produce chicken. So if you’re growing all of these crops and feeding them to animals, that’s a vastly inefficient system. You can take those crops and make meat with them. It takes so much less resources. It is a huge benefit from a land use analysis and direct emissions analysis. Which means as it scales up, it should certainly be possible to get to a point at which both plant-based meat and cultivated meat costs less than industrial animal meat, whether or not there’s a future world where external costs are incorporated into the price of the animal products, and with or without subsidies.
McKenzie: You’ve also said eating alternative meats requires no intentional behavioral change, but meat is an extremely potent cultural touchstone. Can you speak to how you’re trying to overcome that barrier to widespread adoption?
Friedrich: We’re not trying to overcome that barrier. Just like this is a phone, even though it doesn’t have a cord. And this is a camera, even though it doesn’t require analog film. And people for however long thought phones needed to have cords and cameras needed to have film, and now they don’t. The idea is to give consumers something that is indistinguishable from the consumer standpoint to the products that they’re used to. So initially, that’s things like fish sticks, and hamburgers, and chicken nuggets and chicken breasts and those sorts of things. Eventually, it’s everything. And the idea is, from the vantage of the consumer, you are getting something that is indistinguishable: You’re not paying more for it, and you’re not sacrificing on taste and you’re not sacrificing on, you know, this is a comfort food. It’s just a different way of producing the exact same product that people are used to. Except it doesn’t require antibiotics, it doesn’t contribute to pandemic risk, it has a fraction of the direct emissions, it requires a fraction of the land. It is cheaper. It’s really not about convincing people that they should change how they think about food at all.
It’s like renewable energy, right? You’re not convincing people, you shouldn’t drive a car. You’re not convincing people, you shouldn’t heat your house or watch a big screen TV. You’re just powering things differently. This is the same concept. You’re producing meat differently and better.
McKenzie: However, this is not the case at the moment. I mean, some people say that they can’t tell the difference for some products. It is more expensive to eat many of these items, but it is not as expensive as eating a few.
Friedrich: I think the only one that’s there is the Impossible Burger. Even some connoisseurs know the difference. It is why the government must invest. We’re early days. We’re not there with solar panels or electric vehicles yet either. Lots of people are not buying electric cars yet, because you can’t do a cross country trip comfortably. A lot of people have not switched to solar, because it’s not yet super easy and cheap to just choose solar. The same applies to plant-based and cultivated beef. I mean, cultivated meat doesn’t exist commercially anywhere other than Singapore, and it’s a lot more expensive. The Impossible Burger is the only plant-based product to have achieved a taste comparison. That product is about 80 percent more expensive at the grocery store. But we don’t meet our Paris obligations unless we solve this problem. Governments must encourage alternative proteins, just as they incentivize renewable energy and electric cars.
McKenzie: What is the best way to make a systemic and profound change to level the playing fields between all other meats?
Friedrich: It is necessary to scale it up. There are many things that must happen. We’ve seen with Beyond Meat’s current supply chain woesThis is different from a phone application. This is food. There are many supply chain issues that affect food.
McKenzie: Can you elaborate a bit on what’s going on with Beyond Meats?
Friedrich: They’ve been having Problems in the supply and production chainThe idea of producing as many products as people want is frustrating. Impossible Foods experienced the same thing. GFI just published a report in which we stated that plant-based meats will grow to 6 per cent by 2030. This is what should happen in terms protein isolate and coconut oil. Techno-economic analysis was also done, looking at cultivated beef, and what needs be done in terms production of albumin, and what needs do to happen in the factories.
This is why we need more of what’s happening with National Science Foundation and USDA funding of original research on university campuses. We also need government assistance to private industry. Tesla exists because of a Guaranteed loan of $450 millionThe Department of Energy. The US government, along with other governments, must help the private sector succeed in producing plant-based or cultivated meat. They’ve got a leg up just in terms of efficiency. Plant-based beef is much more efficient than chicken-based meat. It requires nine times as many inputs as other products, such as chicken, and 40 times that of beef. But it still is different ingredients from the system that has been feeding the world for 100 years, so it’s going to require different manufacturing plants. In the case of cultivated meat, it’s going to require different bioreactors, it’s going to require, in both cases, raw material, the media to grow the cultivated meat, or the coconut oil to make sure that the plant-based meat does a maximally effective job of bio-mimicking the precise meat experience. There’s a lot that needs to happen. And that’s why we need scientists. And that’s why we need the really big food and meat corporations that are used to supplying millions and millions of consumers and meeting consumer demand. We also need governments to declare that this is a priority. It should be a priority for all global health and environmental issues.
The Paris Agreement will not be possible without alternative proteins. Therefore, the government should encourage the use of alternative proteins. But it also is critically important to ensure that antibiotic resistance doesn’t eliminate modern medicine. Dr. Margaret Chan was the former head for the World Health Organization. on our current antibiotic resistance trajectory, we’re on a fast track to modern medicine not existing. More than 70% of antibiotics manufactured by pharmaceuticals are fed on farm animals. That percentage drops to zero for plant-based and cultivated meats. The UN Environment Program, July 2020The following seven factors are most likely to cause the next pandemic. The first was an increase in meat production. The second was factory farming. A higher number of animals can lead to zoonotic diseases. The more genetically identical animals you have, the more you depress their immune systems and make them more susceptible to COVID-19. The next one could be even more transmissible and potentially more deadly.
As As part of anti-antibiotic resistance mitigation programs, it is a part pandemic prevention programsAs part of our Paris Agreement obligations the government should help to accelerate the transition from industrial animal meat production. We’ve been making meat the same way for 12,000 years. It’s an antiquated technology. And it’s time to give consumers that same meat experience we’re biologically programmed to want and crave, but we now have the food technology know-how to do that with plants, and to do that with cultivation.
McKenzie: Can you say a bit more about why you’re choosing to work with meat companies, when these corporations don’t necessarily have a great environmental track record?
Friedrich: They have large supply chains, which is a positive answer. They have the ability, the knowledge, and the experience to provide meat to people. This means that they can more efficiently get us plant-based meat and cultivated food than people who are starting from scratch. And then also if they see this as opportunity, rather than seeing this as threat, if they are benefiting from the science that governments are funding, if they are benefiting from the private sector incentives, they will either support those programs, or at the very least they won’t use their massive lobbying capacity to fight this transition.
It’s been encouraging to see JBS, which is the largest meat company in the world, producing some spectacularly good plant-based products and investing $100 million in cultivated meat. The same applies to Tyson and Cargill which are the number 2 and 3 meat companies in this world respectively. Smithfield, DRF, number 4 and 5 are also included. They want to sell protein profitably, that’s their business model. External costs are a major headache for them. They’re all looking at, how can they become more sustainable and better corporate citizens without sacrificing profits? This is how they can achieve their goals.
McKenzie: How does this compare with organic products? Organic products are produced by companies that produce both conventional and organic produce. They want to make money, but they are not as committed to the environment as the original organic movement. Do you worry about such a thing?
Friedrich:Organic is a premium product. Organic will be more expensive because it requires more work from farmers. The environmental benefits of plant-based meats and cultivated meats come from their efficiency. By definition, the more efficient your production practices are, the greater the climate benefits.
And then again, there is the The UK Government stated that antibiotic resistance is more likely to be a threat to the human race then climate change.. You can make plant-based and cultivated meats without using antibiotics. Pandemic risk drops to zero. If you think about what antibiotic resistance and pandemic risk and biodiversity loss and climate change do to the global poor, in particular, it’s pretty much tautological, the idea that the people who did the least to contribute to climate change are the ones who are most in jeopardy because of it. The same holds true for antibiotic resistance. A lot more people die in developed economies if medicine stops working, but it’s catastrophic—cataclysmic—in developing economies. Similarly, COVID-19, relative to what it could’ve been, this was not a particularly severe pandemic.Send an email Another 150 million people are living in extreme poverty, all across the world, and this is only for developing countries..
If the meat industry as it exists today shifts to plant-based meat and cultivated meat, that doesn’t solve some of the problems of the food system for sure. But it does solve food’s contribution to pandemic risk and antibiotic resistance, it does slash the amount of land that’s required for food production, it does slash direct emissions contributions. So it’s a pretty colossal step in the right direction.
McKenzie: Some have pointed out that alternative meats are highly processed products that, like most animal agriculture, rely on monocultures, and they’re still more greenhouse gas intensive than other vegan proteins like tofu. What would you say to those who claim otherwise? This is corporate greenwashing?
Friedrich: The uber-response to that, is that yes, this is not a silver bullet, and it doesn’t solve every problem of production agriculture. But it solves some pretty flippin’ big ones. A Diet for a Small PlanetIt was 51 years ago, and it advocated for an unprocessed, nonmonoculture, diversified system for tofu eating. Since its publication, per capita meat consumption has increased by between 200 and 300 percent. Globally, it is higher than that. Even in developed economies, it’s up just astronomically in the 51 years since that book came out. I mean, that’s the book that turned me vegan 34 years ago. People made up for the meat that I stopped eating.
Alternative proteins don’t harm processing efforts, against monocultures or the corporate hierarchy. People can still eat tofu, tempeh, beans and rice. These two things can occur simultaneously, even as meat production shifts from plant-based to cultivated meat. It feels to me like a bizarre direction of activist effort to oppose something that is, you know, it’s working within the current system, but it’s making current products way less bad, even if it’s not addressing these other issues.
If you look at peer-reviewed research that has shown why processed foods are bad, and there is a lot of it, then you will see that the majority of them, 100 per cent, have to do with adding sugar or fat or taking out fiber. And when you look at plant-based meat and you compare it to what it’s replacing: it has more fiber, because animal meat has none. It does not contain cholesterol. It has complex carbohydrates but no sugar. It is significantly more efficient from a processing perspective. It requires a fraction of the monocultures—even if plant-based meat comes from monoculture soy in Iowa, it takes nine calories of monoculture soy to get a calorie of chicken; 40 calories of monoculture soy to get a calorie of beef. So it’s still huge mitigation. And yeah, it doesn’t challenge the existing corporate hierarchy, but it doesn’t entrench the existing corporate hierarchy. It is not as good and nutritious as tofu. The idea is that people would eat this instead meat, and not tofu.
McKenzie: I first heard those criticisms coming from a leftist, vegan space but recently in conversations with meat-eaters have heard those same ideas regurgitated, like, “if I don’t want to eat meat, I would just eat some lentils.” And this is coming from people who eat meat all the time. So it’s been interesting to see those talking points against alternative meats gain traction among meat-eaters.
Friedrich:You can see that people aren’t having a lot of discussions about processed food when you look at what they are buying and eating. I don’t remember what the percentages of people who eat fast food on a weekly basis, but it’s huge, or the people who consume soda on a daily basis, but it’s huge. I think that those of us who work in the food policy field often have a perception that is inaccurate about what the general public thinks about food.
We conducted a poll about some of our policy-related work recently, maybe a whole year ago now, due to all of the media coverage around workers in slaughterhouses getting COVID. Being forced to work and not having access to bathroom breaks and other amenities. We found that only 1 percent of people are concerned about the chicken industry in a national poll. While the New York TimesIt is like drumming on about how exploitative the poultry industry is to human beings.
I believe that companies will be successful if they can achieve price and taste metrics. And if they can’t hit price and taste metrics, they will remain super niche. But we’re optimistic about them meeting price and taste metrics, because the basic science is in favor of that being able to happen.
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