- That's me, that's the richest man in the world,
and that's the burger I just made him.
But there's a catch.
The patty in that burger is made from this stuff.
And the reason I can eat it raw
is it's made entirely from plants.
As you guys know, every year,
I dedicate one of my 12 videos to showcase how clever people
are using science and technology
to change the world for the better.
So, for example, two years ago,
it was a paper centrifuge and microscope
that could diagnose malaria for 51 cents
versus $10,000 for traditional equipment.
And then last year, it was a magical powder
that helps poorer countries
turn contaminated muddy water into clear drinking water.
That's also when I first met Bill,
and he earned my forever respect
after I microwaved up some pizza rolls for him,
and he ate them like a champ.
I've been loosely following the progress of plant-based meat
for a couple years now,
and allegedly it looks and tastes like meat,
yet it's made from plants.
Now, at the top of this video,
I feel like I should start with a confession.
I eat meat, like, kind of a lot.
I've had some form of meat at pretty much every meal
since I was a kid.
My favorite genre of food is barbecue.
And so be that as it may,
as a firm believer in the scientific method,
I feel like it's time for me just to really buckle down
and get to the bottom of this plant-based meat thing.
And so today, on my quest for answers,
I'm looking at three main questions.
Number one, how does it taste?
And not just that, but how does it look and feel and smell?
How successfully does it trick my brain
into thinking this is real meat?
Number two, is it good for me?
If it does trick my brain, what the heck is in it?
Is it just some kind of, like, lab chemical concoction?
And also, how does it compare
to, like, the protein from a real burger?
And number three, is it good for the planet?
And on this one, I have a hunch that it is,
but is it like, meh, it's a little better,
or is it like 100 times better?
Now, I should say a big motivation for me
and something I think even my fellow meat eaters
could agree on
is that the concept of factory farms isn't great.
The whole cows that have never seen a blade of grass thing
and pigs, which by most accounts are smarter than dogs,
that live their entire lives indoors on crowded concrete.
These factories are efficient.
They're optimized for driving down costs,
not for animal well-being.
And I'm not trying to be a downer.
It's just something I don't like to think about
when I'm eating my In-N-Out Burger or Chick-fil-A.
And it's a lame excuse,
but I feel like I sort of never have had
a good alternative option.
I mean, historically, this is a veggie burger,
and nothing about this works as a burger for me.
But in recent years,
the strategy shifted to target people exactly like me,
basically try and make it as close to real meat as possible,
which reduces friction for trying a plant-based option.
So their goal is,
if I'm going meatless at the summer barbecue,
instead of a quinoa salad,
I can still enjoy the full experience
of a burger with my friends.
And so on that note,
let's get right into question number one.
Throw this puppy on the grill.
(burger sizzles)
Sizzle!
It definitely sounds like a burger
and even smells like it.
And you're getting, like, the fat dripping down,
which is causing the flames to come up.
(burger sizzles)
So, so far, the experience feels pretty analogous
to just grilling a burger.
When I lick the fork,
it definitely tastes like there was meat on this fork.
All right, this cuts and feels exactly like a real burger.
But before I officially taste it,
I kind of wanna know exactly what's in there.
And to do that, I'm gonna fly out to the two companies
who are the leader in this space,
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.
At Beyond Meat, the first thing they showed me
were the labs where they do all their research.
Are these actual, are these actors,
or these are real scientists?
- These are scientists, yeah.
- This feels like "Jurassic Park,"
you know, where they're, like, giving you the tour.
And right out of the gate, they put my mind at ease
and showed me a tray of all the main stuff
that makes up their burgers.
Apparently, they work on not just the taste,
but they have teams of researchers
working on the texture, color, the smell,
the grilling sound,
even the same amount of calories and protein
as a meat burger.
Their goal is to make it as frictionless as possible
for people like me to make the switch.
So they have these for the color,
coconut and sunflower oil for the fat
so it sizzles on the grill,
potatoes for carbohydrates,
and then these for the protein,
the majority coming from yellow peas.
These burgers are better for you
because they have no cholesterol,
but they do have saturated fat from the coconut oil,
so you shouldn't think of this
as healthy as, like, a plain salad with no dressing.
After getting the full tour, I was feeling pretty good,
so it was time for the real test in the kitchen.
I've intentionally kept my taste buds virgin.
- Okay, great.
- And I haven't tasted it,
and I had opportunities, but, like, no, I wanna wait.
No pressure, but next week, I'm going to meet Bill Gates.
- Yeah. - And I have to cook for him.
You're like a professional chef, right?
- [Chef Chris] I am.
- In the next like 20 minutes,
you need to transfer all that knowledge
from your brain into mine, okay?
We started with their Italian sausage
made, of course, just from plants,
and Chef Chris showed me some power moves
to impress Bill with on the grill.
I'm so scared.
- [Chef Chris] Cheers.
- Okay, cheers.
Even putting flavor aside-
- [Chef Chris] I think Bill will be okay
with a little bit of a juice.
- There's no way I would've guessed
I wasn't actually eating real meat.
That's pretty good.
- [Chef Chris] Cheers.
- Cheers.
That's really good.
I need one more taste.
That's freaking good.
- Thank you.
- Next up was their burger,
which, it turns out, was equally amazing.
Genuinely, when you surround it with burger stuff,
it's really hard to tell.
- There's no way to tell.
- My next trip was to Impossible Foods,
and they actually let me make a burger myself
just from the ingredients in these bowls.
- So the first thing that we're gonna do
is add the water to the soy protein,
and then we're gonna add the potato protein.
- Okay. - So the next thing
we're gonna put in is our magic ingredient,
which, do you know what this is?
- Red #5, it's just food color. (laughs)
- So this is our magic ingredient.
It's called heme, which is short for hemoglobin.
Heme is responsible for making meat taste like meat.
That's found in every living plant and animal.
You can get heme from soy plants.
- I see.
- You don't have to get it from animals.
- Next we added the cellulose-based culinary binder
to hold everything together,
and then finally the coconut and sunflower oils.
- Have you done any pastry work in your life?
- Oh, tons of pastry work. - Okay.
You're gonna, like, fold and smush.
- All my pastry work's shining through.
- You literally just made the Impossible Burger yourself.
- Like, five little cups. - Five bowls, yeah.
- One of them was water.
- So now I think it's time to cook one of these up.
- 96% of the folks who are ordering our product
are self-identified meat eaters.
- I'm definitely your target demo.
I grew up, like, if the meal didn't have meat in it,
it wasn't a meal.
- When it delivers
in that same characteristic that meat does,
it really proves the point
that we are providing a no-compromises alternative
for those meat eaters out there to make a different choice.
- [Mark] This raised an interesting point.
Meat has been cleverly marketed with being a real man
because real men need their protein.
- [Spokesperson] That's what a man eats.
- [Spokesperson] Made from stuff guys need.
- [Spokesperson] Eat like a man, man.
- [Mark] But the truth is, even meat eaters like me
get roughly half their protein a day from plants
by eating things that contain
some kind of beans, peas, nuts,
or whole grains like corn, rice, and oats.
In fact, many high-performance athletes
are switching to a plant-based diet
because studies have shown
it can help reduce measures of inflammation
by almost 30% in just three weeks,
and inflammation makes it harder to recover after a workout.
So if a plant-based diet is good enough
for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kyrie Irving, Lewis Hamilton,
Venus and Serena Williams, Nate Diaz,
and a growing butt ton of others,
it's probably good enough for me
and my weekly rec league soccer game.
♪ Ballin' like Curry ♪
- [Chef] You can ultimately utilize this
in any way you would use traditional ground beef.
- So tacos, lasagna, meatballs.
- You name it.
(mellow music)
- This is so good.
This is a plant-based burger,
and look at the mess I'm making.
So obviously I thought their burgers were also really good,
but I felt like I wanted a larger sample size
before I felt truly confident feeding Bill.
So I invited some friends to a local restaurant
that serves Impossible burgers.
And the thing is, you can't always trust adults
'cause they might just change their answer to be nice.
- It's really good.
- Kids, on the other hand, are brutally honest,
so we ordered them plant-based burgers, too...
- Do you like it? - It's juicy.
- [Mark] But might have neglected
to mention it to them beforehand.
What do you think?
- It's really good.
- [Mark] There's no meat in that burger.
- Wait, what?
You're lying.
- [Mark] Plants.
- What?
- [Mark] That was a plant burger.
You ate a plant burger.
- Instead of meat, it was vegetables?
- It just tastes, like, extra juicy. (laughs)
- And so feeling more confident than ever,
it was time to visit Bill,
put my culinary skills to the test,
and see if he could help me answer my final question.
So I'm back in Bill's kitchen.
He's gonna be here in an hour, and I need some groceries.
(upbeat music)
All right, Bill.
- Hey. - It's good to see you again.
- How are you?
- So I've been working hard in your kitchen.
- Perfect.
- And I kind of wanted to talk to you
about plant-based meat,
and I thought maybe we could try them out as well.
- Sure.
- But as a control,
I know you're a big fan of Dick's burgers,
so to kind of cleanse the palate,
I thought we could just take a bite.
- That's the real thing.
- The real thing.
As a non-Seattle native, I've gotta say,
I think this may be an acquired taste.
- Yeah, you get used to a certain burger.
- You get used to it.
And so now it was time for my cooking.
(jaunty music)
What do you think?
- It's quite good.
I mean, that's light-years away from what they used to make.
- Like the traditional veggie burger?
- Right.
You know, the quality's gonna keep getting better.
If the plant-based guys are not done innovating,
eventually, they claim
you won't be able to tell the difference.
- [Mark] Next up was my killer bratwurst.
- Wow. Well, that's pretty good.
- [Mark] And at this point in my quest,
I felt like I had a pretty good lock
on questions one and two,
so I asked him about number three.
- The agriculture sector is about 18% of overall emission,
but livestock is about half of that 18%.
- Wow.
- And almost all of that is beef.
- Is this like cow farts, cow burps?
- Slightly more burps than farts,
but it's a mix of those two. - It's a mix.
To put that into perspective,
that means that sector alone is responsible
for more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks,
trains, ships, and planes combined.
Turns out it takes a lot of stuff to make a cow.
- Very inefficient, particularly beef,
it's almost eight to one.
You use eight calories to feed that cow
for every calorie of meat you get out of it
because you're building bone and respiration for that cow.
- Now, this was a really good point
I hadn't fully considered.
If you think about it,
as humans, we're really solar powered.
We eat plants, but they get their energy from the sun.
Then you might be like, "Ah, we also eat animals though."
But they get their energy from plants, too,
which, again, get their energy from the sun.
So when it comes to getting our energy from the sun,
animals are an inefficient middleman.
We get on average 10% of our calories
or energy in a day from meat.
That might sound reasonable
until you look at the amount of resources it takes
to make that meat compared to the other 90%.
If you combined all the land in the US
dedicated to raising animals,
you would get an area like this,
and then plus this much more
to grow the crops needed to feed those animals.
Now, remember, all of that is for the middleman,
for 10% of our daily energy.
Now compare that to the amount of land needed
for crops we actually eat ourselves directly.
That relatively small chunk of land
is where the overwhelming majority
of our personal energy comes from.
And it's not just land resources, but water as well.
To end up with 24 hamburger patties,
it requires the amount of water you see in this pool.
That same amount of water
could make 75 loaves of whole grain bread
and 30 jars of peanut butter.
So if I made myself a delicious peanut butter sandwich,
which has nearly the identical amounts
of both calories and proteins compared to this patty,
and then I ate two a day,
the meat would last me a little over a week
and the sandwiches would last me a little over a year.
So that's the same amount of resources used,
same amount of calories and protein to me per serving.
One just lasted me a year longer
because it's a much more efficient energy transfer method.
This is why a plant-based diet
is a way more efficient use of natural resources.
We could feed an additional 3.5 billion people worldwide
if all countries just ate the stuff they fed to animals.
And here's why that fact matters.
- Particularly as people get richer,
they tend to eat more meat.
If we don't do anything,
this sector will actually grow over time.
- So you're saying not just the fact
that there's more people and a larger population,
but as people move up towards the middle class,
they want to consume more meat.
And you could certainly see that this is true
when you look at the amount of meat consumed
over the past 50 years.
Given the resources required,
a trajectory for meat consumption like this
is simply unsustainable.
A few decades ago, meat was considered a luxury product,
but now it's a commodity for a growing number of people.
In fact, the demand is growing so much,
it now makes sense for farmers in the Amazon
just to burn it down
and to turn that forest into grazing land for animals.
We've irreversibly lost 20% of the Amazon so far,
and that's a double gut punch
'cause now not only is that more cow farts
adding to climate change,
but when you burn those trees,
all the carbon stored inside them
goes back into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas CO2.
- One of the great tragedies about climate
is that it's the poorest in the world,
the farmers who live fairly near to the equator,
that all this heat and flooding and droughts,
they're going to suffer by far the most.
If you're just trying to get people to cut back,
don't eat meat, don't drive to work, don't take trips.
It's such a dramatic set of sacrifices
that everybody has to engage in
that, without innovation,
we're probably gonna go way past the two degrees.
- And that last part is the silver lining.
Plant-based meat is the exact kind of innovation
Bill's referring to here.
And I'm optimistic
because as the demand for plant-based meats goes up,
the price will come down, much lower than actual meat.
So then not only will the experience
be identical to eating meat,
but it's better for you, better for animals,
and much better for the planet.
Oh, and it also costs half as much.
It just becomes a really easy decision
for people to switch in massive numbers.
All right, so what does this all mean?
Now that I've completed my quest for answers,
where do I stand?
And I'll say it still makes me really uncomfortable
to think about these factory farms
or the Amazon being burned down to make room for more cows.
But at the same time,
I can't really blame these poor remote farmers
who know nothing about what a greenhouse gas is
for just trying to feed their family.
As long as the demand for meat continues to grow,
there will be an incentive
to be not cool to our mutual friend, Mother Earth.
So the most effective thing we can do
is try and reduce that demand.
So after all this, I'm not a vegan.
I'm not even strictly on a plant-based diet.
But I have reduced the amount of meat I consume
by more than half, and I feel great.
Importantly, I broke out from that weird mindset
that for it to be considered a true meal,
it has to have some form of meat.
So if any part of this video rings true to you,
I would say don't take my word for it,
try it for yourself.
You can find plant-based meat options
in thousands of restaurants
and even at Burger King and Carl's Jr.
Most grocery stores have a whole section dedicated to them,
so you can substitute it
into your favorite home-cooked meal.
And remember, it doesn't have to be binary,
like you either eat no meat or you're frickin' Ron Swanson.
If a bunch of people did Meatless Monday, for example,
that would have a huge impact on demand.
Some of the challenges we face globally
can feel pretty daunting,
and so I love seeing clever people
innovating on the front lines,
trying to make it as easy as possible
for the rest of us to make the right choices.
It gives me hope about our future here together
and inspires me to wanna do my part.
- I actually thought of all the toughest climate problems
that livestock was going to be the toughest.
Now with these companies
and other ones coming along in this space,
I'd say steel and cement are now the two
that I'm still scratching my head.
- Well, if anyone's gonna be scratching their head
to solve the problem,
I think humanity is grateful Bill Gates is the one doing it.
So on behalf of, I don't know, the world,
we appreciate the efforts you're making in this.
I have some celebratory pizza rolls.
Last year, I made you eat- - Oh!
- Actually, they're frozen.
You don't want those. - Uh-oh, thank you.
- It's just a prop.
I'll spare you.
- You tricked me, Mark Rober!
(upbeat music)