We don't have time to wait for an international consensus on something as
disastrous as climate change. We need to employ every single lever at our
disposal and frankly that includes one of the most powerful levers we have
which is capitalism and consumer choice. Impossible foods creates plant-based
alternatives to meat. Its first product, the Impossible Burger, closely
approximates the look texture and taste of traditional ground beef by using some
of the same molecules found in animal meat but extracting them from plants instead.
It debuted in July of 2016 and is now sold in roughly 17,000
restaurants worldwide. The company's chief communications officer,
Rachel Conrad, says that impossible foods mission is to help save the environment
through innovation. We have prioritized cows over every other living species
they require massive amount of land water and energy to produce a fairly
trivial amount of high-quality protein so we want to do it much more directly
take high-quality protein from plants and make it delicious and nutritious and
sustainable you can buy impossible products at Dunkin Donuts White Castle
Burger King Whole Foods kotoba Red Robin and other restaurants as of now it's
significantly more expensive than traditional me but Conrad says that will
change the impossible burger uses about 80 percent less water about 90 percent
less energy and about 95 percent less land okay great that's great by way the
environment but that also means we don't need vast tracts a real estate for
pasture land and slaughterhouses and transport and we don't need as much
water and we don't need as much energy and so that actually over the long term
pushes the cost for us and ultimately for the consumer down Conrad says
impossible Foods is introducing new meat products in order of their potential
environmental and public health impact the company's first priority was beef
but in January of 2020 the company announced that the Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas that it was adding two new products impossible torque and
impossible sausage the company hasn't yet announced when they'll be available
in stores pigs are a disaster for Public Health when you look at these strains of
flu the current problems with African swine fever is very clear that growing
pigs for meat in these concentrated animal feeding Lots are creating huge
problems pigs consume a huge amount of the antibiotics in the whole world which
is a leading cause of the antibiotic resistance disaster that we are all
facing we need to really address the pig question from both a sustainability
perspective and a public health perspective Conrad says that the
impossible burger appeals not just to the social consciousness and health
concerns of consumers but to their taste buds about 95 percent of people who buy
the impossible burger are regularly consuming animal derived products
whether that's dairy fish chicken or conventional burgers from cows and and
we love that step and we we think that it's great it really shows that we are
penetrating the actual market of meat lovers impossible foods isn't the only
company with the mission of creating more environmentally friendly
alternatives to raising and slaughtering livestock others are attempting to grow
meat in a laboratory and aiming to create whole cuts not just around me
Conrad is skeptical that these ventures can be competitive in their pricing any
time soon we don't have time for $50,000 chicken nuggets you know we have time to
do something that that is immediate and urgent and solves the biggest problem
that humanity faces you can do that by eating plant-based meat do you foresee
going into let's say like steak or a whole fish is that is that a different
ballgame when it's not ground meat that you're talking about so yes know it we
definitely plan to go after those markets there's no question that ground
beef is the biggest sector of of the beef market in America it is obviously
best known in the form of the classic American burger but it's in all sorts of
things from you know chili to meatballs to tacos right so we wanted to go after
that first impossible food says it's plant-based meat cooks and tastes like
the real thing the company's key innovation here is heme the same
protein that makes blood red which allows it simulated meat to bleed and
sear like a beef burger impossible foods isolated the protein from soybeans and
developed a genetic engineering process to manufacture it in bulk
impossible foods is super proud of our genetic engineering a lot of the value
of the company a lot of the intellectual property of the company comes from the
fact that we use cutting-edge R&D including genetic engineering which is
probably one of the most significant important advances of the 20th century
again there's been thousands of meta studies around genetic engineering there
is absolutely zero negative consequence to human health and well-being because
of genetic engineering what would you say to people that are concerned about
let's say the long-term impacts of GMOs that we can't measure yet the alarmist
concerns about about using GMOs we haven't measured the negative
implications of GMOs because there aren't any
we have tried again show me some data that that shows that these are somehow
negative the actual body of scientific literature on this shows that they are
completely safe meanwhile the meat industry has been pushing for labeling
laws that clarify that impossible foods products aren't the real thing on the
grounds that consumers might be confused about what they're actually buying
that's obviously complete bullshit consumers are absolutely certain of what
they're buying when they buy our product which is why we've seen such
stratospheric growth they're really talking about how either meat or milk
should be reserved for products that come from animals harvested from
traditional livestock I i've breastfed my children I know this is like way too
much information for you but you know according to the actual labeling laws
that were starting to see pitched in various states I would actually have
been serving my infants I don't know breast beverage so basically something
as unappealing to a consumer as possible exactly yeah this is again it's all part
and parcel of this idea that man combin industry we know we're facing an
existential threat we can't fight them on the sustainability on the taste
because you know we are really rivaling animal products for for taste they are
trying to fight us from a marketing and communications perspective fighting by
spreading fear uncertainty and doubt and as you said there's this whisper
campaign and like there was an article published in an livestock industry
publication that claimed that for impossible whoppers contained enough
estrogen to grow boobs on a male so can you just respond to that claim and maybe
any of the others that you've seen floating around the reality is that
there is no estrogen in our product you know I mean this is all bs there's sort
of phytoestrogen from plants but thousands of scientific studies show
that that that's totally healthy and in fact you know most Asian societies
consume vastly more than we do and not only are they totally safe the men of
Japan aren't growing boobs but the reality is that they're living longer
and they're healthier than we are a lot of environmental groups or climate
action groups have explicitly embraced the idea that capitalism is at the root
of all these problems and that it's sort of an evil system that needs to be
toppled before we can do anything about that
you've explicitly taken sort of the opposite approach so what would be your
response to those types of arguments I mean I would actually sideline that
entire debate the reality is that we don't have time to shift the economic
system in the entire world in order to fix it in order to then fix climate
change if governments and international protocols and consensus is could somehow
be employed awesome that would that would be great
but but I really do think that we need to leverage every single thing that we
can and I don't know if you're gonna find a more powerful lever right now
than capitalism and consumer demand and consumers
rational behavior