“And what’s the biggest thing we could do to affect it?” Brown said, a glint in his eye. Over rice bowls, Brown asked, “What’s the biggest problem we could work on?” In 2008, he had lunch with Michael Eisen, a geneticist and a computational scientist. Razing forests to graze cattle-an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century-turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.īrown began paying attention to this planetary overdraft during the late two-thousands, even as his lab was publishing on topics ranging from ovarian-cancer detection to how babies acquire their gut microbiome. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. We see our mission as the last chance to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.” He emerged wearing a T-shirt depicting a cow with a red slash through it, and immediately declared, “The use of animals in food production is by far the most destructive technology on earth. When we met, he arrived not in Silicon Valley’s obligatory silver Tesla but in an orange Chevy Bolt that resembled a crouching troll. His first product, the Impossible Burger, made chiefly of soy and potato proteins and coconut and sunflower oils, is now in seventeen thousand restaurants. By developing plant-based beef, chicken, pork, lamb, dairy, and fish, he intends to wipe out all animal agriculture and deep-sea fishing by 2035. A sixty-five-year-old emeritus professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, Brown is the founder and C.E.O.
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