Ethan Brown wanted to make livestock obsolete: Animals, which have to eat grasses and fodder and drink gallons of water in order to subsequently spend hours and days digesting to finally extract the chemical components they need to build up muscle mass. Meat that ends up as a valuable protein on our plates in the form of a steak, fillet, or sausage. For Ethan Brown, the inventor of “Beyond Meat”, this process was too inefficient. Why not instead use chemical components from plants and produce meat directly in the laboratory – just like animals do? But without the animal, which is essentially just a slow “bioreactor”?

The US visionary assembled a team of chemists, biologists, and food technicians and tasked them with finding the formula for vegetarian meat. Some ten years have passed since then, and today many people have already eaten the result: the “Beyond Burger”. A patty, made from pea protein, that smells and tastes like meat, and – thanks to beetroot – is even just as juicy as a real burger. 

Animals are inefficient energy converters 

Ethan Brown’s approach is called food hacking and is part of a major trend: the technologizing of food production, which ideally takes account of the environment, the climate, and animal welfare.

In its European Food Trends Report 2019, the Swiss Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute describes this as nothing less than the “reinvention of food”. 

And this is sorely needed: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that planet earth will be home to approximately ten billion people in 2050 who will all have to be fed. This, however, will not be possible with our current dietary habits, which are based on animal products. A European cow, for example, has to eat up to 300 kilograms to produce just one kilogram of protein. In addition, conventional livestock breeding has a number of shortcomings: Kept in unnaturally dense herds, livestock are pumped full of antibiotics, they produce vast amounts of methane and are fed high-energy soy to accelerate their growth – soy that is grown in gigantic monocultures that require intensive irrigation and for which even parts of the rainforest are deforested. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) reports that soy cultivation has increased by a factor of ten over the past 50 years, and now totals some 269 million metric tons. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, almost 60 million acres of land in South America were turned into farmland, destroying unique habitats for plants and wildlife. In South America alone 42 million acres of farmland were used for soybean cultivation – in 1990. By 2010, the land use had climbed to almost 114 million acres.