Will the future forget about meat?

Food experts are learning to love fake beef. By the 22nd century, the real thing may be a rarity.

NOTE FOR 2018 READERS: This is the third in a series of open letters to the next century. The series mark a little-known chronological milestone. According to UN data, average life expectancy at birth in 10 countries now exceeds 82 years — meaning babies born in 2018 have started being more likely than not to see the year 2100.

What will the world be like at the other end of our kids' lives? We can glimpse the answers in some of today's scientific discoveries, Silicon Valley visions, and science fiction. But in this series of digital time capsules, we also recognize that our hopes and fears usually shape what the future will become.

Dear 22nd Century,

What's for dinner?

A basic enough question for you, perhaps. But for early 21st century food experts, predicting what you'll be eating eight decades hence is a task more taxing than any Iron Chef challenge.

Sure, we know the classic 20th century science-fiction notion that you lot eat "food pills" isn't going to pan out — it's physically impossible to squeeze our daily intake of calories into tablets. And while you may be knocking back those disturbingly tasteless Soylent shakes that are currently all the rage in Silicon Valley, we can assume human ethics won't decline to the point of chowing down on Soylent Green. (Today's secret ingredient is ... people!)

Beyond those near-certainties, all is speculation. Maybe future cities will be awash in fresh fruit and vegetables, thanks to massive vertical farms such as the one that just sprung up in Las Vegas and the one breaking records in a tunnel in Seoul. Maybe, as the New York Times recently suggested, Americans and Europeans will join the estimated 2 billion people on the planet who regularly get their protein from insects.

Or maybe, as food writer Michael Pollan fears, the whole structure of society is designed to make us eat more and more of what he calls "edible food-like substances." Defining "real food" is "going to get harder and harder to do as time goes on,” Pollan told me in a phone interview. “The imperative to process food, to change it, is so strong — because the more you process food, the more money you make from it. That’s one of the fundamental contradictions between the way capitalism works and the way human biology works.”

But now Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and one of the world's foremost champions of real food, has become a lot more ambivalent about whether that's a bad thing.

In fact, he thinks certain edible food-like substances could help to save the planet by the time you come around — the ones that may largely displace meat in our diet for good.

How so? What helped to change Pollan's mind? Two words: fake meatballs.

Ready for prime-time: the plant-based meatless meatball.

Impossible Foods

I first became aware of Impossible Foods the same year the Silicon Valley startup launched, 2016. All of a sudden, a handful of high-end San Francisco Bay Area eateries began touting something called the Impossible Burger — a revolutionary meatless product that was supposed to be just as good as the real thing. A highly-processed secret ingredient called soy leghemoglobin, or heme for short, replaced that rich, juicy burger sensation that was lacking in all previous vegetable patties.

Heme looked like dark red blood, and it was made out of wheat. It doesn't get more "edible food-like substance" than that. But the Bay Area's desire for high-tech novelty and unusual food won out over its love of all things natural, and by the end of the year demand for the Impossible Burger was so great that it went on sale at a top-notch fast-food establishment, Umami Burger. (As I write this, Umami is in financial trouble for an unrelated reason — it expanded to the whole country too fast. Assuming it's dead by your time, trust me, you're missing out.)

The initial Impossible Foods vision was that it would go even more mainstream, becoming cheap and desirable enough to go on sale at the world's largest fast food chain, McDonald's.

Fast forward to 2018, and the startup has made rapid progress towards that goal.

In July, the FDA officially declined to raise any concerns about heme — reflecting the general opinion of food experts that it was harmless. Meanwhile, White Castle and Fatburger were among the largest of some 3,000 restaurants that had added Impossible to their menu. The White Castle Impossible Slider cost $1.99.

McDonald's, here we come?

What a meatless future looks like: the White Castle Impossible Slider.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Personally, I wasn't so sure. I'd been dubious about every Impossible Burger I consumed. Chefs seemed to add a ton of salt, perhaps overcompensating. The heme was great at fooling my palate; the other ingredients (potato protein, wheat protein, coconut oil), not quite so much. I filed it away in my brain under "beta product."

That was, until I talked to Pollan. The venerable author reported from his desk at Harvard that he'd recently tried an Impossible meatball sandwich from Clover, a Boston-area chain. "They add Romano cheese and egg to get the texture right," he enthused. He'd had the same reaction to the Impossible Burger that I'd had — that while it was "uncanny how much it looks and behaves like real meat," he found it "a little more granular, a little more oatmealy" than a regular beef patty.

Now, the experiment at Clover had "fixed it" so Impossible's food-like substance was finally ready for prime time, Pollan said: "I think it's an excellent product."

It's worth emphasizing, 22nd century, just how bizarre this was to hear. Not only is Pollan, 63, known for being a proponent of real meat — his Netflix documentary Cooked follows him as he learns to slow-roast a whole pig in his backyard — this Berkleyite is at the epicenter of the slow-food movement, and has long opposed all kinds of food-industry scientific meddling.

His first line in In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2009) became legendary, a staple of Facebook status updates, a seven-word distilling of everything he'd learned about diet and health: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He encoded what he called "algorithms" in the text to let you know how to define what he meant by "food" — for example, don't eat anything with ingredients your grandparents (in your case, your great-great-grandparents) would not recognize.

I wouldn't be surprised if you laugh at the people of our time for our ADD-like diet fads. We have a societal habit of switching between mostly-similar rulebooks as they come into fashion: I'm doing the Atkins! No wait, I'm Paleo! Forget Paleo, I've switched to Keto! Pollan's common-sense meme seemed the opposite of all that. It was the one rule to rule them all, advice built to last until — well, until your era.

Michael Pollan on stage in 2011, ridiculing Splenda for containing "fake plant" ingredients.

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post

Now here was Pollan straight-up admitting his algorithms had broken down. Here was something his grandmother would not recognize as food, and he loved it. The seven-word statement he'd assumed would be on his tombstone was complicated by Impossible Foods and what it portended for the future of the industry.

"By my standards, it's not food," he concluded. "Doesn't mean I'm against it."

He proceeded to tick off all the ways beef was bad for the planet, ways that (I hope) are becoming increasingly familiar to us. The cattle industry is responsible for enormous environmental harm. It accounts for 80 percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Cows make methane, the most dangerous global warming chemical there is, 28 times worse than carbon dioxide, and at our current scale of 1.5 billion head of cattle, cow farts are no joke. Methane now accounts for 16 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and we keep having to revise that number upwards.

"People who eat a lot of beef are contributing to climate change substantially, in ways they don’t realize," Pollan says.

Chances are, you don't need him to tell you that. Sea levels are set to rise by a coastal-city drowning level of 26 inches in the time between us and you. If you wanted to launch a vast class-action lawsuit against any company involved in the cattle business in our time, you'd have a pretty good case.

Buying beef at the supermarket is literally one of the worst things you can do for the planet, and I can't imagine too many more generations will be able to ignore this fact.

I'm a lifelong meat eater, a huge lover of steak, and I am starting to find the strain of the cognitive dissonance required too great. When Consumer Reports tested 300 random packages of ground beef from 100 locations across America in 2015, all 300 came back positive for fecal contamination, the grain-fed and the superior grass-fed stuff alike. There are only so many burgers you can cook while ignoring this stomach-churning fact.

Our centralized slaughterhouse system is a mess, and every cow in the country has to go through it. In doctor's offices across America, red meat is the new smoking — the thing your doctor urges you to give up every time you go in. Just the other week, mine insisted I go read a troubling study about how bacteria in steaks, even grass-fed, can mess with your gut microbiome. And he's from cattle central, Iowa City.

There are many other reasons to think we won't be consuming meat as we know it by the 22nd century — cool-headed business reasons. "Growing cattle is a very inefficient way to make beef," Pollan says. "If the rest of the world wants to eat meat at the rate [Americans] do, we literally don't have enough world."

He's not wrong. Cattle consume 1,800 gallons of water per pound of beef (again, even the grass-fed kind). Grow wheat to make Impossible burgers instead, and you've saved 1,700 gallons per pound. You don't have to be a corporate accountant to see the savings.

Add to that the fact that half of a cow is unusable after slaughter. Name another industry that has to throw away 50 percent of its product before it even gets close to the consumer. Even the fashion for so-called "nose to tail" eating hasn't shifted that figure.

In the future, will we only encounter meat in museums?

Bob Al-Greene

I've focused on beef, by the way, not just because it's the most resource-intensive of meats by far but because it seems, subjectively, to be the hardest meat to fake. If companies like Impossible can crack the beef problem, it doesn't seem like they'd have much of a problem producing plant-based "chicken" or "pork" that tastes the same as the original. (Heck, McDonald's already pushes a chicken-like product that's barely chicken; it's called the McNugget, and 31 of its 32 ingredients do not come from the bird.)

There's both an active and a passive argument here for the world turning away from meat by the time you arrive on the scene. The active argument is partly health-based — although you find that fried chicken tasty, you may not want to eat it because you've read about all the antibiotics pumped into hens that make consumers more susceptible to disease. It's partly ethics-based — you're turned-off by factory farming and the egg farms that currently grind up millions of male chicks; you're discomforted by the intelligence of pigs.

But I think the passive argument is much stronger. As time goes on, successive generations will simply accept the slow and steady replacement of meat with its cheaper, less resource-intensive, close-enough counterpart. In a 2018 poll of 2,100 Americans by Michigan State University, some 30 percent of respondents rated themselves "likely to purchase foods that look and taste identical to meat but are based on ingredients that are produced artificially."

Here's the telling part, though: a majority of people aged 18 to 29 said they would.

These people are your parents and grandparents. And by your standards, even they may come across as old, barbaric, animal-based meat-loving fuddy-duddies.

Alongside the food-like substance from Impossible, its equally well-funded rival Beyond Meat (which uses pea protein in place of wheat), and their successors, there's also what we call lab-grown meat — or more accurately, cultured meat. Take tissue from an actual dead animal, stick it in a petri dish, give it what it needs to keep growing. Call it the sourdough starter of meat.

Pollan is skeptical about whether there's a sustainable level of input for cultured meat to operate at any kind of scale. Then again, he used to be skeptical about Impossible meat. Food tech moves at speed these days. The cost of producing a single cultured meat burger has already plummeted from $280,000 to around $10 in a manner of years, according to a report from the free market-friendly Adam Smith Institute titled Don't Have a Cow, Man.

As I write there's a kerfuffle over officially naming this foodstuff. The U.S. Cattlemen's Beef Association is trying to get the USDA to declare that none of these cultured or plant-based burgers can use the words "meat" or "beef." Cultured meat startups wanted to call their product "clean meat" but now worry that title sounds too elitist.

In the long run, this naming battle is a distraction. Even if the Cattlemen win, it won't matter, because when consumers eat something that looks and tastes identical to meat, they're going to call it meat. It doesn't really matter what it says on the package. Under pressure from the dairy industry, the FDA says it is going to start preventing nut-based milks from calling themselves milk. That isn't going to slow their sales. By international treaty, for more than a century, the name "champagne" has been reserved for sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France. Do you still call all sparkling wine champagne regardless? Us too.

Maybe such old-school meat will be a treat for special occasions; your motto might be "eat meat, not too much, mostly made from plants."

Economic considerations may make this turf war irrelevant soon enough. If they can't beat the cheaper, more efficient fake meats, the Cattlemen may just have to join them.

Which isn't to say that a completely meatless 22nd century is the only possible outcome. Just as no technology ever seems to die before it is preserved by wealthy hipsters (who have already saved vinyl and obscure video game consoles from extinction), there is likely to be a boutique cattle industry.

Maybe such old-school meat will be a treat for special occasions; your motto might be "eat meat, not too much, mostly made from plants." Very expensive, very well-treated Kobe beef that has been massaged daily and made its way through an epically hygienic and utterly humane slaughterhouse may make its way to the restaurant tables of the uber-rich for decades to come.

Our slaughterhouse era does not look good in the future Museum of Meat.

Bob Al-Greene

Then again, if those same diners are likely to be splattered with red paint when they leave the restaurant, they're less likely to risk ordering the beef. This is a distinct possibility that the same tactics that were used to marginalize makers and users of fur coats in our century will come to be used against the eaters of what you may come to call "unclean" meat.

Because here's the thing: It's going to get harder and harder to ignore the fact that we are killing living beings, fellow mammals with brains capable of feeling the same emotions as us. We're killing them by the truckload, every second of every day. I'm no vegetarian propagandist; as a kid in the 1980s I rolled my eyes when a singer named Morrissey (any of you guys still into The Smiths?) warbled about how "meat is murder." But how long can you keep looking at the end of your fork and not connect what you see with the whole traumatic experience that put it there?

Steven Pinker's groundbreaking study of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), would support the notion that we are slowly coming around to a vegetarian viewpoint. Pinker points out that everything we now think as barbaric in terms of what we do to other humans — slavery, torture, public executions — was once commonplace in the most civilized societies. People rolled their eyes at abolitionists, too.

In 16th century Paris, Pinker points out, there were public displays of cat-burning that made spectators including the supposedly-enlightened aristocracy "shriek with laughter." Over the centuries, western civilization began to ban or shun a spectrum of animal cruelty: bear baiting, cock fighting, dog fighting, fox hunting, animal testing. Can widespread disapproval of animal-eating be that far behind?

Pinker thought, in 2011, that "meat hunger" would prevent this trend from reaching its logical, vegetarian conclusion. Then again, around the same time, his Harvard fellow Pollan never thought he would enjoy a fake meatball sandwich.

If "meat hunger" can be sated by a product that looks and tastes exactly like meat, but in the production of which no animals were harmed, why would a succession of increasingly squeamish, ethical generations not grasp that option? I'm calling it now: Whatever you're having for your next meal, it wasn't something that ever thought or felt.

All we can hope is that you don't hate us for what we ate, and that we really didn't think as clearly as you do about what's for dinner.

To paraphrase William Carlos Williams: Forgive us. It was delicious. So juicy, so protein-rich, so hard to replicate.

Yours in meat hunger,

2018