[Music]
[Applause]
who here likes pasta Wow applause for
pasta I think we have basic unanimity on
pasta I love pasta too and fortunately I
have nine plates of pasta from a local
Italian restaurant it is fantastic
who would like to eat a plate of pasta
while I give this talk yes right here
can you come up to the stage let me give
you this there you go excellent yes take
you back to your seat thank you and I
only have nine plates of pasta and I
have to throw away the other eight I’m
sorry so that’s two four six alright so
one plate of pasta being eaten eight
plates of pasta in the trash who thinks
that was a good idea and no but well the
one guy who’s eating the pasta excellent
I actually heard gasps there was
applause for pasta there was gasps for
throwing pasta away and that’s right
throwing away food is a horrible idea
and yet that’s basically the
relationship that all of us enter into
every time we’re choosing to eat meat
because of chicken as just one example
it takes nine calories into a chicken in
the form of soy and oats and wheat and
whatever the food is that’s turned you
know that is fed to the chicken that’s
turned into feed and fed to the chicken
so it takes nine calories in to get one
calorie back out I’m guessing most of
you the horror you expressed at throwing
away pasta are concerned about food
waste and we should be concerned about
food waste of every 100 calories of food
that’s produced we literally throw away
40 of those calories we throw away
almost half of all of the food that’s
produced in the United States and yet
food that’s produced by funneling crops
through chickens it’s actually 800
percent food waste for every hundred
calories of chicken that we produce and
chicken is the most efficient meat for
every hundred calories of chicken that
we produce we throw away 800 calories by
cycling it through the chicken that
means eight times as much land eight
times as much water eight times as much
gasoline to till the crops eight times
as much pesticide and herbicide dumped
onto the crops and that’s not all of it
there are also multiple extra stages of
production that are required if we’re
going to grow crops to feed them to
animals so that we can eat animals you
have to grow the crops and you ship them
on a gas-guzzling pollution spewing
vehicle to a feed mill and you operate
the feed mill and then you ship the feed
on a gas-guzzling pollution spewing
vehicle to an industrial farm and you
operate that factory farm and then you
ship the animals to the slaughterhouse
and you operate the slaughterhouse it’s
multiple extra stages of gas-guzzling
pollution spewing vehicles and multiple
extra stages of energy intensive and
polluting factories this is not a great
way to
nine point seven billion people by 2050
let’s face it it’s a terrible way to try
to feed all of those people the United
Nations a number of years ago they
crunched the numbers on all of this
inefficiency and all of this pollution
they released a more than four hundred
page report called livestock’s long
shadow and in livestock’s long shadow
they determined that whatever
environmental issue you want to look at
from them smallest and most local to the
largest and most global the
inefficiencies of animal agriculture are
one of the top causes everything from
water pollution to soil desertification
to species loss to climate change on the
issue of climate change specifically the
United Nations says that more climate
change is attributable to the global
meat industry than to all of the planes
and trains and trucks and automobiles
all forms of transport combined almost
15 percent on a per calorie basis animal
agriculture chicken which is the least
climate change inducing meat causes 40
times as much climate change per calorie
of protein when compared to eating
legumes like soy or peas directly so
what’s the solution to the problems of
industrial animal agriculture the Royal
Institute of International Affairs the
foremost think-tank in Europe more
commonly referred to as Chatham House a
few years back they released a report
about the climate impact of the meat
industry and their suggestion was that
the governments of the world educate
their citizens about the climate impact
of the meat industry and encourage
people to eat less meat and the Chinese
government has done just that the
Chinese government has released climate
based dietary guidelines and has said
that it is their goal to cut meat
consumption per capita in China in half
by educating their citizen rain I admire
the optimism of Chatham House and the
Chinese they think they’re going to
educate people about the climate impact
of food and everybody’s going to eat
less meat but I think a more likely
climate hero is Ben and Jerry’s
non-dairy ice cream I’m being facetious
sort of but who here likes Ben and
Jerry’s
yeah I think we have unanimity on Ben
and Jerry’s – it looks like as many
people like Ben & Jerry’s as like pasta
and if you’re like everybody else you
saw Ben & Jerry’s and you thought Ben &
Jerry’s is delicious right if it were 20
bucks a pint that would have figured in
you would have thought Ben & Jerry’s too
expensive if it wasn’t available in
every grocery store that probably would
have occurred to you would have thought
where can I get it and those are in
every study that’s been done those are
the three factors that really dictate
consumer choice taste price and
convenience 100% of people in the
developed world factor taste price and
convenience into their decisions about
what it is that they’re going to eat
some people figure in health that’s a
somewhat distant fourth none of you when
I flash Ben and Jerry’s up here and said
you know do you like this none of you
thought health food half of Americans
eat fast food every single week nobody’s
going to KFC because it’s a health food
right it’s prey it’s delicious it’s
convenient and it’s cheap so how do we
apply the Ben and Jerry’s trifecta price
taste and convenience how do we apply
that to the harms of industrial animal
agriculture and in answering that
question I’m going to tell you three
brief stories about three entrepreneurs
who are doing precisely that the first
one is this guy Ethan Brown the years
2009 and Ethan brown who is this bear of
a man he looks more like a college
football player than he looks like a
tree-hugging environmentalist but there
Ethan is working on clean energy and
he’s learned about the environmental
harm of industrial animal agriculture
and he wants to do something about it
and it occurs to Ethan that meat is made
of lipids amino acids minerals and water
everything in animal-based meat also
exists in plants so Ethan’s brainstorm
is plant-based meat and he forms a
company called beyond meat he starts
raising money he starts hiring food
scientists and chefs and other culinary
experts and after about three years in
2012 he comes out with this beyond meat
plant-based
chicken Bill Gates Christ this chicken
and not only does he invest in beyond me
but he writes a blog in which he says
what I just tasted was not just a clever
meat substitute what I just tasted is
the future of food so Ethan introduces a
couple more products and in 2016 his
next masterpiece the beyond burger the
beyond burger is a plant-based burger
that tastes so meat like it’s actually
offered in the meat case at Whole Foods
at Kroger at Safeway at Albertsons at a
bunch of different grocery stores taste
so meat like that when Tyson Foods
launched their first venture capital
fund in 2016
their very first investment was in
beyond meat you have the largest meat
producer in the United States buying in
two plant-based meat all right Story
number two another guy named Brown Pat
Brown dr. Pat Brown again it’s 2009 and
Pat Brown is a tenured professor of
biochemistry at Stanford University and
he is extremely concerned about what he
sees as an impending climate crisis so
he has an 18 month sabbatical coming up
and he spends his entire sabbatical
figuring out what he personally can do
to try to stave off the climate crisis
and at the end of that 18 months in 2011
he comes to the same conclusion that
Ethan Brown came to but a year before
Ethan launches the beyond meat chicken
and he decides that plant-based meat is
the way to go as a biochemist he knows
everything in meat he can make with
plants so he raises money and he hire
scientists and he hires culinary experts
and it takes him five years to launch
the impossible burger but boy is it
worth it this thing is amazing
it’s so fantastic it’s drawn investments
from li kai-shing the richest guy in
Asia the Facebook co-founder Dustin
Moskovitz the venture capital thought
that the multiple venture capital funds
Google Ventures it’s so fantastic that
he actually launches this thing in
shishi restaurants all over the country
and the first restaurant to offer the
impossible
and the first chef to champion ette is
Momofuku and chef David Chang some of
you may remember that about a decade ago
David Chang very noisily took all
vegetarian entrees off of all of his
menus in all of his restaurants as sort
of his personal protest against
vegetarians and vegetarianism if you can
get pat if you could if you can get
David Chang excited about a plant-based
burger you can get anybody excited about
a plant-based burger and it’s certainly
the case that Eric Schmidt is excited
Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google
he’s now the chair of the board of
Google’s parent company alphabet and
Eric Schmidt a couple years ago he was
asked to reflect on six technological
innovations that he thinks will improve
life for humanity by a factor of at
least tenfold in the fairly near future
he’s a tech guy so he picked mostly
stuff you that you might have predicted
he picks 3d printers for infrastructure
he picks watches that know you’re sick
before you do self-driving cars but the
first thing that Eric Schmidt talks
about is plant-based meat he sees
plant-based meat as an answer to two of
society’s really big questions how do we
feed nine point seven billion people by
2050 and what do we do about climate
change he calls plant-based meat nerds
over cattle all right our third
entrepreneur is a guy named uma valetti
the years 2005 and uma valetti is
training and cardiology at the Mayo
Clinic
and he’s studying regenerative medicine
and he’s a vegetarian and he thinks if
we can grow human muscle tissue why
can’t we grow chicken muscle tissue or
Pig muscle tissue or fish muscle muscle
tissue why can’t we apply the principles
of regenerative medicine to meet Andy
ruminates on this for about ten years
spends a lot of time studying it a lot
of time talking about it he actually
opens a lab to study this where he’s a
tenured professor of cardiology at the
University of Minnesota Medical Center
and in 2015 he launches the world’s
first clean meat company called Memphis
meats it’s called clean meat as a nod
energy clean energy is energy that’s
better for the environment clean meat is
meat that’s better for the environment
it’s also just literally cleaner since
there is no slaughterhouse
there’s no bacterial contamination and
since there’s no live animal there’s no
antibiotics necessary no other drugs so
no antibiotic or drug residues and this
is what clean meat production looks like
at scale sort of your friendly
neighborhood meat brewery so he launches
this company in 2015 and within a couple
of months yes the world’s first clean
meat meatball so this meatball was grown
from cells no cows harmed and he does it
for about 1% of the price of clean meat
production just two years earlier and
valetti like impossible foods and beyond
me he attracts tech Titans Richard
Branson invests Bill Gates invests the
venture capital firm dfj an early
investor in Skype and Twitter they
invest and then Cargill which is one of
the world’s largest food conglomerates
the largest privately held company in
the United States they also invest but
it seems to me that we shouldn’t be
relying or shouldn’t have to rely on the
private sector we shouldn’t have to rely
on venture capital plant-based meat and
clean meat are the solution to some of
the world’s biggest problems they’re the
answer or at least part of the answer so
the US government spends 3 billion
dollars a year on agricultural research
China spends even more imagine if the
governments of the world if they set up
clean meat and plant-based meat research
centers at all of the world’s great
universities for tissue engineering and
plane and plant biology we could solve
these problems a heck of a lot more
quickly but of course people like uma
valetti and Pat Brown and Ethan Brown
they’re not waiting and you all can be a
part of it too if you’re entrepreneurial
minded think about your next venture
being a plant-based meat or a clean meat
company if you’re science-minded
especially if you’re interested in plant
biology or tissue engineering think
about becoming the chief technology
officer our scene
scientists at one of these companies if
you’re in high school or you’re in
college and you don’t know what you want
to do yet think about science think
about entrepreneurship they are awesome
you can do a tremendous amount of good
in the world and do very well for you
and your soon-to-be family but really no
matter what you bring to the table you
have the capacity to join one of these
plant-based meet or these clean meat
companies which are about to be a
trillion-dollar market sector I want to
explain my enthusiasm by way of a quick
historical analogy the year is 1898
there are a hundred and seventy-five
thousand horses on the streets of New
York City those horses are excreting
fifty thousand tons of horse manure
every single month and the streets of
New York City and all of the major
cities they’re covered in horse manure
they’re plagued by flies and horse
carcasses are everywhere and so 1898
again a historical finger-snap ago the
world’s first urban planning conference
is convened and people from all of the
great cities come to New York City and
the only item on the agenda is what do
we do about all of the horseshit and
[Applause]
they can’t figure it out
supposed to be a week long after less
than two days everybody just goes home
despondent ten years later 1908 Henry
Ford introduces the Model T and within
four years there are more cars than
horses on the streets of New York City
and horse-drawn carriages are relegated
to the status of tourist attraction how
many people here at the end of these
talks how many people here are going to
walk out of this auditorium and your
primary mode of transportation is going
to be horse and buggy no of course not
right that would be absurd I am
absolutely convinced that in the
not-too-distant future just like that’s
absurd the idea of growing mass
of amounts of crops to funnel them
through animals so that we can eat meat
will be seen as similarly absurd and the
reason for that is that visionaries have
understood that we can make meat from
plants and we can grow meat without all
of the inefficiencies and without all of
the pollution in other words food
innovation and the one on the one hand
which is competing with industrial
animal agriculture on the basis of the
factors that actually dictate consumer
choice price taste and convenience so
what you’ve got is you’ve got markets
and you’ve got food technology they’re
gonna save the world and you can be part
of it thank you
[Applause]
[Applause]
who here likes pasta Wow applause for
pasta I think we have basic unanimity on
pasta I love pasta too and fortunately I
have nine plates of pasta from a local
Italian restaurant it is fantastic
who would like to eat a plate of pasta
while I give this talk yes right here
can you come up to the stage let me give
you this there you go excellent yes take
you back to your seat thank you and I
only have nine plates of pasta and I
have to throw away the other eight I’m
sorry so that’s two four six alright so
one plate of pasta being eaten eight
plates of pasta in the trash who thinks
that was a good idea and no but well the
one guy who’s eating the pasta excellent
I actually heard gasps there was
applause for pasta there was gasps for
throwing pasta away and that’s right
throwing away food is a horrible idea
and yet that’s basically the
relationship that all of us enter into
every time we’re choosing to eat meat
because of chicken as just one example
it takes nine calories into a chicken in
the form of soy and oats and wheat and
whatever the food is that’s turned you
know that is fed to the chicken that’s
turned into feed and fed to the chicken
so it takes nine calories in to get one
calorie back out I’m guessing most of
you the horror you expressed at throwing
away pasta are concerned about food
waste and we should be concerned about
food waste of every 100 calories of food
that’s produced we literally throw away
40 of those calories we throw away
almost half of all of the food that’s
produced in the United States and yet
food that’s produced by funneling crops
through chickens it’s actually 800
percent food waste for every hundred
calories of chicken that we produce and
chicken is the most efficient meat for
every hundred calories of chicken that
we produce we throw away 800 calories by
cycling it through the chicken that
means eight times as much land eight
times as much water eight times as much
gasoline to till the crops eight times
as much pesticide and herbicide dumped
onto the crops and that’s not all of it
there are also multiple extra stages of
production that are required if we’re
going to grow crops to feed them to
animals so that we can eat animals you
have to grow the crops and you ship them
on a gas-guzzling pollution spewing
vehicle to a feed mill and you operate
the feed mill and then you ship the feed
on a gas-guzzling pollution spewing
vehicle to an industrial farm and you
operate that factory farm and then you
ship the animals to the slaughterhouse
and you operate the slaughterhouse it’s
multiple extra stages of gas-guzzling
pollution spewing vehicles and multiple
extra stages of energy intensive and
polluting factories this is not a great
way to
nine point seven billion people by 2050
let’s face it it’s a terrible way to try
to feed all of those people the United
Nations a number of years ago they
crunched the numbers on all of this
inefficiency and all of this pollution
they released a more than four hundred
page report called livestock’s long
shadow and in livestock’s long shadow
they determined that whatever
environmental issue you want to look at
from them smallest and most local to the
largest and most global the
inefficiencies of animal agriculture are
one of the top causes everything from
water pollution to soil desertification
to species loss to climate change on the
issue of climate change specifically the
United Nations says that more climate
change is attributable to the global
meat industry than to all of the planes
and trains and trucks and automobiles
all forms of transport combined almost
15 percent on a per calorie basis animal
agriculture chicken which is the least
climate change inducing meat causes 40
times as much climate change per calorie
of protein when compared to eating
legumes like soy or peas directly so
what’s the solution to the problems of
industrial animal agriculture the Royal
Institute of International Affairs the
foremost think-tank in Europe more
commonly referred to as Chatham House a
few years back they released a report
about the climate impact of the meat
industry and their suggestion was that
the governments of the world educate
their citizens about the climate impact
of the meat industry and encourage
people to eat less meat and the Chinese
government has done just that the
Chinese government has released climate
based dietary guidelines and has said
that it is their goal to cut meat
consumption per capita in China in half
by educating their citizen rain I admire
the optimism of Chatham House and the
Chinese they think they’re going to
educate people about the climate impact
of food and everybody’s going to eat
less meat but I think a more likely
climate hero is Ben and Jerry’s
non-dairy ice cream I’m being facetious
sort of but who here likes Ben and
Jerry’s
yeah I think we have unanimity on Ben
and Jerry’s – it looks like as many
people like Ben & Jerry’s as like pasta
and if you’re like everybody else you
saw Ben & Jerry’s and you thought Ben &
Jerry’s is delicious right if it were 20
bucks a pint that would have figured in
you would have thought Ben & Jerry’s too
expensive if it wasn’t available in
every grocery store that probably would
have occurred to you would have thought
where can I get it and those are in
every study that’s been done those are
the three factors that really dictate
consumer choice taste price and
convenience 100% of people in the
developed world factor taste price and
convenience into their decisions about
what it is that they’re going to eat
some people figure in health that’s a
somewhat distant fourth none of you when
I flash Ben and Jerry’s up here and said
you know do you like this none of you
thought health food half of Americans
eat fast food every single week nobody’s
going to KFC because it’s a health food
right it’s prey it’s delicious it’s
convenient and it’s cheap so how do we
apply the Ben and Jerry’s trifecta price
taste and convenience how do we apply
that to the harms of industrial animal
agriculture and in answering that
question I’m going to tell you three
brief stories about three entrepreneurs
who are doing precisely that the first
one is this guy Ethan Brown the years
2009 and Ethan brown who is this bear of
a man he looks more like a college
football player than he looks like a
tree-hugging environmentalist but there
Ethan is working on clean energy and
he’s learned about the environmental
harm of industrial animal agriculture
and he wants to do something about it
and it occurs to Ethan that meat is made
of lipids amino acids minerals and water
everything in animal-based meat also
exists in plants so Ethan’s brainstorm
is plant-based meat and he forms a
company called beyond meat he starts
raising money he starts hiring food
scientists and chefs and other culinary
experts and after about three years in
2012 he comes out with this beyond meat
plant-based
chicken Bill Gates Christ this chicken
and not only does he invest in beyond me
but he writes a blog in which he says
what I just tasted was not just a clever
meat substitute what I just tasted is
the future of food so Ethan introduces a
couple more products and in 2016 his
next masterpiece the beyond burger the
beyond burger is a plant-based burger
that tastes so meat like it’s actually
offered in the meat case at Whole Foods
at Kroger at Safeway at Albertsons at a
bunch of different grocery stores taste
so meat like that when Tyson Foods
launched their first venture capital
fund in 2016
their very first investment was in
beyond meat you have the largest meat
producer in the United States buying in
two plant-based meat all right Story
number two another guy named Brown Pat
Brown dr. Pat Brown again it’s 2009 and
Pat Brown is a tenured professor of
biochemistry at Stanford University and
he is extremely concerned about what he
sees as an impending climate crisis so
he has an 18 month sabbatical coming up
and he spends his entire sabbatical
figuring out what he personally can do
to try to stave off the climate crisis
and at the end of that 18 months in 2011
he comes to the same conclusion that
Ethan Brown came to but a year before
Ethan launches the beyond meat chicken
and he decides that plant-based meat is
the way to go as a biochemist he knows
everything in meat he can make with
plants so he raises money and he hire
scientists and he hires culinary experts
and it takes him five years to launch
the impossible burger but boy is it
worth it this thing is amazing
it’s so fantastic it’s drawn investments
from li kai-shing the richest guy in
Asia the Facebook co-founder Dustin
Moskovitz the venture capital thought
that the multiple venture capital funds
Google Ventures it’s so fantastic that
he actually launches this thing in
shishi restaurants all over the country
and the first restaurant to offer the
impossible
and the first chef to champion ette is
Momofuku and chef David Chang some of
you may remember that about a decade ago
David Chang very noisily took all
vegetarian entrees off of all of his
menus in all of his restaurants as sort
of his personal protest against
vegetarians and vegetarianism if you can
get pat if you could if you can get
David Chang excited about a plant-based
burger you can get anybody excited about
a plant-based burger and it’s certainly
the case that Eric Schmidt is excited
Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google
he’s now the chair of the board of
Google’s parent company alphabet and
Eric Schmidt a couple years ago he was
asked to reflect on six technological
innovations that he thinks will improve
life for humanity by a factor of at
least tenfold in the fairly near future
he’s a tech guy so he picked mostly
stuff you that you might have predicted
he picks 3d printers for infrastructure
he picks watches that know you’re sick
before you do self-driving cars but the
first thing that Eric Schmidt talks
about is plant-based meat he sees
plant-based meat as an answer to two of
society’s really big questions how do we
feed nine point seven billion people by
2050 and what do we do about climate
change he calls plant-based meat nerds
over cattle all right our third
entrepreneur is a guy named uma valetti
the years 2005 and uma valetti is
training and cardiology at the Mayo
Clinic
and he’s studying regenerative medicine
and he’s a vegetarian and he thinks if
we can grow human muscle tissue why
can’t we grow chicken muscle tissue or
Pig muscle tissue or fish muscle muscle
tissue why can’t we apply the principles
of regenerative medicine to meet Andy
ruminates on this for about ten years
spends a lot of time studying it a lot
of time talking about it he actually
opens a lab to study this where he’s a
tenured professor of cardiology at the
University of Minnesota Medical Center
and in 2015 he launches the world’s
first clean meat company called Memphis
meats it’s called clean meat as a nod
energy clean energy is energy that’s
better for the environment clean meat is
meat that’s better for the environment
it’s also just literally cleaner since
there is no slaughterhouse
there’s no bacterial contamination and
since there’s no live animal there’s no
antibiotics necessary no other drugs so
no antibiotic or drug residues and this
is what clean meat production looks like
at scale sort of your friendly
neighborhood meat brewery so he launches
this company in 2015 and within a couple
of months yes the world’s first clean
meat meatball so this meatball was grown
from cells no cows harmed and he does it
for about 1% of the price of clean meat
production just two years earlier and
valetti like impossible foods and beyond
me he attracts tech Titans Richard
Branson invests Bill Gates invests the
venture capital firm dfj an early
investor in Skype and Twitter they
invest and then Cargill which is one of
the world’s largest food conglomerates
the largest privately held company in
the United States they also invest but
it seems to me that we shouldn’t be
relying or shouldn’t have to rely on the
private sector we shouldn’t have to rely
on venture capital plant-based meat and
clean meat are the solution to some of
the world’s biggest problems they’re the
answer or at least part of the answer so
the US government spends 3 billion
dollars a year on agricultural research
China spends even more imagine if the
governments of the world if they set up
clean meat and plant-based meat research
centers at all of the world’s great
universities for tissue engineering and
plane and plant biology we could solve
these problems a heck of a lot more
quickly but of course people like uma
valetti and Pat Brown and Ethan Brown
they’re not waiting and you all can be a
part of it too if you’re entrepreneurial
minded think about your next venture
being a plant-based meat or a clean meat
company if you’re science-minded
especially if you’re interested in plant
biology or tissue engineering think
about becoming the chief technology
officer our scene
scientists at one of these companies if
you’re in high school or you’re in
college and you don’t know what you want
to do yet think about science think
about entrepreneurship they are awesome
you can do a tremendous amount of good
in the world and do very well for you
and your soon-to-be family but really no
matter what you bring to the table you
have the capacity to join one of these
plant-based meet or these clean meat
companies which are about to be a
trillion-dollar market sector I want to
explain my enthusiasm by way of a quick
historical analogy the year is 1898
there are a hundred and seventy-five
thousand horses on the streets of New
York City those horses are excreting
fifty thousand tons of horse manure
every single month and the streets of
New York City and all of the major
cities they’re covered in horse manure
they’re plagued by flies and horse
carcasses are everywhere and so 1898
again a historical finger-snap ago the
world’s first urban planning conference
is convened and people from all of the
great cities come to New York City and
the only item on the agenda is what do
we do about all of the horseshit and
[Applause]
they can’t figure it out
supposed to be a week long after less
than two days everybody just goes home
despondent ten years later 1908 Henry
Ford introduces the Model T and within
four years there are more cars than
horses on the streets of New York City
and horse-drawn carriages are relegated
to the status of tourist attraction how
many people here at the end of these
talks how many people here are going to
walk out of this auditorium and your
primary mode of transportation is going
to be horse and buggy no of course not
right that would be absurd I am
absolutely convinced that in the
not-too-distant future just like that’s
absurd the idea of growing mass
of amounts of crops to funnel them
through animals so that we can eat meat
will be seen as similarly absurd and the
reason for that is that visionaries have
understood that we can make meat from
plants and we can grow meat without all
of the inefficiencies and without all of
the pollution in other words food
innovation and the one on the one hand
which is competing with industrial
animal agriculture on the basis of the
factors that actually dictate consumer
choice price taste and convenience so
what you’ve got is you’ve got markets
and you’ve got food technology they’re
gonna save the world and you can be part
of it thank you
[Applause]
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