Dr. Pat Brown, founder of Impossible Foods, Inc. and developer of its most famous product, the Impossible Burger, considers himself an extreme introvert who would never want to star in a movie.
But he says he agreed to tell his story in the new documentary Wild Hope: Mission Impossible, for a very simple reason: to solve what he calls “the most important problem in the world.”
The film, which played Friday at the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Culinary Cinema program, details how Brown, a Stanford biochemistry professor, took a sabbatical 15 years ago to try to figure out what his remaining life’s work should be. He decided to focus on the role of animals in food production — a major contributor to global warming.
He led a team that created the Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger that has as much protein as a beef burger but, according to the company, “uses 96% less land, 87% less water, and 89% less greenhouse gas emissions” to produce.
The good news, Brown says, is that we can reverse much of the harm of global warming just by changing our diets.
“I said I’d agree to do the film if the basic take-home message is, ‘This is the most important problem in the world — to solve the catastrophic environmental impact of our use of animals as a food technology,'” he told MovieMaker at the festival. “That’s number one. Number two, it’s solvable. We haven’t solved it yet, but I think we’ve proven that it’s solvable.”
Wild Hope is from Tangled Bank Studios, founded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a longtime supporter of Brown’s work at Stanford.
There couldn’t be a more perfect backdrop for the earth-focused film than the festival: Stunning Coronado Island is just across the water from San Diego, and offers breathtaking views that make it impossible to forget our planet’s beauty — or fragility. We talked with Dr. Brown after a Q&A that was followed, of course, by a vegetarian tasting.
Stacey Farish: Before Impossible burgers, there were other fake meat products on the market. Did you eat those?
Dr. Pat Brown: Not really. The truth of the matter is that I’ve been vegetarian for five decades, I guess, but I was never particularly drawn to fake meat products, to be honest. I didn’t eat them. For me, that held no interest whatsoever.
But what I did know was that the problem with those products is that they were always designed with the target customer being someone who wants to replace meat on their plate.
Stacey Farish: Isn’t that a great thing?
Dr. Pat Brown: It’s a losing strategy, because most of the people who love meat are not looking to replace it. And the only way that you solve this problem is by producing foods that the most hardcore meat lover, like the right-wing Glenn Beck, who’s in the movie — a hardcore meat guy who has no interest in replacing meat in their diet — actually likes better than the animal product.
The products that were out there were very good at serving their target customers — someone who was looking for meat replacement — and they were terrible at winning over hardcore meat consumers. I wouldn’t have wasted my time starting Impossible Foods, except that I felt like there’s no reason we ought not to be able to make [fake] meat that is not only as good, but is actually more delicious, as judged by a meat lover.
Stacey Farish: How is going plant-based going to help change the environment?
Dr. Pat Brown: If it were possible, and I believe it is, to phase out the use of animals in food production over the next 15 years, by 2040… that alone would would get us to net zero emissions. Meaning we would stop raising the temperature. It would put the brakes on global heating for 30 years, and very quickly. Because one of the issues that is becoming increasingly important is that it’s not just that we need to solve climate change — we need to solve it really fast.
The worse it gets, the worse it gets. …This is the only way to to put the brakes on global heating within a couple of decades. And secondly, this basically enables us to pull out hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 over a period of decades by allowing the original ecosystem to recover…. it literally doesn’t just stop emissions. It pulls tons of greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
The other thing is, there’s this problem that is much less recognized because you don’t see the direct impacts of it: Almost entirely due to our use of animals with food technology, animal agriculture and overfishing, we’ve reduced the population of wild animal species massively. The average population across the whole gamut of biodiversity — of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish — is less than a third what it was 50 years ago. That’s an absolute catastrophe.
And it’s not just that it’s sad that we won’t have those animals around. The wild plants on Earth — 80% of the wild flowering plants — depend on birds and insects for pollination. They’re part of the reproductive system of the plants that keep our planet alive. Those animals are essential for dispersing the seeds… in order to keep the system alive.
What Impossible Burger Creator Pat Brown Is Planning Next
Stacey Farish: What is the end game here? What are you going to do, and what is Impossible Foods going to do?
Dr. Pat Brown: The end game is very simple. I would say we have proven, at least to ourselves and from an engineering and technology standpoint, that it’s possible to create, from plant ingredients, meat and fish and dairy product subsitutes that can outcompete the animal products. You don’t have take my word for it, but we are highly confident that we’ve proven technically that that’s possible.
So the goal is, we’ve created maybe 15 different meat products. The world consumes hundreds of different meat and fish and dairy products. And the challenge is we now have to make better versions of all of them and scale them… scale the production globally. And we want to do it fast, because the problem we’re trying to solve is so critical.
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Stacey Farish: What are you working on now? Will you start a new company?
Dr. Pat Brown: I’m not at Impossible Foods anymore. I left a couple of years ago, and now I’m back at Stanford, and I’m continuing to pursue this mission at Stanford.
And then the other problem is addressing the livelihoods of farmers and ranchers who depend on meat for their livelihood. And I think there’s a natural solution to that that’s a total win win, which is to enable them to get paid for restoring the ecosystems on their land. That captures carbon, which means at a reasonable carbon price, they can make a lot more money than they’re making from chasing cows around.
That can enable them to stay on the land, to keep the land that they’ve been farming, to continue to work the land for a living, to continue to support the rural communities and so forth — but actually make more money than they’re making today.
I’m back at Stanford, basically because right now, for the last couple of years, financial investors have become a lot more risk-averse and into short-term thinking than they were when I founded Impossible.
Stacey Farish: Can you give us some insight on your latest work?
Dr. Pat Brown: The best protein ingredient on earth comes from leaves. … But what you need to do is to have a scalable, cost-effective way of isolating the protein from leaves as a pure protein. The proteins in leaves are extremely water soluble, which means we can make a clear liquid solution that has like five times the protein concentration of milk.
From a food security standpoint, because leaves are largely interchangeable, when it comes to isolating proteins from them, you don’t have to depend on a small handful of crops, which is a huge vulnerability of our current food system. …. There’s this incredibly versatile protein source there hasn’t been exploited, because until recently we didn’t have a way to extract the protein from leaves to be a palatable ingredient.
But in the past couple of decades, now it’s quite doable. And so I’m just working on that, developing that, and taking it to scale at Stanford, and then I’m just going to publish it. And if I have to start a company, I will. But I’m hoping that if I make a compelling enough case that someone can make money on this, someone else will do it.
Main image: Wild Hope: Mission Impossible, courtesy of Tangled Bank Studios.