Fake is so harsh, couldn't they have used Faux?
From The Baffler, January 27:
Fake Meat, Real Profits
You’ll be hearing more this year about an ongoing revolution: meat imitations, whether from “cells” or “plants,” are replacing cows like the car replaced the horse and buggy. But it’s even better than that: “The solution to both of the big problems in food technology—how we’re going to feed a burgeoning population and what we’re going to do about climate change—is actually pretty simple,” writes Bruce Friedrich, the voice of the insurgency. “Plant-based protein.”
In December, Eat Just, the volatile startup formerly known as Hampton Creek famous for its eggless mayo, received a historic green light to sell lab-grown chicken in Singapore, a first for a secretive industry hampered by regulatory hurdles. Many environmental and animal rights enthusiasts are celebrating the progress, by a logic that at first blush makes plenty of sense: a full counter of meat-like grocery products that appeal to carnivores will mitigate harm to the environment and the animals involved. But there’s a giant, undiscussed, confounding party at the table: the world’s richest investors, and the delicious returns they expect for saving the world.
Consider Friedrich himself, a cofounder and executive director of the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit making the case to donors and governments around the world to prioritize alternative meats, arguing they will redress “Environmental Degradation,” “Global Poverty,” “Animal Welfare,” and “Human Health.” Also—that is to say, simultaneously, seemingly without any perceived conflict or friction—he’s a cofounder[*] of two venture capital firms that have collectively raised over $35 million to inject into alt-meat companies, making over thirty such investments so far in projects that span the entire new sector, from Beyond Meat to cell cultivation to plant-based seafood.
These circumstances deserve our meditation. I’m not suggesting that Friedrich and his counterparts are grifters, but I will assert that we give them our trust all too willingly. Meat imitation technologies can deliver staggering profits and act as a lever to transition from a destructive animal diet—but we must recognize that those two potentialities are necessarily in conflict.
Learn more about Friedrich’s past and you’ll bristle even further at the idea that he’s somehow incapable of doing great things and getting stinking rich at the same time. Friedrich’s commitment to living a moral life, animated by Catholic devotion, is evident in the first half of his biography, during which he pursued noble goals by ascetic if haphazard means. He spent nearly two years in prison for raiding a military exercise with three fellow Catholic leftists and taking a hammer to a government aircraft. He ran a soup kitchen in D.C. before working for PETA, where he rose in the ranks over the course of thirteen years, co-authoring The Animal Activist’s Handbook. Until middle age, his life was defined by direct action. The rest will be defined by investments.
It’s safe to say we don’t quite know what to do about someone like Friedrich. Ezra Klein interviewed him twice on his podcast, first in 2016 and then in early 2019. Klein’s admiration for Friedrich’s character is apparent—“you’re, like, a terrible person who doesn’t care about others,” he says with playful sarcasm early in their first conversation—and this perception warps the interview, as Klein tries to understand how his guest can work with such profit-focused partners when Friedrich himself, obviously, cares nothing for money. “Is this really a moneymaking enterprise?” Klein asks. “Or is this a way of doing philanthropy in maybe a different or more innovative direction?” Friedrich, to his credit, does not blink. “It is a huge moneymaking enterprise,” he says, sounding bewildered by Klein’s naïveté. “So you’re super-rich now?” Klein jokes. Friedrich refers to himself as “mission-driven,” but the fiduciary conflict between philanthropy and venture capital is brushed aside. Several years later, when Klein hosts Friedrich on the show again, after Friedrich’s nonprofit and venture capital firms have expanded manifold, the topic doesn’t even come up. In a 2019 profile that detailed Friedrich’s lifetime of self-sacrifice, the New York Times referred to his venture firms as one example of “using every tool at his disposal” to coax society from meat-eating.
The archetypal alt-meat hero is a white man with a graduate degree who played college football. When his journey begins, he’s bored in a cushy corporate post, secure in everything except his ego. All the good that he hoped to do—Eat Just cofounder Josh Tetrick joined humanitarian projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown worked in renewable energy—it’s not happening fast enough. Our hero has an incredible idea, calls a friend about it, that friend calls a venture capitalist, and soon, the man presides over a glitzy headquarters, surrounded by scuttling scientists and Michelin star chefs, serving reporters and investors with small-plate samples, spinning yarns and making bold predictions.
“Two years ago, at the age of 55, Jeremy Coller had something of a midlife crisis,” reads the trade rag Institutional Investor, referring to the star British private equity baron who manages $17 billion in assets. “Yet despite his professional achievements, Coller felt that his biography was a snooze.” Right on cue, he had an animal rights awakening that inspired him to take up an investor crusade against fast food giants, browbeating them to transition from industrial agriculture. Because there’s no solving a problem without a venture capital firm, he made one for the sole purpose of keeping Beyond Meat and companies like it afloat through the middle stages of their life cycles. Whether or not this “activism” provides Coller the fulfillment his billions could not, the activity has done its part to carve out a moral path to market for products that are profitable for Beyond Meat, Burger King, Tyson, and his asset management firm all at once.....
....MUCH MORE
Okay, for referring to Institutional Investor as a trade rag we'll let them get away with 'fake'
I'm still giggling.
