Where's the beef?

I first wrote about it six years ago, almost to the date.  There was no way that I could not appreciate the moment.  I was confident that it was going to be a big part of the future.

Later, I talked about it with students, even had them read news reports and commentaries. I talked about it with people whenever the topic came up.  A couple of times, I even bought it from the store and tried it at home.  I was sure that I came across as a madman, but I never wavered; so confident I was about it being the future.

What is it that I am referring to?

Meat that is not really meat.

I wrote six years ago:

It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals.  All the old definitions on what foods can or cannot be consumed will have to be redefined.

And then Burger King introduced the Impossible Whopper--"100% Whopper, 0% beef."

The news today is that after the test marketing, Burger King is going nationwide with the Impossible Whopper.

The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations for the next month as it tests the potential demand for the meaty-tasting meatless patty.

When such a powerful company adopts the beefless beef, hey, we are well beyond the tipping point.  It, ahem, beefs up the market:

Burger King wasn’t the first chain to see the value in adding Impossible Burgers to the menu. Roughly a year ago, White Castle became the first major fast food chain to offer an Impossible Slider on its menu. The burgers can also be found at more upscale fast-casual restaurant chains like Bareburger, Applebee’s, Red Robin, and Five Napkin Burger joints.

Burger King going full-speed on meatless meat has its own downside:

For months, many restaurants across the country have been unable to stock the soy-based patties, which taste remarkably beefy. Impossible Foods, their Redwood City maker, couldn’t keep up with rising demand — and even restaurants that had previously served the burgers couldn’t get them. The reason, just possibly, was that the company had promised to supply Impossible Whoppers to 7,300 Burger King locations by the end of the year.
“It disappeared off our shelves and then showed up at Burger King across the street,” said Christian Gainsley, owner of the Bernal Heights restaurant Outer Orbit. “It felt like a betrayal.”

Success is a wonderful thing!

Impossible Foods’ recent wins come as its chief rival, Beyond Meat, is raking in piles of cash as a publicly traded company and building up a sizable war chest to conduct research and development for new products.
Impossible Foods has raised nearly $700 million to date as a private company. Its backers include  Khosla Ventures,  Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project.

These alt-meat products are derived from plants.  And then there is the other approach--growing meat in labs from animal cells, and R&D there has been on an accelerating path.

Why are these important?  For two reasons. One, the ethics of killing animals.  Second, the impact on the environment--our meat consumption is not sustainable in its current structure.

Livestock raised for food already contribute about 15% of the world’s global greenhouse-gas emissions. (You may have heard that if cows were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest emitter.) A quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used to graze them, and a third of all cropland is used to grow food for them. A growing population will make things worse. It’s estimated that with the population expected to rise to 10 billion, humans will eat 70% more meat by 2050. Greenhouse gases from food production will rise by as much as 92%.
In January a commission of 37 scientists reported in The Lancet that meat’s damaging effects not only on the environment but also on our health make it “a global risk to people and the planet.” In October 2018 a study in Nature found that we will need to change our diets significantly if we’re not to irreparably wreck our planet’s natural resources.

If you are like me, it has been decades since you went to the Burger King, correct? Well, head on there, and check out the Impossible Whopper and be a part of the future!

Hey, is it beef that you are eating? Facebook it!

Governing is not easy.

The best example is from right here in the US, in the House of Representatives in DC.  The party that has a significant majority of 247 members out of 435 cannot even figure out whom to elect as the leader.  It is one thing to campaign and spew rhetoric, it is another to govern.

The good thing is that nobody died from this chaos and confusion among the conservatives.

It is a different story in the old country, where, to use the late Mario Cuomo's wonderful line, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, campaigned in poetry and is terribly failing at the prose that governing is.

The latest?  Modi had yet another successful visit to the US, meeting with the computer emperors and adoring Indian-Americans in the Silicon Valley.  What happened later?  Within a day after Modi's return to India, a Muslim was brutally killed.

Here's what happened: On Sept. 28, in a village less than 60 miles from Modi's posh New Delhi home, a Hindu priest announced in a local temple (under threat by some hot heads, he claims) that a Muslim family was consuming beef, a no-no for Hindus who regard cows as sacred. Shortly afterward, an enraged Hindu mob barged into the family's house and pulled out the ailing 50-year-old father and his 22-year-old son from bed. Disregarding the pleas of the three bewildered women in the house, they beat the men with such rapturous fury that within minutes the father was dead and his son in a coma.

Perhaps this was a village that has had quite a history of religious violence?  Nope:

This village had been a model of inter-religious harmony for the six decades since India's independence from the British, with nary a hint of violence. Though Muslims were always a small minority among the 6,000 people, they were intricately woven into the village fabric. Each community greeted the other with its salutation and jointly celebrated each other's religious festivals. The bludgeoned man's older son was a technician in the Indian Air Force.
The terrifying message of the grisly episode is that if this could happen to this family in this village it could happen to any Muslim anywhere in India.

Modi has not said anything. Nothing. Zippo. Nada. Zilch.

this great communicator — whom Zuckerberg hailed as a model leader who would revolutionize governance with his masterful use of social media "to connect with citizens" — has issued not a single tweet, and posted not a Facebook statement expressing regret or offering condolence for this dead Muslim citizen. Despite escalating calls from opposition leaders and the intelligentsia demanding that he condemn the episode, he has remained stubbornly mute — prompting several award-winning writers to return their national honors in protest.

One of those who returned the award was Nayantara Sahgal, a niece of the former Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru:

 Ms. Sahgal said she was concerned at the environment in the country and it seemed to be getting “worse and worse” in the past 15 months. “I guess the death of this poor man in Dadri [Mohammad Akhlaq] was the final…the last straw,” she said.
She criticised the government’s inaction and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence. “In all these cases, justice drags its feet. The Prime Minister remains silent on this reign of terror. We must assume he dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology,” she said in a written statement.

Shikha Dalmia notes what I have always written about too:

If Zuckerberg and his fellow CEOs don't fully understand Modi's agenda, it is because they live in a bubble where they get their cues on India-related matters from the Indian-American IT professionals who dominate Silicon Valley. The vast majority of these folks, despite their outward trappings of Americanization and modernization, are assertive Hindus and true believers in Modi's hype about making India a technological superpower. They come from a class and caste background that inclines them to cover India's warts, even if that means pooh-poohing the plight of poor and persecuted minorities.

Zuckerberg knows all too well about Pecunia non olet!  He also knows he can enjoy a good steak whenever he wants without any fear that he will be killed for it.  So, why trouble Modi about the killing of a Muslim in a village somewhere!

Pecunia non olet. Really? Money does not stink?

Through my early teenage years, I was impressed with the work that Mother Teresa was doing in Calcutta, as the city was known then.  So much so that during my first or second year of the undergraduate program, I wrote to the organization inquiring about volunteering there over the summer break.  I never got a reply, which, in retrospect, was a good thing.

As I systematically turned my intellectual inquiries away from engineering and attempted to understand the world around me, many of the data points about Mother Teresa that I had previously dismissed began to bother me.  Especially about the money.  Years later, it was, thus, all the more an enjoyable read when Christopher Hitchens laid it all in his usual, blunt, style, in the context of her canonization:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

Apparently, MT, which was Hitchens' way of bringing her down to this terrain where the rest of us mortals walk, did not care where the money came from.  Pecunia non olet!  Which is Latin for money does not stink.

It is funny that I should learn that Latin phrase thanks to a post at the business publication, Forbes, and that too in an analysis of the now notorious Donald Sterling and his philanthropic contribution to UCLA:

Donald Sterling’s foundation pledged $3 million for kidney research at UCLA and made an initial payment of $425,000 ... Now, not surprisingly, UCLA has decided to return the money. “Mr. Sterling’s divisive and hurtful comments demonstrate that he does not share UCLA’s core values as a public university that fosters diversity, inclusion, and respect,” the university said in a press release.

The godly MT did not think that a dictator's money stank, but a secular UCLA returned a racist's money. Go figure!

Meanwhile, an export from India, which brings the country more than two billion dollars apparently does stink, according to one leading contender for the prime minister post:

Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has attacked the current government over India's position as one of the world's biggest beef exporters.
Indian exports account for about 20% of the global supply and while economically this might seem to be a good thing, in India, the cow is revered as holy by Hindus, and so the consumption and sale of beef always sparks fierce political and religious debate.

I know what you are thinking: India exports beef?  What about the holy cow?

[It] is not cows but the less revered water buffaloes that mostly make the cut for meat-processing factories.
Half of the world's buffalo population is in India, and global demand for buffalo meat has become a source of revenue and brought in a lot of money for the country.
Both buffalo meat and meat from cows are known as beef internationally.

It turns out that MT was, as they say in India, a non-veg person, if that is a relevant data for you to contemplate on Pecunia non olet.

A brave new world where beef is not beef, and oranges are not oranges

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Unless you are way too young a reader, in which case I worry about you, that quote might have made you smile and wince at the same time.  It was the one of the most bizarre moments of political presidential theatre in recent years.  In saying that, Slick Willie, the sharp intellectual and debater that he is, underscored the importance of definitions.  

Public policy issues are increasingly about definitions.  It depends on what we mean by marriage.  It depends on what we mean as drugs.  It depends on what we mean by unborn child.  Not only will such questions not go away, but advancement in scientific understanding and technological sophistication will continue to complicate our lives by challenging a lot more of the definitions.

Even a few years ago, it would have been bizarre for anybody to state that whether eating beef in India will be ok will depend on the definition of beef.  After all, beef comes from cows that have to be slaughtered and killing cows is not usually ok in that country.  Life was simple.  But, if beef is produced without ever killing a cow, then is that really beef and, therefore, will consuming that be acceptable?

Google's Sergey Brin funded the project to grow beef in a petridish:

Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view the world

The "sacred cow" population and animal welfare groups will be pleased with his rationale:

Brin said that he was moved to invest in the technology for animal welfare reasons. People had an erroneous image of modern meat production, he said, imagining "pristine farms" with just a few animals in them. "When you see how these cows are treated, it's certainly something I'm not comfortable with."

I am one of those people never comfortable with the thought that the animals are not only slaughtered, but are also ill-treated, in order to get the meat to the consumer.  More than any taste preference, it is this discomfort that pushes me away from meat most of the time.  Which is also why I have been fascinated with "fake meat" and even include a reading on it in the introductory course that I teach.  In this case, the "fake beef," which could be a commercially viable product in little more than a decade, is not any concoction from soybeans, but:

The cultured beef, composed of muscle cells, was grown in the lab by harvesting a sample of muscle tissue from a cow. The tissue was then cut into small pieces and separated into fat and muscle cells. The individual muscle-specific stem cells were then grown in the shape of a ring and cut so they formed strands. These strands were layered to formed sheets of tissue to get the consistency of beef.

So, no cow was killed here.  It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals.  All the old definitions on what foods can or cannot be consumed will have to be redefined.  

If you thought that the plant world was safe from such definition issues, think again.  

A couple of months ago, I read this piece in the New Yorker on how Florida's oranges are at risk because of a bacterial disease.  It was one of the most difficult essays that I ever had to slog through in my years of reading that magazine.  The fruit trees do not immediately show signs of the disease, but slowly, over the years, begins to turn yellow and produce mis-shapen and bitter fruits.  It is a disease that threatens to wipe out Florida's oranges.  

Caption at the source:
An orange from a tree infected with citrus greening, right, is stunted compared with a normal orange

There is no known cure for it.  No way, yet, to treat it.    The possible cure for it might come via genetic engineering:

An emerging scientific consensus held that genetic engineering would be required to defeat citrus greening. “People are either going to drink transgenic orange juice or they’re going to drink apple juice,”

Yes, that GMO food issue all over again.  But, that might be the simpler of the definition issues to worry about.  Where will this DNA come from?  

of the dozen bacteria-fighting genes he had then tested on his greenhouse trees, the one that appeared effective came from a pig.

So, assuming that the pig DNA approach works, is approved, and becomes a success.  Lots of ifs, yes.  But, if so, then a new definition issue: will the pork-avoiding population of Hindus, Jews, and Muslims, consider this orange juice as "kosher"?

It is a fascinating world in which we live.  It will get even more exciting as we question more and more the various definitions on which we base our respective lives.

And Bill Clinton made it all the more exciting with his sexcapades!

Are you eating beef, or chicken, or corn?

Well, it is all the same. Kind of. According to a study,

The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald's, Burger King or Wendy's is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.
And it isn't only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil. .....
Eating a diet of meat from corn-fed animals hasn't been linked to any specific health effects in humans. But it has resulted in widespread environmental degradation, including drained water supplies, degraded soils, and reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides and farm machinery fuel, says preventive medicine physician Bob Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study.