Raw Deal by Chloe Sorvino

Author:Chloe Sorvino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

A Billionaire’s Feast

I’ve done my own Supersize Me–inspired reporting over the years, but when it came to the thought of lining up lab-grown alternatives like Good Meat’s chicken nuggets, Upside’s chicken breast, and Aleph Farms’ rib eye, I was both fascinated with trying to see and smell it in person and completely perturbed by actually eating it. I ended up opting out. There are many complicated moral dilemmas involved when it comes to eating meat. That all got heightened and turned on its head, for me, when contemplating lab-grown meat. Aside from the antibiotics use and fetal bovine serum, lab-grown meat is designed and produced in a sterile environment. There’s no chance for Fred Provenza’s beloved phytonutrients to exist.

There are also broader ethical implications, says Sikowis Nobiss, of the Plains Cree and Saulteaux nations, who is the executive director of Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous-led organization focused on climate and agribusiness. “I don’t think I could eat it,” Nobiss said. “We think rocks are alive. Why wouldn’t we think that this thing running in a lab is not alive, and it’s basically being grown just for consumption. It never moves. It just sits there and it just grows? I don’t think that’s okay, and I don’t think that’s the way to solve the world’s problems.”

But many of the world’s richest men sure do. That includes Bill Gates, who as of May 2022 had the fourth-highest net worth in the world, to a tune of nearly $130 billion. A small fraction of that has been invested in food tech. Gates’ shillings can instantly change a market. Gates—an investor in Eat Just and Upside Foods, as well as Impossible Foods, Beyond, Nature’s Fynd—thinks rich nations should eat 100 percent synthetic meat. He doesn’t think the eighty poorest countries will be eating synthetic meat—a statement that ignores the traditions of pastoralists and Indigenous groups.

Most of Gates’ deals are early stage, except some follow-ons in Impossible rounds in 2018 when Impossible raised $189 million, and again in 2019, when Gates personally joined a $300 million roster that included Jay-Z, Katy Perry, Serena Williams, and her husband, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. Gates’ stake in Impossible is still minority but will probably amount to a tasty exit. Impossible has been eyeing a public market debut, which could value the start-up at $10 billion or more.

Gates and many other Impossible investors don’t need the money. But that’s not the point. Gates has backed most of these top start-ups and his investments show that he is intent on bringing alternative proteins—from Impossible’s heme-and-soy to lab-grown meat—to the masses. His track record shows he tends to accomplish what he sets out to. But Gates is playing both sides. Gates is also the top farmland owner in the country, according to the Land Report. Yet for all the talk of a sustainable revolution, that cropland is mostly farmed as industrially and conventionally as it comes.II Across the more than 250,000 acres traced to Gates’ fortune through different shell companies,

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