Welcome to Pluripotent — it’s Thursday, July 16th, and after more than one-third of a year living within an eight-mile radius, I’m excited to leave the New York City bubble for a week starting Saturday. I’ll be writing to you next week from the Cape. As ever, news tips and contact information for scientists working on cell-cultured lobster roll can be patched through to me via direct message, also feel free to follow me over at @chasepurdy.
NEW YORK — By now, I imagine a fair number of people reading this are familiar with the Burger King commercial advertising its new and long-winded "Reduced Methane Emissions Beef" burger.
The reaction online seems mostly uniform: It’s humorous (cow farts are inherently funny). It’s a good move for a restaurant chain the size of Burger King (which has some 7,000 locations in the US). And it’s also probably a pretty big stretch to claim feeding cows lemongrass cuts their emissions by a third (a big stretch).
The company released a more detailed description of its effort in this video, which omitted that at least one of the scientists who worked closely on the effort — Dr. Ermias Kebreab — definitely doesn’t think it’s entirely truthful for the chain to claim feeding lemongrass to cows decreases methane emissions by 33%.
In fact, in some instances the number could be as low as around 3% — a less compelling figure for the multinational to tout.
But there’s a bigger issue, which is the glaring reality of how the beef supply chain actually works.
As Dan Rejto of the Breakthrough Institute points out, beef cattle spend at least half their methane-emitting lives grazing. In fact, it has been estimated that as much as 89% of methane from US beef cows is emitted before “finishing,” which is the several-month period before ranchers sell their livestock at auction to feedlots. It’s on feedlots that typical beef cattle are fed more specific, fattening diets that include grains — and it’s on those lots where lemongrass would ever come into the equation.
“It is definitely a pretty small fraction of a cows total carbon footprint,” says Rejto, who tracks potential tech solutions for environmental problems related to food and agriculture for the institute. “It's long been understood that a big research gap to overcome is that part of the cow's life cycle, what happens prior to the feedlot.”
He adds that it remains unclear to him if Burger King has the supply chain traceability tools to guarantee that a particular burger a person eats came from a cow that ate lemongrass.
Still, Rejto says he was surprised when he first saw the Burger King commercial.
“If you'd asked me a couple years ago if I could imagine Burger King taking steps to address methane emissions or sell a plant-based burger, I'd be incredulous,” he says. “But at least they are trying to act on consumer pressures to some degree.”
To get a better idea of just how much methane a cow emits, here’s a little section from the first chapter of Billion Dollar Burger, which looked at emissions from different species of food animals:
Cows do more damage because of their digestive process, which, through fermentation in their four stomachs, creates a lot of methane gas. Once released into the atmosphere, methane has about twenty times the heat trapping power as carbon.
Just how much methane a single, 1,200-pound cow produces each year depends entirely on what the animal is fed, but scientists often cite about 100 kilograms of methane, about the same as a car burning through more than 230 gallons of gasoline.
For anyone working in the cell-cultured meat space, I imagine reaction to the video is little more than mild amusement, a creative-but-fleeting effort by folks in the animal agriculture supply chain to address a climate change problem that will require a lot more than lemongrass to solve.
Even still, cultured meat companies should recognize that they will face some of the same questions as Burger King. Skeptical journalists, scientists, investors, and consumers will want a contextualized understanding of company climate claims. Once pilot production plants are up and running (only five companies have publicly talked about their own so far), companies will have more precise data to share about just how much more environmentally sustainable their processes are — and people will want to see those data.
In other news…
Billion Dollar Burger, Memphis Meats, and BlueNalu were mentioned in this story on cultured meat by the Document Journal.
Mike Selden and Brian Wyrwas at Finless Foods got some spotlight in Forbes for their work cultured fish.
The US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee released its 800+ page report (pdf) this past week.
The naming debate rages on, as a BlueNalu-funded survey gave “cell-based meat” a boost. (I’m still partial to “cultured meat.”)
The CTO of Motif Foodworks gave a nod to Impossible Foods and JUST for communicating clearly to consumers in a way that builds trust.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, I’ll dream of a day in which I can call myself a “tahini magnate.” Seriously though, check out this story in The New York Times about Julia Zaher, an Arab Israeli and the owner of the tahini-selling company Al Arz, for the blowback she's getting for donating to an Israeli gay rights group.