去年8月，硅谷最熱門的創業公司完成了一輪1700萬美元融資。雖然只是A輪，但引來不少科技界大佬。“我沒搶過理查德·布蘭森和比爾·蓋茨，所以敗下陣來，”一家沒機會投資的天使基金管理受托人喬迪·拉希哀嘆道。曾投資特斯拉和SpaceX等知名企業的風險投資公司德豐杰領投，一位合伙人稱這家公司的產品是“巨大的技術革新”。

這家初創公司技術領先的產品到底是什么？是肉——僅在美國的銷售額就超過2000億美元，也是西方飲食里的重要元素。但這家公司的產品之所以具有革新性，關鍵在于其研究內容不是肉能制成哪些食物，而是如何生產肉。這家讓投資界垂涎不已的公司名叫Memphis Meats, 目標是不用動物生產肉。

這種拯救世界的創意立刻引發硅谷關注，因為科技從業者相信只有技術才能解決當前的大問題：養活增長迅速急需蛋白質供應的人口，又不能引發全球動蕩。畜牧業在全球溫室氣體排放中占比高達14.5%，所以不靠畜牧業生產肉類是關鍵。谷歌創始人是這么描述無動物成分肉類前景的：“可以改變我們看待世界的方式”，谷歌聯合創始人謝爾蓋·布林說。“我想尋找即將可行的技術，一旦成功就是革新性的。”

實際上在很多硅谷工程師看來，制造肉類的流程效率太低，已經到了顛覆的時候。看起來，通過動物轉化為肌肉組織非常不合適。每獲得一磅可供使用的牛肉，要消耗26磅飼料。在崇尚高效的文化里，如此浪費簡直讓人不可容忍。

In August one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups closed a $17 million round of funding. The Series A had attracted some of the biggest names in tech. “I got closed out because of Richard Branson and Bill Gates,” bemoaned Jody Rasch, the managing trustee of an angel fund that wasn’t able to buy in. Venture capital firm DFJ—which has backed the likes of Tesla and SpaceX—led the round, with one of its then-partners calling the nascent company’s work an “enormous technological shift.”

The cutting-edge product the startup was trying to develop? Meat—the food whose more than $200 billion in U.S. sales has come to be the defining element of the Western diet. But what made this company’s work so revolutionary was not what it was trying to make so much as how it was attempting to do it. Memphis Meats, the brainchild that had the startup-investor class salivating, was aiming to remove animals from the process of meat production altogether.

It’s the type of world-saving vision that has oft captured the imagination of Silicon Valley—the kind of entrenched problem that technologists believe only technology can solve: feeding a fast-growing, protein-hungry global population in a way that doesn’t blow up the planet. Conjuring up meat without livestock—whose emissions are responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gases—is core to that effort. Just listen to how the progenitor of Googleyness itself describes the prospect of animal-free meat: “It has the capability to transform how we view our world,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said. “I like to look at technology opportunities where the technology seems like it’s on the cusp of viability, and if it succeeds there, it can be really transformative.”

Indeed, in the eyes of many Silicon Valley engineers, meatmaking is a process that’s so inefficient it’s ripe for disruption. Animals, it seems, are lousy tools for converting matter into muscle tissue. Cows require a whopping 26 pounds of feed for every one pound of edible meat produced. In a culture obsessed with high performance, that is maddeningly wasteful.

為什么不另辟蹊徑呢？這就是Memphis Meats和其他一些初創公司努力的方向。Memphis Meats代表了一種可能，叫私包農業，科學家通過動物細胞研究“人工”或“干凈”的肉。還有些公司則努力讓植物口感接近肉質。他們的目標不是做出素食主義者喜歡的蔬菜肉餅，而是高級素肉餅，肉食愛好者帶著參加鄰居的燒烤聚會也毫無問題。（當然只是基本上沒問題。）這類公司包括Beyond Meat和競爭對手Impossible Foods，其中Impossible Foods從蓋茨和科拉斯創投等處融資多達2.75億美元。在克羅格之類主流商場的肉制品區域，已經能找到植物肉餅，從名廚David Chang執掌的Momofuku Nishi到TGI Fridays餐廳，今年1月開始菜單上也都開始出現植物肉餅。

細胞農業和植物制肉公司目標是一致的，只是實現的路徑很不一樣。推崇植物肉餅的人認為人工制成的肉無法規模化；而Memphis Meats和其他反對者認為，不管怎么處理植物制品，吃起來永遠是植物味道。但兩伙人最終目標是一致的：打造無動物肉制品的未來，人們不用再犧牲動物，不用充滿愧疚和妥協。

替代肉廠商指出，植物奶制品已呈爆發性增長，占美國零售市場份額近10%，可見市場潛力。“我想說，人們不用非要選擇吃什么，” Memphis首席執行官兼聯合創始人烏瑪·瓦萊蒂表示，“但可以選擇加工上桌的過程。”

為了讓選擇更輕松，新一代農業創業家首先要澄清幾點，首先是說清楚“肉類”意味著什么。Beyond Meat首席執行官伊森·布朗表示，希望人們認為“從組成成分”看待肉類，而不是只看來源。這種轉變不僅限于認知層面，更是科學意義上的，是將肉類拆分到細胞層面理解。

但要讓人們接受并不容易，抵制者也不少。其中有些人似乎對干擾自然很生氣。“這伙人就是想重新定義肉類，都是些不吃肉的人，”家族從事肉類行業超過150年的蘇珊娜·斯特拉斯堡說。“真正的問題是，他們是想養活人類，還是純粹為了滿足自我需求。”

價值2400美元的肉餅

在培養皿里培養細胞聽起來像科幻小說情節，但這種技術的基礎早已出現，已經幾十年了，基本上跟醫學上培養人類細胞和組織差不多。Memphis Meats的瓦萊蒂在梅奧診所接受培訓當心臟病專家時就開始想，能不能用同樣方法培養肉類。之后他在雙子城執業，病人心臟病發就往心臟注射干細胞。

麻煩在于要降低成本，要降到能做肉餅，而不是治療心臟病的成本。Memphis Meats制出一磅約2400美元的人工肉餅，進展相當顯著。去年成本還是一磅18000美元，2013年荷蘭科學家馬克·珀斯特制成的第一個人工肉餅花費超過30萬美元。

降低成本最大的障礙是細胞介質，也即細胞的食物。Finless Foods首席執行官麥克·塞爾頓告訴我，公司做出第一份魚肉炸丸子（價格：一磅19000美元）時，相關材料占成本99%。動物細胞標準介質重要組成部分是胎牛血清（FBS），提取自牛胚胎的心臟，母牛懷胎時宰殺獲得。即便不是動物權益保護者，也能看出為什么這種方法很難令行業接受。所以現在研發的重點是尋找替代手段。塞爾頓表示Finless已經將FBS的使用減少一半，方法是將血清中關鍵成分通過發酵增加產量，Memphis表示已經找到不需要FBS的方式，但不愿透露具體使用材料，因為涉及專利問題。

即便科學家發誓不用FBS，有一種顧客可能還是不會接受人工肉，即嚴格素食主義者，因為制作過程中不可能徹底放棄動物。人工肉制造商還是得首先從動物身上提取細胞，哪怕只是活體切片，不必再用宰殺方式。

不過珀斯特表示，沒想讓素食主義者和嚴格素食者接受人工肉。他相信如果強制推廣只會適得其反。“選擇植物食品還是更有效率，”60歲的創業家珀斯特表示。

為什么不放棄細胞培養的途徑，用豆類或胡蘿卜之類制作更美味的肉餅呢？“植物制肉產品已經出現40年了，”他表示，“但基本上還是替代品，跟真實的肉差別還很大。我們相信選用植物產品不會有多大改變。”

我還沒嘗過細胞農業做出的肉類產品，其實真正嘗過的人極少，因為市面上還沒有。一方面，推動此類產品進入商場還要通過嚴格的監管流程，另一方面，制造商如何獲得許可繼續在該科學領域繼續探索也不明確。美國食品藥品管理局監督通過發酵制成的產品，這也是生化領域的關鍵過程，同時美國農業部負責監管肉類質量和安全。在杜邦公司監管合規部門工作的文森特·西瓦爾特表示，如果相關公司現在申請許可，最順利的情況下也要兩年才能通過。

“大部分公司都太樂觀了，” MosaMeat聯合創始人馬克·珀斯特說。

從2008年開始，珀斯特就在研究人工肉，現在從他的公司MosaMeat發展情況，加上過去九年的經驗來看，他對破除障礙擴大規模有些悲觀。挑戰在于找到FBS的替代品，大幅降低成本，提升細胞生長速度，還有找到合適的監管路徑，各領域互相交織。科學方面還有個障礙：讓細胞按照固定的結構生長，因為未來目標顯然不只是制作肉餡。想讓培養皿里的動物細胞長成牛排的樣子？沒那么容易。

關于新產品多久能真正進入市場，珀斯特不愿多猜測。但在寫本篇文章過程中，我聽過各種對日期的推斷，從明年到超過十年都有。“大部分公司都太樂觀了，”珀斯特有些沮喪地說。“他們很理想化。”少數幾位采訪對象甚至將人工肉跟太空探索相提并論；他們認為，人類建立火星殖民地需要這項技術。幾乎所有從事該領域的科學家都會陷入宏大的概念中，即科學可以借鑒世界上最大的問題。“我不愿叫自己理想主義者，”珀斯特說，“但我努力的目標是產生社會影響。我猜這也是種理想主義。”

血色將至

如果對細胞農業來說擴大規模是限制因素，那么植物肉遇到的挑戰更嚴峻：如何讓高粱口感像西冷牛排。“制造完美植物肉的道路上不是非黑即白，”塞爾頓表示。即便你能讓園林乳液看起來像肉，甚至放進嘴里嘗起來像肉，這么說吧，想嘗起來像真正的肉還是完全不一樣。

Beyond Meat的研究在名叫“曼哈頓海灘計劃”的實驗室中進行，就在離加州埃爾塞貢多總部不遠的街上。“我希望人們能明白這件事對全球的重要意義，”首席執行官伊森·布朗說。“我們有最聰明的科學家，也會提供這項工作需要的資金，”他補充說。“這是全球面臨的問題，不只關乎飲食選擇。”

Beyond Meat從植物中提取蛋白，通過加熱、冷卻和加壓等方式改變蛋白的性狀，模仿動物肌肉。“如果不需要動物或動物器官，為什么還非要吃動物呢，”布朗表示。“動物只是從植物中吸取所有材料，按照特定方式重新組合而已。”

布朗承認團隊還有很多事要做。“我比其他人更挑剔，”他說，“我認為前方還有很長的路要走。”布朗總在提醒有很多事要做，他辦公室里掛著一幅海報，上面寫著“不過是味道好點的素火雞”——來自2015年一位評論家的嚴厲批評。

對研究替代肉類的人們來說，第一步就是充分理解想要取代的是什么，不只是味道和口感，還有為何會產生特定的聲音，烹制過程中為何會變色，一位科學家向我描述說，烹飪就像“肉類的戲劇”。

So why not take them out of the equation? That’s precisely what Memphis Meats and a cohort of other startups are trying to do. Memphis represents one possible path called cellular agriculture, in which scientists are trying to grow what has become known as “cultured” or “clean” meat from animal cells. Others are trying to make plants taste like meat. The goal here is not to create your vegan cousin’s Boca Burger of yore, but instead a veggie patty that a hard-core carnivore wouldn’t be ashamed to bring to a neighborhood barbecue. (In principle, anyway.) Companies in this camp include Beyond Meat and its rival Impossible Foods—which has raised an eye-popping $275 million from the likes of Gates and Khosla Ventures. These more convincing plant burgers can already be found in the meat aisle of mainstream grocery stores like Kroger and are on the menus of restaurants ranging from famed chef David Chang’s Momofuku Nishi to TGI Fridays starting in January.

Both cellular ag and plant-based meat companies have the same goal—but their paths to get there couldn’t be more different. The plant-burger boosters don’t believe cultured meat will ever be able to scale; Memphis Meats and its brethren counter that plants—no matter what you do to them—will always taste like plants. But both groups share the same ultimate vision: to create the post-animal economy—a world free of consumer sacrifice, guilt, and compromise.

As a sign of the market’s potential, alternative meat producers point to the explosive growth plant-based milk has made in the dairy aisle, now capturing almost 10% of U.S. retail sales by volume. “I want to be able to say you don’t have to make a choice in what you’re eating,” Memphis CEO and cofounder Uma Valeti says, “but you can make a choice on the process of how it goes to the table.”

Hoping to make that choice easier, the new agripreneurs are tackling semantics first—redefining what “meat” means. Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown says he’d like to get people to think about meat “in terms of its composition” rather than its origin. The reframing isn’t just an epistemological one, but also a scientific one, reducing meat to its molecules.

That won’t be an easy sell, and the movement has its detractors—some of whom seem miffed by the notion that anyone would try to mess with Mother Nature. “They want to make up their own dictionary version of what meat is, and these are people who do not eat meat,” says Suzanne Strassburger, whose family has been in the meat business for more than 150 years. “The real question is, are they feeding people or are they feeding egos.”

The $2,400 Meatball

Growing cells in Petri dishes sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but the basic elements of the science are actually decades old. It’s essentially the same process used in medicine to cultivate human cells and tissues. Memphis Meats’ Valeti started thinking about growing meat when he was training as a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic. Later, at his own practice in the Twin Cities, he began injecting stem cells into patients’ hearts to regrow muscle after a heart attack.

The trouble is getting the economics to work for a hamburger, not a human heart. Memphis Meats created a cultured meatball that costs about $2,400 a pound to produce, and that was notable progress. The cost last year was $18,000 a pound—down from the more than $300,000 spent on the first cultured burger made in 2013 by Dutch scientist Mark Post.

The biggest hurdle to lowering the cost is the cellular medium, the stuff the cells feed on. Mike Selden, CEO of Finless Foods, told me that this substrate contributed 99% of the cost of growing the company’s first fish croquettes (price tag: $19,000 per pound). A critical part of the standard medium that works across animal cell types is fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is extracted from the heart of a calf fetus when its mother is pregnant at slaughter. One does not have to be an animal rights activist to see why this is not an acceptable option for the industry. As a result, much of the R&D focus right now is on finding an alternative. Selden says Finless has cut its FBS use down by half by reproducing the essential components of the serum through fermentation, and Memphis says it has come up with an FBS-free medium but won’t reveal what it’s using instead because it’s proprietary.

But even if scientists forswear FBS, cultured meat may not be wholly acceptable to one group of potential customers—vegans—because the animal can never be completely removed from the process. Cultured meat producers still have to source the first set of cells from an animal—even if it’s just a small biopsy that doesn’t require slaughter.

Post, however, says he’s not trying to turn vegetarians and vegans into cultured meat consumers anyway. In fact, he believes, it would be counterproductive. “Eating a plant-based diet is always going to be more efficient,” says the 60-year-old entrepreneur.

Then why not forget the cell-culture route and try to make better burgers from the likes of peas and carrots? “We’ve seen plant-based products for 40 years,” he says, “but they are basically still substitutes that are very different from the real thing. We believe plant-based options alone are not going to make a big difference.”

I never got to taste a meat product made from cellular agriculture—very few people ever have—because none are on the market. For one thing, there are significant regulatory challenges to getting them to grocery store shelves, and it’s unclear how a manufacturer seeking approval would even proceed in this uncharted area of science. The FDA oversees products made through fermentation—a key process used in the biotech sector—but the USDA is responsible for regulating meat quality and safety. Vincent Sewalt, who works in regulatory compliance at DuPont, has said if a company started the approval process today it would take two years to get through in the very best-case scenario.

“Most of the companies are overly optimistic,” says MosaMeat cofounder Mark Post.

Post has been working on cultured meat since 2008, now through his company MosaMeat, and his experiences over the past nine years have made him somewhat cynical about the hurdles to scaling. The challenges of finding an alternative to FBS, bringing costs down massively, speeding up cell growth, and finding an appropriate regulatory pathway, have compounded one another. And there’s another scientific roadblock too: getting the cells to adhere to a certain fixed structure—assuming, that is, the aim is to produce more than ground chuck. Want your Petri-dish animal cells to end up shaped like a porterhouse? Not so easy.

Post won’t put a timeline on how long the quest to get to market will take, but during my reporting I heard people throw out dates ranging from next year to more than a decade hence. “Most of the companies are overly optimistic,” Post says, ruefully. “They’re very idealistic.” A few sources even spoke of cultured meat in the context of space exploration; we need this technology to colonize Mars, they contend. For nearly all of these scientists, it has been hard not to get sucked into the grand notion that science can solve the world’s big problems. “I wouldn’t call myself an idealist,” says Post, “but I’m driven by the societal impact this can have. I guess that is idealism.”

There Will Be Blood

If scaling up is the limiting factor for cellular ag, the key challenge in making viable plant-based meat is more rudimentary: getting ingredients like sorghum to taste like sirloin. “There’s no black-and-white path to creating the perfect plant-based burger,” says Selden. Even if you can get a garden emulsion to look like meat, and even feel like meat in your mouth, it’s a whole different animal, so to speak, to get it to taste like the real thing.

Beyond Meat’s research takes place at a lab dubbed the Manhattan Beach Project, down the street from its headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. “I wanted people to understand the global significance,” says CEO Ethan Brown. “We have the brightest scientists and we’re going to fund them at a level that this work deserves,” he adds. “This is a global problem, not a culinary choice.”

Beyond Meat is taking the proteins from plant matter and resetting their bonds using heating, cooling, and pressure, so they mimic animal muscle. “Why go through all the trouble of using the animal or any organism if you don’t need to,” says Brown. “The animal is just taking all of that material from the plant and organizing it in a certain way.”

Brown admits that his team still has a ways to go. “I’m more critical than others,” he says, “and I say we’re pretty far away.” As a constant reminder of the work that still needs to be done, Brown has a poster hanging in his office that reads “Slightly better Tofurky”—a harsh line from a critic in 2015.

For anyone working on alternative meat, the first step is fully understanding what it is you are trying to replace—not just its taste and texture but why it makes that certain sound and changes color when it cooks, what one scientist described to me as the “theater of meat.”

“剛開始我們在想肉類為什么能做到這樣，即肉類的原理，” Impossible Foods首席執行官兼創始人帕特·布朗（跟同做植物肉的對手伊森·布朗沒有關系）解釋說。帕特·布朗在斯坦福大學擔任生化專業榮譽教授，他開始研究肉類的時候跟研究疾病差不多。“科研人員不會說我想治好癌癥，”他表示。“首先得了解普通細胞的工作原理。”他補充說，“這才是生物醫學研究解決問題的方式。食品行業不會這么想問題。”

Impossible的突破之處在于發現肉類本質在于原血紅素——即血液中攜帶氧氣的含鐵分子，也是肉質呈紅色的主要原因。原血紅素也在豆科植物中存在，可將氮變為肥料。布朗花了一年多思考，以為能從大豆根瘤中提取出原血紅素，但他錯了。首先用覆蓋泥土的植物就會影響食品安全，翻土收割過程中也會將碳釋放到大氣中對環境產生負面影響，而這是布朗極力避免的。

“We started out by basically asking how does meat do what it does—how does meat work,” explains Pat Brown, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods (and no relation to plant-based-meat rival Ethan Brown). Pat Brown, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford, started by studying meat in the way a researcher would study disease. “You don’t just say I want to cure this cancer,” he says. “You have to understand how normal cells work.” He adds, “That’s the way you solve a problem in biomedical research. And really that is not the mindset in the food world at all.”

Impossible’s breakthrough was in discovering that meat’s essence comes from heme—the iron-rich molecule in blood that carries oxygen and is responsible for the deep-red color. Heme also exists in the roots of plants like legumes that turn nitrogen into fertilizer. Brown spent a little over a year thinking, incorrectly, that he could source heme by harvesting the root nodules of soybeans. But using the dirt-covered plants would be a food safety disaster—and turning the soil to harvest them would release carbon into the atmosphere, creating the kind of negative impact on the environment Brown is trying to offset.

他再次從根本上尋找答案。三十年前他曾設計一種細菌菌株產生HIV酶，研究HIV病毒如何入侵人類細胞。“那是分子生物學家的絕招，”他說。所以幾年前他試著用同樣的方式制造原血紅素，用蛋白質的植物基因注入酵母，然后將改良的酵母糖和營養物質刺激發酵。過程中，大部分酵母過濾掉，剩下原血紅素。

在舊金山外的Impossible實驗室，我嘗了嘗原血紅素。有點像金屬，一點也不美味，有點像狠咬嘴唇之后的味道。那股味道在我口中縈繞挺久，還很奇怪地讓我想起醬油。我參觀的那天，一個工程師團隊正在處理生產過程中的問題，白色實驗室外套上濺滿了植物血液，看起來像慘案現場。“平常不是這樣的，”Impossible研發總監克里斯·戴維斯連連道歉。五年前戴維斯接到布朗的電話時，還在同一個辦公園區另一家公司研究生物燃料。 “我當時說，你知道我是做什么的，對吧？”戴維斯回憶說。而布朗只是解釋說“牛是一種技術，將植物轉變為人類喜歡的食物”。

He again went back to his roots for an answer. Thirty years ago he engineered a bacterial strain to produce an HIV enzyme so he could study how it enables HIV to infect human cells. “That’s the go-to move of a molecular biologist,” he says. So several years ago he tried the same approach for producing heme. He took the plant gene for the protein and inserted it into yeast, then fed the modified yeast sugars and nutrients to stimulate fermentation. In that process, most of the yeast is filtered out, leaving behind heme.

At Impossible’s lab just outside San Francisco I try heme in its pure form. It was far from delicious, with a metallic quality that tastes like the aftermath of biting down hard on your lip. Its flavors lingered for a long time in my mouth and oddly reminded me of soy sauce. A team of engineers was sorting out a production problem the day I visited and their white lab coats, splattered with plant blood, made it appear like an especially horrific crime had just taken place. “This is not normal,” apologizes Chris Davis, Impossible’s director of R&D. Davis had been working on biofuels at a company in the same office park when he got a call from Brown five years ago. “I said you do know what I do, right?” Davis recalls telling him. Brown, says Davis, simply explained the “idea that the cow was just a technology to turn plants into something you want to eat.”

研發團隊主要工作是研究肉的味道，味道一小部分通過舌頭感知，其他部分主要通過氣味。肉類味道成分不是單一分子，因此Impossible的科學家要努力確定其中數百種化合物成分。戴維斯帶著我從氣相色譜質譜系統旁邊走過，該系統能將氣味分子分離出來，就像烹制真正的肉時一樣。一位年輕的研究人員坐在機器旁邊，記錄下不同氣味。例如，最近有位測試人員辨認出香菜、麥片、塑料和生馬鈴薯的香味。（嗯，好香。）

如果原血紅素是Impossible肉餅的血，椰子油就是脂肪。小麥蛋白和馬鈴薯蛋白凝膠組成了肉的“肌肉” ——這是一種強壯的纖維，加入膠質凝膠后變得可塑。研發團隊不斷使用各種成分調整氣味和質地，每天都有幾次樣品供員工品嘗。讓布朗嘗時有時候可能會麻煩。這位創始人嘗起味道來反應極其慢。“他一直是素食主義者，所以發揮不了什么作用，”戴維斯說，“他不知道肉什么味。”

戴維斯說，第一次制成的肉特別像腐臭的玉米粥。“很糟糕，”他說， “但比起之前的產品已經很好。”戴維斯解釋說，實驗室的規矩是，“不能毒死朋友，味道差點還能忍受。”

Much of the work the R&D team focuses on is developing meat flavor, a minor fraction of which we perceive by way of our tongues and the rest via aroma. No single molecule makes up the smell of meat, so Impossible’s scientists are trying to identify the hundreds of compounds involved. Davis walks me by its gas chromatography mass spectrometry system, which separates out those molecules as a slab of real meat is cooking. A young researcher sits by the machine marking down notes about the varying aromas. One recent tester, for example, had identified the scents of cilantro, Cheerios, plastic, and raw potato. (Yum.)

If heme is the Impossible Burger’s blood, then coconut oil is its fat. Wheat protein and potato protein gel make up the meat’s “muscle”—its sinewy fiber—and then gum gel is added to make the whole concoction moldable. The R&D team constantly plays with those ingredients to adjust smell and texture. A couple of times a day the team comes around with samples for employees to taste. That can sometimes hit a snag when they come around to Brown. The startup’s founder is a notoriously slow taste tester. “He’s been a vegan for so long that he doesn’t actually do a very good job,” Davis says. “He doesn’t know what meat tastes like.”

Davis says the best description of the company’s first successful meat analog was rancid polenta. “It was still terrible,” he says. “And yet it was so much better than anything we’d made to that point.” The rule of the lab, explains Davis, is that, “it’s very bad manners to poison your friends, but you’re allowed to make it taste bad.”

在食品行業，如果產品不成熟公司一般不會推出。但Impossible Foods 和Beyond Meat等公司在模仿科技行業，總在推出改進版本，用硅谷行話說就是“迭代”。

Impossible肉餅每次重大改版都用鳥類名字命名，蛇鳥、藍腳布比鳥、禿鷹，還有渡渡鳥。不斷的改進也代表了布朗的終極目標，即造出比牛還要美味的東西，而不只是像牛。布朗說，付出這么多努力不只是為了好吃的肉餅。“我們的使命就是食品生產環節中完全不用動物，”我們在紐約的高檔餐廳Saxon + Parole里一邊吃Impossible肉餅，他一邊這么告訴我。公司內部叫這款肉餅黃鸝2.0版。

“不能毒死朋友，味道差點還能忍受。” Impossible Foods研發總監克里斯·戴維斯表示。

但事實上，公司技術方面還有個重要的決定方，就是美國食品藥品管理局。雖然Impossible Foods不用申請便可在美國推廣肉餅，但還是主動申請FDA確認其用來攜帶原血紅素的蛋白質“通常比較安全”，簡稱GRAS。但FDA反饋了一些后續問題。（2015年，Impossible撤回了GRAS申請，去年10月增加一些安全數據后已重新提交。）

更讓某些人擔心的是，研究證明紅肉中的原血紅素會推動合成名叫N-亞硝基化合物的化學物質，或簡稱NOCs。該物質已證實有致癌作用。戴維斯并不相信。“現在有很多流行病學數據表明，吃肉不利于健康，”他表示， “看起來很清楚。但肉類哪一部分導致這種結果，數據里并沒有顯示。”

素食主義黑手黨

對一些動物權益保護組織來說，替代肉類方面的努力也意味著幫他們在實現最終目標上取得了一些進展。保羅·夏皮羅在美國人道協會擔任主管政策的副總裁，也是即將出版的《干凈肉類》一書作者，他總結道：“從事該領域的人可能會真正保護到動物，比我努力一輩子還有成效。”

隨著該領域獲得進展，可能已經救了一些豬，也救了一些雞，但用最重要的目標評判的話仍然失敗：所謂最重要的目標，是讓人們停止殺戮和食用動物。過去30年里，素食者的百分比基本保持不變。許多動物權益保護者提出，如果大部分美國人不會出于道德原因停止食用動物肉，也許應該提供更好的選擇。 “我們應該注重研發各方面都更加創新的產品，而不是天天勸人們妥協。”凱爾·沃格特表示。

沃格特就是人們開玩笑時常說的素食黑手黨之一，素食黑手黨是一群富有的投資者，主要目標是避免動物成為食物。沃格特跟很多千禧一代一樣，在Netflix上看過一系列類似題材的紀錄片后開始對保護動物權益感興趣。但跟很多同齡人不一樣，2016年沃格特將無人駕駛汽車初創公司Cruise賣給了通用汽車，售價10億美元，所以有錢投資。他和妻子特雷西·沃格特開設了一處農場動物庇護所，后來變成嚴格素食者，投資了Memphis Meats。對沃格特來說這是一次簡單的思想實驗：對100年后的人們來說，“哪些行為比較原始，令人討厭，或完全錯誤？”

In the food industry, companies traditionally don’t launch a product until they think it’s ready for prime time. But the likes of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are emulating the tech world by constantly rolling out improved versions—or in Valleyspeak, “iterations.”

Every major reformulation of the Impossible Burger gets named after a bird—anhinga, blue-footed booby, condor, dodo. The updates represent Brown’s ultimate goal of making something superior to a cow rather than something identical to one. The effort is about far more than making a great burger, says Brown. “Our mission is to develop the technology that makes animals obsolete as a food production technology,” he tells me as we each chow down on an Impossible Burger—the version known internally as Oriole 2.0—at New York’s sleek Saxon + Parole restaurant.

“It’s very bad manners to poison your friends, but you’re allowed to make it taste bad,” says Impossible Foods R&D Director Chris Davis.

But as it turns out, there’s one rather important player who has some questions about the company’s technology. And that’s the FDA. While Impossible Foods doesn’t need the agency’s approval to market its burgers in the U.S., the company voluntarily asked the regulator to confirm the designation of the protein it uses to carry heme as something “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. But the FDA responded with some follow-up questions instead. (In November 2015, Impossible withdrew its GRAS submission but refiled this October with additional safety data.)

More troubling to some is that studies have shown that heme found in red meat facilitates the production of chemicals called N-nitroso-compounds, or NOCs, that have been shown to be carcinogenic. Davis, for his part, is not convinced by the science. “Right now there’s good epidemiological data that eating meat is bad for you,” he says. “That’s pretty much clear. But which part of meat is causing that—the data just isn’t there.”

The Vegan Mafia

For some animal rights groups, the alt-meat effort marks a chance to finally make some progress on their ultimate aim. Or as Paul Shapiro, vice president of policy at the Humane Society of the United States and author of the forthcoming book Clean Meat, sums up: “It’s possible that folks in this field might end up doing more good for animals than what I’ve done with my life.”

While the movement may have persuaded industry to free some pigs from gestation crates and hens from cages, it has so far pretty much failed in the goal many view as paramount: getting people to stop killing and consuming animals. The percentage of people who identify as vegetarians in the U.S. has remained essentially unchanged over the last three decades. If mainstream Americans won’t stop eating animal flesh for ethical reasons, suggest many animal rights advocates, then perhaps they will if they’re given a tastier alternative. “Rather than presenting people with tradeoffs, we should focus on making new products that are better than the status quo in every way,” says Kyle Vogt.

Vogt is part of what several people jokingly refer to as the Vegan Mafia, a group of wealthy investors whose main motivation is to remove animals from the food system. Like a surprisingly large number of millennials, it seems, Vogt in part got interested in animal welfare after binge-watching a series of Netflix documentaries on the topic. But unlike many others in his age cohort, Vogt sold his self-driving-car startup Cruise to General Motors (GM, -0.27%) for $1 billion in 2016—and therefore has the money to do something about it. He and his wife, Tracy Vogt, who opened a farm animal sanctuary, subsequently became vegan and invested in Memphis Meats. For him it’s a straightforward thought experiment: For people living 100 years from now, “what are they going to see that seems barbaric or abhorrent or just completely wrong?”

隨著硅谷資本逐漸失去耐心，有些人開始議論。MosaMeat的珀斯特在2013年第一次用人工動物細胞制成漢堡，當時由谷歌億萬富翁布林支持。珀斯特認為有些競爭者計劃進入市場的時間表不切實際，部分原因是為了迎合投資者。“整個硅谷的節奏都是迅速發展，”珀斯特告訴我。“可能不切實際，但硅谷的魅力和神話還有個特點，就是沒人關心真相。”

行業的影響也能從公司選擇語言中看出來，一些公司的描述中簡單將生物描述為蛋白質轉化技術。我寫這篇報道的幾個月里，經常聽到類似描述。總是聽起來很刺耳，而且有時候顯得毫無靈魂。

“在大多數人類涉及的領域，技術是一件好事，”41歲的Modern Meadow聯合創始人兼首席執行官安德拉斯·福佳科思說，該公司在新澤西州納特利市的一個小校園里。“食物是人類存有懷疑的領域之一。”剛開始Modern Meadow就決定主要皮革材料，而不是肉類，因為公司認為皮革材料的影響更大。福佳科思還擔心產品需要多長時間才能上市以及消費者能否接受。他解釋說，所有食物都涉及技術，但是再有名的食品公司也不想提技術，他們想稱之為烹飪藝術。不過，“如果想吸引投資者，而且產品看起來有創新性，就得用技術術語包裝。”他表示，“對消費者來說不一定有吸引力。”

更顯諷刺的是，替代肉行業真正獲得信任是因為食品巨頭加入。這一幕可謂峰回路轉。之前傳統包裝食品公司吞并天然食品初創公司時，新生公司往往會銷聲匿跡。但這次肉類食品創新的情況相反：食品巨頭在支持新生行業。

我跟泰森食品和嘉吉食品高管聊過，兩家公司分別投資了Beyond Meat 和Memphis Meats，也許未來會出現動物肉、人工肉和植物肉在超市貨架上并排擺著的一天。“為了養活90億人，每個人都要貢獻，”嘉吉食品成長型風投部門總裁索尼婭·麥卡隆姆·羅伯茨表示。“新行業對我們來說不是威脅，而是機會。”

但替代肉行業也不是所有人都想跟大佬們合作。Impossible首席執行官帕特·布朗就想不通，怎么可能找到跟傳統肉類制造商相符的利益訴求。“這么說吧，”他表示。“我不敢想象，一旦那些公司能稍微掌控我們之后會發生什么。他們可不希望我們在未來15年顛覆傳統行業。”

嘉吉食品的羅伯茨對此表示：“我聽過一些類似說法。讓人有點傷心。”

通過小測驗

10月，300人左右在布魯克林紅鉤一處改造過的倉庫里聚會，此處正在舉辦第二屆細胞農業新收獲年度峰會。這種討論替代肉的論壇上，午餐通常都是素食。（想找真正的牛奶加進咖啡？祝你好運。）

雖然行業太小，幾乎人人都彼此認識，但也有不和諧的時候。尤其是很多初創公司鼓吹自家技術比同行先進時，明顯引發了擔心。受丑聞困擾的素食者，也是梅奧創始人漢普頓·克里克最近表示，明年人工肉產品就能面世，這番表態的真實性立刻引發爭論。而且看來沒有定論。（該公司在聲明中稱，“我們的目標是2018年底前推出第一款可量產的干凈肉。”）

關于公司描述自家產品的方式，也能讓人感覺到劍拔弩張的氣息。對陣一方是享受古怪科技的樂趣（技術愛好者比較注重），另一方則是擔心太古怪會嚇跑消費者。

With Silicon Valley’s dollars has also come impatience, say some. Post, of MosaMeat, who created the first hamburger from cultured animal cells in 2013 with backing from Google billionaire Brin, believes some of his competitors have set unrealistic timelines to market in part because that’s what tech investors want to hear. “The whole Silicon Valley rhythm is imposed on this development,” Post tells me. “That may not be realistic, but part of the charm and myth of Silicon Valley is that nobody cares.”

Its influence can also be seen in the language of the enterprise—one that casually refers to living creatures as protein conversion technologies. In the months I spent reporting this story, I heard those kinds of descriptions regularly. It was always jarring—and at times, came across as a bit soulless.

“In most realms of human endeavor, technology is a positive thing,” says Andras Forgacs, the 41-year-old cofounder and CEO of Modern Meadow, which operates on a nondescript campus in Nutley, N.J. “Food is the one realm where we’re very suspicious about it.” Early on, Modern Meadow decided to focus on leather materials rather than meat because that’s where it thought it could have the most impact. Forgacs also had some concerns about how long it would take a food product to get to market as well as consumer acceptance. All food involves technology, he explains, but the most established food companies don’t want to call it that—they want to call it the art of cooking. Still, “if you want to attract investors and seem like you’re the revolutionary new thing, you have to robe yourself in the language of technology,” he says. “That doesn’t necessarily appeal to consumers.”

In one of the stranger ironies, what has given real credence to the alt-meat realm is Big Food’s arrival on the scene. It’s an odd turn of events. When legacy packaged food companies began gobbling up natural food startups, the latter lost much of their street cred. But the opposite has happened with meat nouveau: Big Food’s backing has helped validate the burgeoning industry.

The executives I spoke with at Tyson and Cargill, which have invested in Beyond Meat and Memphis Meats, respectively, laid out a future in which meat from animals, cultured meat, and plant-based meat all sit side by side in the supermarket. “To feed 9 billion people we’re going to need everybody,” says Sonya McCullum Roberts, president of growth ventures at Cargill. “It’s not a threat to us, it’s an opportunity.”

Not everybody in the alt-meat crowd is willing to partner with the big guys. Pat Brown, Impossible’s CEO, can’t imagine how his interests could possibly align with those of a meat producer. “Let’s put it this way,” he says. “I don’t have any illusions about what would happen if one of those companies had any measure of control over us. They would not want us to completely replace their industry in 15 years.”

Says Cargill’s Roberts: “I have heard some of those comments. And they hurt a little bit.”

Passing the Smell Test

In October some 300 people gather in a converted warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for the second annual New Harvest conference on cellular agriculture. As is typical of alt-meat confabs, the lunch is vegan. (And good luck finding any real milk for your coffee.)

Despite the niceties that come in an industry where everyone knows everyone else, there are still plenty of moments of discord. One clear point of angst is how candid the various startups are being with one another about the advancements of their technology. Scandal-plagued vegan mayo maker Hampton Creek had recently said it would have a cultured meat product on the market next year, and questions abound about how realistic the pronouncement really is. Not very, seems to be the consensus. (“We aim to make our first commercial sale of a clean meat product by the end of 2018,” the company said in a statement.)

One can sense another underlying tension in the way companies are describing their products in the first place. The battle lines seem drawn between the joys of weird science (which the techies cherish) and those who fear consumers will run from that.

International Flavors and Fragrances的杰西·沃爾夫顯然屬于第一陣營。第二天會議剛開始，他就發表了“聲味并茂”的演講：他讓大家打開每人座位上的小玻璃瓶，聞一下味道。他介紹說，瓶子里62種成分，組合起來會形成有機素食烤雞香味。他告訴眾人，制成香味需要很多科學。（我把小瓶帶回辦公室給同事們聞，大部分人都覺得像多力多滋玉米片。）

兩小時后，一場名叫“推動細胞農業進入真實世界”的討論環節中，芝加哥咨詢公司Hyde Park Group食品創新負責人瑪麗·哈德萊茵提到一種奇怪的現象，現在有幾十種容易讓人上癮的添加劑，然而購物者都希望越簡單越好。她對參會者說，少添加劑、未加工食物和干凈的食品標簽會很有發展前景。“另一方面我們又有了實驗室出產的新型肉。應該好好關注各種矛盾的想法。”

關于細胞農業制出的肉應該叫什么名字也存在爭議，凸顯了該問題的復雜性。之前叫“實驗室肉”、“試管肉”和“人工肉”，聽起來都令人作嘔，現在行業傾向于叫“干凈肉”。但干凈肉好像也不太合適。首先，消費者往往認為干凈食品是沒有人工添加劑的，這點就不太一樣。“聽起來像給生物工程制造的肉類產品取了個怪名字，”哈德萊茵告訴我。但更麻煩的在于，干凈肉這個名字暗示普通的傳統肉類骯臟，仿佛不該吃。“這個名字很有攻擊性，而且毫不在意農民的感受，” Food + Tech Connect創始人兼首席執行官丹妮爾·古爾德表示，這家公司為食品行業創業者和投資人提供資源并打造社區。妖魔化潛在顧客，帶著批判眼光且讓其產生愧疚情緒，這種推廣策略不太可能奏效。

“真正的問題是，他們是想養活人類，還是純粹為了滿足自我需求，”一位長期從事肉類行業的人問道。

素食肉支持者也難免遭遇矛盾。去年夏天，加州大學伯克利分校組建了替代肉類實驗室，學生可以進行植物食品研究。項目非常受歡迎，后來擴大規模才能多容納十幾個人。但第一學期之后學生們很不滿意，因為制成產品跟加工食品的配方一樣復雜。新實驗室聯系主席理查多·圣馬丁表示，學生們想改變當前的食品行業，而不是全盤復制。即便做植物肉餅，看起來也沒太創新。“他們不相信未來想繼續這么做，”圣馬丁表示。“學生們覺得這樣只是滿足了保護動物的愿望，但在解決食物問題上作用不大。”

寫這篇報道過程中，我幾乎問所有人是不是素食者。我很吃驚地發現很多從事該行業的人并非素食者。MosaMeat的珀斯特說，他應該當素食者但并不是。“有些說不出的因素，讓我們感覺很難跨出那一步，全面接受植物食品，”他承認。“感覺像后退一大步。我不太愿意。”替代肉實驗室等等圣馬丁表示，每次看到動物受虐待的消息都很難受，“但我走進超市吃漢堡時，跟之前看到的消息聯系不到一起。就是做不到徹底不吃。”

我也能感覺到很多人的糾結。大多數時候我是素食者，基本上不吃紅肉。在我寫這篇報道的幾個月里，對人們為何不該吃牛肉、雞肉和豬肉的原因也加深了了解。

但11月初我在北加州高速公路上開車，看到前方有家速食漢堡連鎖店。我抵不過內心糾結，停下車進去吃了個漢堡。那天的漢堡真是美味至極。（財富中文網）

本文另一版本發表于12月15日出版的《財富》雜志，標題是《牛肉都去哪了？》

譯者：Pessy

審校：夏林

Jesse Wolff of International Flavors and Fragrances is clearly in the first camp. He kicks off day two with a presentation that includes show and smell: He instructs us to open a vial that’s been placed on the back of every chair, and then take a whiff. Inside are 62 components that make up organic vegan roast chicken aroma, he says. There’s a lot of science behind the flavor, he tells the crowd. (When I take the vial back to my office, most of my colleagues think it smells like Doritos.)

Two hours later, during a session called “Getting Cellular Agriculture Into the Real World,” Mary Haderlein, principal of Chicago consulting firm Hyde Park Group Food Innovation, alludes to the strangeness of an additive with more than five dozen ingredients in an era when shoppers say they want simplicity. There’s a big push for fewer ingredients, unprocessed foods, and clean labels, she tells the same conference-goers. “And then on the other hand we have lab meat. Those are conflicting thoughts that have to come into focus.”

Embodying this issue is the debate over what to even call meat made from cellular ag. The industry has landed on “clean meat,” after deciding that terms like “lab-grown meat,” “in vitro meat,” and “cultured meat” all have too much of an ick factor. But clean meat has its own baggage. For one thing, it has a different meaning to consumers who think of clean food as something free of artificial ingredients. “It seems like a weird term to attach to a bioengineered meat product,” Haderlein tells me. But even more problematic is that clean meat suggests that the alternative—plain, old regular meat—is dirty and wrong. “The term is offensive and insensitive to farmers,” says Danielle Gould, founder and CEO of Food + Tech Connect, a resource hub and community for food entrepreneurs and investors. And making potential consumers feel demonized, judged, or guilty is unlikely to be an effective marketing strategy.

“The real question is, are they feeding people or are they feeding egos,” asks a meat industry veteran.

The veggie meat cohort is not immune to the tension. This summer, the University of California at Berkeley launched an alt-meat lab for students to do plant-based food research. The program was so popular it was expanded to accommodate about a dozen extra people. But the students rebelled after the first semester, disheartened by how many of the products had the same heavy formulation as processed foods. They wanted to change the current food system, not replicate it, says Ricardo San Martin, cochair for the new lab. Somehow making a burger, even one made of plants, didn’t seem quite so innovative. “They were not convinced that this was the route they want to take,” San Martin says. “They feel it fulfills their ethical concerns with animals, but it doesn’t fulfill the kind of food they want to eat.”

Over the course of reporting this story I asked pretty much everyone I talked to whether they were vegetarian or vegan. It was surprising to me how many of those engaged in this movement weren’t. Post, of MosaMeat, said that he should be but that he wasn’t. “There is something in us that makes it inherently difficult to take that step to a plant-based diet,” he admits. “It feels like a step back. And something in me resists that.” San Martin of the alt-meat lab offered that he feels horrible whenever he sees any information on the mistreatment of animals, “but when I go to the supermarket and eat ham, I don’t see the connection. I just can’t make it.”

I felt their confusion. Most days I eat vegetarian, and I rarely eat any red meat at all. In fact, for months, as I’ve reported this story, I’ve been acutely aware of all the reasons why we probably shouldn’t eat beef, chicken, or pork.

But in early November, as I was driving on the highway in Northern California, I saw an In-N-Out Burger up ahead. I pulled off the highway, and gave into the cognitive dissonance. It was the best hamburger I can remember.

A version of this article appears in the Dec. 15, 2017 issue of Fortune with the headline “Where’s the Beef?”