A Butcher Walks Into A Meat Lab

Will plant-based protein save the world? I left my home on a farm in upstate New York and travelled to the heart of Silicon Valley to find out.

- Sophia Hampton

For the first time in a long time, I don’t smell like cow manure. Here in Oakland, California, nearly 5,000 kilometres from my home on a farm in upstate New York, I’m walking into the Impossible Foods production facility, a massive polygon of beige rectangles that can squish out a million kilos of plant-based meat a month. I’m a farmer in training and butcher, which means this place threatens to render my entire field of work obsolete. There’s gotta be a punchline around here somewhere.

To prep for my tour, I put on rubber boots, a snappable lab coat, a hairnet, a hard hat, and protective goggles. Someone gives me an X-ray detectable pen that can write in refrigerated temperatures. I wash and sterilise my hands about 3,000 times. There are automatic boot scrubbers and a machine that squirts out suds I’m supposed to stomp through on purpose. Along a yellow-painted pathway that indicates where pedestrians should stay to avoid the forklifts, I follow a man named Pierre whose official title here is Continuous Improvement Engineer.

We start in a chilly room with stainless-steel tanks towering over us. Pierre says they’re for making the potato protein, one of the 20 plantbased ingredients found inside an Impossible Burger. I ask about the potatoes. Yukon Golds? Russets? Who grew them? He taps a computer monitor, which tells us they’re not actually potatoes at all, more of a potato derivative, sourced from an undisclosed supplier. The screen lists about seven other chemical-sounding ingredients, and on second thought Pierre thinks maybe I’m not supposed to see this and we follow the yellow path to the main production line.