I'll be having the replicated meat
So It Turns Out, #35
Hi,
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week.
So it turns out that I’ll be having the replicated meat
As someone told me recently, “Maybe you should pick some problems to solve that are, well, solvable by an individual person.”
Look, just because I currently believe that I should be spending my life working on straightforward efforts fighting future apocalypses on a) privacy, b) America’s national security, c) COVID, or d) global warming, or …well, okay, you have a point.
But one area where I’ve long been concerned — as Friends of the Stack can attest — is that my descendants will definitely judge me harshly for eating factory-farmed meat. I actually don’t — contrary to many trendy philosophers — think that we’re all vegetarian in the future. I think it’s probably more like how you’d imagine, well, Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise-D’s relationship to meat. He thinks authentic, home-grown cooking matters and should be preserved1, he probably makes exquisite cassoulet from meat grown and butchered by families near Chateau Picard who’ve been in business for centuries, but he replicates his hamburgers instead of buying them from some factory farm. Much like in the same way that we wouldn’t buy food from an Upton Sinclair-era slaughterhouse, standards evolve.
We now know that cows, specifically, are a delicious but meaningful contributor to global warming. My steaks and burgers come at the cost of cow farts that will help melt the ice caps, which is a hilarious but terrible fact to really grapple with. (And because cow farts are methane, stopping their production has a faster impact than reducing CO2 production — methane degrades more rapidly in the atmosphere than CO2, all other things being equal).
Now, I don’t think that individual actions alone can solve climate change — humans kick the ass of big problems with institutions (note here that I do not say, “governments,” and remind you that Ronald Coase will knock you down onto the Coasean floor if you forget that all sorts of institutions like firms and PTAs and nonprofit communities exist).
Still, at the margin, I should try to help.
But humans, well, humans are lazy. Humans — myself very much included in this group — generally don’t want to do the hard thing. We miss the mark, all the time2 and will keep on doing so, generally. It’s hard to stop eating meat if you find it delicious.
So I’ve long said that once a non-cruelty-causing or (in recent years) greenhouse-gas-reducing3 choice came around, I’d start eating it sometimes. I’ve tried meat replacements before — in fact, when I lived in Los Angeles, the one place in America you could try the beta version of Impossible Burgers was a Santa Monica burger joint, but then it frankly had a meatloaf-y like consistency back then. The promise was clear, but it just wasn’t there yet. Still, the Impossible Burger folks are constantly iterating, so I recently decided to buy some of their 2.0 version from my local supermarket.
After that recent taste test of Impossible Burgers, I am (admittedly) pleased to report that we are not quite there yet, but it’s really really close. And I’m (admittedly) fully resigned to the notion that we will be there very soon.4 Even already, the burgers taste burger-y enough that you have to actively remind yourself they’re not beef burgers. And in addition to being factory-farm-free, they’re ~90% lower carbon footprint than a cow5, because it’s just farm-raised plants as the base ingredients, without requiring a moo in the middle. So I’ll probably be eating more of them.
What’s even more surprising is that several of you Friends of the Stack do so, too. In some private conversations recently, I learned that literally the vegetarian I’d least expect to like Impossible Burger and the carnivore I’d least expect to like Impossible Burger both apparently love it. That seems like, well, a meaningful pair of data points.
An increasingly common theme in business writing about world-saving businesses (e.g., fighting climate change) is that they need to make sense for even the totally unaltruistic capitalists6. Perhaps there’s a smaller version of that principle: if you want to end factory farms, you need a way to do it that works for both people who don’t love meat, and those that do.
Right-click and “View Source” is a crime, says Missouri governor
Today, the Governor of Missouri took some time out from mismanaging his COVID response to threaten to prosecute a local reporter that responsibly disclosed an issue in a state government website. The website, intended to enable citizens to check the credentials of teachers, did so in the dumbest way possible. Apparently, the website pushed the entire list of every teacher and their Social Security Number out as part of the web page to every user accessing the site, and then relied on a JavaScript front-end to only show you the teacher info that you “should” see. Think of it as sending you the whole list in the mail, with a cardboard template paper-clipped to the top of the list, with a small window in it cut out for only the name you “should” see. You still have the whole list, whether you know enough to do the trivial step to pull off the cardboard front-piece.
All that the reporter did was right-click on the page and select “Inspect” to see the raw code underneath. You, yourself, can literally do this right now, on, say, the Governor’s website, though luckily no privacy-violating information is revealed there…
The governor, baselessly, is now accusing this civic-minded reporter who was only trying to protect people, of being a malicious hacker. This is, needless to say, insane, and the reporter already has offers of help from lawyers that, quite literally, are the world experts on defending security researchers in court.
The state of Missouri shouldn’t and probably won’t win. But it should tell you something that in 2021, a state thinks the right thing to do to respond to altruistic help on the internet is to threaten to arrest the person who revealed their mistake.
(Disclosure: I’ve known several folks who were civil servants or government contractors in Missouri. To my knowledge, none of them currently work for the state in any capacity.)
A brief review of Squid Game, now on Netflix
May this bat bless your timeline
May these elephants bless your squash time
May this pup be fruitful in his advisory business
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
He is, after all, an English Frenchman.
Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu…
This doesn’t necessarily mean not eating meat. For example, there are some early efforts to modify cows’ digestive processes with nutritional supplements, so that they fart less. As a side effect, this improves their digestive efficiency and they are happier, produce more milk, need less antibiotics, and get stung less by cattle flies. I’ll also probably start trying to eat more dairy and meat coming from those cows over time, once supply chain labeling makes it possible for me to choose those.
The Impossible Burgers folks also talk about, on occasion, the endgame of developing a fake burger that tastes more burger-y than meat burgers, which would be utterly hilarious. “NO DAD I DON’T WANT BEEF BURGERS THEY DON’T TASTE MEATY ENOUGH” is a sentence designed to, frankly, crash the average American grillmaster’s brain. I expect to hear it at a cookout by 2030, at the latest.
Per Kelsey Piper of Vox, whose writing I trust implicitly on altriusm-related data analysis. A writer who postmortems her decision process that meant she only sounded the warning on COVID ahead of almost any other journalist, instead of every other journalist, is the kind of writer I deeply respect.
See, e.g., this discussion with Chris Sacca https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/chris-sacca/