“You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” — Erin Somers
In February, Bruce Friedrich came on the show to explain how lab-grown meat would save the planet. Today’s guest is less sanguine about this revolution. Erin Somers — author of the bestselling novel The Ten Year Affair and a twenty-year vegetarian — spent a year exploring our supposedly meatless future. In “Where’s the Beef?”, the cover story of this month’s Harper’s, Somers describes the still-born lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t.
The problem, Somers explains, isn’t technological. Having raised $330,000 from Sergey Brin, the Dutch scientist Mark Post grew the first burger from cow shoulder cells back in 2013. What subsequently failed is everything else. The price never fell, VCs lost interest, conservatives legislated against it, and the industry’s best hope, Believer Meats, went bankrupt. Above all, the revolution never went mainstream. “You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger,” Somers explains.
Somers’ journey ended at the iconic Berkeley Bowl where she was offered a Sumo orange, a hybrid fruit engineered to be both delicious and resilient. Technology fed her after all. Just not in the way that revolutionaries like Bruce Friedrich predicted. The revolution won’t be meatless. Let’s hope we can still save the planet.
Five Takeaways
• The Woolly Mammoth Meatball. Vow grew a meatball from fossil DNA — and no one was allowed to eat it. A forbidden food as emblem of an industry that mirrors our AI moment: gold rush, hype, a product never quite arriving.
• The Technology Works. Nobody’s Clamoring. From Post’s $330,000 Brin-funded burger to beer-brewery bioreactors — the science delivered. The price, workforce, and demand didn’t. “No one’s clamoring for it.”
• The Believer Collapse. The industry’s best hope went bankrupt while Somers sat at its own trade conference. The postmortem: scaled too quickly, pushed by backers. The affair with artificial meat is concluded.
• The Pincer. VCs bailed for AI-sized wins; conservatives legislated against a “nonentity” — almost total theater. And personal responsibility won’t fix it: “you can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.”
• The Sumo Orange. Downturns are chapters, not endings — AI had its winters too. Her story ends at the Berkeley Bowl with an orange engineered to be delicious and resilient. “It’s not so dark.”
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Read Where’s the Beef?: harpers.org
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: after Friedrich’s promise, a dose of realism
00:02:43 The idealistic dream of cultivated meat
00:04:10 Twenty years a vegetarian: an aesthetic decision
00:05:23 The woolly mammoth meatball: a forbidden food
00:07:18 A microcosm of America: gold rush, hype, carnival
00:08:27 Mark Post’s petri dish: the technology works
00:10:06 “No one’s clamoring for it”
00:10:29 The Research Triangle: an unexpected hub
00:11:25 The pincer: VCs bail, conservatives legislate theater
00:14:27 Bezos’s $30 million: virtue or drop in the bucket?
00:16:22 The Believer Meats collapse: bankruptcy at the conference
00:18:55 The ten-year affair with artificial meat
00:20:14 MrBeast at Upside Foods: the blind chicken test
00:21:55 “You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger”
00:23:28 Four times the price: a privileged progressives’ product?
00:25:41 An AI winter for meat? Downturns as chapters
00:26:29 The hybrid future: Monbiot and regenerative agriculture
00:27:29 Ending at the Berkeley Bowl
00:29:12 The Sumo orange: engineered to be delicious
00:30:09 Where’s the beef with the next novel?