The Bill Gates backed company thats （比尔盖茨的公司的支持）.pdf

The Bill Gates-backed company thats reinventing meat October 3, 2013: 5:00 AM ET Beyond Meat closes in on the perfect fake chicken, turns heads, tastebuds By Marc Gunther The pizza is real but the chicken is not. FORTUNE -- Most people consume protein in what vegetarians call the secondhand form, that is, after it has been digested and converted into meat by chickens, cows, and pigs. This is inefficient, as Winston Churchill noted In Fifty Years Hence, an essay published in 1931. Churchill wrote: We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will ... from the outset be practically indistinguishable from natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation. Then again, predictions are hard -- especially about the future. Food scientists and entrepreneurs have tried to reinvent meat for decades, with little to show for it. Last summer, Dr. Mark Post, a Dutch scientist and medical doctor, unveiled a five-ounce hamburger that was grown in a laboratory from cow muscle, at a cost of $325,000. (Google (GOOG) founder Sergey Brin picked up the tab.) Closer to home, mock meats from companies like Kellogg (K) and Kraft (KRFT) can be found in supermarket freezers, branded as Chikn Nuggets, an All-American Flame Grilled Meatless Burger, and Classic Meatless Meatballs. Soy-based, mushy, and more expensive than the real thing, they remain niche products. And yet, the need for alternatives to meat has never been greater. Global demand for meat has tripled in the last 40 years, driven by population growth and a doubling of per-capita meat consumption, according to the Worldwatch Insitute. That has intensified pressures on land, water, feed, fertilizer, and fuel. Meat is a climate change problem, too: Animal agriculture is said to be responsible for about 14.5% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, more than t