#any CEO of a big company that comes near him will get decapitated

[isittheboogieman]

* Check out my fucked little scarecrow

[thekytchensynk]

Business Lunch (Fictober Prompt 15)

Prompt number: 15

Fanfiction Fandom: Ducktales

Rating: G

Warnings: No warnings

Read this story on AO3

The letter had arrived without a return address, which had set off some warning bells for Fenton and ALL of the warning bells for his mother.

"What is this?" She gestured to it. "What sort of fool thinks we'd-" She trailed off as Fenton just opened it the way he would any other piece of junk mail, giving him a look of disbelief mixed with anxiety that, once upon a time, would have meant he was grounded, big-time.

"No one would send me a bomb or something through the mail," he argued.

But it didn’t turn out to be either junk mail or some sort of booby trap. It was, instead, a letter inviting Fenton to a “lunch meeting to discuss a potential scientific opportunity.” It didn’t even use a name, just starting “To the lucky resident” instead.

His mother’s eyes further narrowed. She didn’t even need to say anything -- he knew the contents made her even more suspicious. And to be fair, Fenton couldn’t blame her. To a detective, this had to look like step one in either a scam or crime.

But he’d already decided to check it out. The “meeting” was to be held at a fairly popular cafe called Serene Subsistence, so the chances of someone trying something were low. And if the person knew where he lived, they also probably knew he was Gizmoduck -- he wasn’t sure anyone in the neighborhood didn’t. So if they did try something, he had ways to handle the trouble.

So the next day, Fenton made his way to the cafe. Since it was a nice spring day and since the letter hadn’t specified any particular seating arrangements, he chose to sit at a small outdoor table in front of the place, shaded by a blue-striped umbrella and looking through the minimalistic menu.

Fenton hadn’t eaten at Serene Subsistence before, and now that he’d arrived, he sort of understood why. His instincts must have seen something in the decor, or in the sign design, and warned him off. Instead of describing the various options, the menu gave each one just a picture, a name -- something like “the Green Continent” or “the October Surprise” -- and a small list of icons to indicate whether the meal was low-salt, low-fat, gluten-free, all-organic or a host of other things. Huge swaths of white space surrounded each entry.

“You’d think they could put a few lists of ingredients,” Fenton mused out loud, squinting at the menu as though that might reveal hitherto unseen text.

“Awww. come on, where’s the fun in that?”

“You.” The word was out of his mouth before he could stop it, disgusted and angry and very out of place in this hip cafe. If that hadn’t drawn people’s attention, the way the glassware and silverware rattled as he slammed the menu to the tabletop would have.

Mark Beaks waved a hand at him dismissively as he pulled up the selfie camera on his phone and snapped a picture of himself in front of the table. “Come on, calm down, we’re not here to fight. We’re here to talk business.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I’d known I’d be talking business with you,” Fenton said, enunciating hard to prevent his full anger from leaking through.

Beaks grinned at him as though he were a kid who just got his times tables right. “Of course. That’s why I didn’t put my name on it. Uh-duh.” He pulled one of the other chairs at the table out and plopped into it without looking, eyes already back on the phone. “So, yeah, thanks for not looking into that too much, I would have felt really stupid if I get here and you hadn’t shown up.”

Fenton would have loved to have done that. He would have loved to be anywhere but here. Just showing up had given this arrogant tech addict a win, and this guy liked nothing better than wins. Which left him which the difficult task of trying to decide if leaving or staying would give this guy another win.

Or, which would be better for him. After all … what did Beaks want? Why would he be here? If he was plotting something, odds were good that just letting him talk would get it out into the air. Would that be worth dealing with a bit of Beaks to find that out? Maybe stop something before it started?

With a sigh that couldn’t even contain all of the disappointment he felt at doing this, Fenton sat back down. “All right,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Simple. I’m headhunting.”

For a brief moment -- blame too many supervillains -- Fenton thought he was talking like … literal headhunting. Like decapitating people. Luckily, before he could let his reaction to that get onto his face, the clinical part of his mind reminded him that this was a business meeting, and that in business parlance, headhunting had a whole other meaning.

“So, what, are you checking someone’s references?” Fenton asked, trying not-terribly-hard to cut the venom out of his voice. “Looking for recommendations? People who might be willing to build a body-bulking villain serum to-” His mind put two and two together and came up with an answer he did not like.”Are you trying to hire Dr. Gearloose away? Because whatever his reputation, he’s very loyal to the-”

“Gear wha?” Beaks finally looked up from his phone again, and he looked and sounded so puzzled that Fenton felt sure it had to be real. Any skill Beaks had at deception didn’t really center on fooling others with an act so much as just ignoring most people so you never had to worry about fooling them.

Despite that Dr. Gearloose not being the target was good news, Fenton found himself somewhat insulted on his mentor’s behalf. “He’s one of the greatest scientific minds on the planet,” Fenton said. “But you’d never get him away from his lab.”

“Ohhhhh! The guy whose stuff always goes evil!” Beaks said, looking pleased at having worked this out. “Yeah, no. Not interested. Scrooge can keep that stuff. Not good for the Waddle image when things suddenly go all…” He finished the thought by curling one hand into a claw-like shape and making a rasping sound that Fenton assumed was meant to personify “evil.”

But if he really, honestly didn’t care about Dr. Gearloose … “So why are you here?”

“For you-” something about the way he said it made Fenton think there was initially meant to be another word there -- his name probably. But Beaks had probably forgotten it. It was certainly on brand. “I said it in the letter, right?”

“The letter was vague,” Fenton pointed out. “And it’s not like the two of us are exactly on good terms.”

Again Beaks wave a hand, as though dismissing the entirely valid criticism out of hand. “Past is past,” he said. “Just let it go. I want to offer you a spot at my company and I don’t want any misunderstandings to get in the way of that.”

“Misunderstandings?” Fenton’s voice rose again, drawing more stares. Forcing his tone back to an annoyed murmur, he added, “Like when you put countless lives in danger just for your … your click count?”

“Clicks? What, no,” Beaks said, seeming scandalized. But Fenton counted in his head. Three. Two. One. “It’s likes, man. Engagement is key. Clicks. Who even clicks on something anymore…”

“Whatever,” Fenton said.

“But yeah, I meant misunderstandings like that,” Beaks added, almost as an afterthought. “We just need to move past that and see if we can come to a beneficial arrangement.”

The absolute nerve of this guy. “Listen,” he said, and this time it really was a bare whisper. “The suit will never go anywhere near you or your-”

“Wait, wait wait.” Beaks interrupted, shaking his head. “Not that. You. I got to hear some of what you showed off to Dee on that infiltration mission, some seriously interesting stuff in there. We could use someone with that sort of brainpower in our labs.”

That brought him up short. Him? The offer still wasn’t tempting, but that one reveal had changed the entire perception of their conversation. This was about him? About science?

And also about the info he learned from spying on what you thought was a date, the logical part of him mind reminded him unhelpfully.

“You want me to … invent things? For Waddle?” Fenton repeated, just to make sure. This felt wrong, like a trap. It seemed like something that might actually be part of a real business, not the sham that Beaks seemed to run.

Beaks was back on the phone again, and Fenton would have assumed he’d checked out entirely if he didn’t keep on answering questions and comments. “Well, yeah,” he said. “The awesome Waddle devices that trendy young influencers just have to have don’t invent themselves, you know. Slap our name and logo on them and boom! Instant must-have gear. Something for the shareholders to talk about. I gotta prove I can still bring in the cool -- and the cash, too.”

Ah. “So anything that the people in your lab, you take credit for?”

“Duh.” Beaks looked across the table at him, and for the first time in this entire conversion, it felt like he was actually being serious. “People don’t just want the goods, they want to feel like they’re buying into something larger than life. If I sold our phones under some other random name with a stodgy old buzzard as the CEO, you know what sort of market share that would get? None. Because people don’t just want a phone, they want a phone from me. It’s the same reason people react so strongly to you when the cops could usually do the exact same thing. Because they weren’t just saved, they were saved by a hero.”

He hadn’t thought about it that way before, and now, he sort of wished he never had. A hero? His mother was a hero. She’d saved as many people as he, probably more, and she also did the things needed to bring them to trial, to let justice do its work. All he could really do was stop what was right in front of him. Maybe Beaks was right about how it worked in business. But that was maybe the best reason of all to just stop listening to the idiocy that came out of his mouth. All it did was validate Beaks’ own sense of importance.

He stood. Started to leave. “Thanks, but I’ve got to go.”

A chair scraped. “Hey!” Beaks’ indignant voice followed him.

He felt the hand on his shoulder, trying to tighten with some degree of command or control, but it felt laughable. Weak. And then Beaks said, “Hey, amigo, hold on, tell me what the problem is. We can work something out.”

Whirling, Fenton said, “If I was interested, what would the starting pay be?”

Except he said it in Spanish. Not as fluid as his mother’s but still far more dancing than that one thudding word when Beaks has uttered it.

He expected the confusion -- the tech CEO wasn’t fooling anyone into thinking he could actually speak another language. But he got the other thing he expected to see almost immediately. The narrowing of the eyes. The darkening of the expression, as anger took the edge off Beaks’ carefree attitude. He’d been asked a question, he didn’t understand the question, and he thought not being able to answer it made him look foolish. That more than anything else told him all he needed to know.

“All right. Not interested, thank you.”

He didn’t even wait around to see if Beaks reacted to that. He just walked away.

[tortuga-aak]

This cardiologist is betting that his lab-grown meat startup can solve the global food crisis

Memphis Meats/Facebook

Memphis Meats founder Uma Valeti sought out to find an alternative to the meat industry after discovering the brutality and unsanitary conditions behind it.

Valeti, a doctor, teamed up with a molecular biologist, Eric Schulze, to create meat products in a petri dish.

The startup, backed by Bill Gates and Richard Branson, has already cultivated and harvested edible beef, chicken, and duck in its bioreactors.

Memphis Meats is working towards making its homegrown meat more affordable for mass market — and also more appetizing.

  Uma Valeti remembers the first time he really thought about where meat comes from.

A cardiologist turned founder, Valeti grew up in Vijayawada, India, where his father was a veterinarian and his mother taught physics. When he was 12, he attended a neighbor's birthday party.

In the front yard, people danced and feasted on chicken tandoori and curried goat. Valeti wandered around to the back of the house, where cooks were hard at work decapitating and gutting animal after animal to keep the loaded platters coming. "It was like, birthday, death day," he says. "It didn't make sense."

Valeti remained a carnivore for more than a decade, until after he had moved to the U.S. for his medical residency. But in time, he found himself increasingly disturbed by food-borne illness. He was especially grossed out by the contamination that happens in slaughterhouses when animal feces get mixed in with meat. "I loved eating meat, but I didn't like the way it was being produced," he says. "I thought, there has to be a better way."

In a tiny R&D suite in a nondescript office building in the unglamorous Silicon Valley exurb of San Leandro, a lanky, red-haired molecular biologist named Eric Schulze is fiddling with a microscope, and I'm about to get a look at that better way. Like the specimen he'll show me, Schulze is something of a hybrid.

Memphis Meats/FacebokFormerly a Food and Drug Administration regulator, he's now an educator, TV host, and senior scientist at Memphis Meats, the company that Valeti founded in 2016 and whose laboratory he is showing me. Lining one wall is a HEPA-filtered tissue cabinet, to which someone has affixed a "Chicken Crossing" sign, and a meat freezer labeled "Angus." Along the opposite wall is an incubator dialed to 106 degrees Fahrenheit, the body temperature of Anas platyrhynchos domesticus—the domestic duck.

Schulze plucks a petri dish from the incubator, positions it under the microscope, and then invites me to look into the twin eyepieces. "Do you see those long, skinny things? Those are muscle-forming cells," he says. "These are from a duck that's off living its life somewhere." The cells look like strands of translucent spaghetti, with bright dots—nuclei, Schulze says—sprinkled here and there.

He removes that petri dish and inserts another. In it, scattered among the spaghetti strands, are shorter, fatter tubes, like gummy worms. Those, he explains, are mature muscle cells. Over the next few days, they'll join together in long chains, end to end, and become multicellular myotubes. These chains will form swirls and whorls until they look like the sky in Van Gogh's Starry Night. Also, Schulze casually notes, "they'll start spontaneously contracting."

Wait. Contracting? As in ... flexing?

"This is all living tissue. So, yes," Schulze says.

The idea of a dish full of duck mince suddenly beginning to twitch and squirm makes me shake my head. What's making duck bits move if not a brain and nerves? Schulze is used to this reaction. "For the past 12,000 years, we've assumed that when I say the word 'meat,' you think 'animal,' " he says. "Those two ideas are concatenated. We've had to decouple them."

Meat without animals. It's not a new notion. In a 1932 essay predicting sundry future trends, Winston 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."

The basic science to grow meat in a lab has existed for more than 20 years, but no one has come close to making cultured meat anywhere near as delicious or as affordable as the real thing. But sometime in the next few years, someone will succeed in doing just that, tapping into a global market that's already worth trillions of dollars and expected to double in size in the next three decades. Despite a bevy of well-funded competitors, no one is better positioned than Memphis Meats to get there first.

Operating with a team of just 10 (though it's expected to grow to 40 in a matter of months), the startup has already cultivated and harvested edible beef, chicken, and duck in its bioreactors, a feat no one else has achieved. Even allowing for the vagaries of regulation—it's not clear which federal agency will oversee a foodstuff that's real meat but not from animals—the company expects to have a product in stores by 2021.

"They're the leader in clean meat. There's no one else that far along," says venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, whose firm led Memphis Meats' recent $17 million Series A.

Before he met Valeti in 2016, Jurvetson spent almost five years researching lab-grown meat and meat alternatives, believing the market was set to explode. "They're the only one that convinced me they can get to a price point and a scale that would make a difference in the industry," he says.

Memphis Meats/FacebookGoing in with Jurvetson was a lineup of household-name investors that includes Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Jack Welch; their money will be used to build up Memphis Meats' already formidable trove of intellectual property and to fine-tune the process of combining cells to produce the tastiest steaks and patties, and drive down the cost. The infusion of prestige also boosts competitors. Memphis Meats' lineup of backers "is enormous, especially for a small company like mine," says Mike Selden, CEO of lab-grown fish-filet startup Finless Foods. "When investors tell me, 'Great idea, but we can't really vet the technology,' I can say, 'Richard Branson and Bill Gates think it's great.' "

The business case for clean meat, as the fledgling industry's progenitors prefer to call it, could hardly be plainer. As emerging middle classes in places like China and India adopt Western-style diets, global consumption of animal protein skyrockets. (Memphis Meats is working on duck because it's so popular in China, which consumes more of it than the rest of the world combined.) But the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 90 percent of the world's fish stocks are now fully exploited or dangerously overfished. More than 25 percent of Earth's available landmass and fresh water is used for raising livestock. Only one of every 25 calories a cow ingests becomes edible beef. And meat processors often must pay disposal companies to haul away their inedible tonnage—hooves, beaks, fur, cartilage.

But it's not just the financial opportunity that has the likes of Gates and Branson so excited: Meat is an ongoing environmental and public-health catastrophe. Livestock account for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas production—more than all transportation combined. As meat demand soars, virgin rainforest gets razed to grow feed, and freshwater sources are diverted from drought-prone regions. Overcrowded pig and poultry farms are reservoirs for global pandemics; animals raised in them are pumped full of anti­biotics, spurring the rise of drug-resistant superbugs.

A subset of affluent consumers is willing to pay higher prices for free-range beef, cage-free eggs, and other animal products marketed as sustainably produced and cruelty-free, but that's a tiny slice of the market. With the FAO expecting meat consumption to nearly double by 2050, only a radical break with the past will prevent doubling down on practices such as high-density feedlots and vertical chicken farms.

The idea of such a radical break attracted Branson, who stopped eating beef in 2014 out of concern over deforestation and slaughterhouse practices. "I believe that in 30 years or so," he wrote in a blog post, "we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based."

Big as it would be if Branson's prediction comes true, those behind Memphis Meats believe they're part of something even larger. Already, so-called cellular agriculture produces everything from leather and vaccines to perfume and building materials. Within a few years, proponents say, it could eliminate organ donation, oil drilling, and logging. The possibilities are as broad as life itself. "Human civilization was largely enabled by the domestication of livestock," says Nicholas Genovese, Valeti's co-founder. "If we can master producing meat without livestock, it's really going to be the second domestication."

Valeti's meat-without-animals epiphany came soon after his cardiology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in 2005. In a cutting-edge clinical trial, he used stem cells to repair damage caused by cardiac arrest. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that can become different types of tissue as they mature; injected into a heart that's been ravaged by a coronary, they can form healthy new muscle to replace what has been lost. If stem cells could be cultivated into heart muscle, he thought, why couldn't they be manipulated into making a drumstick or a porterhouse? Why not grow just the porterhouse and skip the rest of the cow? And while you're at it, why not grow a steak with a healthier nutritional profile?

A bit of research showed Valeti that he was far from the first to have the idea—but also convinced him that what hadn't been feasible was quickly becoming so. Rapid DNA sequencing was making it radically faster and cheaper to, say, program yeast cells to manufacture proteins. Advances in data science made it possible to tease out relationships in huge volumes of experimental data. Meanwhile, the growing high-end market for sustainable and humanely raised foods pointed to a path for a product that was bound to be expensive in its earliest incarnations.

"If I continued as a cardiologist, maybe I would save 2,000 or 3,000 lives over the next 30 years," Valeti says. "But if I focus on this, I have the potential to save billions of human lives and trillions of animal lives." His ambitions got a major boost in 2014, when a friend from New Harvest, a nonprofit institute that supports work in cellular agriculture, offered to introduce him to Genovese, a stem cell biologist. Like Valeti, Genovese had become vegetarian. As a high school student, Genovese was a member of his local 4-H Poultry Club, competing to raise the largest chickens. "Everyone would get their baby chicks on the same day. A few months later, there's a weigh-in, and they give out trophies," he recalls. "As a teenager, it's very exciting." It was also sobering. Those chickens, he says, "looked up to you for their feed, and looked up to you to protect them. You lock them up at night so the foxes don't get them. But at the end, you send them to their demise."

Getty Images/William Thomas CainHe earned degrees in cell biology and tissue engineering and eventually got a job in a lab run by Vladimir Mironov, who was investigating the use of bioprinting—3-D printing using living cells—to generate replacement organs. In 2010, Genovese accepted a three-year fellowship from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the controversy-courting animal welfare nonprofit, to conduct research into cultured meat. The PETA connection also made him a target for protest from local hog farmers, who objected to his presence after he moved to the University of Missouri. After learning about Valeti's work, Genovese quickly nabbed a position in his new lab at the University of Minnesota.

By 2015, with Genovese on board, Valeti realized it was time to ditch academia. Another New Harvest contact suggested he reach out to IndieBio, the life-sciences-oriented tech accelerator. He did, and within an hour he was on the phone with its director, Ryan Bethencourt.

Bethencourt, a vegan, was well versed in the challenges and promise of cultured meat. He had previously tried to persuade Mark Post, a Dutch researcher who'd produced the first full hamburger patty out of lab-grown beef, to bring his work to IndieBio. (Post demurred but subsequently launched MosaMeat, backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.) "I said to Uma, this is an opportunity to become a leader in this space and transform food as we know it," Bethencourt recalls. IndieBio became the first outside investor in Valeti and Genovese's startup, initially dubbed Crevi Foods, after the Latin word for "origin." (The founders quickly realized that it was a bit too clever. "Nobody understood it," Valeti says.)

In September 2015, the two men moved to the Bay Area and started culturing cow muscle and connective tissue cells. (We think of meat as synonymous with muscle, but much of meat's flavor and mouthfeel comes from the breakdown of collagen, a component of skin, ligaments, and fascia. It's necessary to blend different types of cells to make lab meat that tastes like the real thing.)

By January, they had enough to make their first tiny meatball. "I'll never forget when we first tasted what we had harvested," says Valeti. "It just immediately brought back all the memories you get when you eat meat." It had been 20 years since Valeti had, but it nonetheless confirmed that, as far as they still had to go, they'd produced, on the most fundamental level, meat.

That helped validate the idea of trying to grow meat in the first place. All the aims of Memphis Meats and its ilk—­making food healthier, more humane, and more ecofriendly—could arguably be better served by leading consumers to plant-based alternatives. Such options are getting more sophisticated: Another Silicon Valley startup, Impossible Foods, has raised almost $300 million for a veggie burger that browns like ground beef and even "bleeds" when served rare, thanks to the presence of heme, a com­ponent of the blood molecule hemoglobin, which is also found in plants. The Impossible burger mimics the taste of a haute fast-food patty, though its consistency is not quite there—the outside caramelizes, but the interior is a tad puddingy. (Gates has put money into Impossible, as well as in its competitor, Beyond Meat.)

But the lab-grown-meat crowd believes plants will never be the whole answer. Meat is simply too complex and culturally ingrained. "Humans evolved over thousands of years eating meat," says Valeti. A high-tech veggie burger might be able to replace ground chuck, but that's one narrow application. Lab meat, he says, "because it's meat, can be cooked any way meat is cooked. People can buy it off the shelf, take it home, and cook it in the ways they've known for centuries."

Those arguments led Hampton Creek, one of the best-known and best-funded plant-based food startups, to expand into clean meat. For its first four years, Hampton Creek focused on using plant proteins to replace eggs in products like mayonnaise and cookie dough. But CEO Josh Tetrick came to appreciate consumers' attachment to what they know. "A big limiting step to plant-based meat is culture. My family wouldn't go to Walmart and buy something that says 'plant-based hamburger,' " says Tetrick, who grew up in Alabama.

Tetrick's pivot toward clean meat happened amid a conflict with the company's board of directors, which led to all five outside directors resigning. That followed a long series of company stumbles, including an attempted coup by top executives who tried to go behind Tetrick's back to the board and were promptly shown the door; accusations of a large-scale buyback program to boost sales, which drew scrutiny from the Justice Department; and the loss of one of its biggest distributors—Target.

Skeptics wonder if the company's surprise June announcement that it will have one or more cultivated-poultry products in stores by the end of 2018 was a diversionary tactic. The timeline seems optimistic. Even if the kinks can be worked out that quickly, there's no guarantee regulators will sign off in time. Still, Hampton Creek has raised more than $200 million in venture capital and has a team of 60 working on R&D, including top cell biologists from academia and industry.

In September, to punctuate an announcement that it had secured patents around its clean-meat processes, Tetrick tweeted a video of what looks like a burger sizzling in a skillet; a spokesman declined to say whether the video shows the company's first clean beef. A knowledgeable industry insider says Hampton Creek's progress and dysfunctions are real. "I think the only thing that will prevent Hampton Creek from being first to market with this is the company exploding," says the source. (Asked for a response to this statement, Hampton Creek declined to comment.)

For Memphis Meats, with its significant head start and singular focus, the path to success is straightforward. It needs to make its meats more appetizing and much cheaper. One morning this summer, Valeti assembled his full team to talk about how far they had come and how far they still had to go. A few weeks earlier, Memphis Meats had held its first-ever tasting for outsiders, inviting more than 25 people to sample fried chicken and duck à l'orange.

The event was deemed a success.

"They really nailed the texture and mouthfeel," one guest, sustainable food advocate Emily Byrd, said. But it was expensive. Growing that "poultry" cost about $9,000 per pound. At his company meeting, Valeti revealed that the most recent harvest, in May, had been considerably cheaper, with the meat costing $3,800 per pound. "I want it to keep going down by a thousand dollars a month," said Valeti. "Our goal is to get to cost parity, and then beat commercial meat."

Memphis Meats/FacebookThat remains a distant goal. But theoretically, cultivating meat should have high startup costs but low operational costs: Given the right conditions, living cells divide on their own. The major factor governing costs is the nutrient-rich medium in which those cells grow. All the companies that have successfully grown meat have relied on fetal bovine serum, which is extracted from cow fetuses, as a key medium component.

But FBS is expensive, and significantly weakens claims cultivated-meat companies can make about vegan or cruelty-free products. Hampton Creek says it has grown and harvested chicken without FBS, although it has been tightlipped about its methods. Memphis Meats acknowledges it used FBS to start its cell lines but says, "We have validated a production method that does not require the use of any serum, and we are developing additional methods as we speak."

Tetrick likens the expense of medium—it's called "feed" at Memphis Meats—to the need electric-car makers have to develop better batteries. "If we figure out how to surmount that limiting step," he says, "suddenly all the economics start looking better."

Electric cars are an apt metaphor, because whenever clean meat does hit supermarkets, it will almost certainly be pricier than conventional meat. Memphis Meats and its competitors will likely spend a few years courting consumers who buy wild-caught Atlantic salmon and grassfed sirloin at Whole Foods. "They're going to have to somehow position it as something worth paying more for," says Patty Johnson, an analyst who covers the meat industry for Mintel Group.

One possibility, she says: Like Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats could persuade influential chefs to feature its wares on their menus. Another would be genetically engineering nutritional profiles so the company could tout increased health benefits—adding, say, omega-3 fatty acids to beef to make it as healthy as salmon.

Valeti is careful to avoid sounding as if he wanted to put Big Meat out of business. He argues that the big meat processors will be keen on clean technology, whether as licensees, customers, investors, or acquirers. (Agribusiness giant Cargill joined Gates and Branson in Memphis Meats' Series A; Tyson Foods has a venture fund that invests in similar technologies.) Cows and pigs aren't getting any cheaper to raise or slaughter, but if lab meat follows the course of other early-stage technologies, it can continue to get more inexpensive for years to come. "It's not crazy to think you might one day be able to brew meat at $2 per pound, $1 per pound," says Bethencourt. "At that point, we can replace pretty much all industrial meat. In 20 years, I think people will look at growing and killing an animal as bizarre."

And while Missouri's pig farmers may see their doom in a world of meat without animals, companies that buy meat from farmers view it very differently, explains Jurvetson. When an outbreak of avian flu or mad cow strikes, "if you're in their industry, it's a very scary world," he says.

Valeti won't mince words, either. "The status quo in animal agriculture is not OK. That status quo is going to kill a lot of people." All the more reason to bring on the second domestication.

NOW WATCH: A running coach explains the 2 most important activities runners should do to avoid knee pain

from Feedburner http://ift.tt/2iIjLLV