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The Future of Meat (Ep. 367)

Over 40 percent of the land in the contiguous U.S. is used for cow farming. Can scientists build a more sustainable burger? (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)

Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Let’s begin with a few basic facts. Fact No. 1: a lot of people, all over the world, really like to eat meat — especially beef, pork, and chicken.

Jayson LUSK: If you add them all together, we’re actually higher than we’ve been in recent history.

That’s Jayson Lusk.

LUSK: I’m a professor and head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University. I study what we eat and why we eat it.

DUBNER: In terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the U.S., how do we rank worldwide?

LUSK: We’re the king of meat eaters. So, compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat per capita.

DUBNER: Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

LUSK: Yes, and part of that difference is income-based. So, if you took Argentina, Brazil, and adjusted for income, they would probably be consuming more than us, but we happen to be richer, so we eat a little more.

The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year. That’s an average. So, let’s say you’re a meat eater and someone in your family is vegetarian: you might be putting away 400 pounds a year. But, in America at least, there aren’t that many vegetarians.

LUSK: I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

DUBNER: Really? Why?

LUSK: I’ve been doing a survey of U.S. food consumers every month for about five years, and one of the questions I ask is, “Are you a vegan or a vegetarian?” So, over five years’ time and about 1,000 people a month, I’ve got about 60,000 observations.

DUBNER: Wow. And is this a nationwide data survey?

LUSK: It is. Representative in terms of age and income and education. I’d say on average, you’re looking at about three to five percent of people say “yes” to that question. I’d say there’s a very slight uptick over the last five years.

So, again, a lot of meat-eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat? Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries. And, increasingly, China.

LUSK: One of the things we know is that when consumers get a little more income in their pocket, one of the first things they do is want to add high-value proteins to their diets.

DUBNER: What is the relationship generally between G.D.P. and meat consumption?

LUSK: Positive, although sort of diminishing returns, so as you get to really high income levels, it might even tail off a little bit. But certainly at the lower end of that spectrum, as a country grows and adds more G.D.P., you start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

Meat consumption is of course driven by social and religious factors as well; by health concerns, and animal welfare: not everyone agrees that humans should be eating animals at all. That said, we should probably assume that the demand for meat will continue to rise as more of the world keeps getting richer. How’s the supply side doing with this increased demand? Quite well. The meat industry is massive and complicated — and often heavily subsidized. But, long story short, if you go by the availability of meat and especially what consumers pay, this is an economic success story.

LUSK: So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to 100 years. And the reason is that we have become so much more productive at producing meat. If you look at most of the statistics, like the amount of pork produced per sow. And we’ve taken out a lot of the seasonal variation that we used to see, as these animals have been brought indoors. And you look at poultry production, broiler production: the amount of meat that’s produced per broiler has risen dramatically — almost doubled, say — over the last 50 to 100 years, while also consuming slightly less feed.

That’s due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. The same goes for beef production.

LUSK: We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

As you can imagine, people concerned with animal welfare may not celebrate these efficiency improvements. And then there’s the argument that, despite these efficiency improvements, turning animals into food is wildly inefficient.

Pat BROWN: Because the cow didn’t evolve to be meat. That’s the thing.

Pat Brown is a long-time Stanford biomedical researcher who’s done groundbreaking work in genetics.

BROWN: The cow evolved to be a cow and make more cows and not to be eaten by humans. And it’s not very good at making meat.

Meaning: it takes an enormous amount of food and water and other resources to turn a cow or a pig into dinner — much more than plant-based foods. And as Pat Brown sees it, that is not even the worst of it.

BROWN: The most environmentally destructive technology on earth: using animals in food production. Nothing else even comes close.

Not everyone agrees that meat production is the environment’s biggest enemy. What’s not in dispute is that global demand for meat is high and rising. And that the production of meat is resource-intensive and, at the very least, an environmental challenge, with implications for climate change. Pat Brown thinks he has a solution to these problems. He’s started a company—

BROWN: —a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas:

Kelly FOGARTY: We want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat, and where meat meets the future.

* * *

What determines which food you put in your mouth every day? There are plainly a lot of factors: personal preference, tradition, geography, on and on.

LUSK: So, take something like horse consumption. It’s almost unheard of to even think about consuming a horse in the United States.

Jayson Lusk again, the agricultural economist.

LUSK: Whereas, you go to Belgium or France, it would be a commonly consumed dish.

But there’s another big factor that determines who eats what: technology. Technology related to how food is grown, preserved, transported. But also: technology that isn’t even related to the food itself. Consider the case of mutton. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep. The meat of a young sheep is called lamb. I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last six months, probably the last six years. Maybe never. But if we were talking 100 years ago? Different story.

LUSK: It’s certainly the case that back in the 1920’s and 30’s that mutton was a much more commonly consumed product.

Mutton was a staple of the American diet; one of the standard items shipped to soldiers during World War II was canned mutton. But shortly after the war, mutton started to disappear. What happened?

LUSK: A sheep is not just meat. These are multi-product species and they’re valuable not just for their meat but for their wool.

Oh yeah, wool. And unlike leather, which can be harvested only once from an animal, you can shear wool from one sheep many times, over many years.

LUSK: So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of the underlying animal.

And what might affect the demand for wool? How about synthetic substitutes? Nylon, for instance, was created by DuPont in 1935, and became available to the public in 1940. A year later, polyester was invented.

LUSK: So, you know, any time you had new clothing technologies come along, that’s going to affect the underlying demand for sheep and make them less valuable than they would have been otherwise.

So an increase in synthetic fabrics led to a shrinking demand for wool — which meant that all those sheep that had been kept around for shearing no longer needed to be kept around. Also, wool subsidies were repealed. And America’s sheep flock drastically shrank: from a high of 56 million in 1942 to barely 5 million today.

LUSK: It is amazing. I’ve worked at several agricultural universities across the U.S. now, and often the largest sheep herds in those states are at the university research farms.

And fewer sheep meant less mutton for dinner. Is it possible Americans would have stopped eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely: if you ask a room full of meat-eaters to name their favorite meat, I doubt one of them will say “mutton.” Still, this is just one example of how technology can have a big effect on the meat we eat. And if you talk to certain people, it’s easy to believe that we’re on the verge of a similar but much larger technological shift.

BROWN: My name is Pat Brown. I’m currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., as well as Paris and Taipei — his father worked for the C.I.A. He studied to be a pediatrician and in fact completed his medical residency, but he switched to biochemistry research.

BROWN: I had the best job in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things and follow my curiosity.

Brown did this for many years and was considered a world-class researcher. One of his breakthroughs was a new tool for genetic mapping; it’s called the D.N.A. microarray—

BROWN: —that lets you read all the words that the cell is using and effectively kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how the genome writes the life story of a cell, or something like that. It also has practical applications, because — what it’s doing, in a sort of a deterministic way, specifies the potential of that cell, or if it’s a cancer cell.

Some people think the DNA microarray will win Pat Brown a Nobel Prize. When I bring this up, he just shakes his head and smiles. It’s clear that his research was a deep passion.

BROWN: For me, this was the dream job, it was like in the Renaissance, having the Medicis as patrons or something like that.

But after many years, Brown wanted a change. He was in his mid-50’s; he took a sabbatical to figure out his next move.

BROWN: It started out with stepping back from the work I was doing and asking myself, “What’s the most important thing I could do? What could I do that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?” And looking at what are the biggest unsolved problems in the world? I came relatively quickly to the conclusion that the use of animals as a food-production technology, is by far. And I could give you endless reasons why that’s true, but it is absolutely true. By far the most environmentally destructive thing that humans do.

There is indeed a great deal of evidence for this argument across the entire environmental spectrum. The agricultural historian James McWilliams, in a book called Just Food, argues that “every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture … ends up having its deepest roots in meat production: monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rain-forest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming — all these problems would be considerably less severe” if people ate meat “rarely, if ever.”

LUSK: You know, there’s no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences. To suggest that it’s the most damaging environmental thing we do is, I think, a pretty extreme overstatement.

But what about the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with raising meat — especially in the U.S., which is the world’s largest beef producer?

LUSK: Our own E.P.A. — Environmental Protection Agency — suggests that all of livestock contributes about 3 percent of our total greenhouse-gas emissions. So, I mean, 3 percent is not nothing, but it’s not the major contributor that we see. That number, I should say, is much higher in many other parts of the world. So the carbon impacts per pound produced are so much smaller here than a lot of the world that when you tell people, “the way to reduce carbon emissions is to intensify animal production,” that’s not a story a lot of people like to hear.

DUBNER: Because why not, it sounds like it’s against animal welfare?

LUSK: Well, two reasons: Exactly, one is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you’re talking about broiler chickens, or hogs — less so about cattle — and the other one is, there are concerns about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place you can get all this waste in a location, that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don’t have some significant environmental problems.

DUBNER: So, the E.P.A. number, livestock contributing three percent, does that include the entire production chain, though? Because, some of the numbers that I see from environmental activists is much, much higher than that.

LUSK: The U.N. estimate that you often hear from — originally was created in this report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” is something around 19 percent. But that 19 percent, roughly, number, is a global number. Actually, there was a study that came out pointing out some flaws in that, so they reduced it somewhat.

In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production.

LUSK: Over the last 5–10 years, there’s been a lot of negative publicity — stories about environmental impacts, about carbon emissions, about animal welfare. And if you just look at the news stories, you would think, “Boy, people must be really cutting back, given the sort of frightful stories that you see on the front pages of the newspapers.” But if you look at the data itself, demand looks fairly stable. And that suggests to me it’s hard to change people’s preference on this.

There’s something about meat consumption. Some people would argue that we’re evolved to like meat, that it’s a protein-, vitamin-packed, tasty punch that we’ve grown to enjoy as a species. There are some people that even argue that it’s one of the reasons we became as smart as we did, the vitamins and nutrients that were in that meat allowed our brains to develop in certain ways that it might have not otherwise.

Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number-one scientific problem to solve was replacing animals as food.

BROWN: And it’s a problem that nobody was working on in any serious way. Because everybody recognized that most people in the world, including most environmental scientists and people who care about this stuff, love the foods we get from animals so much that they can’t imagine giving those up.

Brown himself was a longtime vegan.

BROWN: I haven’t eaten meat for decades, and that’s just a personal choice that I made long before I realized the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons. And it wasn’t something that I felt like I was in a position to tell other people to do. And I still don’t feel like there’s any value in doing that.

Brown makes an interesting point here. Many of us, when we feel strongly about something — an environmental issue or a social or economic issue — we’re inclined to put forth a moral argument. A moral argument would appear to be persuasive evidence of the highest order: you should do this thing because it’s the right thing to do. But there’s a ton of research showing that moral arguments are generally ineffective; people may smile at you, and nod; but they won’t change their behavior. That’s what Brown realized about meat.

BROWN: The basic problem is that people are not going to stop wanting these foods. And the only way we’re going to solve it is not by asking them to meet you halfway and give them a substandard product that doesn’t deliver what they know they want from meat or fish or anything like that. The only way to do it is, you have to say, “We’re going to do the much harder thing,” which is we’re going to figure out how to make meat that’s not just as delicious as the meat we get from animals, it’s more delicious and better nutritionally and more affordable and so forth.

In other words: a marginal improvement on the standard veggie burger would not do.

BROWN: It’s been tried. It just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of effort.

So Brown start fooling around in his lab.

BROWN: Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

BROWN: I felt like, okay, there’s a bunch of things I thought could be useful, and then I felt like I could just go in with a little bit more confidence to talk to the investors.

“The investors” meaning venture capitalists. Remember, Brown’s at Stanford, which is next door to the biggest pile of venture capital in the history of the world.

BROWN: And basically my pitch them was very naive from a fundraising standpoint, in the sense that basically I mostly just told them about how there’s this absolutely critical environmental disaster that needs to be solved and—

DUBNER: And they’re probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture, or—

BROWN: Yeah, that’s the thing. And most people still are. So I just told these guys, “Look, this is an environmental disaster. No one’s doing anything about it. I’m going to solve it for you.”

So how does the almost-pediatrician-who-became-a-freewheeling-biochemist build a better meat from the ground up? That amazing story after the break:

BROWN: Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.

* * *

It’s estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture comes from cows.

LUSK: And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

The Purdue economist Jayson Lusk again.

LUSK: Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back, as a lot of people think. And as a consequence — we look at carbon consequences — it’s mainly beef that people focus on, not pork or chicken, because they don’t have the same kind of digestive systems.

There has been progress in this area. For instance, it turns out that adding seaweed to cattle feed drastically reduces their methane output. But the scientist Pat Brown is looking for a much bigger change to the animal-agriculture industry.

BROWN: If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now — which I would do, if I could, and it would be a great thing for the world.

It is very unlikely to disappear any time soon; it is a trillion-dollar global industry, supported in many places by government subsidies, selling a product that billions of people consume once, twice, even three times a day. Pat Brown’s desire would seem to be an impossible one; the company he founded is called Impossible Foods. It’s essentially a tech startup, and it’s raised nearly $400 million to date in venture capital.

BROWN: So, we’ve only been in existence for about seven years and we have about 300 people. We started by basically building a team of some of the best scientists in the world to study how meat works, basically. And by that, I mean to really understand at a basic level the way, in my previous life, when I was a biomedical scientist, we might be studying how, you know, a normal cell of this particular kind becomes a cancer cell, understanding the basic biochemical mechanisms.

In this case, what we wanted to understand was: what are the basic biochemical mechanisms that account for the unique flavor chemistry and the flavor behavior and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities that consumers value in meat? And we spent about 2.5 years just doing basic research, trying to answer that question, before we really started working on a product. And then decided for strategic reasons that our first product would be raw ground beef made entirely from plants.

DUBNER: Because burger is what people want?

BROWN: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I think it was a good strategic choice: the largest single category of meat in the U.S., it’s probably the most iconic kind of meat in the U.S., it seemed like the ideal vehicle for communicating to consumers that delicious meat doesn’t have to come from animals, because it’s sort of the uber-meat for a lot of people.

DUBNER: Uber, lower-case “u.”

BROWN: With a lower-case, yes.

DUBNER: People are not hailing burgers, riding them around?

BROWN: No, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the animal agriculture industry. So, from an impact standpoint, it made sense as a choice.

So Pat Brown set about repurposing the scientific wisdom he’d accrued over a long, fruitful career in biomedicine. A career that may improve the health and well-being of countless millions. And now he got to work on a truly earth-shaking project: building a better burger. A burger that doesn’t come from a cow. An Impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an Impossible burger?

BROWN: That’s an interesting aspect about the science, which is that we didn’t look for, “What are the precisely specific choices of ingredients that would work?” We studied, “What are the biochemical properties we need from the set of ingredients?” And then we did a survey of things available from the plant world that matched those biophysical properties of which there were choices.

So what are the main components of this burger?

BROWN: I can tell you what it’s made of right now. What it’s made of right now is different from how it was made two years ago, and that was different from how it was made two and half years ago and the next version we’re going to launch is a quite different set of ingredients.

We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients at the time included:

BROWN: A protein from wheat; a protein from potatoes — not a starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, it’s a byproduct of starch production. Coconut oil is the major fat source. And then we have a bunch of other small molecules, but they’re all familiar things: amino acids, vitamins, sugars. Nutrients.

But all these ingredients did not make Pat Brown’s plant-based hamburger meat taste or act or look like hamburger meat. It was still missing a critical component. A component called heme.

BROWN: Heme is found in essentially every living thing and heme in plants and human animals is the exact same molecule, okay? It’s just one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental molecules in life on Earth, period. The system that burns calories to produce energy uses heme as an essential component, and it’s what carries oxygen in your blood. And it’s what makes your blood red.

And none of this we discovered — this has been known for a long time and — so animals have a lot more heme than plants. And it’s that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavors of meat that you would recognize something as meat. It’s the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique taste of meat and fish.

DUBNER: Is it involved in texture and mouthfeel and all that as well, or just taste?

BROWN: Just taste. Texture and mouthfeel are really important and there’s a whole other set of research around that. Super important — it kind of gets short shrift, because people think of the flavor as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat. But you have to get that other stuff right, too.

Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple years of research and experimentation, were getting a lot of that stuff right. But without heme — a lot of heme — their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

BROWN: So there is one component of a certain kind of plant that has a high concentration of heme, and that is in plants that fix nitrogen, that take nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer. They have a structure called the root nodule, where the nitrogen fixation takes place and for reasons that are too complicated to explain right now they, that has a high concentration of heme and I just happened to know this from way back.

And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants:

BROWN: They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak, okay? And I did a calculation about the concentration of that stuff — soy leghemoglobin is the protein, which is virtually identical to the heme protein in muscle tissue, which is called myoglobin — that there was enough leghemoglobin in the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the meat consumed in the U.S. Okay? So, I thought, “Genius, okay. We’ll just go out and harvest all these root nodules from the U.S. soybean crop and we’ll get this stuff practically for free.” Well, so I raised money for the company and we spent half the money trying to figure out how to harvest these root nodules from soybean plants, only basically to finally convince ourselves it was a terrible idea.

But if you’re a veteran scientist like Brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

BROWN: You know you’re going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things and a lot of them are going to fail. And if you don’t have a high tolerance for that and realize that basically, the way you do really really important, cool stuff is by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself for the failures, but just celebrating the successes, you know, you’re not going to accomplish as much.

And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop wasn’t a complete failure.

BROWN: I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that it really was a magic ingredient for flavor. But then we had to start all over, and then what we did was: we said, ”Okay, we’re going to have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. Okay”? And since now we weren’t bound by any natural source, we looked at three dozen different heme proteins, everything from, you know, paramecium to barley to Hell’s Gate bacteria, which is like this —

DUBNER: That’s a plant? Hell’s Gate?

BROWN: It’s a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survive with temperatures above the boiling point of water that we mostly just looked at for fun, but funny thing about that, the reason we rejected it is that it’s so heat-stable that you can cook a burger to cooking temperature and it still stays bright red, because it doesn’t unfold. But anyway — and then we pick the best one, which turned out to be, just coincidentally, soy leghemoglobin, which is the one we were going after—

DUBNER: So your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

BROWN: It wasn’t really a brilliant idea, it accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

Through the magic of modern plant engineering, Pat Brown’s team began creating massive stocks of heme. And that heme would help catapult the Impossible burger well beyond the realm of the standard veggie burger — the mostly unloved veggie burger, we should say. The Impossible Burger looks like hamburger meat — when it’s raw and when it’s cooked. It behaves like hamburger meat. Most important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

Alison CRAIGLOW: I would like the American with an Impossible Burger.

WAITER: And how would you like that cooked?

CRAIGLOW: Oh, I didn’t realize — I’ll have it medium … medium. Is it pink in the middle when it’s … it is?

The Freakonomics Radio team recently ate some Impossible burgers in a restaurant near Times Square.

Zack LAPINSKI: I mean, I actually can’t taste the diff —

CRAIGLOW: It tastes like a burger

Ryan KELLY: Good day for the Impossible Burger

Greg RIPPIN: Yeah, approved by Freakonomics.

Their meal happened to coincide with the release of Impossible Burger 2.0 — an updated recipe that uses a soy protein instead of a wheat protein and has a few more tweaks: less salt, sunflower oil to cut the coconut oil, and no more xanthan gum and konjac gum. In my own tasting experience: Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good but a little slushy; 2.0 was burger-tastic.

These are of course our subjective observations. Here’s some actual evidence: Impossible Burgers are already being served in roughly 5,000 locations, primarily in the U.S. but also Hong Kong and Macau. These include very high-end restaurants in New York and California as well as fast-food chains like Umami Burger and even White Castle. This year, Impossible plans to start selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

BROWN: We’ve grown in terms of our sales and revenue about 30-fold in the past year. And our goal is to completely replace animal as a food technology by 2035. That means we have to approximately double in size and impact every year for the next 18 years.

DUBNER: Are we to understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

BROWN: Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology platform and sort of the know-how about how meat works in general; we were working on understanding dairy products and cheeses and stuff like that. And then we decided, okay, we have to pick one product to launch with, and then we have to, from a commercialization standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

DUBNER: As the scientist, or as a scientist, were you reluctant to kind of narrow yourself for that commercial interest, or did you appreciate that this is the way in this world things actually happen?

BROWN: Both. I mean, let’s put it this way: I would like to be able to pursue all these things in parallel, and if I had the resources I would. But if we launched another product right now, we’d just be competing against ourselves for resources for commercialization, so just doesn’t make any sense.

We put out an episode not long ago called “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet.” It featured the science journalist Charles Mann.

MANN: How are we going to deal with climate change? There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways, that represent, if you like, poles on a continuum. And they’ve been fighting with each other for decades.

The two poles are represented by what Mann calls, in his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet. The prophet sees environmental destruction as a problem best addressed by restoring nature to its natural state. The wizard, meanwhile, believes that technology can address environmental dangers. This is, of course, a typology, a shorthand; a prophet doesn’t necessarily fear technology any more than a wizard fears nature. That said: if there were ever an embodiment of the wizard-prophet hybrid, a person driven by idealism and pragmatism in equal measure, I’d say it’s Pat Brown. Which means his invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum.

The consumers and activists who might cheer a meatless meat are often the same sort of people who are anti-G.M.O. — genetically modified organisms. And the Impossible Burger would not have been possible without its genetically modified heme — which, by the way, the F.D.A. recently declared safe, after challenges from environmental groups like Friends of the Earth. Another group that might object to Impossible Foods? The meat industry. You know, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

FOGARTY: My name is Kelly Fogarty and I serve as the executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association. And I am a fifth- generation beef cattle rancher here in Oakdale, California.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association would change their name or are you okay with it?

FOGARTY: You know, it’s funny you mention that. There’s always a little bit of a notion there in the back of my mind of, you know, of course being in the industry for so long. I take it as representing all of the livestock industry. But you know, definitely having a special nod to all the female ranchers out there would be nice to have as well.

DUBNER: And what is the primary difference between the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association?

FOGARTY: As the United States Cattlemen’s Association, we are made up primarily of cattle producers. So your family ranches. You know, cow-calf operations run by producers and kind of for producers is what U.S.C.A. was built on. Whereas National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does include some more of packer influences as well as you know some of the processing facilities as well.

DUBNER: Can you just talk generally for a moment: how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative, “meat”?

FOGARTY: So from our end you know, in looking at the “meat” — and I appreciate you using those quotes around that term — from our end, we’re not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we are really looking at is not a limit on consumer choice or trying to back one product out of the market. It’s really to make sure that we’re keeping the information out there accurate and that what is available to consumers and what is being shown to consumers on labels is accurate to what the product actually is.

In 2018, Fogarty’s organization filed a petition with the U.S.D.A. to prevent products from being labeled as “beef” or “meat” unless they come from a cow.

DUBNER: Does that mean that your organization thinks that consumers are confused by labeling? Is that the primary objection?

FOGARTY: So the primary objection from the United Cattlemen’s Association is that we want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner. And so when we see the term “meat” being put on these products that is not derived from that definition, what our producers came to us and really wanted us to act on was what we saw happened in other industries, specifically when you look at the dairy industry and where the term “milk” has now been used.

“Almond milk,” for instance. Which comes from almonds, not animals. Which led the National Milk Producers Federation to argue that it should not be sold as “almond milk.” The FDA agreed; its commissioner pointed out that “an almond doesn’t lactate.” There are important differences between so-called “milk” that doesn’t come from animals and so-called “meat” that doesn’t come from animals. Almond milk has very different nutritional content than cow’s milk; the Impossible Burger, meanwhile, has a similar nutritional profile to hamburger — including the iron content, which vegans can have trouble getting enough of. That’s another reason why Kelly Fogarty and the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association might not want the Impossible Burger to be labeled “meat.”

DUBNER: I am just curious about the mental state of your industry because I was looking at your Facebook page and one post the other day led with the following: “Eat or be eaten. Be at the table or on the menu. Fight or be forgotten.” So that sounds — it would make me believe that the future of meat is one in which cattle ranchers feel a little bit like an endangered species or at least under assault.

FOGARTY: I think that speaks to a lot of misconceptions that are out there regarding the U.S. beef industry. Whether it be in terms of you know nutrition, environment, animal welfare. We’ve really been hit from a lot of different angles over the years.

DUBNER: Okay, well, according to some scientific research, meat production and/or cattle ranching are among the most environmentally damaging activities on earth, between the resource-intensiveness, land but especially water, and the externalities, the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

FOGARTY: I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are defined as what is termed as upcyclers, and cattle today, they’re turning plants that have little to no nutritional value just as-is into a high-quality and a high density protein. And so when you look at where cattle are grazing in the U.S., and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they are grazing on are land that is not suitable for crops or it would be you know kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land. And the ability of livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

Fogarty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned; that it’s come to be seen as a target for environmentalist groups and causes.

FOGARTY: I would absolutely say, the livestock industry and to that matter, the agriculture industry as a whole I think has really been at the brunt of a lot of disinformation campaigns.

Fogarty points to that U.N. report claiming that the global livestock industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions were shockingly high. A report that was found to be built on faulty calculations.

FOGARTY: So, it was really an inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a conversation.

The inflated percentage of around 18 percent was really around 14.5 percent — so, “grossly” inflated may be in the eye of the aggrieved. Fogarty says that even though the error was acknowledged, and a revised report was issued.

FOGARTY: Folks have not forgotten it as much as we wish. It’s still something that it’s hard to have folks kind of un-read or un-know something that they initially saw.

The fact is that the agricultural industry is massive and massively complex. Without question, it exacts costs on the environment; it also provides benefits that are literally the stuff of life: delicious, abundant, affordable food. As with any industry, there are tradeoffs and there is friction: activists tend to overstate their claims in order to encourage reform; industry defenders tend to paper over legitimate concerns.

But in the food industry especially, it’s clear that a revolution is underway — a revolution to have our food be not just delicious and abundant and affordable but sustainable too, with fewer negative externalities. Some startups, like Impossible Foods, focus on cleverly engineering plant matter to taste like the animal flesh so many people love. Other startups are working on what’s called lab-grown meat, using animal stem cells to grow food without animals. This is still quite young technology, but it’s very well-funded. I was curious to hear Kelly Fogarty’s view of this.

DUBNER: One of the investors in the lab “meat” company Memphis Meats is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big meat industry. I mean, another investor, for what it’s worth, is Bill Gates. But I’m curious what’s your position on that. Because the way I think about this long-term, presumably a firm like Cargill can win the future with alternative “meat” in a way that a cattle rancher can’t. So I’m curious what the position is of ranchers on this kind of investment from a firm like Cargill or other firms that are sort of hedging their bets on the future of meat.

FOGARTY: You know it’s a really interesting point, and it’s been a bit of a tough pill for producers to swallow, the fact that some of the big three, some of these big processing plants that have been so obviously heavily focused and have been livestock-dominant are now kind of going into this alternative and sometimes the cell-cultured lab meats, alternative proteins. And it really has been a point of contention among a lot of producers who are kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit — I don’t want to say betrayed by the industry, but a little bit so…

Others may soon feel betrayed as well. A company called Modern Meadows is using similar technology to grow leather in the lab, without the need for cattle. The Israeli company SuperMeat is focused on growing chicken. And then there’s a company called Finless Foods.

Mike SELDEN: Finless Foods is taking the seafood back to basics and creating real fish meat entirely without mercury, plastic, without the need for antibiotics or growth hormones, and also without the need for fishing or the killing of animals because we grow the fish directly from stem cells.

That’s Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless. He’s 27 years old; he started out as a cancer researcher. Like Pat Brown, you could call him a wizard-prophet hybrid. He does take issue with the idea of “lab-grown” food.

SELDEN: The reality is, labs are by definition experimental and are not scalable. So this won’t be grown in a lab at all. It’s prototyped in a lab in the same way that snacks are prototyped in a lab. Doritos are prototyped in a lab by material scientists looking at different dimensions of like crunch and torsion and all these other sort of mechanical properties. So what our facility will look like when we’re actually at production scale is something really a lot closer to a brewery. Big steel tanks that are sort of allowing these cells space in order to divide and grow into large quantities of themselves, while accessing all of the nutrients that we put inside of this nutritional broth.

The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exacts its share of environmental costs. But like Pat Brown, Mike Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

SELDEN: So, the goal of Finless Foods is not to create something that competes on ethics or morals or environmental goals. It’s something that will compete on taste, price, and nutrition — the things that people actually care about.

Right now, everybody really loves whales and people hate when whales are killed. What changed? Because we used to kill whales for their blubber in order to light lamps. It wasn’t an ethical movement, it wasn’t that people woke up one day and decided, “Oh, killing whales is wrong.” It was that we ended up using kerosene instead. We found another technological solution, a supply-side change that didn’t play on people’s morals in order to win. We see ourselves as something like that. You know, why work with an animal at all if you don’t need to?

Indeed: you could imagine in the not-so-distant future a scenario in which you could instantly summon any food imaginable — new foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of favor. How much fun would that be? I asked the agricultural economist Jayson Lusk about this.

DUBNER: If we had a 3D printer, and it, let’s say, had, just, we’ll be conservative, 100 buttons of different foods that it could make me. Does anyone press the mutton button?

LUSK: Well, you know, one of the great things about our food system is that it’s a food system that, yes, makes food affordable, but also has a whole awful lot of choice for people who are willing to pay it. And I bet there’s probably at least one or two people out there that will push that will mutton button.

I also asked Lusk for his economic views on the future of meat, especially the sort of projects that inventors like Mike Selden and Pat Brown are working on.

LUSK: I have no problems with what Dr. Brown is trying to do there, and indeed I think it’s very exciting, this technology. And I think ultimately it’ll come down to whether this lab-grown meat can compete on the merits. So, there’s no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger — I’ve seen it on menus — it’s almost always higher-priced than the traditional beef burger. Now as an economist, I look at that and say, “Those prices, to me, should be signaling something about resource use.” Maybe it’s imperfect; maybe there’s some externalities. But they should reflect all the resources that were used to go in to produce that product. It’s one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than, say, chicken — it takes more time, more inputs, to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken.

So, why is it that the Impossible Burger is more expensive than the regular burger? Now, it could be that this is just a startup, and they’re not working at scale; and once they really scale this thing up, it’ll really bring the price down. It could be they’re also marketing to a particular higher-income consumer who is willing to pay a little more. But I think if the claims about the Impossible Burger are true over time, one would expect these products to come down significantly in price and be much less expensive than beef production. You know, this is not going to make my beef friends happy, but if they can do that, good for them; and consumers want to pay for, this product, they like the way it tastes and it saves some money, which means it’s saving some resources; I think in that sense, it’s a great technology.

Whether or not you eat meat; whether or not you’re interested in eating these alternative meats, from plant matter or animal stem cells — it’s hard not to admire the creativity that someone like Pat Brown has exercised: the deep curiosity, the ability to come back from failure, the sheer cleverness of putting together disparate ideas into a coherent scientific plan.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins; we had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Pat Brown, founder and c.e.o. of Impossible Foods.

Kelly Fogarty, executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association.

Jayson Lusk, economist at Purdue University.

Mike Selden, co-founder and c.e.o. of Finless Foods.

RESOURCES

“Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock,” Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2013).

Just Food by James McWilliams (Little, Brown, 2009).

“Changes in the Sheep Industry in the United States,” The National Academies (2008).

EXTRA

“Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post The Future of Meat (Ep. 367) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/meat/

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liz-goodwin · 8 years ago

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Emboldened by Trump, Republicans aim to halve legal immigration

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AK) (L) and David Perdue (R-GA) speak to the media during a news conference on Capitol Hill, February 7, 2017 in Washington, DC. Cotton and Perdue unveiled immigration legislation they say is aimed at cutting the number of green cards issued annually by the U.S. in half. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

While much of the media has been focused on the administration’s campaign against illegal immigration, a rising star among Senate Republicans, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has been pursuing a parallel agenda: a bill to cut legal immigration in half, an idea long considered toxic in Washington whose time may be coming around.

Perhaps no one in Washington was happier to hear the news than Roy Beck, a cheerful 68-year-old former reporter who founded the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, and has been waiting for a moment like this for 20 years. Curtailing legal immigration has long been an untouchable subject in politics—an idea pushed by a handful of groups like Beck’s but largely ignored on the Hill by members of both parties. Now, the environment has drastically changed, with Cotton, who enjoys access to Donald Trump’s White House, championing the cause, and a president who seems open to the idea.

In 1996, Beck was crushed when a Republican-controlled Congress pulled back from a bipartisan plan to enact sweeping restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration. He can still narrate the ins and outs of the Congressional defeat in vivid detail. Beck, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and says he came to his position not out of ethnic nativism but out of concern about the environmental and economic impacts of population growth, founded his organization the next year. But he realized it might take another decade for a risk averse Congress to tackle such a hot-button issue again.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t once a decade, it was once every two decades,” Beck said last week in NumbersUSA’s Arlington office. Beck put his dreams of restricting legal immigration on hold as he instead directed his energies toward stopping Congressional efforts to offer a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants in 2006 and 2007, and again with the “Gang of Eight” talks in 2013. In 2007, Beck marshaled his grassroots supporters to flood senators’ offices with more than a million faxes, helping to kill the immigration bill.

Then, suddenly, the winds of the immigration debate shifted. Republican candidates for the presidency from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush began to talk about the need to limit legal immigration. And Trump’s candidacy, which often focused on the supposed dangers of immigrants from Mexico and Muslim-majority countries, began to take off. In a policy paper, Trump called for a total “pause” on employment-based visas—something virtually no member of Congress would have advocated for before.

“It was very heartening all of the last two years…as one candidate after another begin to talk about how there needs to be some trimming [of legal immigration],” Beck said.

Beck saw his organization’s Facebook membership grow from under 1.5 million at the end of 2015 to 6 million this year. When he first started NumbersUSA, Beck worked for nativist John Tanton, who warned of a “Latin onslaught” in immigration and compared immigrants to bacteria, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported. But Beck has disavowed Tanton’s views and says the country should not discriminate against immigrants based on their race or nationality. He proudly pointed at the 6 million number, printed out and pasted to the glass wall of his office’s glass conference room, last week.

“I guess immigration was in the news,” he joked.

Cotton’s bill delivers on several of Beck’s long-time key policy wishes like eliminating the visa diversity lottery, which gives 50,000 green cards to people in nations without significant immigration levels to the United States, and capping refugee levels at 50,000 per year. But the majority of the bill’s legal immigration reduction comes from revoking U.S. citizens’ right to sponsor their siblings, parents and adult children for a green card. (Some elderly parents will still be allowed in on temporary renewable visas if citizens need to care for them.)

The bill will cut legal immigration by more than 400,000 people in its first year, and by more than 500,000 people each year ten years from now. It works so fast because the millions of family members who are currently waiting in line for a green card—some for more than 10 years—will see their petitions disappear immediately. The plurality of those on the wait list are from Mexico, according to a State Department analysis.

Candidates for US citizenship take the oath of allegiance during a Naturalization Ceremony for new US citizens at the City Hall of Jersey City in New Jersey on February 22, 2017. (Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)

Cotton believes the bill will return legal immigration to “historical” levels—when immigrants made up a smaller share of the U.S. population than they do now. Net immigration right now is about .3 percent of the U.S. population a year—lower than the .4 percent yearly average since 1790. But the foreign-born population overall is currently at 13 percent—higher than it’s been in recent decades and approaching America’s all-time high of 14.8 percent in 1890, according to the Pew Research Center.

Cotton—and Beck—believe reducing legal immigration will raise wages for less educated people already in the country, and that the American economy would be better off if immigrants with certain skills came in rather than those who are just related to citizens. One potential economic problem with decreasing legal immigration, however, is that the falling U.S. birthrate means half a million fewer immigrants per year would result in near zero population and workforce growth, and put the cost burden of the nation’s retirees on a smaller base of younger workers.

It remains to be seen whether Cotton’s bill, called the RAISE Act, an acronym for “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act,” will become the vehicle for Beck and his ideological compatriots’ first major victory in Congress. So far, it only has one cosponsor, Sen. David Perdue of Georgia. Several leading Republican senators, including Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, have spoken out against it.

But Cotton likely can count on the president’s support when the time comes. “I won’t go as far as to say the White House has endorsed the bill or adopted the bill as their own, but President Trump expressed very strongly to Sen. Cotton that he supports the principle of making our immigration system more of a merit based system and less of one which relies on family sponsorship,” Caroline Rabbit, Cotton’s communication director, told Yahoo News.

The bill contains no hint of compromise for the other side at all—neither a modest increase in employment-based visas nor a small-scale legalization that could address Trump’s dilemma about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants protected by his predecessor. Trump told ABC News last month that these young people shouldn’t be worried they will be deported because he has a “big heart”—but it’s unclear if he plans to ask Congress to legalize the group. At least one deferred action recipient was rounded up in the recent raids targeting undocumented immigrants.

“I don’t know how you’d get support just to do one side of it in the Senate,” Flake told Politico. “I just don’t.”

Cotton and his office are only just now beginning to reach out to senators to court their support, and it’s always possible the senator will throw in a sweetener in exchange for support from senators wary of signing onto a bill that solely reduces legal immigration. The landscape could also change dramatically by the time the bill is seriously considered, after the GOP deals with its main legislative priorities, Obamacare repeal and tax reform.

Asked if they would accept a compromise, such as a small-scale legalization of the young people protected by President Obama’s deferred action executive order or an increase in employment based visas, Beck said, “We’re certainly not an all-or-nothing kind of organization.”

But Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigration advocacy organization America’s Voice, said the bill has a “snowball’s chance in hell,” even if it included legalization for deferred action youth. He said he believes the bill is simply Cotton’s way of positioning himself for a future presidential run.

“I know they’re feeling good these days, but they’re really smoking something if they think this has legs,” Sharry said of anti-immigration groups excited about the bill.

Sharry said those who oppose the bill will make the “powerful” case that it’s hurting U.S. citizens who want to bring in their families. But, said Beck, “It’s not a humanitarian thing. I chose to move away from my family in the Ozarks and I see them once a year. The thing is in today’s world I’m connected with them practically every day. You can be connected with anyone in the world now.”

Either way, the effort is sure to continue to raise Cotton’s profile. The combat veteran and Harvard graduate reportedly suggested Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster for the national security adviser job to the White House. And advocates on both the left and the right of the immigration issue are calling Cotton the “next Jeff Sessions,” the former senator from Alabama who was a lonely voice calling for lowering legal immigration and is now Attorney General. Sessions’ former top aide, Stephen Miller, is a key White House adviser who’s also called for reducing the share of the foreign-born population of the country.

In a rowdy town hall Wednesday night in Arkansas, Cotton fielded several questions about his support for immigration restrictions, including from a seven-year-old boy named Toby who said he and his grandma liked Mexicans and didn’t want to pay for a wall. Cotton replied to the child that the United States is a “melting pot” and “we are all one people,” but that Mexico had to deal with its own problems.

Beck, meanwhile, is all anticipation. “I’d like to see it brought by the fall,” he said of the bill. “It’s a good year.”

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

President Trump denounces anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S.

Photos: ‘Not My President’s Day’ protests

The most interesting man in the White House

Trump’s Sweden gaffe gets ridiculed on late night TV

More than 1 million sign White House petition for Trump’s tax records

#_uuid:0c03577b-ac93-340a-83f6-492c37baafac #immigration #_author:Liz Goodwin #congress #_revsp:Yahoo! News #_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL

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gethealthy18-blog · 5 years ago

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46 Ways to Give Experiences Instead of Stuff This Year (Even Last Minute)

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/news/46-ways-to-give-experiences-instead-of-stuff-this-year-even-last-minute/

46 Ways to Give Experiences Instead of Stuff This Year (Even Last Minute)

Table of Contents[Hide][Show]

In the midst of holiday gift giving, I can’t help but think about the fact that often these well-intentioned gifts eventually lead to more stress, for the giver and the receiver. So much so that over time my husband and I decided to give experiences instead of material gifts as much as we can. After a few years of trial and error, this is now pretty much the norm in our family … and the results are amazing!

Even last minute, an experience gift can be easy to arrange, thoughtful, and rewarding to both giver and receiver. Going to the movies as a family, taking a painting class, making pottery, learning to scuba dive, or simply receiving a homemade “spa day” and a night off with the remote control … these are priceless memories or skills that last a lifetime.

Give the Gift That Lasts

Don’t get me wrong … I love giving gifts and always enjoy finding, wrapping, and giving the perfect gift to a family member or friend. Still, as a mom, I also dread the aftermath: the paper and toys all over the floor, the lingering messes, the kids complaining about having to clean up their toys …

As every parent has inevitably experienced at some point, the joy of material gifts fades quickly and even the most anticipated Christmas toys soon become a chore to clean up.

Which leads to my next question …

Are We Drowning in Too Much Stuff?

The dramatic success of the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up provides a hint that perhaps many of us feel that we simply have too much stuff (short summary of the book = throw most of it away).

Turns out, we probably do!

Think for a second about your grandparents’ home when you were growing up. If it was anything like mine, it was probably a small house with even smaller closets. And the closets were not that full. And they raised six kids in that house! They also didn’t need drastic storage and organizing solutions or extra storage rental units.

Fast forward to present day. Joshua Becker, my favorite expert on the topic of clutter and minimalism (see my interview with him here), shared some sobering trends on his Becoming Minimalist blog.

Consider this:

Back in 2013, the LA Times reported that the average American home has over 300,000 items in it and there are over 50,000 storage facilities nationwide (and this is the fastest growing real estate segment!).

At least 1 in 10 of us have a storage unit to store our excess stuff.

There are five times more storage facilities in the U.S. than the number of Starbucks!

There is enough physical space for every man, woman, and child in America to stand in U.S. storage facilities — all at the same time!

Do we really have so much more stuff than people did just two generations ago?

Yes we do…

More Clothes

Our grandparents had an average of nine outfits, including dress clothes and work clothes.

Now, we have an average of 30, plus a lot of extra clothes that don’t qualify as an “outfit.”

The AVERAGE family spends $1,700 on clothes annually while giving or throwing away over 200 pounds of clothes per year.

More Toys

This is the part that really shocked me…

The average child in the developed world owns over 200 toys but only plays with 12 of them on average per day!

Even crazier? Only 3% of the world’s children live in the US, but they own 40+% of the world’s toys!

If It Makes You Happy…

Those staggering statistics about how much stuff we all own wouldn’t worry me if it seemed that the excess stuff improved our lives in some way or made us happier, healthier, or closer to our children … but that isn’t the case. To quote Sheryl Crow:

If it makes you happy It can’t be that bad If it makes you happy Then why the hell are you so sad

We have and consume twice as many material goods than we collectively did 50 years ago, but statistically we are much less happy.

54% of us report being overwhelmed with clutter and 78% of us have no idea how to overcome it!

This also leads to additional stress. Joshua Becker explains:

Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items. The research found we lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list.

Certainly, there is much more to why we are less happy than we used to be than just the excess clutter, but statistically, it is a contributor, and an easy one to address.

Why Give Experiences Not Stuff?

Many studies have shown that material possessions do not equal happiness and that experiences are much more intrinsically fulfilling that things. (Additional bonus: you don’t have to find a place to store experiences except in your heart, memory, and maybe in a photo book!)

A researcher named Thomas Gilovich at Cornell University has spent more than a decade trying to understand why experiences have the ability to contribute to happiness so much more than material purchases. Along with another researcher, Matthew Killingsworth, he published this research in the Journal of Psychological Science showing that experiences provide more lasting happiness than material possessions.

They basically concluded that people tend to get less happier with material purchases over time, and more happy with experiences. They speculate that this is because we adapt to physical things, so even the nicest car or newest phone becomes commonplace after enough time, while memories tend to get fonder over time.

Isn’t that fascinating?

Gilovich explains:

Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods … You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences.

Gilovich and Killingsworth found that we remember even negative experiences fondly as a funny story or bonding experience. Experiences are also a uniting factor. You are more likely to bond with someone who enjoys the same hobby or activity or has traveled to the same places that you have than with someone who has a similar possession.

The anticipation leading up to a family trip, event, or experience even has the potential to provide happiness itself, making it the gift that truly keeps on giving! Happiness in the anticipation, happiness during the experience and happiness in the memories.

Beats the heck out of a pile of toys that you trip over while tucking the kids in at night!

It turns out that Aristotle had it right all those years ago: “Men fancy that external goods are the cause of happiness (but) leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment in life.”

Give Experiences: The Importance for Kids

As important as shared experiences are for adults, they are even more important for children and for healthy psychological development. In fact, shared family time (even in simple things like family dinner together) is drastically important for a child’s well-being (much more important than the dozens of extracurricular activities we often neglect family time for).

Shared family time and experiences have been linked to:

bonding within the family

fewer behavioral problems in children

a stronger sense of identity

a sense of security for children

higher rates of academic success

lower rates of violence

Of course, these shared experiences can be as simple as time spent together during/preparing meals, while driving, or reading stories before bed, but prioritizing shared experiences as gifts helps reduce unwanted material items and fosters family bonding.

Our Rule for Gifts

You might have heard of the “4-Gift Rule” that some parents follow:

Something they want, Something they need, Something to wear, Something to read

We follow a variation of this focused on a few material gifts and a few shared experiences. Our kids typically get:

The “Want”: One Material Gift – Despite my preference for experiences, we do get one gift for each child that is strictly something they want. Often these end up being experience gifts as well like craft supplies or a sewing machine or the Gorilla Gym that has been a favorite in our house for years. Sometimes they are also educational gifts like a Roominate set, a Perplexus puzzle, or bulk Legos.

The “Need”: Experience Gifts – Each child gets at least one experience gift per year, and often we get them several more experience-based gifts as well (see my full list below). Since family experiences are so important for us, we consider these gifts a need so we prioritize and budget for them.

The “Wear”: Clothes – I’ve created capsule wardrobes for my kids and for holidays they often get one clothing item they need like a new coat or hiking boots. This may also be something fun, like dress-up clothes, if they don’t need any new clothing.

The “Read”: Memory Books – We try to take the kids to the library often since they get to choose so many new books without them taking up room on the shelves, but our kids do get a different kind of book as a gift. Each year, I keep a folder on my desktop for each child and throughout the year add pictures from field trips, birthdays, daily hikes, camping trips and other fun memories. At the end of the year, I compile each child’s photos into a hardcover book that I print through a photo service (like Shutterfly). This is my favorite gift to give them each year since it helps them relive and remember everything we did as a family that year, and it is a gift that they can take and show their own families one day. These books end up being the favorite gift every year (and bonus, the photo service saves them so I can reprint if one ever gets ruined!).

In addition, each child gets fun (and sometimes practical) stocking stuffers.

What About Extended Family Gifts?

Even once we decided to make the switch to experiences with our kids, it took a while to figure out how to approach the topic with extended family. We approached it in two ways:

Switching to giving experiences to family members as well

Gently explaining our reason for choosing experiences and encouraging extended family to give experiences as well

It has taken a few years, but extended family is now on board and the kids cherish the time with other family members as well. One year a family member took our daughter to see the Nutcracker, and grandparents often give memberships to museums or zoos, or gift certificates to go to a movie or lunch.

At the end of the day, we can’t (and shouldn’t) control what extended family chooses to give our children. Personally, I’m very grateful that our family has decided to prioritize experience-type gifts as well, but even if they didn’t and decided to still give material gifts, we would welcome these and teach our children to be grateful for these gifts (as the relationship with family is more important than arguing about the gifts).

45+ Ways to Give Experiences This Year

The average parent spends over $250 per child on toys and gifts each year! While experience-type gifts can be a little more expensive up-front, they end up being much cheaper in the long run. Especially when we consider that with that average, we’d spend over $1200 on gifts for our children, we don’t mind spending even a couple hundred dollars on a worthwhile membership or experience that will last all year.

The move away from material gifts was a slow one for us. We’re always adding to our running list of ideas, and each year we try to choose a few that sound suited to our current family ages and interests.

Maybe one of these will spark an idea for a special someone left on your list!

Family Gifts

Bigger memberships or vacations are often family gifts:

Escape Room – These are popping up everywhere and run about $15-30 a person. Check to make sure the theme is family friendly, but this is an ideal group activity Mom, Dad, and older kids can do with extended family for some fun quality time.

Museum Memberships – Check around for local museums that offer annual memberships. Many offer discounts for local residents or have programs for kids. We have found great deals on local art and history museums.

Science Center Memberships – Many cities also have a children’s museum or science center with an annual pass option. We found that it was cheaper to purchase an annual membership to a nearby science center than for our family to go one time! This is a great place to go on a rainy day and is a common destination for our Friday fieldtrips.

Orchestra Season Tickets – Even though we don’t live in a large city, we have a local orchestra that preforms every couple of months. I called and found that season tickets for children were extremely affordable (less than $8 a show) and this is now a fun family activity that the kids look forward to.

Community Theater Tickets – If you have a local theater, take children to these as well. This was our big family gift last year, and we got a few season tickets. My husband and I get to go to the more grown-up performances as date nights and we alternate taking the older kids to performances that they enjoy (like Annie, Rudolph, etc.).

Tent for Camping – Sometimes a material gift leads to an experience. This tent was a family gift a couple of years ago and we’ve used it quite a few times. (I picked that one because it is really easy to set up!)

Minor League Baseball Tickets (or college, or MLB)– We all love baseball (because it is the best sport 😉 ) and season tickets to our local minor league team have been a great family outing that lasts all summer long. Really, any sports ticket (college, pro, etc.) is a great family activity.

Nature Center Tickets – Check for local nature areas or nature centers in your area and see if they offer an annual pass. We’ve found these for nature centers, a local cave, and state parks.

Local Attraction Season Passes – Any other local attraction with a season pass can be a great gift. Check for other types of museums, historical sites, or local attractions.

New Family Hobbies – Take up hiking, camping, card games, a sport, or other fun activity and get the necessary equipment or passes for your new hobby.

Be Puzzled – Feeling brave? This 33,000 piece puzzle is the world’s largest. It might take you the whole year to put together and will foster a LOT of family time!

Fun Family Outing– Plan in advance a trip to a local amusement park, a family vacation, or other activity. Remember, looking forward to an experience makes the experience more fun and fosters happiness on its own!

Volunteer – Truly a gift that keeps on giving. If possible with your kids’ ages, volunteer at a local food pantry or charity and give your kids (and yourself) the gift of helping others!

Give to Charity – Another favorite in our family- we designate about $100 in end of year contributions per child to let them decide how to give. Most often, they love choosing gifts like farm animals, fruit trees, or educational supplies for those in need around the world through programs like Food for the Poor.

Gifts for Kids

Local Pottery Painting – An absolute favorite with our girls. Our local pottery place has dozens of options to paint and this has been a fun activity for the kids (and me!). Either pick out some unpainted places to paint or get a gift certificate.

Pottery Making – For older kids, some places offer pottery making lessons or classes.

Rock Climbing – Have a local rock-climbing gym? See if they offer annual passes or pick up gift certificates for a climbing outing with older kids. Bonus: It is a great way to get exercise too!

Local Jump Gym – Another fun activity that helps kids stay active. See if you have a local jump gym or indoor trampoline center and get annual passes or gift cards.

Batting Cage Membership – For a child who loves baseball, look for a local batting cage that offers year-long memberships or bulk discounts on packages. This is a great way to stay active and a fun outing with your child.

Bowling or Skate Tickets – These are getting harder to find, but if you have a local bowling alley or skating rink, ask them about family passes or gift certificates.

Every Kid in a Park – If you have a fourth grader, there is no excuse not to get this one: a free year-long pass to all the national parks with the “Every Kid In a Park” program. This pass provides access to national parks for everyone in your immediate family, not just the fourth grader, so it is a great family gift and is available to homeschoolers as well! (Here’s how to get it)

Treasure Hunt – If you are giving a material gift, make the giving itself a fun experience. Instead of wrapping up the final gift, wrap up a clue and let the child go on a treasure hunt to find the final gift (or figure out what it is and go with you to get it!) This is especially fun for a larger gift or experience!

Geocaching – Speaking of treasure hunts, geocaching is fun, free way to go on a treasure hunt with your kids almost anywhere in the world. You can learn more about it here.

A New Skill – If your child wants to try horseback riding, sewing, painting, or other similar activity, give them classes or ways to experience and develop this new hobby or skill. To keep it low-cost, see if you can find a family member or an elderly member of your community who might enjoy passing on the skill at a lower cost.

Lunch Dates – Give gift certificates to a favorite breakfast or lunch place to a child and plan a one-on-one date with that child.

Movie Tickets – We don’t go to the movies often, but often there’s some great family movies coming out around Christmastime.

Question Book – My kids all love this Question A Day Book and it gives us a fun conversation starter each day. The “question book” is a fun pre-bedtime activity at our house.

Learning Magazine Subscription – Our kids love getting “real mail” in the mailbox and extended family members often get them subscriptions to learning magazines. They look forward to the magazine coming each month and to doing the activities (and bonus: you can recycle the magazine when they are done with it!)

Craft Bucket – One of my favorite Christmas gifts as a child: a basket of craft activities that lasted me a year! My aunt filled a large basket with scissors, paper, glue, string, and every other craft supply imaginable. That basket led to dozens of hours of fun for me as a kid, and now my girls sometimes get activity baskets like this with crafts we can do together. My kids love getting books about how to draw, painting kits, sticker pads, construction paper, and other craft kits.

Garden Kit – Just like crafts, gardening is a great activity to do with children. If you have a budding gardener (pun intended) on your hands, wrap up some seeds and gardening supplies and let your child help you garden all year!

Musical Instrument – A favorite gift one Christmas was a steel drum that my husband has been teaching the kids how to play (though I admit, on a couple of especially loud days I have regretted the idea!). This is the one we got, and they have loved learning to play it. We’ve also ordered mini musical instrument kits for the kids to all create their own music.

Movie Night Packages – Our children don’t watch much TV, but we do love family movie nights. To make the tradition even more fun, we wrap up a new family movie DVD and some healthy snacks in a box for each child to let them “host” the movie night.

Game Night Packages – A game night is another great family activity, and giving each child one game was a fun way to expand our collection and they love playing “their game” when we have a game night. Some favorite games are Apples to Apples, Tsuro, Uno, Sequence, and basic card games.

DIY Gifts – My kids have enjoyed getting the supplies to make homemade soap, lip balm, lotion, or other DIY items that they can use or give as gifts. (Bonus: they are learning new skills too!) This paper-making kit was an especially big hit!

Gifts for Dad

Check out this post for ideas of usable practical gifts that dads will enjoy (and that help them be healthier, sleep better, etc.). In my experience, guys are the toughest to find experience-based gifts for, but here are a few ideas that my hubby has liked over the years:

Home Brewing – My hubby likes beer and I prefer when he drinks organic (or at least non-GMO) beer. A few years ago, he got into home brewing beer and it has been a fun hobby for him. I’d recommend this book to learn more about brewing, and while there are pre-made brewing kits, I’d suggest talking to a local home brew store if possible to find out what supplies and ingredients he will need.

Sports – Any sports-related experiences have been a hit with my hubby. I think my biggest (and most expensive!) surprise for him ever has been to get to go to spring training for his favorite team and even get to play with some of the players, but tickets to see his favorite teams play have also been a big hit. These all tend to be more expensive, so I had to save for several years for one of these surprises, but I think it ended up being an amazing and memorable experience for him.

Outdoor Activities – This will vary a lot depending on the guy, but finding ways to support outdoor experiences he already loves is a great gift idea. This might be finding time to camp as a family, or for him to go hunting, hiking, or play sports.

Scuba Certification – One year, my hubby and I gave each other scuba certifications as a gift. We got to go through the process together, and ended up with a great hobby we could enjoy (though not a great one for taking younger kids!)

Skydiving – Is your guy adventurous? Skydiving is a ton of fun and many cities have a local place you can go.

Gifts for Mom

Memes abound online about mom enjoying going to the bathroom alone, or her hobbies including eating without a child in her lap or sleeping in. These are some practical experience gift ideas that every mom will enjoy! Since moms deserve every good thing (ok, I know I’m biased), here’s a list of material gift ideas I’ve loved receiving as well.

A Day Off – Moms work hard all year, and things seem to get even busier around the holidays. One of my favorite gifts ever was a series of “days off” that I didn’t have to cook, clean, or have any household responsibilities (and it included a gift card to go out for coffee!). Even better (hint to dads), get together and schedule a moms’ night out for several of your wives to go to dinner together!

Pampering – With that whole “motherhood is pretty hard work” thing, any kind of pampering is an awesome gift, and one that mom may not do unless it is a gift. Massages are my personal favorite!

Date Nights – Getting time along can be tough with kids, so some of my favorite gifts ever have been pre-planned date nights when my husband handled the arrangements, lined up a sitter, and made the plans.

A Nap or Getting to Sleep in – This may be one of the toughest gifts to pull off, but one of the most appreciated. If you can figure out how to let mom sleep in for a day or take a nap, she will be grateful!

Any Family Gifts – Any of the family gifts listed above are also a great option to get for moms as they’ll enjoy the family time and the idea of an activity to do with the kids.

Gifts for Grandparents + Extended Family

Day Out with Kids – This has been a favorite for grandparents to give to the kids, but also to receive. The kids pick a fun activity they want to do with grandparents or extended family and give it to them as a gift. It might be something like going out for smoothies or playing at the park, or even a trip to the grocery store to gather ingredients and cook a meal together.

Amazon Prime – I know several extended family members who use Amazon all the time, but did not want to pay for the Prime membership. In the past, we’ve given these family members a Prime membership (click on “give the gift of prime” and enter their email address). This is partially a material gift as well, but tends to make purchases they are already making faster and easier.

Memory Book – Either make a photo book with a company like Shutterfly that showcases some favorite memories with the recipient, or let your kids make a homemade book by printing and cutting out pictures and writing captions.

Membership Add-Ons – For grandparents who live close by, you may be able to add them to any of the family memberships listed above. We added guests/grandparent options to our zoo and science center memberships as well as to many of the local attraction places. This allows them to come for free and spend time with our kids (and is a bonus for us as well, since we have extra eyes to watch and help with the kids.

Giving Experiences: The Bottom Line

Even if you’ve already purchased gifts for this year, consider adding some experiences as well or slowly transitioning to more experience-based gifts over time. The family time and memories are worth so much more than gifts, and statistically, giving experiences may help reduce your stress levels and contribute to family bonding.

Have you tried to give experiences instead of gifts in the past? What other suggestions would you add to this list?

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/62144/give-experiences/

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