The Revolution Won’t Be Meatless: Erin Somers Finds the Beef

“You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” — Erin Somers

 

In February, Bruce Friedrich came on the show to explain how lab-grown meat would save the planet. Today’s guest is less sanguine about this revolution. Erin Somers — author of the bestselling novel The Ten Year Affair and a twenty-year vegetarian — spent a year exploring our supposedly meatless future. In “Where’s the Beef?”, the cover story of this month’s Harper’s, Somers describes the still-born lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t.

 

The problem, Somers explains, isn’t technological. Having raised $330,000 from Sergey Brin, the Dutch scientist Mark Post grew the first burger from cow shoulder cells back in 2013. What subsequently failed is everything else. The price never fell, VCs lost interest, conservatives legislated against it, and the industry’s best hope, Believer Meats, went bankrupt. Above all, the revolution never went mainstream. “You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger,” Somers explains.

 

Somers’ journey ended at the iconic Berkeley Bowl where she was offered a Sumo orange, a hybrid fruit engineered to be both delicious and resilient. Technology fed her after all. Just not in the way that revolutionaries like Bruce Friedrich predicted. The revolution won’t be meatless. Let’s hope we can still save the planet.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Woolly Mammoth Meatball. Somers’s obsession began around 2022, when the Australian company Vow extracted DNA from a fossil and made a woolly mammoth meatball — which, because no one could be sure meat grown from DNA that old was safe, no one was allowed to eat. A forbidden food, conjured at great expense: to Somers, the perfect emblem of an industry that was always “a microcosm of what is going on culturally” — a gold-rush mentality among investors, a tech product perpetually not-quite-arriving, and a carnival of curiosities around the edges. It speaks, she says, directly to our AI moment: massive hype, cons and bills of goods sold in the meantime, and the actual product arriving years late in a different form. Her quest began with the simplest motive in journalism: “I just really wanna taste it.”

•       The Technology Works. Nobody’s Clamoring. The scientific story is genuine: Mark Post grew the first lab burger from cow shoulder cells in 2013 — two years’ work, $330,000, bankrolled by Sergey Brin, eaten live at London’s Riverside Studios — and the field has since scaled from petri dishes to bioreactors the size of a beer brewery. “They can actually do the things that they say.” What’s missing is everything downstream: a price point anywhere near conventional meat (two to four times as expensive), a trained workforce, and — the quiet killer — demand. “No one’s clamoring for it.” The shuttered North Carolina factory Somers visited stands fully equipped and ready to run; it simply “didn’t quite make it over the finish line.” Even MrBeast, blind-testing Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken sandwich for millions of viewers, couldn’t tell the difference — which made Somers, still untasted at the time, irrationally jealous.

•       The Believer Collapse. The piece’s centerpiece has a novelist’s timing. The day before the industry’s trade conference in North Carolina’s Research Triangle — the unexpected hub, anchored by the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at NC State — Somers drove forty-five minutes into the countryside to check on Believer Meats’ multimillion-dollar facility and found it shuttered. The next day, sitting among the a