29. Bruce Friedrich Thinks There’s a Better Way to Eat Meat

**Steve Levitt** (0:04)
I've interviewed all kinds of people on this show, but so far, I've avoided having guests who are activists.
I have nothing against activists, it's just that they often aren't that much fun to talk to. They believe so deeply in their cause, and they want you to also believe so deeply that there isn't much room for thoughtful conversation.
Well, today I'm breaking that rule because my guest, Bruce Friedrich, is a very unusual activist. He started his career at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and his early exploits included streaking naked at Buckingham Palace in front of Queen Elizabeth and President Bush, and utilizing large quantities of fake blood during New York Fashion Week. But over time, he came to believe that the best way to achieve social change was by using the power of markets. So in 2016, he founded the Good Food Institute, or GFI. It's a non-profit dedicated to the idea that through science, we can create plant-based and cultivated proteins that will prove a better way of feeding the world than traditionally produced meat. The goal isn't to convince people meat is bad, but rather to provide substitutes for traditional meat that are so tasty and so cheap that the demand for old style meat simply fades away.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steve Levitt** (1:24)
I have a personal interest in what the Good Food Institute is doing because I love the taste of meat, but I also love animals. I've got a vegetarian wife and kids that are vegan, so consequently, I eat way less meat than I otherwise would. My biggest concern about this interview is how will I keep focused on what I see as the most important points, like the interesting economic issues around the negative externalities of meat production, and the conflicts that arise when a huge, well-established meat industry faces possible collapse as a consequence of better technologies for producing protein.
My guess is that I'm going to be coming up this topic from a perspective that Bruce Friedrich rarely encounters, and my fear is that I won't be able to get him off his usual script. The speech he has to give over and over.
You run the Good Food Institute, a non-profit devoted to reimagining protein, which effectively means finding alternatives to traditional meat. And I'm very interested in both the science and the economics of reimagining protein. But before we get into that, I think it's worth taking some time to walk through the various reasons you believe people eat too much meat, things like environmental impact or animal cruelty, health reasons. I think this is important because on tricky topics like these, my friend Danny Kahneman has taught me the value of slowing down. Because my tendency, and I'm sure the tendency of others, is to make quick judgments. Of course we eat too much meat. Or maybe it's just a bunch of tree huggers exaggerating the problem. Or maybe there are a hundred other more pressing problems we need to solve first. And actually, I think those are probably three opinions in my own life I've expressed over this exact issue. So on a podcast like this, we have the luxury of time and the luxury of a lotful data-oriented listeners that are interested in knowing the facts. So how about we start by talking about the environmental impact of meat production? What can you tell us about that?

**Bruce Friedrich** (3:28)
GFI was set up to answer the questions, how do we feed almost 10 billion people by 2050 without lighting the planet on fire, essentially? And we specifically look, as you said, at reimagining protein. And there is a recognition that there are significant external costs to the way that we produce protein today.
And this just makes intuitive sense if you think a little bit about it. The idea of growing lots and lots of crops to feed them to animals so that we can eat animals is vastly inefficient. So according to the World Resources Institute, the most efficient animal at turning crops into meat is the chicken. And it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's chicken meat.

**Steve Levitt** (4:22)
Let me stop you there. Because the thing about that is, while it's true and it's really inefficient, the people who are raising chickens are paying that price, right? So there's a market for land and a market for feed. It's not a good technology for creating meat, but it's not an externality in the sense that economists think about it. It's not a cost that's outside the market. It's in the price of chicken. So I think you wouldn't necessarily say people are eating too much chicken because it's priced in. Does that make any sense to you?