Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: There will always be really fortunate people in this world who are able to hand select their eggs from the local farmer down the street and pay four times as much for that egg as they would if they bought it from Kroger, but that's not an efficient way to make food. That's not the way we're going to feed the world.

David Abel: I'm David Abel, and this is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School. With livestock accounting for nearly a fifth of global emissions, we'll look today at what fast food chains and other large buyers of commodities like beef and poultry are doing and should be doing to reduce their climate footprint. Burger King, for example, this year introduced the first vegetarian version of its signature sandwich, the quarter pounder Whopper. White Castle sells a similar plant based burger at its 370 plus locations. While Carl's Jr. features the Beyond Famous Star, the vegetarian version of its signature burger, at more than a thousand locations. McDonald's has taken another approach. On its website, the company touts the "importance of companies taking bold action on climate change", and last year the company vowed to recycle all food packaging discarded in its restaurants by 2025. But are these material changes or just cosmetic? Do they represent a serious response to consumer demand for action to protect the environment? And what more needs to be done? Joining us to discuss how the fast food industry and other major food companies are changing their businesses to address global warming is Nicole Johnson-Hoffman, chief sustainability officer and senior vice president at the OSI Group, which is an Illinois based holding company of meat processors that operates in 17 countries and supplies restaurants, including McDonald's. In addition to your work at OSI Group, you serve as president of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Can you give us a sense of the main challenges this industry faces in trying to reduce its carbon footprint and become more sustainable?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: The beef industry is a really interesting challenge when we're trying to make change in a loose organization of individuals and companies that are operating all over the world and in all kinds of different conditions. Here in the US, we have around 800,000 beef producers who are by and large small family farmers. The average beef producer in the US has fewer than 100 head of cattle. It's typically a sideline business for them. It's not their primary business. And so they're not receptive to dictates from large corporations like the one I work for. So helping them to understand the needs of customers and also their responsibility for addressing climate change is a challenge.

David Abel: Tell me more about the kinds of companies that OSI Group works with. Who are your customers?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: It's really different in every part of the world that's producing beef, so in North America, we have issues around use of antibiotics and ensuring that we're good stewards of antibiotics and protecting them for efficacy for humans and animals for the future. We're also concerned about protection of waterways, ensuring that we're not overusing water resources to produce beef, and ensuring that the crops that are being planted and harvested in order to provide grains in our feedlots are environmentally responsible. In other parts of the world, you've got some active issues regarding deforestation and protection of natural grasslands, and bee farmers are struggling with how to address those issues while at the same time remaining profitable.

David Abel: Are these companies serious about changing their ways, and why should we believe that they are?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: Well, Big Ag is living in the real world. We are living climate change today. We live it in the storms that disrupt our supply chains. We live it in the disease outbreaks that are unexpected and unprecedented in different parts of the world. Climate change is going to impact the food that is available for people and the prices that we pay for that food in the future. And my customers are all in the food business. And so they're working on these issues because they understand that that's part of their long term business plan, and if they weren't, it would be irresponsible for them as business people. They're also trying to satisfy activist shareholders and other stakeholders who are really concerned about the impacts they have in the world. We can try to force farmers to say the right words. Or we can talk instead about the concrete real concerns that we have and that they have and that we all understand to be true and work on those, because the politically loaded words, the politically loaded language that we use is an obstacle to gaining the kind of buy in that we need from the people who actually need to make the change.

David Abel: What are we talking about when we're talking about making this industry more sustainable? How do you define for example, sustainable beef? What does that really mean?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: The Global Roundtable was formed in order to sort of wrestle that issue to the ground, and then give a framework for regional beef producers around the world to address their real problems. And so on the Global Roundtable's definition for beef sustainability, we've said you need to address five different big picture principles in order to say that you're working adequately on beef sustainability in your part of the world. You need to address your use of natural resources. You need to address your impact on people and communities, on the animal's health and wellbeing, on the food that you meant to be producing, and whether you're not producing, whether or not you're producing wholesome food for people because that's the whole point. And then finally the effort that you're putting into improving efficiencies and using innovation. And if you're doing those things, we've said you are welcome to participate in this Global Roundtable family and be part of this global effort.

David Abel: Tell us a little bit more about the relationship between antibiotics and sustainability. How does that correlate?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: Antibiotics are challenging to our sustainability thought processes. They're similar to use of hormone implants and beef production in that they improve efficiencies, and so therefore improve sustainability outcomes. But people are really concerned about them, and with respect to antibiotics, for good reason. So we know that we have to do what we can to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics in order to preserve their efficacy for the future. And at the same time, we believe one, that cattle are living creatures that deserve proper care, proper medical care, and their lives aren't expendable. And so if we have the ability to improve their health, we should do that not only for the animal, but also for the quality of the food that we're producing for people. So we believe that to be true, and two, we believe that we do need to not waste that resource. And so for sustainability reasons, we can't allow those animals to die when we could help them live.

David Abel: So more use of antibiotics, actually what you're saying is, can make these farms more sustainable.

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: Well, if you wanted to simply move your greenhouse gas numbers as an industry, you would absolutely maximize your use of growth promoting hormones in the cattle and maximize your use of antibiotics. In those ways you would produce more beef per animal, more beef for your greenhouse gas emissions in total. And so your GHG outcomes would be significantly better.

David Abel: You've pointed to a need to preserve native grasslands and other measures to protect soil. Why is this important, and what role should regulators be playing to make this happen?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: More and more climate work is being focused on the health of soils and the possibility to use soils to help us address our carbon problem. Healthy soils, we know are carbon sinks. They will pull carbon into the soil and capture it and store it over time. If we allow those soils to remain undisturbed, so for example, if we allow them to grow native grasses with really deep roots, we know that they will do the job for us in filtering that carbon from our environment and protecting us. Interestingly, cattle have a really important role to play in that. So if I'm sitting on grasslands, for example, if I'm a landholder in the center of the country, and I'm sitting on some grasslands, and I want to preserve those grasslands, the best way for me to make that land profitable is for me to put cattle on the land and allow the cattle to graze that land. They do a beautiful job of encouraging the proper grasses to grow. And then to work that crop for us. Cattle are uniquely designed to do that, and then also in the process to turn those grasses into really great high quality protein for people to eat.

David Abel: Are there examples of where soil erosion has been a big problem?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: I think that's a significant issue across the country. We have not done enough work to help people understand how to keep soils healthy. We have pursued monoculture agriculture in places where that's not great for the soil outcomes. And we've also discouraged farmers from continuing to farm their land and encourage them to do other things with it. So I live in a part of the country that is continually plowing under what used to be agricultural land and putting up housing subdivisions. And then the people move into those beautiful housing subdivisions and complain about big companies and their environmental impacts. This is something that we all need to wrestle with.

David Abel: Is the OSI Group catering more to these new upstarts? Is that an increasing share of your business?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: My company is in the business of supplying of the world's biggest brands primarily. So we are really focused on delivering what they want. I have one of my customers who says, I don't know what we'll be selling in 50 years, but I know that we'll be selling more of it than anyone else. My customers are generally agnostic about what they put on their menus. If the consumer wants pickled beets, they will sell pickled beets. And they may be today tied up with their brand, with the certain products that they sell, but they know that those brands can evolve and have evolved over the histories of these companies. And they're able to adapt. You know, for us as a company, we're quite pleased to provide whatever our customers want. And I have some customers who are looking at plant-based meats now, and we're pleased to make those for them. I have other customers who are all in on beef and chicken, and we're pleased to make that as well. It's an interesting challenge to try to find supply chains that can deliver what these big brands require at a level of safety and consistency of price and predictability that they require. And that's very different than the small chains do.

David Abel: You grew up on a small dairy farm in rural Minnesota, and you once even ran a slaughterhouse. What are some of the lessons that you learned from those experiences? And how do they inform the bigger questions about how Big Ag and their customers can become more sustainable?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: As you say, I grew up on a small dairy farm in Minnesota, and we worked really hard. We had the world's largest kitchen garden. We had goats and chickens, and we raised a couple steer for beef. And we, my gosh, for a while we had geese. But we fed almost no one with all that effort. The food that we produced from that farm was interesting. It's quality was highly varied, and there was almost nothing left over to sell into the market after all that effort. That's not an efficient way to make food. It makes beautiful pictures. It's gorgeous on Instagram, but that's not the way we're going to feed the world. There will always be really fortunate people in this world who are able to hand select their eggs from the local farmer down the street and pay four times as much for that egg as they would if they bought it from Kroger. But you know, that's just, that's a tiny handful in the great scheme of things in the world.

David Abel: How does that translate into the questions of what smaller farms can do to innovate and serve maybe as examples for what larger production operations could actually do?

Nicole Johnson-Hoffman: I have in my life in my, in my work in agriculture, I have come to love scale. The beauty of being able to drive real change in a short period of time to maximize your impact on the lives of people. That comes from scale. So the slaughterhouse that I ran, we harvested about 4,500 head of cattle every day in that slaughterhouse, and I know we did it to high standards of food safety. I know that we were subject to continue audits by our customers and everyone else under the sun. I know that we had 40 USDA inspectors working in that plant every day. And it was a beautiful thing. So you know, I like that. I do think there's a place in this world for people who want to produce food really lovingly in a handcrafted way on a small scale. And I salute them, and I love what they do. But I also don't believe that that's going to be the way to necessarily reduce our climate catastrophe as it's been described or to address the real problems that we have in feeding the world.

David Abel: Now we're going to discuss how the food we eat is inextricably linked to climate change and how different diets could lead to a greener, more sustainable planet. Over the past year, plant based foods that directly replace animal products have grown 17% and generated more than $3.7 billion in revenue, while plant based meat sales grew some 23% in the same period. But emerging industry focused on growing plant-based or cell-generated meat has sparked fears of a brave new world, one with increasing amounts of genetically modified foods. Joining us to discuss these rapid changes in food production are Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, a Washington based nonprofit that promotes alternatives to produced animal products, and Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Bruce Friedrich, you founded the Good Food Institute to harness sea changes we've seen in other sectors of the economy and bring them to the dinner plate. Can you tell us why these changes are needed? What's the larger problem you're trying to solve?

Bruce Friedrich: Every year a report comes out that talks about the inefficiencies of global animal farming. So just this year, the journal Lancet, which is one of the three most respected medical journals in the world, published the results of a massive three year study. And what they found, to quote one of the researchers, is that the meat industry, it's destroying our planet, and it's jeopardizing global health. Despite that, what we have found is that educating people isn't working. We're producing and consuming more meat in the United States than we have ever per capita in recorded history and globally. According to the United Nations, we're going to need to produce 70% more meat by 2050. So we need a better solution than just trying to, you know, shame people out of their meat consumption. We need to produce meat in a new and better way. And that's the focus of GFI. We're focused on producing meat directly from plants. So instead of feeding plants to animals, it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out, and chicken is the most efficient animal at converting crops to meat. That's horribly inefficient. And we can turn those plants into meat directly. So bio-mimic meat with plants, or something even, you know, equally exciting for actual animal meat, instead of growing animals, let's grow the cells directly. It takes six weeks to raise a chicken to slaughter weight. If you feed the cells directly, you can get that same growth in six days.

David Abel: Wow. Max Bazerman, as a longtime vegetarian whose work has looked at how people choose between what's right and what's convenient, can you give us some sense of the scope of the challenge? If we need more people to move away from eating animals or eating animals that were raised in traditional ways, how can our policy makers and businesses persuade more people to do that rather than just getting more people to become vegetarian?

Max Bazerman: I've been a vegetarian since 1993. My wife a bit longer than that. And I believe the number of people we've converted to vegetarianism is approximately zero. On the other hand, we have had lots of people over to our house for dinner, served them wonderful meals that didn't include any meat. And I think that that parallels what we see going on in the world of suggesting alternatives to meat eating. We're not very good at convincing people to become vegetarian or vegan, but we're shockingly good at producing more and more high-quality alternative products that people are consuming at a much faster basis. Getting people to reduce their meat consumption because there are better, cheaper, tastier alternative products seems to be a path for success.

David Abel: Maybe the answer is that more of us should be invited to your house for dinner, and-

Max Bazerman: Absolutely.

David Abel: Maybe that would help.

Max Bazerman: You're welcome to come over, David.

David Abel: Thank you. Bruce Friedrich, tell us about some of the innovations we're seeing today. For example, what is clean meat or cell-based meat, and how viable are they as sources of food for millions of people in terms of nutrition, taste, affordability and availability?

Bruce Friedrich: There are sort of two alternatives. If you start from the proposition that the way we're eating meat right now has problems. One option is to think about veggie burgers in a whole new way. So up until probably less than 10 years ago, people thought about vegetarian meats as for vegetarians, not for everybody. And then along came people like Ethan Brown at Beyond Meat and Pat Brown at Impossible Foods, and they said, no, we can give people everything they like about meat. We can give them the taste, the texture, everything else. But we can do that with plants. We can make plant based meat that is indistinguishable to meat eaters, but because it's so much more efficient, it will cost less. So that's option one. And just this year, the United Nations gave Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods their Heroes of the Earth Award because of the massively less environmental impact, including climate change, of these alternative products. And because of the fact that meat eaters like them, they are actually subbing out for actual animal-based meat. And then in 2013, along comes a researcher who was a professor at Harvard Medical School previously. Now he's at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, a guy named Mark Post, and he had an event in London in which he fed people an actual beef burger. It's actual beef. It's actual, you know, it's from a cow, except that he didn't have a live animal. He grew the cells for the cow directly from cells without all the inefficiencies of the live animal. The first company, Memphis Meats to do cell-based meat, clean meat, clean meat is a nod to clean energy. Clean energy is energy that's better for the environment. Clean meat is real animal meat that's better for the environment. And Memphis Meats is the first company, they incorporated in 2016, there are now more than two dozen companies growing meat directly from cells. And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have flagged this as one food innovation that they think could feed the world with a much less intense environmental impact.

David Abel: Can you just tell us, Bruce, a little bit more exactly how that works?

Bruce Friedrich: I mean the first thing to say is that when the Good Food Institute started, and we were thinking about plant based meat and we were thinking about clean meat, we were thinking that clean meat was going to be a lot harder to understand. Mapping the science was going to be a lot harder for both of these technologies. What happened was people had an idea, and then people had a company. So one of the things that GFI is focused on is laying the scientific groundwork in a way that had never happened before. We're actually funding open source science, and we're actually producing documents that say this is what it looks like from start to finish so that each new company doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. And also so that scientists around the world who are doing tissue engineering, who want to cross apply what it is that they're doing to food, know exactly what everybody else has done, and so they know where they could focus their efforts to have the maximum positive impact. And what we discovered is that plant based meat is a lot harder to wrap your mind around than clean meat because really all clean meat is, is it's taking tissue engineering and applying it to food. So it's exactly the same thing. And it's, you know, it's pretty simple. It's not at all scary. There's nothing, you know, Frankenstein about it. It's you grow that, you take a biopsy from an animal, it can be like a sesame seed sized biopsy from an animal. You bathe the biopsy in nutrients. You grow it on a scaffold in essentially a meat brewery, you know, like a bio-reactor. And that's what you end up with is as this technology scales up, meat production is going to look like, you know, you're going to have your friendly neighborhood meat brewery.

David Abel: And is it scalable to feed millions of people?

Bruce Friedrich: It should be. We don't know with absolute certainty. It hasn't been done yet, but there aren't any scientific hurdles, it doesn't look like. So, I mean, we have been doing this with therapeutics, so obviously not 20,000 liter bioreactors. But based on all the work that our scientists are doing and these dozens of companies, people are super optimistic about the likelihood that it will in fact be doable. And the more our scientists dive into it, the more optimistic they become about the likelihood of this being, you know, the future of actual animal meat.

David Abel: Max Bazerman, you recently started investing in some of these products. Are we on the cusp of a food revolution, or do you worry that there might be more hype than substance? Is there reason for concern about a potential backlash as we've seen with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs?

Max Bazerman: Well, David, I'm new to this world. I've been paying attention for less than a year, and I've been to a couple of conferences. And when I see the amount of significant investor money available, the number of fascinating new products coming online, I'm actually quite optimistic. But in terms of sort of startups entering any world, it's a risky proposition for any particular company. But overall I think that there's going to be a lot of fascinating new products, and I think that we're changing how people will eat. Will there be failures? Sure, there's going to be lots of failures as there will be in any kind of startup space. But I'm very, very confident that 10 years from now, the look of the grocery store will be fundamentally different because of the good foods evolution.

David Abel: And do you think this is viable beyond, you know, the United States where we're perhaps more open to changes in industrial kind of engineering in our foods than many other places, especially Europe where there's a lot of fear of this kind of thing.

Max Bazerman: So when we think about genetically modified, there are so many things that are genetically modified. And it's unclear what it is that consumers don't trust, whether it's genetically modifying, particular genetically modifying anything, or whether it's that we don't trust specific companies that are in the middle of this movement. I think that most consumers are comfortable with many, many genetically modified products that they consume on a quite regular basis. But I think that thinking more broadly, there is a protein shortage coming as more and more people want to consume protein. And to the extent that we have a new way of producing protein at a dramatically lower price, this may be a necessity and opportunity rather than a threat.

David Abel: Bruce Friedrich, how do you respond to those concerned about so-called “frankenfoods,” or those who will say that we shouldn't be engineering the food we eat?

Bruce Friedrich: Well, I mean, I think when people are talking about engineering the food we eat, they're talking about something pretty different from attempting to bio-mimic meat with plants. And they're talking about something pretty different from simple tissue engineering. This doesn't require genetic modification at all to be wildly successful. And I think most of the companies involved are not using GMOs. So I mean, one of the things that we look at is, you know, you look at the European Union, really, you look at any place in the world, and people are worried about food security. They're worried about food safety. They're worried about water quality. Most governments are worried about climate change. They're worried about this range of issues. They're worried about antibiotic resistance, which doesn't get as much play, but is as at least as scary as climate change. There was a report from the UK government a couple of years ago. They said the threat to the human race from antibiotic resistance is greater than the threat to the human race from climate change. It's going to be killing 10 million people per year by 2050. That's more than cancer. It's going to cost the global economy $100 trillion. And if we keep feeding the majority of the antibiotics that pharmaceuticals are producing, if we keep feeding those to farm animals, I mean you want to scare, google the end of working antibiotics. You want a real scare, punch China in there, because no matter what we do in the United States, no matter what they do in Europe, if China keeps using these antibiotics that are banned everywhere else, antibiotic resistant superbugs don't know, national or international borders. They will, you know, jump the borders and could be killing lots and lots of people. I mean, people at the World Health Organization are talking about the end of modern medicine as a result of this problem. Really nobody has an answer to how do we decrease meat consumption? You know, the UN says 70% more meat by 2050. Nobody has an answer to that unless we give people better alternatives, these are the better alternatives.

David Abel: On the subject of antibiotics: Do these clean meats require any antibiotics to grow? Is that part of what you expect will help make these products flourish?

Bruce Friedrich: Yes, I mean I think the food security issue, the fact that they don't require any antibiotics at all, so food security, you can produce a lot more food on a lot less land. They don't require any antibiotics at all. They are much, much better for the climate, a much lower climate impact. And I think those are the things that are going to get, especially governments, particularly excited about and embracing these technologies. I mean these are the reasons that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation say this is the solution for people in the developing world. This is the solution for sort of the poorest areas of the world. You know, it's not just a better veggie burger for the three of us at this table. It's high quality protein for people who have no protein at all.

David Abel: Max Bazerman, you've done some work on the ethical or moral obligations people have in this space. I'm curious, do you think big institutions like universities or the military have some kind of responsibility to start serving people more meat substitutes?

Max Bazerman: I do think that they have that responsibility, but not everybody would agree with me. And so I, when I go to the sort of our very excellent cafeterias at Harvard, I don't tend to stop the managers and preach the benefit of vegetarian food. But what I do do is when they're serving something that's vegetarian that I find particularly appealing, I go out of my way to thank them for doing that and to talk about how that, how the specific food that I ate that day was uniquely appealing, and it would be terrific if we had that more often. So I find complimenting people for what they do well that makes the world a better place is probably a more effective strategy than to preach the benefits of some pure state like veganism.

David Abel: Bruce Friedrich, you've cited reports suggesting that plant based foods that directly replace animal products have grown into a $3.7 billion industry. What's the trajectory here? Do you expect a something akin to exponential growth? Why or why not?

Bruce Friedrich: Well, I mean one of the things that we're focused on at GFI, so we now have GFI affiliates in India, Israel, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Europe. I think I left somebody out, but, and the focus of our international operations and the focus of our policy department in the United States is to convince governments that they should be putting R & D money into basically perfecting and optimizing the production of both plant-based and clean meat. So they should be funding R & D. So the governments of the world, they put tens of billions of dollars into R & D focused on global health and focused on environmental concerns. Some of that money should be going into plant based and clean meat R & D. If that happens, we'll be able to get both the quality of the products will go up more quickly, and the cost will come down more quickly. So because these products are so much more efficient at scale, they will cost less. But we are still very far from being at scale. So the precise trajectory is a little unclear, but we're very, very optimistic. I mean, you know, you look at something like we now take all of our pictures on our phones with digital photos. Very little photography happens with film. The vast majority of our conversation now happens either via text or via cell phone. Not a lot happening on landlines. You know, none of us is going to leave here and go out and get onto a horse to go back to our house. It's automobiles. And those transitions happen very, very quickly. And the point is that if you give consumers what they want, so if we can figure out a way to give consumers everything that they like about meat, but we can produce it at a lower cost, eventually we get to, if X is plant based meat and Y is clean meat, X plus Y equals pretty close to a 100. I mean, I think there will still be regenerative agriculture. There are some people who actually want the animal to be raised and slaughtered and maybe that even goes up a little bit from what it is right now. Maybe more people will want that once their alternatives are plant based and cell based meat. But for the most part, I think we get to a point at which all of the lowest common denominator meat, all of that goes away. And it's replaced by meat produced from plants and meat grown directly from cells.

David Abel: Max Bazerman, what do you think shareholders and others should be doing to encourage traditional agricultural companies to adopt some of these newer, more sustainable methods? What will ultimately take them to change their ways?

Max Bazerman: So it's quite possible that some organizations aren't going to change their ways, but I think others who want to claim that they're interested in outcomes beyond the bottom line may well be susceptible to that. And in many cases when you move from being, all we care about is bottom line to having a double or triple bottom line focus, you're able to get higher quality employees. You're able to get better press, and consumers become more attracted to your brand. And so I think that there are a variety of reasons why firms may want to switch. From attending the Good Foods Institute conference in Berkeley last September, Tyson was there in the significant representation. And I think that they see themselves as being in the protein business. And certainly I'm not privy to the inner workings of Tyson, but I think that they're hedging their bets in case this becomes a more effective way to produce better or cheaper protein than their current methods of producing chickens.

David Abel: Bruce Friedrich, do you see Big Ag on board with these changes or standing in the way? And what are you guys doing to encourage them to reduce their carbon footprint?

Bruce Friedrich: They are definitely on board with the changes. I mean I've been on multiple panels with the folks from Tyson Foods, and as Max just mentioned, Tyson came to our conference in Berkeley last year. We've got Tyson and Perdue, and I think Smithfield has also signed up. They are rebranding themselves as protein companies. And Tyson has said, we don't want to be disrupted. We want to be the disruptor in these companies. The people in these companies see themselves as producing high quality protein to feed the world, which is noble. And if they can do that without the headaches of industrial, you know, raising and slaughtering of animals, all the better. And if that can be even more profitable, all the better still. So I think initially to some degree they're pointing out the sustainability moves involved in these sorts of, involved in moving toward the blended products or the plant based products. But at the end of the day, they want to make money. And if they can do that while also doing better by the environment and better by the global poor and better by global health and better by animals, they'll definitely do it.

David Abel: And now some thoughts from Mike Toffel, professor of environmental management at Harvard Business School.

Mike Toffel: Agriculture contributes a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas, and 60% comes from manure and methane emissions from animals like cattle. It's a huge challenge that also provides a huge opportunity for those who produce meat and meat substitutes. As we heard from Nicole Johnson-Hoffman, the cattle industry itself is trying to make its practices more sustainable. And Bruce Friedrich showed how the emerging technology of lab grown meat can tackle some of the problems of industrial scale cattle raising if lab grown meat gets cheaper to produce and goes mainstream.

But a problem this big can't rely just on supply side innovation. Some of the environmental improvements will come from the demand side. The fact that consumers can eat less meat, as Max Bazerman was commenting. Case in point, Ayr Muir, the CEO and founder of Clover Food Lab, a Boston area vegetarian quick service restaurant chain. He's an HBS alumnus, and in the few times I've met him, his passion is clear. Finding a way to help people eat fewer animal products day to day as the best way to reduce their carbon footprint. Ayr recognizes that when people decide what to eat, they consider taste, cost, convenience, and health, and that few prioritize climate impact.

Ayr Muir: Day one question for Clover: Is there a menu that would be so alluring that somebody who has no problem eating fried chicken, who loves burritos, who loves eating burgers, has no problem with any of those things, which is most of our country, would walk past those options to eat something that's just vegetables?

Mike Toffel: 90% of Clover's customers are not vegetarian, which is solid proof of the ability of individuals to make small impactful changes to their diet. Clover Food Lab also seeks to reduce its climate impact by buying local seasonal produce. They've developed flexibility into their operations to accommodate in ever-changing set of ingredients.

Ayr Muir: Over the course of a day, 10% of the menu will change. Over the course of a week, maybe 40% of the items will shift. Over the course of a month, about 80% of our menu will change. And that's very unique to us. We've built a lot of tech to make it happen. If there's a great tomato harvest, and a farmer has a lot of excess tomatoes, we bring them in, and we serve tomato everything. Or if it's a really bad year for tomatoes, we may not buy them at all.

Mike Toffel: Encouraging people to change is hard. And it's no different when it comes to changing what we eat. But Clover is an example of a business tackling this in a way that sells freshness and flavor while being pretty quiet about the environmental benefits. That's how they attract so many meat eaters to a vegetarian restaurant. It's remarkable. Ayr argues that government agricultural subsidies are a major barrier to innovation in the food system because they distort prices and can lead to worse environmental outcomes. He uses the example of oat milk, just oats blended with water, which costs him three times as much as organic milk because dairy is so heavily subsidized.

Ayr Muir: There are subsidies on the feed that's going to the cows. There's subsidies on the medicines that are fed to those cows. There's subsidies that go directly to the dairy farmers. There are subsidies that go to the distributors. There's subsidies for the roads to subsidize trucking to make that cheaper. And all of the subsidies are leading that to this very odd situation where the economically correct choice for me to make is to serve milk to my customers instead of the oat milk. You know, those things have very, very different footprints.

Mike Toffel: Which means we need to keep an eye on the climate impact of government subsidies, at least as much as we make our own daily food choices. I'm excited to see so many innovations in the food industry that has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, whether in meat production, meat substitutes, or other foods, and expect we'll see lots more in the coming decade.

David Abel: That's it for Climate Rising this week. I'm David Abel. In our next episode, we'll look at the challenges of building support for climate action in the business community, especially for carbon tax.

Auden Schendler: What they really need is for carbon legislation for corporations to come out in force and say, yeah, we want this. That hasn't been happening. We have worked with trade groups in the outdoor industry to try to push them along. In the snow sports industry, the trade group will say, yeah, we get it. Climate's a big problem, and we're going to launch a program to get everyone to reduce their carbon footprint 20%. that doesn't do.

David Abel: Thanks for joining us. I'm your host, David Abel. This is Climate Rising, a podcast produced by Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, and please leave us a review. We appreciate the feedback.