FAUX SURE! IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE FAKE MEAT
这是真的，人造肉消费时代来临！
RECENTLY I ROLLED into a local restaurant to try an Impossible Burger, an all-plant patty invented by the Silicon Valley startup Impossible Foods. It’s renowned for having an eerily chewy, even bloody, meat like quality, a startling verisimilitude that has made it “perhaps the country’s most famous burger,” as New York magazine recently wrote. One bite into its gorgeous, smoky flavor and, damn, I was convinced.
最近笔者溜进一个纽约的本地餐厅，尝鲜了一下“不可能的汉堡”。 ”不可能的汉堡“ 是由 硅谷一家名为"不可能的食物"的创业公司发明，他们用全素材料制造人造肉饼，从而推出人造肉汉堡。这个人造肉汉堡能给食用者带来与食用真肉一样惊人相似的神奇咀嚼口感，甚至能让人在口腔内感受到那种血淋淋的肉类质地；它因此而一炮走红，纽约杂志最近评论夸这个汉堡为“可能是这个国家最出名的汉堡”。我一口咬下去，那种略带烟肉风味的美味口感令人舒爽，哇，真的不由我不信！
This is good news, because the time has come to scale up fake meat, fast. Why? Because in the fight to stave off climate change, meat replacement is—forgive me—one of the lowest-hanging fruits.
这是个好消息，因为大量消费人造肉的时代很快就会来临，并且越来越快。原因？因为在人类延缓气候改变的能使用的手段中，替代肉是最容易实现的。
Meat production chews upland and spews out methane by the kiloton, accounting for about two-thirds of all green house gas emissions from agriculture. A University of Oxford study recently found that, to keep global warming below 2 degrees this century, we need to be eating 75 percent less beef and 90 percent less pork globally. “Without concentrated change, we really risk exceeding key environmental limits,” Marco Springmann, one of the Oxford researchers, warns me.
生产肉类的畜牧业啃掉高地，其数以千吨计排放的甲烷占整个农业排放的温室气体的三分之二之多。牛津一所大学研究发现，为实现本世纪内把全球气候变暖控制在2摄氏度之内，我们需要少吃75%的牛肉和90%的猪肉。牛津的研究人员Marco Springmann 表示，“如果没有更大的改变，我们真的面临环境崩溃临界点被突破的风险。”
Diets are culturally enshrined, so changing them will be hard. Fake meat can help camouflage that epic transformation as a mere tweak.
饮食是一种文化传承，想改变代代相传的饮食习惯很难。而人造肉可以通过伪装帮助人们先走出人类行为大改变中的一小步。
Still, even the most uncanny substitutes for meat face an uphill slog if they’re going to replace 75 to 90 percent of beef and pork. The first taste of an Impossible Burger—a moment when low expectations work a powerful magic in the product’s favor—is one thing. But how do you keep meat-eaters asking for more after their sixth, and their 26th？
不过即使是最神奇的肉类替代品，目标要替代掉75%的牛肉和90%的猪肉，始终是步步维艰。“不可能的汉堡”魔力般的第一口感其实部分源于低期望值造成的相对反差。但是怎么能让肉食者在吃完第6个，甚至第26个的时候还会持续不断的食用呢？
Fortunately, the science here is firing on all pistons. Impossible Foods owes much of its appeal to a bioengineering process that cranks out big, blood-red tanks of “heme,” a crucial molecule that gives veggie meat “that slightly metallic bloody flavor,” as David Lipman, chief science officer of Impossible Foods, tells me. Mean while, “cultured meat,” created by growing actual animal cells in a vat, is moving toward viability. In New York, the nerds at Ocean Hugger Foods have engineered a process to transform tomatoes into mock tuna. And over in the Netherlands, a company called The Vegetarian Butcher is developing a Nespresso-style device: You pour in a bag of vegetable protein and out pops fabricated meat. The company aims to release it in two years.
所幸的是科学真是火力全开。“不可能食物”公司的首席科学家David Lipman告诉我，他们公司的魔力来自于他们利用生物工程造出大量的亚铁血红素，一种能够让素肉具备“轻微铁质口感类似血的味道”的关键分子。同时，通过在容器内培养动物干细胞而生产的“培养肉”，虽然目前成本高昂，离真正普及也越来越近。纽约的Ocean Hugger食品公司的专家已经发明生物合成工程把西红柿造成“仿”吞拿鱼。荷兰的Vegetarian Butcher已经研制出一种像雀巢胶囊咖啡机一样的设备，你只要放进一袋植物蛋白，它会"吐" 出来一块人造肉。该产品计划在两年内推出市场。
To get to true mass adoption, fake meat will need to compete favorably with the real thing on multiple fronts. Impossible Foods’ goal is to drive the price of its product below that of Safeway’s 80/20 hamburger meat, at which point people will simply vote with their wallets. The new industry also wants to improve on animal flesh in various ways. Those on-demand fabricator swill out compete traditional meat because “you won’t need to refrigerate it if you’re making it as you go,” cofounder Niko Koffeman says. That’d make unmeat an enormous boon for energy-poor developing regions. Plus, custom fabrication could improve choice. “You could have very soft and tender meat for elderly people,” Koffeman adds. “You could have a custom meat for whatever you need.”
而在大量普及之前，人造肉需要在各条战线与真肉竞争。“不可能食物”公司目标是努力把价格降到低于Safeway公司的80/20汉堡肉的价格，这样就可以让消费者简单地用自己的钱包来做选择。该公司同时正用不同方式来改善人造肉产品。合伙人Niko Koffeman说，“按需而变的人造肉会淘汰传统肉食，因为你想烹饪时根本不需要解冻。” 他补充说，定制的人造肉可以提供不同的选择，“老人可以选择非常软和细嫩的肉，不同的需求有不同的人造肉来满足。"
We could speed this dietary shift with smart public policy too. Beginning in 2006,New York City cut the number of adults consuming one or more sugary drinks per day by 35 percent by running zingy public service campaigns and requiring the labeling of their hefty calorie counts in fast-food restaurants. Imagine similar measures promoting fake meat: “Save the planet, bite by bite.” Save your health too.(To say nothing of your conscience: Industrial-scale animal farming is an ethically ghastly enterprise.)
我们可以通过聪明的公众政策来推进这一场饮食习惯的迭代。2006年纽约市曾发起一场漂亮的公众服务运动，要求快餐店标识明示高热量食物饮品，就这样把人均每天消耗糖饮料降低了35%。同样方式也可以用来推广人造肉。 “一口一口，拯救地球” 还可以拯救你的健康。（更有个人意识上的积极意义，工业规模的动物养殖在公众伦理道德上本来就非常不讨好）
You can tell the world is shifting this way, because the ranchers are nervous. Last year, the US Cattlemen’s Association asked the government to define “meat” as a product “derived directly from animals.” That anxiety, and the sheer momentum of the science driving it—goes to show that this grand shift isn’t impossible.
你可以感受到世界正在慢慢改变，因为牧场主开始紧张焦虑。去年美国牧场联盟要求政府定义"肉"这个产品，“必须直接来自动物身体”。这种焦虑，来自科学的简单直接的推动，让人意识到这种大改变并非不可能发生。
英语原文来自Wired连线杂志；原文链接 https://www.wired.com/story/embrace-fake-meat-future-benefits/
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