Bruce Friedrich was responsible for some of the animal-rights movement’s most notorious stunts—but now he’s working to win over meat eaters one bite at a time.Bruce Friedrich was responsible for some of the animal-rights movement’s most notorious stunts—but now he’s working to win over meat eaters one bite at a time.
Before our meeting, I told Friedrich I’d never eaten an Impossible Whopper, the BK burger made from a mixture of soy proteins. So now we’re having a taste test. And unlike my 30 Days of Meat, this isn’t some journalistic stunt. Rather, it’s at the core of how Friedrich hopes to change the world. The Good Food Institute played a part in bringing cultivated meat from lab to table, as Friedrich and his colleagues have been talking to the feds about doing since 2017. Founded in 2016, the organization has 200 employees, most based in the US, and affiliate offices in India, Brazil, Singapore, Israel, and all over Europe. Its data is routinely cited by large institutions, including the World Health Organization and the UN Environment Program.
As an undergraduate at Grinnell College in Iowa, Friedrich was an antipoverty activist. In 1990, he came to Washington and ran the homeless shelter and soup kitchen at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, living onsite and taking a weekly salary of $5. The next year, he converted to Roman Catholicism and was confirmed at St. Aloysius Church on I Street, Northwest.
Friedrich sees alternative proteins as essential to mitigating climate change and helpful for lessening global hunger. Humans currently consume 380 million tons of meat annually, an amount that’s expected to triple by 2050. Feeding, slaughtering, processing, and dis-tributing livestock already makes up one-fifth of global greenhouse-gas emissions. If alt-proteins don’t become mainstream, Friedrich reasons, there’s no way to keep the planet from dramatically warming.
There are other challenges. In an Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in 2023, half of American adults said they’d be unlikely to try cell-cultivated meat. Asked to choose from a list of reasons why, about half the respondents said they were worried about safety, and most selected “It just sounds weird.
“Oh, yeah, that is a common observation,” he says. “But one of the other things I have heard is that if somebody’s eating the Impossible Whopper, they won’t know it’s the Impossible Whopper because it’s not distinct enough.”
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