It was the steak dinners, Ethan Brown says, that changed his life. He had embarked on a career in the clean energy industry, a path befitting an environmentalist out to save the world. But the incongruity he perceived among his colleagues, who would lament environmental problems while eating beef, pushed Brown — a vegetarian since the age of 18 — in a different direction.
"We would go to conferences and sit there wringing our hands over all these [energy] issues, and then we'd go to dinner and people would order huge steaks," Brown told Popular Science in 2013.
Brown left the energy industry and founded a startup called Beyond Meat in 2009, building on the work of University of Missouri food scientist Fu-hung Hsieh, a pioneer in "high moisture extrusion of fibrous meat analog" — making fake meat taste more like flesh, in other words. Beyond Meat achieved early hype with its Beyond Chicken strips, designed to obliterate memories of limp tofu dogs or crumbly veggie burgers. Observing the strips shred into ligament-like strands at Beyond Meat's factory in Columbus, Mo., Food Network star and author Alton Brown remarked at Wired in 2013, "It's more like meat than anything I've ever seen that wasn't meat."
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