About Rebekah Moses
Rebekah Moses leads impact strategy at Impossible Foods, a company seeking to address climate change and build a sustainable food system through plant-based meat and dairy. She builds environmental and social impact strategy associated with product and growth, and runs the business sustainability platform. Additionally, she’s Impossible’s moonlighting agronomy advisor, working on development of novel crop-based protein supply chains. After beginning her career in the defense and policy space, Rebekah moved into food system sustainability, focusing on mechanisms of conserving biodiversity while scaling food production. She has worked at the intersection of ecology, agriculture, and international development in the Middle East and domestically. Following her graduate studies at the University of California at Davis, she has supported USAID, UC Berkeley, Stanford and most recently Cal Poly’s coastal ecosystem facility. Rebekah’s research contributions can be found in journals like the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Journal of Applied Ecology. She is a frequent magazine and podcast commentator on solutions for scaling a food system to feed 10 billion consumers. Rebekah joined Impossible excited by the possibility for reversing biodiversity loss and addressing climate change through the power of consumer movements.
World reliance on livestock is providing 20% of the world's calories, and 30% of protein. But that reliance comes at the expense of our climate, biodiversity, and water resources. Consumers have the power to scale the food system in a way that strengthens food security while sparing our finite natural resources - they just need the right toolkit. Since solving these problems requires transformations, not just improvements, Impossible Foods is doing deep research to solve what makes meat look, taste, cook and smell the way it does; the resulting technology platform can put better, more sustainable options in consumers' hands. Impossible Foods offers plant-based meat to satisfy growing demand for beef, without compromising taste, nutrition, or the planet. Their flagship product, the Impossible Burger, is offered at 5,000 restaurants and is coming to retail in 2019. This presentation will offer a solutions-focused discussion of the environmental impacts of our agricultural sector, and ways to mobilize the private sector to create positive change.
Having worked on the production side of agriculture, she conducted extensive research in the middle-east and in ecosystem services prior to coming to Impossible Foods. While at Impossible Foods, Rebekah was involved in finding an alternative to expand the conversation of beef production with a focus on yield gaps. By providing the consumer the tools to have an opportunity to mitigate sustainability, the food-technology company is offering alternatives to help with the transition of a plant-based diet approach. Impossible Foods recognizes the difficulty in the transition as most humans eat meat and find transitioning to plant-based diets incredibly difficult and unfeasible. Impossible Foods’ mission involves targeting uncompromisingly delicious meat, fish, and dairy products directly from plants, without having consumers compromise for a trade-off.
The food-tech company, located in Redwood City, California, was founded by former Biochemist, Dr Pat Brown of Stanford University, with a global goal of achieving sustainability by 2050. Dr Brown began the food-tech company with the motivation of mitigating spectacular biodiversity loss due to the agriculture industry. Having analyzed the data from the Niko Alexandratos and Jelle Bruinsma paper, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050, there is great concern for resource use over the demand of meat and dairy. The data shows beef consumption will increase by 88% as livestock is generating emissions as much as the entire global transportation industry. There is an increasing focus on the energy and automobile sector of sustainability, however, the focus on the food and agriculture industry has been heavily ignored because an alternative did not seem feasible in the past. Dr Brown has taken the social approach of past innovations from the evolving transportation industry. He believes if we could transition from a horse to an electric car, we could use the same logic to transition from eating beef to eating plant-based foods that tastes like beef. By creating a product to mimic the flavor of animal products, Impossible Foods projects meat-eating consumers will transform the food and agriculture industry to a plant-based food industry of approximately a 1.7 trillion dollar global market threshold.
With one-third of global water use and one-half of all landscapes being used, we have maxed out environmental thresholds for 2018 and 2019. As the numbers of biodiversity loss and deforestation rise, the data is clear on the apocalyptic future we will face based off projections if a solution to our global eating habits and demand for animal products is not implemented soon. The Impossible Burger is significantly more sustainable than a burger from cows using 74% less water, 87% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and 95% less land. Cattle has a scaling problem that has led to deforestation and production technology companies must meet consumer needs by targeting sustainability. If we end the extensifying of our animal agriculture footprint by using our resources to feed animals for consumption, we will lose our land, animals, and food through a conversion. By leading with delicious food, affordable products, and easy attainability, Impossible Foods hopes to transform the future of food to make room for a thriving biodiversity of animals in our incredible forests.
Credits:
Created with images by Unijewels - "eat burger onion" • RyanMcGuire - "calf cow maverick"