Part of the appeal of the new burgers is their smaller environmental footprint. Beef is the most wasteful food on the planet. Cows are not optimized to make meat; they’re optimized to be cows. It takes 36,000 calories of feed to produce 1,000 calories of beef. In the process, it uses more than 430 gallons of water and 1,500 square feet of land, and it generates nearly ten kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, an Impossible Burger uses 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Beyond Meat’s footprint is similarly svelte.
Yes, a good argument can be made that small-farm, grass-fed beef production (in places that can grow abundant grass) has a very different ethical and environmental landscape, but unfortunately, that’s just not a significant factor. America gets 97 percent of its beef from feedlots. And feedlots are irredeemable.
In the early hours of one morning in May of 1749, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet, worked furiously at her desk in an ornate three-storied Parisian house. Piles of books on mathematics and scientific instruments littered her desktop and spilled over onto the floor, the bureau, the shelves. The marquise’s fingers were stained dark with ink, but she didn’t care. No one important was going to see her anytime soon. She had long given up the pleasures of society life.
Splayed out next to the marquise was a red, morocco-bound copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), the 510-page, three-volume masterpiece that had revolutionized the scientific world and helped usher in the European Enlightenment. What had started as a basic translation from Latin into French had now morphed into a full-blown commentary. The work had proven much more difficult than anticipated, even for someone as educated and intellectual as du Châtelet. But she had come too far to give up now. This book, the first of its kind, was to be her legacy.
When musicians write memoirs, the chapters in which fame kicks in are usually both the best part and the beginning of the end. Tales of backstage debauchery are a reader’s reward for slogging through endless reminiscences about a singer’s childhood pets or their parents’ divorce.
But fame has a distancing effect as well. Once an artist plays their first sold-out show, or signs their first record deal, or spends their first holiday in Biarritz with Mick and Bianca, they are no longer relatable human beings whose experiences in earlier chapters — childhood crushes, bullies, trouble at school — mirror our own. The glass partition in the limo slowly rises, and they are lost to us.
And that’s what makes “Mattered” such a fascinating read. This set of random pieces actually reveal how -- for one, shining moment -- the losers ran Hollywood. For a brief time, movies consisted of stories told by weirdos, loners, outcasts and straight-up failures for weirdos, loners, outcasts and straight-up failures. (And according to Heather Hendershot’s “City of Losers: Losing City” essay, several of the best films took place in New York City, that haven of loserdom, with Al Pacino usually serving as a tour guide.) For this was a point in history when a lot of the American public, whether it was soldiers finally come home from Vietnam or folks simply disillusioned by such stateside scandals as Watergate, felt that way.