ReportWire

Tag: meat consumption

  • Plant-based meat is a simple solution to climate woes – if more people would eat it

    Plant-based meat is a simple solution to climate woes – if more people would eat it

    THORNTON, Colo. (AP) — Lars Obendorfer says he was “badly insulted” after he first began offering vegan sausage at his stands, dubbed “Best Worscht in Town.” He even found himself mediating between customers arguing on social media about what to him was just another menu item.

    “There was downright hostility between the meat eaters and the vegans,” he said. “And I just couldn’t understand it, and I said, ‘knock off the arguing.’”

    That was six years ago.

    Today, his vegan currywurst — a take on the classic German fast food consisting of pork sausage with ketchup and curry power — is no longer a novelty but a menu fixture at his 25 stands across Germany.

    Of the 200,000 sausages he sells every year, 15% are plant-based.

    “It actually tastes like a normal sausage,” customer Yasemin Dural said. “I even had doubts earlier that it might have been a meat sausage, but you really don’t notice it at all.”

    Eating more plants and fewer animals is among the simplest, cheapest and most readily available ways for people to reduce their impact on the environment, climate scientists have long said. According to one University of Michigan study, if half of U.S. animal-based food was replaced with plant-based substitutes by 2030, the reduction in emissions for that year would be the equivalent of taking 47.5 million vehicles off the road.

    “We are in a climate crisis, a climate emergency,” says Greg Keoleian, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan who co-authored the study. “We all need to play a role, and these products are one strategy to easily reduce your footprint.”

    An explosion of new types of plant-based “meat” — the burgers, nuggets, sausages and other cuts that closely resemble meat but are made from soybeans and other plants — is attracting customers all over the world. Even in Germany, where cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt have given their names to iconic meat dishes, plant-based meat is becoming more popular.

    This latest innovation in meat substitutes has already made meaningful strides. Between 2018 and 2022, global retail sales of plant-based meat and seafood more than doubled to $6 billion, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm.

    Still, that’s dwarfed by global retail sales of packaged animal meat and seafood, which grew 29% in the same period to $302 billion. Plant-based meat and seafood makes up just 2% of the world’s global protein consumption. And sales have been uneven. While demand for plant-based meat is growing rapidly in some countries like Germany and Australia, sales have flattened in the U.S.

    ___

    EDITORS’ NOTE. This story is part of The Protein Problem, an AP series that examines the question: Can we feed this growing world without starving the planet?

    ___

    NEW RECIPES TO THE RESCUE?

    Plant-based meat has been around for decades. Morningstar Farms, a division of Kellogg Co., introduced soy-based breakfast sausage in 1975. But the current boom began about 10 years ago, when startups like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat began selling burgers that more closely resembled meat and were aimed at carnivores, not just vegetarians and vegans. Beyond Meat’s burgers, made with pea protein, even “bleed” with the help of beet juice.

    Those products quickly took hold in Germany, a country where meat-heavy dishes like schnitzel and bratwurst are a mainstay of diets but where widespread concern about climate and animal welfare have been driving big changes. Last year, Germans’ annual meat consumption fell to a 33-year low of 52 kilograms (114 pounds) per person. At the same time, plant-based meat sales rose 22%, according to Euromonitor, and they have tripled since 2018.

    In Australia — where the average person ate around 120 kilograms (264 pounds) of animal meat in 2020, according to the United Nations, putting the country just behind the U.S. in terms of meat consumption — retail sales of plant-based meat have been growing, up 32% between 2020 and 2022.

    Sam Lawrence, the vice president of policy for the Asia division of the Good Food Institute, a plant-based advocacy group, said Australia was initially behind Europe and the U.S. in the adoption of plant-based meat. But that’s changing fast, in part because of health concerns. In 2018, the country had only around eight plant-based meat companies, he said. Now there are more than 40, many with their sights on the vast Asian market.

    But it is the U.S. that represents one of the biggest hopes for a solution: It is the largest market for meat substitutes. It is also one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases from animal agriculture, weighing in as the second-largest consumer of meat per capita behind Hong Kong, according to 2020 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

    Reversing that trend would have a significant impact on global meat consumption, and Tyler Huggins knows it.

    Huggins is the co-founder and CEO of the plant-based food company Meati. He comes from a family of bison ranchers, and he still eats meat occasionally. But after studying damage to rangeland ecology with the U.S. Forest Service, he earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering with a focus on developing new kinds of plant-based meat.

    Huggins says it’s imperative to wean Americans from their meat-heavy diet because the country is already using most of its arable land.

    “How are you going to continue to feed a growing population and an increased demand in meat?” Huggins said. “We have to get more efficient in the way we produce things.”

    Colorado-based Meati makes chewy, fibrous steak filets and chicken cutlets from mushroom roots and a handful of other ingredients, like chickpea flour. Its chicken cutlet has fewer calories, less cholesterol and nearly as much protein as animal chicken.

    Meati collects spores from mushroom roots, feeds them sugar and ferments them in stainless steel tanks full of water. Every 22 hours, the fermented mixture — which resembles applesauce — is drained from a 25,000-liter tank, formed into cutlets and cooked. In four days, a single microscopic spore can produce the equivalent of a whole cow’s worth of meat.

    Eventually, the company expects to produce more than 40 million pounds of meat annually at its 100,000-square-foot Mega Ranch in Thornton, Colorado. That’s about 160 million four-ounce servings, or half the amount of beef served each year at Chipotle, one of Meati’s biggest investors.

    A MATTER OF TASTE

    Meati came onto the plant-based meat scene in 2017, around the same time that dozens of others were trying their hand in the space. At least 55 plant-based companies and brands — including entries from big meat producers like Tyson Foods — launched in the U.S. during 2017 and 2020, according to the Good Food Institute. Meanwhile, plant-based meat sales more than doubled in that same period, to $1.6 billion.

    But then sales plateaued, inching up just 2% between 2020 and 2022, according to Euromonitor. At the same time, U.S. animal meat and seafood sales rose 12.7%.

    Some contend that the high price of meat alternatives is limiting their appeal. As of April, U.S. plant-based meat and seafood prices were an average of 27% higher than animal meat and seafood in the U.S., according to Euromonitor. That was larger than the 20% gap in Germany.

    For Peter McGuinness, the CEO of pioneering plant-based burger maker Impossible Foods, taste — not price — is the biggest issue.

    “I think the category is not good enough,” McGuinness said. “What is the number one thing people want in food? Taste. If I don’t have the taste, they don’t care about the cholesterol and the saturated fat.”

    A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of U.S. consumers found that about 8 in 10 U.S. adults said taste was an extremely or very important factor when buying food, with its cost and nutritional value following close behind. Americans are much less likely to prioritize the food’s effect on the environment (34%) or its effect on animal welfare (30%).

    Lisa Feria, the CEO of Stray Dog Capital, which invests in plant-based meat companies, said that even though the initial exuberance in the U.S. market is now thinning out, new brands that emerge from this period will be stronger and better-funded, which will help the plant-based meat market grow at a more sustainable pace.

    “We deserve these products that are better for us, for the environment, definitely for animals, that we could eat for generations to come no matter how many people are on the planet,” Feria said.

    But it will take some convincing. An hour north of Meati’s Mega Ranch is the U.S. headquarters of JBS, one of the world’s largest meat producers. JBS launched Planterra Foods, a U.S. plant-based brand, in 2020 but closed it two years later. JBS, which still makes plant-based meat in Europe and Brazil, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

    FOR THE SAKE OF THE PLANET

    The meat industry has sown its own doubts about its plant-based rival. The Center for Consumer Freedom — which says it’s funded by restaurants and food companies but won’t say which ones — has run Super Bowl and newspaper ads criticizing plant-based meat, saying it has “chemicals and ultra-processed ingredients that you can’t pronounce.”

    Indeed, questions about the healthiness of plant-based meat have weighed on sales. Plant-based foods have some benefits over meat; they have no cholesterol, for example, and may have less fat and more fiber. But plant-based foods can also be higher in sodium, to better mimic meat’s flavor, and they don’t always have as much protein.

    Beyond Meat, another pioneer in the market, is focused on improving the health of its products. The company notes that its Beyond Steak beef tips were recently certified as a heart-healthy food by the American Heart Association.

    But Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO Ethan Brown says that in places like Germany — unlike in the U.S. — concerns about health are outweighed by concerns about the environment.

    “In the European Union, there’s clearly a desire to do something meaningful about climate,” Brown said. “Here in the United States, it’s unfortunately become politicized.”

    For Adrienne Stevson, it’s all about the environment. A graphic designer from Johnson, Vermont, Stevson was a heavy meat-eater for most of her life. She has a family cookbook filled with meaty recipes, and she even worked for a time as a prep cook preparing meat.

    So when her partner became a vegan, she was skeptical. But the more she learned about the benefits to the climate, the more she warmed to plant-based meat.

    Stevson still uses her family cookbook, but she swaps out the meat for Beyond Meat ground beef, Impossible sausage and other products, like tofu. In an ideal world, she says, she wouldn’t have to do that.

    “I think in an ideal world we could live with eating dairy products and meat products,” Stevson says. “But there’s way too many people on the earth and we haven’

    ___

    McHugh is based in Frankfurt.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    Source link

  • A Slice of ‘Bacon’ Made Me Believe in Fake Meat

    A Slice of ‘Bacon’ Made Me Believe in Fake Meat

    Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

    I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

    This lab-grown fat, or “cultivated fat,” was made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco start-up, with one purpose: to win people over to plant-based meat. And a lot of people need to be won over, it seems. The plant-based-meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling. Once the novelty of seeing plant protein “bleed” wore off, the high price, middling nutrition, and just-okay flavor of plant-based meat has become harder for consumers to overlook, food analysts told me. In 2021 and 2022, many of the fast-food chains that had once given plant-based meat a national platform—Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s—lost interest in selling it. In the past four months, the two most visible plant-based-meat companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have each announced layoffs.

    Meanwhile, the future of meat alternatives—lab-grown meat that is molecularly identical to the real deal—is at least several years away, lodged between science fiction and reality. But we can’t wait until then to eat less meat; it’s one of the single best things that regular people can do for the climate, and also helps address concerns about animal suffering and health. Lab-grown fat might be the bridge. It is created using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but it’s far simpler to make and can be mixed into existing plant-based foods, Elysabeth Alfano, the CEO of the investment firm VegTech Invest, told me. As such, it’s likely to become commercially available far sooner—maybe even within the next few years. Maybe all it will take to save fake meat is a little animal fat.

    Animal fat is culinary magic. It creates the juiciness of a burger, and leaves a buttery coat on the tongue. Its absence is the reason that chicken breasts taste so bland. Fat, the chef Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is “a source of both rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.” The fake meat on the market now is definitely lacking in the flavor and texture departments. Most products approximate meatiness using a concoction of plant oils, flavorings, binders, and salt, which is certainly meatier than the bean burgers that came before it, but is far from perfect: The food blog Serious Eats, for instance, has pointed out off-putting flavor notes, at least prior to cooking, including coconut and cat food. On a molecular level, plant fat is ill-equipped to mimic its animal counterpart. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meat, is solid at room temperature but melts under relatively low heat, so it spills out into the pan while cooking. As a result, the mouthfeel of plant-based meat tends to be more greasy than sumptuous.

    Replacing those plant oils with cultivated animal fat, which keeps its structure when heated, would maintain the flavor and juiciness people expect of real meat, Audrey Gyr, the start-up innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for plant-based substitutes, told me. In a sense, the technique of using animal fat to flavor plants is hardly new. Chicken schmaltz has long lent rich nuttiness to potato latkes; rendered guanciale is what gives a classic amatriciana its succulence. Plant-based bacon enhanced with pork fat follows from the same culinary tradition, but it’s very high-tech. Fat cells sampled from a live animal are grown in huge bioreactors and fed with plant-derived sugars, proteins, and other growth components. In time, they multiply to form a mass of fat cells: a soft, pale solid with robust flavor, the same white substance you might see encircling a pork chop or marbling a steak.

    Out of the bioreactor, the fat “looks a little bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, a co-founder of the London-based cultivated-fat company Hoxton Farms, told me. It is a complicated process, but far easier than engineering cultivated meat, which involves many cell types that must be coaxed into rigid muscle fibers. Fat involves one type of cell and is most useful as a formless blob. Just as in the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugars, oils, and other fats, Eitan Fischer, CEO of Mission Barns, told me. The bacon I’d tried at the tasting had been constructed by layering cultivated fat with plant-based protein, curing and smoking the loaf, then slicing it into bacon-like strips. Mixing just 10 percent cultivated fat with plant-based protein by mass, Steele said, can make a product taste and feel like the real thing.

    Already, cultivated-fat products are within sight. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its cultivated fat into its own plant-based products; Hoxton Farms hopes to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based-meat manufacturers. Other companies, such as the Belgian start-up Peace of Meat, the Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultivated fat. In theory, the fat can be mixed into virtually any type of plant-based meat—nuggets, sausages, paté. In the U.S., a path to market is already being cleared. Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture. Pending its own regulatory approvals, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch its products in a few supermarkets and restaurants, which also include a convincingly porky plant-based meatball I also tried at the tasting. (Due to the pending approval, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)

    I left the tasting with animal fat on my lips and a new conviction in my mind: At the right price, I’d buy this bacon over the regular stuff. Because cultivated fat can be made without harming animals—the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-ranging pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Barns told me—it may appeal to flexitarians like myself who just want to eat less meat.

    Although there’s no guarantee it would taste as good at home as it did when prepared by Mission Barns’s private chef, with its realistic texture and flavor, cultivated fat could solve the main issue plaguing plant-based meat: It just doesn’t taste that good. Cultivated fat is “the next step in making environmentally friendly foods more palatable to the average consumer,” Jennifer Bartashus, a packaged-food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told me.

    But cultivated fat still faces some of the same problems that have turned America off plant-based meat. The current products for sale are not particularly healthy, and cultivated fat would not change that fact. Building consumer trust and familiarity may also be an issue. Some people are leery of plant-based products because they’re confused about what they’re made of. The more complex notion of cultivated fat may be just as unappetizing, if not more so. “We still don’t know exactly how consumers are going to feel about cultivated fat,” Gyr said. Certainly, finding a catchy name for these products would help, but I have struggled to find a term less clunky than “plant-based meat flavored with cultivated animal fat” to describe what I ate. Unless cultivated-fat companies really nail their marketing, they could go the way of “blended meat”—mixtures of plant-based protein and real meat introduced by three meat companies in 2019, which was “a bit of a marketing failure,” Gyr said.

    Above all, though, is the price relative to that of traditional meat. Plant-based meat’s higher cost has partly been blamed for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultivated fat, in all likelihood, will not be cheaper in the near future. Neither founder I spoke with shared specific numbers; Fischer, of Mission Barns, said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “fairly expensive” compared with traditional meat products, while Steele said his hope is that companies using Hoxton Farms’ cultivated fat in their plant-based-meat recipes won’t have to spend more than they do now.

    Despite these obstacles, cultivated fat is promising for the flagging plant-based-meat industry because of the fact that it is absolutely delicious. Cultivated fat could “lead to a new round of innovation that will pull consumers back in,” Bartashus said. After all, plant-based and real meat could reach cost parity around 2026, at which point even more companies might want to get in on meat alternatives. Cultivated fat might warm us up to the future of fully cultivated meat. With enough time, lab-grown chicken breasts could become as boring as regular chicken breasts.

    Enthusiasm about cultivated fat, and fake meat in general, has a distinctly techno-optimist flavor, as if persuading all meat eaters to embrace plants gussied up in bacon grease will be easy. “Eventually our goal is to outcompete current conventional meat prices, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fischer said. But even as the problems with eating meat have only become clearer, meat consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. Globally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. At the very least, cultivated fat provides consumers with another option at a time when eating a steak for one meal and then opting for plant-based meat the next can count as a win.

    Since the tasting, I’ve often thought about why eating the bacon left me feeling so perplexed. When I gnawed on the crispy golden edge of one of the strips, I knew I was eating real bacon fat, but my brain still wrestled with the idea that it had not come directly from a piece of pork. I’ve only ever known a world where animal fat comes from slaughtered animals. That is changing. If cultivated fat can tide the plant-based-meat industry over until lab-grown meat becomes a reality, these new products will have done their part. In the meantime, we may come to find that they’re already good enough.

    Yasmin Tayag

    Source link