Big Beef Prepares For Battle, As Interest Grows In Plant-Based And Lab-Grown Meats
The livestock industry is lobbying to try to stop plant-based meats from gaining market share. It promoted a new law in Missouri that forbids misrepresenting a product not derived from a dead animal as meat.
FRANK MORRIS: ‘The U.S. meat industry is gigantic, with roughly $200 billion a year in sales, and getting larger. But the industry faces emerging threats on two fronts: plant-based meat substitutes and actual meat grown in labs. Plant-based meat substitutes are a lot more, well, meaty than they used to be. They sear on the grill and even “bleed”… The industry that makes these products is taking off, growing 20 percent a year… After more than a decade of fast growth, plant-based milks have now captured about 13 percent of the liquid milk market, according to the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes alternatives to animal protein.
“Business is booming,” says Todd Boyman, co-founder of food company Hungry Planet. “We just can’t keep up. We’re actually having to expand our production facilities to keep up with the demand that’s out there for this type of food”… Of course, taking the animals out of the meat business is not good news for people who raise meat animals for a living. In fact, livestock producers face two big threats to market share: rapidly-improving plant-based meat substitutes, and meat grown from animal cells in laboratories. The meat industry is focused on shaping the regulatory environment for its new competitors, taking into account lessons learned from the rise of plant-based milks…
Danielle Beck, director of Government Affairs for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, says lax oversight helped plant-based milk… The livestock industry is lobbying to try to stop plant-based meats from gaining market share with ambiguous labels. It promoted a new law in Missouri that forbids “misrepresenting a product” not derived from a dead animal as meat. The law is tied up in court, but its language is interesting, because it also addresses an as yet distant but ominous threat to the livestock industry: real meat produced without slaughtering animals — meat grown entirely in laboratories’. SOURCE…
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