The Promise and Problem of Fake Meat

The potential success of fake meat reflects the lengths we will go to avoid changing our behavior: We would rather change the entire definition of meat to include something we know isn’t meat, rather than eat less of it to save the planet and ourselves.

EMILY ATKIN: We have a meat problem. It’s a key driver of the climate crisis, drinking water pollution, and land overuse. And excessive consumption of factory-raised and processed meat increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes… That’s a problem for our personal health, and that of the planet…

Perhaps we should apply different standards to the meat and fossil fuel industries. They may be two of the largest contributors to the climate crisis, but meat, unlike oil, is something most us regularly touch, feel, and taste. It’s personal, and thus much harder to demonize than fossil fuels… But what if we could have it both ways? What if we could eat meat without the consequences?..

That’s the big idea behind Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The competing food companies, which have grown rapidly over the past year, might be famous for creating vegetarian burgers that look, taste, and bleed like beef. But that’s not all they’re trying to do. They’re also trying to change the world by changing what society believes meat to be…

It makes sense, too, why Americans might believe that the answer to the meat problem lies in a scientific lab, rather than in our stomachs. Science has long driven the modern food industry. When our diets were too high in fat and cholesterol, food scientists created low-fat products…

Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger do have better nutritional profiles than beef burgers: Less calories, more protein, less fat… Combine that with the large body of research linking meat consumption to disease risk, and you have a pretty convincing case that the world’s health would be better off if we replaced traditional meat with these products…

While we may not not know exactly how Impossible or Beyond burgers are made, they clearly fall into the ultra-processed category. They were literally created in scientific labs. Their proteins are isolates, extracted mechanically from whole soy and peas. Their fats are industrial vegetable and seed oils. In fact, companies like Impossible and Beyond have arguably created a new, higher tier of ultra-processed food. As Engadget noted, “A Cheeto or Twinkie is unambiguously synthetic.”

But these fake-meat products are engineered, specifically, to fool our senses into thinking they’re whole foods—and then marketed, by meat companies, to change our language to reflect the trick. This is nutritionism at its finest, and its success so far reflects the lengths we will go to avoid changing our behavior: We would rather change the entire definition of meat to include something we know isn’t meat, rather than eat less of it to save the planet and ourselves’. SOURCE…

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