What’s The Beef With Fake Meat?
Have we cracked the code on mass-producing realistic meat substitutes, or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream?
Animal agriculture has been around for millennia, but is it due for a high-tech upgrade? This week, I delve into the world of alternative proteins with the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich.
We spent a good couple of hours exploring the fascinating topic of how we can feed billions of people without the huge inefficiencies, cruelties and environmental impacts of the current global system of animal agriculture. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, around 5 billion hectares is currently used for farming, or 40% of the Earth’s land surface. Of this, about one-third is used to grow crops (to feed both humans and animals), with the remaining two-thirds used as grazing land. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, and a major driver of climate change.
Bruce has been pondering these issues for decades and has concluded that unless we find a way to give people what they want — fast, cheap, always available protein, mostly in the form of processed meats — then we are destined to fail our climate goals. This is a reasonable thesis, and there are parallels with the conundrum of how to provide energy to billions of people without the emissions: no one is seriously expecting a car-free future, nor is anyone advocating using less electricity. The most effective solution is to replace the dirty options with clean ones.
And yet, as I spoke to Bruce, who is doing a fabulous job of pointing out the dangers of the inexorable rise in meat eating (globally, some estimate 50% more meat will be consumed in 2050 than today), I was struck by how different the food challenge is and how many obstacles have to be overcome to make alternative proteins, or ‘fake meats’, mainstream.
There are a number of routes to a lower-impact food system, including switching to different meats (chicken is far better than beef or lamb, for instance) or simply eating less meat. But if we want fully to replace meat and animal products such as dairy with alternatives, then we need advanced scientific methods that reproduce what meat provides in terms of nutrition but without the externalities. This is the focus of the GFI and the organisations it supports.
The first set of solutions are plant-based and involve blending a precise combination of plant-derived fats and proteins to give a ‘meat-like’ experience. You’ll probably be familiar with the outcome, things like Impossible and Beyond Meat burgers, or our family’s favourite Move Mountains fish fingers. The other is cultured or cultivated meat, which borrows from the medical science of human organ replacement and reproduces cells in a ‘bioreactor’ to essentially grow meat products ‘offline’ from the animal who donated the cell. This may sound like science fiction, but it can be done, albeit at great cost.
The challenges are to get either, or both, of these solutions to a price point where they can scale and win over the public. This will require a fair few enabling conditions: Firstly, some kind of price incentive (or disincentive on the externalities) is likely to be needed to get to price parity — certainly in the early days as development costs are needing to be repaid. Secondly, the social aspects of how this will impact farming and land-based employment will need to be better understood and a transition actively managed if it is going to involve widespread change. You only have to look at recent protests across Europe or India to see the lobbying power of aggrieved farmers. And thirdly, control of popular narratives to avoid misinformation impeding public acceptability.
This last point is perhaps the hardest to manage. In food, as with the energy sector, there is an existing, highly profitable and politically formidable incumbency which can be expected to mount a spirited defence of its current agricultural methods and associated profit margins. Just ask the renewables, nuclear, electric vehicles and now heat pump sectors how they have been hit by decades of mis- and disinformation from the fossil fuel sector, and you can easily imagine how the food transition could be slowed to a snail’s pace. Stop to consider the role the energy majors have had in the clean energy transition and you can see how slow they have been to embrace it.
And in many ways, the food transition is likely to be much harder, due to the exceptionally personal nature of diet and health. A critical difference in this transition is that we’re going to have to ingest these novel replacements, so the potential to sow seeds of doubt and distrust are much greater. If embracing a heat pump is made hard to swallow, imagine how easy it could be to choke off alt-meat markets.
As Bruce is keen to point out, there is no silver bullet to any of the world’s chronic and persistent problems — the GFI is pursuing a path that potentially offers a lot of promise but time will tell if it can scale successfully, given the headwinds. But increasing awareness of the downsides of the current system and harnessing scientific advances to deliver alternatives is clearly an important endeavour. Here’s hoping they can make progress.
To listen to the interview with GFI President Bruce Friedrich visit cleaningup.live, search for Cleaning Up on your podcast platform of choice, or watch the video on YouTube here.
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