RECENTLY I ROLLED into a local restaurant to try an Impossible Burger, an all-plant patty invented by the Silicon Valley startup Impossible Foods. Itโs renowned for having an eerily chewy, even bloody, meat like quality, a startling verisimilitude that has made it โperhaps the countryโs most famous burger,โ asย New Yorkย magazine recently wrote. One bite into its gorgeous, smoky flavor and, damn, I was convinced.
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This is good news, because the time has come to scale up fake meat, fast. Why? Because in the fight to stave offย climate change, meat replacement isโforgive meโone of the lowest-hanging fruits.
Meat production chews up land and spews out methane by the kiloton, accounting for about two-thirds of allย greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. A University of Oxford study recently found that, to keep global warming below 2 degrees this century, we need to be eating 75 percent less beef and 90 percent less pork globally. โWithout concentrated change, we really risk exceeding key environmental limits,โ Marco Springmann, one of the Oxford researchers, warns me.
Diets are culturally enshrined, so changing them will be hard. Mock Meat can help camouflage that epic transformation as a mere tweak.
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Still, even the most uncanny substitutes for meat face an uphill slog if theyโre going to replace 75 to 90 percent of beef and pork. Theย firstย taste of an Impossible Burgerโa moment when low expectations work a powerful magic in the productโs favorโis one thing. But how do you keep meat-eaters asking for more after their sixth, and their 26th?
Fortunately, the science here is firing on all pistons. Impossible Foods owes much of its appeal to a bioengineering process that cranks out big, blood-red tanks of โheme,โ a crucial molecule that gives veggie meat โthat slightly metallic bloody flavor,โ as David Lipman, chief science officer of Impossible Foods, tells me. Meanwhile, โcultured meat,โ created by growing actual animal cells in a vat, is moving toward viability. In New York, the nerds atย Ocean Hugger Foodsย have engineered a process to transform tomatoes into mock tuna. And over in the Netherlands, a company calledย The Vegetarian Butcherย is developing a Nespresso-style device: You pour in a bag of vegetable protein and out pops fabricated meat. The company aims to release it in two years.
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To get to true mass adoption, mock meat will need to compete favorably with the real thing on multiple fronts. Impossible Foodsโ goal is to drive the price of its product below that of Safewayโs 80/20 hamburger meat, at which point people will simply vote with their wallets. The new industry also wants to improveย on animal flesh in various ways. Those on-ยญdemand fabricators will outcompete traditional meat because โyou wonโt need to refrigerate it if youโre making it as you go,โ cofounder Niko Koffeman says. Thatโd make unmeat an enormous boon for energy-poor developing regions. Plus, custom fabrication could improve choice. โYou could have very soft and tender meat for elderly people,โ Koffeman adds. โYou could have a custom meat for whatever you need.โ
We could speed this dietary shift with smart public policy too. Beginning in 2006, New York City cut the number of adults consuming one or more sugary drinks per day by 35 percent by running zingy public service campaigns and requiring the labeling of their hefty calorie counts in fast-food restaurants. Imagine similar measures promoting fake meat: โSave the planet, bite by bite.โ Save your health too. (To say nothing of your conscience: Industrial-scale animal farming is an ethically ghastly enterprise.)
You can tell the world is shifting this way, because the ranchers are nervous. Last year, the US Cattlemenโs Association asked the government to define โmeatโ as a product โderived directly from animals.โ That anxietyโand the sheer momentum of the science driving itโgoes to show that this grand shift isnโt impossible.
Mock meat has many benefits, particularly for people looking to reduce their consumption of animal products. ย “Many of the new fake meats, the ones made typically with pea or soy, are โrich sources of protein and the amino acid lysine, which most plant foods lack, aside from legumes,โ According to registered dietician Taylor Wolfram, MS, RDN, LDN, who specialises in veganism
