When meat goes fake, will people understand why we ate the real thing?
“This is a historic moment in the food system. We’ve been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we’ve eaten meat we’ve had to kill an animal — until now.”
- Josh Tetrick, Chief executive, Eat Just Inc. (December 2020)
Last year ended with an all-time first. “Real, high-quality meat created directly from animal cells for safe human consumption,” approved for sale in the form of “cultured” chicken nuggets. Nuggets that cost $50 a piece to make in October 2019, now available at the same price as quality chicken you’d find at a restaurant.
The fake meat industry is making products that look, taste and “bleed” like the real thing. Just, Beyond, Impossible and others are on a mission to make these lab-grown or plant-based alternatives affordable and ubiquitous. Their exponential progress means cruelty-free meat — indistinguishable from the real thing — will probably be commonplace by 2030.
There’s a huge market for it. One study from late 2019 found 90 percent of those that buy plant-based alternative foods are meat eaters. Around the same time, Burger King had its best quarter in four years, thanks to sales of its plant-based Impossible Whopper. Acknowledging that the food you’re eating was once alive makes a lot of people squeamish. It’s worse knowing the animal was killed prematurely and probably suffered plenty before dying. And it’s getting harder to abstract ourselves from that reality. For those of us still eating meat, the number of vegetarians and vegans we know personally or follow through media is snowballing. Younger generations are increasingly adopting vegetarian and vegan lifestyles. Switching to cruelty-free alternatives, once they’re available with no compromise on taste, texture or price, is a no-brainer.
Fake meat is also potentially healthier and definitely better for the planet, involving less land, less water and fewer greenhouse gas emissions. And it offers a novel potential solution to feeding the world’s future population, as the traditional methods prove more and more insufficient. Venture capitalists have had a keen interest for years. Bill Gates and Richard Branson are among many billionaires that have invested significantly in the “clean meat” industry.
If there’s an economic incentive, and (what many would call) a moral imperative, this journey logically ends with every culinary meat having a synthetic alternative. First they will be comparable, then the quality will eventually surpass that of the original. The first business to achieve that for pork, poultry, steak, seafood, will be in line for big profits.
Fast forward another few decades. Faultless fake meat is widely available. It’s better than ever, as its market of producers has grown, then consolidated, and now includes many more mainstream vendors. In the face of an evermore ethical and vegan consumer base, lab-grown and plant-based meats are the only viable future-proof business model for the meat industry.
An entire generation grows up where every conceivable meal can be made without an animal dying. It’s unlikely they know anyone that still eats meat sourced from live animals. Looking back from that privileged position, would many think they would’ve once condoned animals being killed for their food? And condoned how it was done, with slaughterhouses and battery cages. With 130 million chickens slaughtered daily. With meat as the go-to for fast food and the default filling for crap supermarket sandwiches; being the stalwart of two to three meals every single day. All while there was an abundance of alternatives, even without as many fake meats to fall back on. They’ll be disgusted and perplexed how it was ever accepted. They’ll have a point.
History is littered with groups that partook in terrible practices en masse because it was the done thing. Because it was easiest to go along with the status quo, and not conforming would make no practical difference on any significant scale anyway. From forms of racism and misogyny to corporal punishment and indoor smoking in public places. It’s likely that, within our lifetimes, meat-eating will go the way of other bigotries and biases.
I’m “flexitarian” at best. I’m wondering if I should have this reckoning with myself now, rather than waiting for it to be forced upon me. But if I want to avoid the disdain of my grandkids, I’m probably already decades too late.
