A Fresh Take on
Fake Meat
Melissae Fellet
F
or some, the pleasure of eating meat
comes served with a side of guilt.
Raising animals for food contributes to
climate change, water pollution, and
habitat destruction. Governmental dietary
recommendations and social campaigns like
Meatless Monday pepper us with messages
to eat less meat, particularly red meat. But
for meat lovers, come dinnertime, alternative
protein sources, like beans or soy-based meat
substitutes, are no match for the experience
of eating a burger. Taking a bite, the meat
feels dense, it rebounds as you chew, and
juices squirt into your mouth. Consumers
crave it, and global demand for meat is
projected to skyrocket.
Now scientists are using food science,
biotechnology, and tissue engineering to
develop new meat substitutes with the taste,
texture, and appearance of meat—to deliver
the pleasure, without the environmental
consequences. Chicken strips, ground
beef crumbles, and burgers made with
these techniques are already appearing on
grocery store shelves, made by companies
with reported funding from tech giants like
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google cofounder
Sergey Brin, and Twitter founders Biz Stone
and Evan Williams. Whether driven by a desire
to save the planet or make healthier foods,
these food innovators hope high-tech toolkits
will help create products that meat eaters
love.
Pat Brown’s Impossible Dream
“Our target consumers, which are the only
ones that are going to make a difference for
the mission, are hard core, uncompromising
meat lovers”, said Patrick O. Brown, to a
crowd at the fall 2015 American Chemical
Society meeting in Boston. Brown, a renowned
biochemist who pioneered DNA microarrays
in the 1990s, left his professorship at Stanford
University to start Impossible Foods, a Silicon
Valley food start-up, bent on upending
what he calls “the world’s most destructive
industry”. If the company can make plant-
based products that meat and dairy lovers
prefer over what they consume today, he
Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Ecosystems 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s10021-011-
9517-8.
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