A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

Plant-based meat needs government support to scale up, but a culture war stands in the way

From Frida Garza, Grist.org
July 2024

More public investment in plant-based meat would not only help drive research and development of new technologies and help scale manufacturing, according to GFI, it would also be a signal to private capital markets that the alternative protein space is worth taking seriously.

Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images

Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people eat burgers: They would still sizzle and bleed, they’d taste great, but they wouldn’t actually contain any meat. Today it seems that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival has been more than a little delayed. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have fallen over the last two years, and a recentbevy of headlines suggest that this latest wave of imitation meat was just that: a passing fad.

A new report suggests that if the alt protein industry has any hope of scaling, it will take robust funding from a number of different sources — including, crucially, the public sector. The report compares plant-based meat imitations to electric vehicles, a powerful climate solution that has benefited from government support, such as direct purchase subsidies.

But like the EV industry before it, alternative meat has a culture war problem to sort out before it can grow — with or without government investment.

Despite some obvious differences, there’s a major parallel between electric cars and alternative meat: They’re designed to be a one-to-one replacement for their predecessors. Buying an electric vehicle “doesn’t require consumers to make extensive behavioral changes” like forgoing a car completely, said Emma Ignaszewski, one of the authors of the report. Similarly, consumers can simply choose to buy burgers that aren’t made from animal protein rather than burgers that are. “You can enjoy your burger, but it can be produced with far lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat is,” said Ignaszewski, who is a senior associate director at the Good Food Institute, or GFI, a think tank that promotes alternative proteins.

Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have fallen over the last two years. Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

Research has shown that animal agriculture is responsible for 11 to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The development of plant-based foods — meat substitutes that don’t contain meat — could help reduce these emissions and lead to less deforestation and land degradation. One study found that a vegan diet produced about 75 percent less planet-warming gas emissions than meat-rich diets.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: July 2024
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