From 'bleeding' burgers to meaty aromas, plant-based meats are becoming a more plausible alternative to the real thing
into Honest Burgers, a small chain of restaurants in Britain. Mindful of the carbon emissions that come from raising cows, he orders a plant-based burger. It tastes convincingly beefy, at least when encased in a brioche bun and loaded with vegan Gouda and chipotle “mayo”. He asks where this wondrous environmentally friendly virtueburger was made? Sheepishly, staff inform him that the patty—supplied by Beyond Meat, a California-based company—has been flown in from America.
Nearly two-fifths of Americans who described themselves as carnivores told a survey by Mintel in February that they wanted to add more plant-based foods to their diet. Some call themselves “flexitarians”: not wholly vegetarian or vegan, but anxious to reduce their meat consumption nonetheless. Young people are the most fervently flexible.
Today’s alternative-meat makers are more ambitious. They aim to outcompete the conventional meat industry. Their scientists are designing plant-based meats that taste a lot like the real thing. Many plant-based food firms hope one day to make pseudomeats that even more closely resemble animal muscle itself. This is tricky. To get the texture of their plant-based burgers and nuggets right, manufacturers use a process called extrusion, in which the mixture of ingredients is pushed through a small hole to create meat-like fibres. However, real animal muscle tends to have more complex structure than anything extrusion can achieve.
From an environmental perspective, the new meats are surely better. Rearing and slaughtering animals is an inefficient way to produce food, says Bruce Friedrich of the. Most of the energy that goes into making a cow is used as it walks around, digests food and grows the non-edible bits of its body such as bones and hooves.
Hoping to mimic the success of plant-based milks, Beyond Meat insisted that its products were placed in the same refrigerated aisles in supermarkets as its animal-based competitors—a condition that Whole Foods, a supermarket chain, acceded to in America in 2016. Sainsbury’s, a British supermarket, now stocks plant-based meat in the meat aisle.
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