Where’s the beef?

Over the past 80 years the world’s human population has quadrupled while at the same time people’s taste for meat has grown considerably. But the supply has not been able to keep up with the demand. Currently according to the World Health Organization nearly a third of the world’s population have inadequate food. But raising animals for food is an ever greater strain on the environment as forests worldwide are cut down to make way for giant fields to grow animal feed. The amount of land, energy, water, fertilizer, human labor and other resources needed to raise animals for meat is staggering, increasingly expensive, and the environmental toll on the planet is huge. Despite the arguments in favor of reducing our meat intake, the United States (followed by Australia and Argentina) is, on a per capita basis, the world’s largest consumer of beef and meat in general. But this may be beginning to change. Largely because of cost but also for environmental and health reasons, a new competitor to traditional meats has arrived in restaurants and grocery stores: imitation meat made from vegetable products and designed to resemble beef, pork, chicken, and other meats.

Currently more than 50,000 grocery stores and restaurants across the country including fast food chains such as Burger King, McDonalds, Subway, KFC, Wendy’s and many more carry products from the two leading imitation meat suppliers, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and others. During the past year, fast food restaurants served more than 228 million plant-based burgers, still but a tiny fraction of sales of all-beef burgers (over 6.4 billion). In many states, particularly those dominated by meat processing companies, efforts have been made to outlaw the use of the word “meat” in describing those products made with vegetables. The “imitation meat” business is little more than a decade old and may change considerably in the future.

Typically, an imitation “meat” is formed into a patty, sausage, or nugget so as to resemble the item it is imitating. The material is formed into a paste containing as many as two dozen different vegetable ingredients. All seem to contain several “vegetable proteins” extracted from their host plant and introduced into the mix (it’s not clear why they don’t just put the whole vegetable into the mix but perhaps this would damage the final taste). Two ingredients that occur in many of the products are pea and soy. Soy leghemoglobin (a.k.a. as heme) is a key ingredient in some items for color and texture. Canola and coconut oils are frequently added. Other common ingredients include methylcellulose(?), thiamine hydrochloride(?) leghemoglobin(?) zinc glucomate(?) Nearly all of the imitation meat products use copious amounts of water, sugar, and especially salt.

As someone who has always favored natural foods and who had never tried artificial meat, I approached the actual eating of a sample fake meat meal with some trepidation. I remembered the old Alka-Seltzer commercial of a man in his pajamas sitting on his bed anxiously moaning, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” From my local grocery store I purchased an Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger, currently the nation’s best selling artificial meat product. Following directions, I browned the patty for two minutes per side in the fry pan and placed it between two slices of semolina toast. I added a thin slice of gouda cheese but otherwise left it as is, forgoing the fast food restaurant ploy of gussying up the burger with all sorts of extraneous ingredients. Then I ate it (well, not the whole thing but at least half). The appearance and the texture were surprisingly convincing: almost like a beefburger at a fast food restaurant. The taste wasn’t bad, Despite my fear, I had no trouble keeping it down. But I was not able to find the desired “beefy” taste. As I ate, I kept remembering the 40 year old Wendy’s commercial in which an older woman with a hoarse voice asks, “Where’s the Beef?” Of the many flavors I tasted, the dominant one wasn’t beef but salt. Still, millions of people are persuaded and think an imitation meat product is almost the same as the real thing. But the purveyors of fake meat should not rest on their impressive accomplishments. A new type of product labelled ”cultured meat” takes cells from live animals and grows rhem in a special chamber where, in a short time, the cells grow into pieces of meat (without the bones and other inedible parts). These products are in the process of getting development approval and should be on the market soon. Might this trigger a science-fiction field day?

Architect and landscape designer Mac Gordon lives in Lakeville.