Saving the Planet, One Bite at a Time
It takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce a single beef hamburger — that’s the equivalent of a full week of water use in the average household in the United States.
With the world facing growing evidence of the damage from a warming climate, people who are looking to reduce their impact on the environment have to look no farther than the kitchen.
“Ditching meat for substitutes,” Timothy Egan wrote in The Times, “is the most effective thing an individual can do to fight climate change, according to a study in the journal Science.”
The market for substitutes is taking off — sales of meat alternatives reached $19.5 billion globally last year, according to Euromonitor International, a research company. More companies are looking to expand their offerings of nonanimal meat products.
Impossible Foods, the maker of the faux-meat Whopper available at Burger King, aims to develop replacements for all meat-based food by 2035.
The company’s latest achievement? Fishless fish.
In June, Impossible said it had created an anchovy-flavored broth made from plants using heme, the same protein used in its meat formula.
“It was being used to make paella,” Pat Brown, Impossible’s chief executive, told The Times. “But you could use it to make Caesar dressing or something like that.”
The world’s marine fish stocks are 90 percent depleted, according to the World Economic Forum, a rate that Mr. Brown called an “ongoing meltdown.”
“With respect to the urgency of the environmental impact, fish are second to cows, followed by other animals,” Mr. Brown said.
Plant-based seafood is one solution to overfishing, but the San Francisco company Wild Type has a different plan. Using cellular agriculture, it is growing salmon in a lab.
“The cells know what to do,” Aryé Elfenbein, one of the company’s founders, told The Times. “They become muscle fibers. They become fat tissue. They create the connective tissue that we know as meat.”
But the company is facing problems in scaling up production. Wild Type had a tasting in June at a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, but it took almost four weeks to create the half-kilo of salmon served.
Not everyone is excited about the fake meat revolution. In 24 American states this year, the meat industry and its advocates have worked to pass legislation making it illegal for plant-based food to be labeled as meat.
As David Hillman, a Republican state representative in Arkansas, told The Times, “I want my rib-eye steak to have been walking around on four feet at one time or another.”
But a group of plaintiffs, including the creators of Tofurkey, have recently filed a suit in Arkansas saying that the law violates their constitutional rights by limiting the sort of words they can use in their marketing.
“If you want to convey something tastes like bacon, what do you do?” said Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association. “Do you say it’s salty and fatty and, wink-wink, piglike? The point is that we should not have to engage in linguistic gymnastics.”
Meat substitutes still have a lot of ground to make up. A 2018 study predicted a record-setting year for American meat consumption, and fake meat accounts for only 1 percent of the total market.
But, as Mr. Egan wrote, if it will help stave off the worst of climate change, then “more power to the plant dog and soy burger masquerading as meat.”