Why go to new meat?
The Impossible Whopper sold at Burger King — with the tagline “100 percent Whopper, 0 percent beef” — looks just like a juicy beef burger.
It is made of 21 ingredients, according to its website, including genetically modified soy protein concentrate, coconut oil, sunflower oil and other items most people have never heard of, such as cultured dextrose, soy protein isolate and zinc gluconate.
Plant-based meat doesn’t come from a cow or a pig. But it’s not your old-fashioned skinny veggie burger, either.
Beyond Meat, one of the major companies competing in the plant-based meat business, said its products are made by layering in plant-based fats, binders, fruit and vegetable-based colors and flavors using a process of heating, cooling and pressure to create the fibrous texture of meat.
The word “meat” is a point of contention. For example, Missouri passed a law this year saying companies can’t represent a product as meat if it isn’t produced from livestock or poultry. Four organizations are challenging the law on behalf of plant-based meat companies.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, livestock accounts for 14.5 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. Cattle alone produce 65 percent of livestock emissions.
This happens because carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, is released into the atmosphere when forests are cleared to make room for animal feed production and livestock grazing. Animals also release methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, through burps and flatulence when digesting their food. Animal manure and rice paddies are also huge sources of methane.
Agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gases varies by country, depending on how animals are bred, herded and fed, but some experts say the overall number is much higher than 14.5 percent. Jeff Anhang, with the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corp., says livestock production accounts for at least half of human-caused greenhouse gases.
Most studies focus on emissions, “so they miss the fact that food causes almost all of our environmental issues,” said Joseph Poore, a researcher at the University of Oxford who was the coauthor of a 2018 journal article examining the impact of food production, from deforestation to retail. “Avoiding meat and dairy, for the large majority of people, including Americans, is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact, he said.