With the rise of the plant-based patty, is this the end of meat?

SCIENCE, CULTURE ARE CREATING A POST-MEAT WORLD OF TOMORROW — BUT ARE WE READY?

Canadian researchers sent the nutrition world into an uproar this week by publishing a review that showed the health risks of eating meat have been overstated.

In the largely skeptical U.S. news coverage, there was a familiar tone of moral scolding, linking runaway carnivorous appetites to environmental degradation. There were also shocking statistics, including that the average American eats 100 kilograms of flesh in a year.

But there was also something less typical, more shrill and confused, almost like an alarm from some distant corridor of the culture. Was that panic? Fear of what an unknown meatless future might taste like? Imagine nutrition scientists telling people to eat meat in 2019! They should be explaining how to ferment a bucket of slugs into a sustainable yet tasty Sunday dinner for six when all the cattle farms are covered in solar panels.

Food science, especially the kind that gets into the papers, has long been presented as a modern fable of doing more with less, of feeding the multitude with five (whole grain artisanal) loaves and two (line-caught wild) fish. Hence the recent fixation on eating bugs for protein and sustenance, rather than just for kicks.

So there is a strange contradiction in a food scientist telling you to eat meat. It is like a climate scientist telling you to fly to Mexico for a cheeky weekend away.

It is at odds with the morality of the age, which advocates eating less animal protein and more of the sustainably efficient weird stuff — both technologically weird like the Willy Wonka proteins woven from extruded bean snot and infused with soy “blood” that are now being fried and served on buns as fast-food burger replacements; and the naturally weird, like cricket flour, pupae protein, alien fungi, and aromatic molds. Everybody knows meat is dead. It is literally dead, of course, except for some shellfish and the more daring sashimi preparations.

But it may also be figuratively toast in the long run for a variety of reasons, including political concern about climate change and the exponential nightmares of a growing human population.

As usual, price will be the immediate driver of any change, but price itself is driven by other factors, both within human control and without. There is also a lot of hyperbole around.

“History tells us that there’s a ceiling to these products (plantbased meat alternatives and replacements), and their ability to capture and dominate markets,” said Joel Dickau, who studies food history at the University of Toronto, especially the 20th century corporate effort to analyze the enjoyment of food and relate this new science to industrial processes.

Like an old man watching the world pass him by, meat’s future is not what it used to be. After the First World War, new technologies that were rallied to the pressures of global catastrophe transformed a luxury into a staple. Meat was in everyone’s future.

Meat’s future today is not even what it was a generation ago. Back then, the young internet still held promise as a medium that amplifies good ideas. You could imagine the ethical outrages of factory farming being solved by some reasonable legislation coupled with a newfound cultural sensitivity toward animal welfare, such that everyone started eating a modest diet heavy on the veg, but still including one lovely pork chop during the week, a happy steak on Saturday, and a well-read chicken roasted for sandwiches.

The tone on meat today is much more apocalyptic, revolutionary, and absolutist. The post-meat world — when we all go “Beyond Meat,” as in one of the more successful and vaguely cultish trademarks — will be a better place free of the abuse and agony suffered by animals, and the ecological degradation suffered by everyone else.

That is the story anyway. It sounds like a venture capitalist’s daydream because it is, and not for the first time.

Industrial research on meat analogues dates to the First World War and the dietary needs of soldiers, but as a consumer project, it began in earnest in the 1960s, Dickau said. When the oil crisis hit in 1973 and drove up beef prices, companies pulled the trigger on a market push for these soyand pea-based concoctions.

“Scientists hoped that their knowledge of texture would allow the realization of utopian food products that were instantly familiar yet cheaper, healthier, and more consistent than those currently available,” Dickau wrote in a research article.

It did not turn out that way. The massive failure of meat-substitutes on the supermarket shelves of the 1980s was a consequence, Dickau argues, of being marketed as replacements for well-known originals, not as novel products on their own.

“People don’t readily accept substitutes,” he said.

He cites a hilarious story in the Financial Post Magazine of 1972 in which a reporter tried to get a family of five to live for three days on meat substitutes like bean “meat,” coincidentally during a major snowstorm, only to learn at the end that no one could stomach it. After about 24 hours the kids had eaten eggs and dad snuck a salmon steak.

“We are enmeshed in a web of preconceived notions,” wrote the reporter Ann Rhodes, explaining why tea biscuits made with fish protein concentrate might taste OK with tartar sauce, but “they are not a very beautiful experience.”

This is the esthetic hurdle faced by modern veganism. “How do you design something from scratch? Can you design something from scratch?” Dickau said.

In a way, there is nothing new under the sun, and invention of new food is a phoney pose. What is the notorious 21st century frankenburger but a legume sandwich, a falafel in a pita?

On the other hand, imitation is also dodgy. Things do not have to be called “Tofurkey” or “vegan bacon.” That is an invitation to failure in comparison with the original.

Dickau’s view is that history leans strongly to favouring innovation away from meat to new products, bolstered by an ethical and nutritional rationale, rather than trying to recreate meat out of vegetables.

“Ghosts are not worried by wolves,” wrote the great American food writer M.F.K. Fisher in How To Cook A Wolf, her 1942 book on wartime gastronomy. “But to the living, who must eat to stay so, beef in any form is a problem indeed.”

She was writing about the anguish caused to old school French chefs in the years before the Second World War when young people drifted from the “cuisine des sauces” of their parents. They were no longer eating “a little pigeon simmered artfully with red wine and truffles,” but rather a “saignant” (bloody) Chateaubriand, or grilled steak with watercress.

Wartime America was similarly troubled by meat, not just its taste, but how much of it the future would demand.

“It is unfortunate that so many human beings depend on eating some form of animal flesh every day for strength. Many of them do it because their bodies, weakened or diseased, demand it. Others simply have the habit,” Fisher wrote. She praised the use of herbed butter to make meat or fish taste even better. “They are not necessary, but they are nice, in the right sense of the word, so that eating meat becomes not a physical function, like breathing or defecating, but an agreeable and almost intellectual satisfaction of the senses.”

There is a similar wartime feel today with climate change. There is a sense that technology will be part of the answer. Culture and economy and labour patterns will change too. But mostly, there is a growing sense that eating meat can no longer be simply a “physical function.”

It must become a pleasure, more exception than rule. As Dickau tells it, that leaves a lot of room for new recipes, new tricks of taste, new traditional dishes.

Planta, an Asian-inspired vegetarian restaurant run by Toronto chef David Lee, on Sundays offers a dim sum menu that seems veggily tricky, given the variety of tastes and textures to get right, absent the sweetness of shrimp or pigginess of pork.

Good cooking has always involved either mastery or innovation. Chefs either meet old expectations, or they create new experiences. They can do one or the other at different times, occasionally both in moments of genius. But they must do at least one. (That old joke about pizza and sex — that good is great, and bad is still pretty good — is not even true. Bad pizza is as awful as most things you could invent.)

At Planta, for example, wontons with snow pea leaves are familiar and bland, neither masterful nor innovative. But Sweet Loretta Martin, the fried rice! The memory of its taste lingers in the mind. Pineapple is like that. Tossed in a hot bowl with goji berries and Thai basil, it is familiarly rich, shockingly tasty and ethereal all at once. It is a masterful innovation. Truly, cashews could be the new bacon.

This is fine dining, of course, which can fall in and out of new philosophies inside of a year. It takes a lot more to move the culture, even if the current fads point in the vegetarian direction.

It would take a big shift in price — such as from a real price on carbon — to push meat alternatives beyond the vegetarian market, said Jeffrey Pilcher, a leading food historian and Dickau’s PHD supervisor.

He points to the First World War and the civic imperative to eat less meat, which coincided with industrialization of agriculture, which made meat cheaper, so people actually ended up eating more.

“Morality only gets you so far when you have a hamburger just sitting there,” Pilcher said. For all the hype, the plant-based patty taking fast food by storm “is for people who want to eat junk food but want to feel good about doing something for the environment as well. If people really want to be vegetarian they should just eat vegetables.”