NASHVILLE — Here is how my father-in-law now begins every meal at our house: He asks the blessing, unfolds his napkin and prepares to tuck in. Then he pauses, his fork still in the air, and asks, “Is this real meat?”
No air of suspicion accompanies the question. He’s simply curious. Is what he’s about to put into his mouth the kind of food he’s been eating for nearly all of his 91 years? Or does it merely look (and smell and feel and taste) like something he’s been eating for nearly all of his 91 years?
That similarity to real meat — its appeal to the senses, the way it mimics the experience of eating familiar foods — is exactly what the fake-meat industry has invested immense resources into achieving. In recent weeks I’ve served my family plant-based spaghetti and meatballs, plant-based tacos, plant-based breakfast sausage, plant-based bratwurst and two brands of plant-based hamburgers, almost always without telling anyone what they were eating until the meal was over.
It all started when I read “Meat Hooked,” a chapter in “The Fate of Food,” Amanda Little’s wide-ranging examination of how we’ll eat in “a bigger, hotter, smarter world,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. According to Ms. Little, “Livestock production accounts for about 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, more than all forms of transportation combined.” And that’s not even taking into account the water resources monopolized by livestock production or the deforestation caused when land is cleared for grazing.
Worse, the demand for meat keeps growing. Worldwide, it has nearly doubled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by 2050. Already, the single greatest cause of deforestation in the Amazon is cattle ranching, accounting for 80 percent of newly lost forest. “Razing forests to graze cattle,” writes Tad Friend in a brilliant piece for The New Yorker, “turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.”
Clearly, any food that can disrupt this planet-threatening trend is a welcome development, but are the new meat substitutes truly feasible replacements for meat? At my house, reports have been varied. The Beyond Burger and the Pure Farmland breakfast sausage were a hit all the way around: All three generations at the table pronounced them delicious. (“This is a good piece of meat,” my father-in-law remarked, unprovoked, before learning his burger’s true provenance.) Beyond’s bratwurst and Pure Farmland’s meatballs earned family scores that ranged from zero to 10. Pure’s “plant-based protein starters” crumbled nicely during browning but remained a disconcerting shade of red. Even so, the casserole I made with it tasted no different from the same casserole made with regular breakfast sausage. Beyond’s “beefy crumbles,” by contrast, were truly enjoyed by no one in my house, although the college junior ate the leftover casserole for lunch at least twice, apparently preferring even unappealing leftovers to cooking something for himself.
The Impossible Burger cannot be distinguished from a real hamburger by half the people who eat it in a taste test, according to Mr. Friend, but they are not yet sold in grocery stores here, so I took the college junior and a 12-year-old family friend to Burger King for a true taste test. The 12-year-old ordered her burgers the same way she eats all burgers: just bread and “meat.” The college student ordered his with the works. After blindfolding them, I gave each one a bite of both a regular Whopper and an Impossible Whopper. Neither one was fooled. After only one bite, they both correctly identified which burger was which. Then they both ate both burgers. The Impossible Whopper might not taste exactly like a traditional Whopper, it turns out, but it tasted perfectly good to them.
Most recently my whole family tried the Impossible Burger at Hopdoddy, a local burger bar where the bun and toppings — and the price — are several steps up from fast food. My husband and his father chose the Impossible Cheesesteak, while everyone else got a regular Impossible Burger. We all enjoyed our meal, but my future daughter-in-law, a vegetarian, pointed out something that the rest of the family, none of whom are regular consumers of old-school vegetarian burgers, had noticed: The Impossible Burger doesn’t fall apart in your hands. “I almost always end up finishing a veggie burger with a fork,” she said.
But my elderly father-in-law’s assessment of the new foods is what has most inspired me. In the beginning of this experiment he was always astonished when I’d tell him what he’d just eaten for dinner: “Really? But it’s so good!” By now, two months in, there’s nothing remarkable about the news that what he’s eating is something he’s never eaten before. It tastes good, and to him that’s all that matters.
My nephew, a vegan, calls plant-based meat substitutes “junk food for vegans.” (Any product made with 21 different ingredients, some of them unpronounceable, is not his idea of clean eating.) But vegans and vegetarians aren’t the primary market for the new plant-based meat substitutes anyway. Companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are trying to convert meat eaters, people for whom a disintegrating vegetable patty is in no way appealing but who might be persuaded to cut down on their meat intake if the substitute foods mimicked the experience of eating meat.
The plan seems to be working: “Plant-based ‘meat’ is poised to become a $140 billion industry,” according to Business Insider, “with Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat leading the way.” These companies have the potential to affect the global environment so positively that they have earned the highest environmental honor the United Nations bestows: a Champions of the Earth award.
But the clearest measure of their success might be neither U.N. recognition nor their own bottom lines. It’s the competition. Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue and Hormel are now rolling out plant-based or hybrid plant-meat products. (Pure Farmland is a division of Smithfield.) When Big Meat wants in on the action, you have to figure the food landscape is undergoing a radical change. And that can be only good news for the real landscape.
Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”
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