62 International The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
2 tion has more than quintupled, to $8.4bn.
Many of these companies look to plant-
based milks as a precedent. The market for
these took off in the mid-2000s, recalls
Matt Ball from the Good Food Institute
(gfi), a non-profit group in Washington,
dc, that monitors and promotes awareness
of plant-based meat. That owes something
to canny marketing. In 2002 Dean Foods
bought Silk, a soya-milk brand, and insist-
ed that it was placed next to cows’ milk on
supermarket shelves. That made consum-
ers think of it as just another variety of the
white stuff you pour on cereal, rather than
a weird product for people with allergies.
Plant-based milk—including almond,
oat and hemp—now accounts for about
15% of retail milk sales in America and 8%
in Britain. Over the past year nearly two-
fifths of American households bought al-
ternative milks. Often they do so alongside
dairy products; in a poll by Ipsos-mori38%
of American consumers said that they guz-
zle plant-based milk, but only 12% did so
exclusively. The others were flexitarian,
drinking both moo juice and the nutty or
beany variety. In Britain 20% of people sur-
veyed by Mintel glugged such products, but
only a third of those did so because of an al-
lergy or intolerance. The rest said the new
milks were healthier or more ethical.Children of the Quorn
Meatless meat has been around for a while.
In 1901 John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of
the cornflake (which he hoped would make
people less keen on sex), was granted a pat-
ent for protose, a “vegetable substitute for
meat” made of wheat gluten and peanuts.
For a long time, however, the market for
pseudomeat was small, and the incentive
for making it tasty was accordingly mod-
est. This is perhaps why so many early veg-
gie burgers had the taste and the texture of
heavily salted woodchips.
Today’s alternative-meat makers are
more ambitious. They aim to outcompete
the conventional meat industry. Their sci-
entists are designing plant-based meats
that taste a lot like the real thing.
What makes meat taste like meat? The
full sensory experience of eating a slab of
meat starts when the constituent proteins,
fats and sugars within it interact during
cooking. Apply heat and the amino acids
and sugars react. The meat goes brown and
releases dozens of volatile molecules that
give it its flavour and odour in a process
known as the Maillard reaction. After-
wards, as the meat is eaten, the bite, tex-
ture, umami flavour and melting fats com-
bine to give meat-eaters an experience that
they know as “meaty”.
Each new entrant to the market has
tried to recreate these sensations of meati-
ness as closely as possible. Their products
are generally based around a source of
plant protein such as soya, wheat or le-gumes, which are then combined with a
range of fats, colours and flavourings. The
soya-based burger from Impossible Foods,
for example, also contains haem, an iron-
rich molecule that exists in living things to
help proteins carry oxygen. Haem gives
beef its reddish colour. It helps to create a
meaty aroma and flavour once the meat is
cooked. In the Impossible Burger, the for-
mulation uses leghaemoglobin. This oc-
curs naturally in the roots of soya but is
made for Impossible Foods using geneti-
cally modified yeast.
Beyond Meat’s burger is made from pro-
teins that come from peas, mung beans and
rice, and is laced with beetroot to give the
patty a reddish hue and the ability to
“bleed” when bitten. It also contains
specks of coconut oil and cocoa butter that
give the burger a marbling when cooked,
akin to the fat in a beef burger.
Many plant-based food firms hope one
day to make pseudomeats that even more
closely resemble animal muscle itself. This
is tricky. To get the texture of their plant-
based burgers and nuggets right, manufac-
turers use a process called extrusion, in
which the mixture of ingredients is pushed
through a small hole to create meat-like fi-
bres. However, real animal muscle tends to
have more complex structure than any-
thing extrusion can achieve.
Most of these companies argue that
their products are healthier than animal
meat. Some claims are more convincing
than others. A plant-based burger tends to
provide the same number of calories as a
similar-sized slab of beef. Plant-based
meats contain no cholesterol, have less fat
and more fibre and vitamins. They also
avoid the increased risk of colorectal can-
cer that, according to the World Health Or-
ganisation, is linked to eating a lot of pro-
cessed red meat. However, they also tend to
contain more salt and less protein.
A big difference between meat and
plant-based products is that the latter are
continually improving. Since they are de-
signed from scratch, manufacturers can
keep tweaking the recipes to make each
bite yummier or more nutritious. Whereas
meat firms constantly search for ways to
raise animals more efficiently, pseudo-
meat makers adapt and refine the product
itself. Like the software-writers of SiliconValley, their recipes are never complete.
From the moment Impossible’s burger
was released, the company began gather-
ing feedback. Consumers told the company
they wanted a burger with a better “bite”
and they wanted to be able to grill it them-
selves without it falling apart. Impossible
also wanted to reduce the amount of salt
and saturated fat while adding more pro-
tein. The Impossible Burger “2.0”, released
earlier this year, replaced wheat protein
with soya, which had the added advantage
of making the burger gluten-free. Future it-
erations are planned. Researchers want to
make the burgers juicier, so they do not be-
come dry when cooked beyond medium.
“The cow is not going to taste better,” says
David Lipman, the chief scientist at Impos-
sible Foods. But plant-based meats will.High steaks
Atze Jan van der Goot at the Food Process
Engineering Laboratory at Wageningen
University has been working with a Dutch
firm called the Vegetarian Butcher (a pio-
neer in the plant-meat industry). Their lat-
est invention can create muscle-like struc-
tures and textures within slabs of
plant-based meats using a device called a
Couette cell. This consists of two concen-
tric cylinders, one of which rotates around
the other while the ingredients are sand-
wiched in between. By exerting force on
the proteins in the mixture, the ingredients
lengthen into fibres and wind around one
another. The result is a gelatinous red slab
of plant meat that contains long, thick,
elastic muscle-like fibres which look and
flake apart like pulled pork or beef. Dr van
der Goot’s team has shown that when
grilled, cuts from this “muscle” can sizzle,
brown and give off aromas like a steak.
From an environmental perspective,
the new meats are surely better. Rearing
and slaughtering animals is an inefficient
way to produce food, says Bruce Friedrich
of the gfi. Most of the energy that goes into
making a cow is used as it walks around, di-
gests food and grows the non-edible bits of
its body such as bones and hooves.
As yet, rigorous environmental assess-
ments of plant-based meats are rare. But
both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat
have commissioned independent re-
searchers to carry out life-cycle analysesofThattakesthebrisketSource:RonMilo,WeizmannInstituteandAlonShepon,HarvardUniversity *Globalaverage,1kgoffatandbone-freemeatandedibleoffal2019 orlatestavailable
Greenhouse-gas emissions Freshwater withdrawals Land use
kg of CO2 equivalent per kg litres per kg m² per kg
Beef (herd) 99.5 1,451 326
Meat* Pork 12.3 1,796 7.8
Chicken 9.9 660 6.7
Beyond Burger 3.5 9.7 2.7
Impossible Burger 3.5 107 2.51