Tech Companies Say the Future of Food is Fake
Silicon Valley magnates with unlimited cash, very little social conscience and a canny ability to exploit patent laws are set to take control of our food supply – are you ready for fake food to become the new real?
“May you live in interesting times” is an ancient Chinese curse – and if you are a meat eater, or indeed any other kind of eater, these are definitely interesting times.
The path forward is clear, even if you enjoy eating meat. We eat too much of it, it’s doing too much damage to the planet as well as to our health and there is an urgent need for us to cut back – or cut it out altogether.
As the recent furore over a lab grown burger has confirmed, the race to find an acceptable substitute for conventionally reared meat is well and truly on and our appetite for no-meat dishes appears to be growing.
One 2012 poll showed that 27% of Americans – the largest meat eating population in the world – admitted to consciously seeking to cut down their meat consumption. Likewise the Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications recently proclaimed ‘flexitarianism’ —reducing the amount of meat you eat without going veggie —one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. A 2013 survey carried out by The Food People on behalf of Linda McCartney Foods confirmed that ‘flexitariansism’ is also a ‘megatrend’ here in the UK.
Old favourites and new directions
For years the meat substitute market has more or less languished with a grim selection of chickenless nuggets and beefless burgers made from soya derivatives such as tofu, tempeh and textured vegetable protein (TVP), seitan (made from wheat gluten) or Quorn (made from a soil mould fungus).
Some have also proposed that we should be making better use of a seemingly endless protein resource eaten for millennia – insects. But while traditional cultures might enjoy the odd bug au natural, our focus as with most new food products is to find a way to process them in order to overcome the ‘yuk factor’ – and, of course, to create a value-added and, most importantly, patentable food product. For this reason early forays into insect food have focused on well seasoned buggy burgers and highly flavoured stir-fries.
The spectre of a lab grown meat has also been hanging over the market for some time with the animal rights group PETA offering offered £1 million to the first scientists who could make lab grown (chicken) meat a commercial success. A noble aim, some might argue, until you realise that the caveats on that offer are so restrictive that it is unlikely it will ever be paid out!
The new food technocracy
Even with the debut of world’s first in vitro burger, a long-time project of Dutch vascular physiologist Mark Postat of Maastricht University, we’re still a long way from that moment. That single burger cost $330,000 to produce.
Look even deeper behind the celebratory headlines and guess what else you’ll see? The in vitro burger also required a steady diet of antibiotics and foetal stem cells (taken from unborn animals collected from slaughterhouses) to help it grow.
Because lab-grown meat doesn’t have fat, as the live telecast of the taste test showed, it needed to be fried in a huge amount of butter to keep it from drying out. In future say the scientists they could add lab-grown fat to the meat to give it more flavour.
It also requires a colouring since the test-tube meat is actually yellow. While vegetable colourings like beetroot and saffron were added for the initial taste test, the makers believe that ultimately blood is the only thing that will give the lab burger the realistic colour that meat-eaters expect.
And don’t expect the lab burger to be on the shelves any time soon. Commercial development could take up to 20 years – so it’s not exactly fast food.
But the science of fake meat is getting a financial shot in the arm from some unlikely supporters who are determined to change our ideas about meat forever.
Look behind the scenes of the new meat and animal product analogues market and you will see a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley magnates. These include Microsoft founders Bill Gates (chickenless eggs), Sun Micorsystems Vinod Khosla and (egg and cheese analogues and lab-grown meat and leather) and twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (the newly launched Beyond Meat chicken analogue).
A pan-European project called Like Meat funded by multiple big money backers, is also currently looking to fund the development of meat analogues. While the lab burger, recently taste-tested at a high profile PR exercise in London, was backed by money from Google founder Sergey Brin.
Taking things one step further is Modern Meadow, backed PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, which aims to combine in-vitro meat cultivation with 3D bioprinting. Bioprinting is a process that uses a biological ‘ink’ containing various types of cells. The ink is printed out in multiple layers, and in three dimensions, to produce a structure such as a kidney or an ear – or indeed a food item. The hoped-for end result is a steak you can print out from biological materials. Never mind running out of ink, running out of blood could be the bigger problem for this kind of new food tech.
Disrupting the market
What all these savvy investors have in common is an eye for a market in need of a shakeup. Vinod Khosla describes the marriage of technology and food as “disruptive” and sees potential for profit by selling these new processed foods into schools and hospitals – places where ‘bad food’ has become a talking point.
Khosla and his contemporaries also see the processed food industry as being in need of their expertise in branding, patenting and IP in order to become more dynamic and profitable than ever.
While the PR messaging is very much based around animal welfare and environment, the market they are aiming for is vastly larger than the maybe 10% of the population who are vegetarian or vegan. These entrepreneurs want conventional meat eaters – a larger and more lucrative market – to make the switch.
Beyond meat
First to make it to market is the Beyond Meat range of chicken analogues made from a mixture of pea and soya protein, which are purported to be so close to the real thing in taste and texture that it fooled New York Times foodie columnist Mark Bittman.
Other food writers have been less easily fooled, however, whilst still acknowledging the purported benefits of plant-based meat analogues.
These include being better for the environment and our health. Meat production is highly energy and resource intensive, and studies consistently show that diets which are high in plant-based foods improve health and longevity.
With vegetable-based ‘meats’ there are no antibiotic residues, and, of course, there is less chance of a ‘horsegate’ type scandal. Some would also argue that they provide consumers with more variety and choice.
Fooling your tastebuds
What’s new isn’t just the type of products that are being sold but the marketing behind them. For years meat analogues have been sold with an implied apology.
The new marketers, however, are making a feature of the ‘fake’ aspect of their products and the fact that they could “fool your tastebuds”.
For Beyond Meat’s Ed Brown the key to wide adoption, and winning over a much bigger share of the roughly $177 billion annual animal protein market in the US alone, will be to get fake meats sold right alongside the real thing.
“The meat counter for me is about an unlevelled playing field,” Brown explained at a recent WIRED business conference. “They should be selling protein, not meat and meat alternatives.”
This jostling for prime position in the supermarket, however, is not what most people care about. They care about the taste, and if they have any kind of higher sensitivity to health or environment they care about the impact on health and the environment – for good or for ill.
We can only speculate on these two points. Take-up of fake meats is rising but is still very much a niche market – and generally with prices to match. It is only when a food product is widely consumed that the real impact can be assessed.
Swings & roundabouts
Even so we mustn’t forget that, ultimately, these are processed foods as opposed to fresh; and processed foods have an environmental footprint. Indeed according to researchers David and Marcia Pimentel we often grossly underestimate the energy resources necessary to process, preserve, package, store and eventually cook processed foods.
Processed foods can also lack the full range of nutrients that wholefoods contain. They also further separate us from our food sources, reinforcing the belief that food comes from a factory rather than a farm.
They can come with other problems too. Soya is rich in plant estrogens which if consumed at the same level at which we consume meat could risk estrogen overload and with it the risk of estrogen dependant cancers of the breast, ovary, prostate and testes.
Non-fermented soya also has high levels of phytic acid which can reduce the body’s uptake of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc.
The processing of soya burgers includes submerging the beans in the petrochemical solvent hexane to separate the oil from the protein and reduce the amount of fat in the product. Traces of the chemical can remain in the finished food product.
Likewise Quorn eaters have for years been dogged by problems like hives, diarrhoea and vomiting and no one has yet got to the bottom of why some people are more prone to these symptoms than others. And with rising levels of intolerance and allergy to wheat gluten seitan won’t be for everyone either.
We also need to ask ourselves whether the meat analogue is an end it itself or simply a useful bridge to help us move into a future where we eat less but better quality meat and include a greater proportion of fresh fruit and vegetables in our daily diets.
Is the future fake?
Hardly anyone could argue with Bill Gates’ assertion that we need to find new ways to deliver protein and calories to everyone. “Our approach to food hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years.” Gates bemoans, “ It’s ripe for reinvention. We need to look for new ways to raise nutrition in the poor world while shifting some of our choices in the wealthy world.”
Whether the products currently on offer will actually feed the hungry or simply expand the choices of the already overfed remains to be seen.
But the tech magnates remain undeterred. “It shouldn’t really matter if your chicken McNugget comes from formed and processed chicken or directly from plants,” says Peter Thiel.
Vinod Khosla has likewise gone on offensive stating that artificial beef, made from soya protein, “is still beef.”
Food writer Michael Pollan, however, tells me he is more cautious: “Cloned meat is an interesting thought experiment, especially for vegans and vegetarians, but it seems unlikely it will be coming to a fast food outlet near you any time soon. However plant substitutes for certain animal products – such as cheese for pizza – strikes me as a useful strategy for reducing our consumption of animals products, which we will need to do.”
He adds that ultimately “We should put our energies into reforming the animal agriculture we have now, making it more humane, cleaner, and less of a threat to public health.”
Clearly there are still multiple hurdles to get over, but like it or loathe it fake meats are here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future, or until we all get smart enough to reject them and return to a sensible, ecological and healthful diet of fresh, unprocessed foods.
This article is an extended version of one which appears in the September 2013 edition of Friends of the Earth’s EarthMatters magazine.
