![]() Chinese Buddhist fake meat dates back to the seventh century CE, where monks would replace meat in traditional dishes with vegetables, soy or gluten, especially when hosting guests to their monastery. The meat substitute business goes back well before we had our first hickory smoked “deli” slice. Stalwart brands like Tofurkey, Amy’s, and Gardein spent decades sequestered in the “specialty foods” or “salads and stuff” sections, and advertised their wares in the language of the farmers market rather than the lab: Tofurky still insists on “aprons, not lab coats.” While earlier generations of faux meat were birthed out of the utopian fervor of radical vegetarians, religious ascetics, and puritanical health nuts, the new crop of alt-protein savants keep the fervor but translate it into a familiar Silicon Valley story about saving the world, framing, as writer Erin Schwartz put it, “real, global problems in such a way that their products could resolve them.” At a moment when some of the world’s biggest agricultural polluters and chicken killers are getting in on the plant-based action - and investors are hankering for a tendfold return - it seems reasonable to ask whether the promise of miracle “meat” could add up to anything other than ever-more growth and consumption: more of the same problems these products aim to solve.Įrsatz patties and hot dogs and cutlets have been around for many decades - we know because we’ve been eating them. But Meat 2.0 is not just technology - it’s tech. Of course, food (from potatoes to Pop Tarts) has always been radically shaped by technology, be it selective cultivation, grafting, or chemical emulsifiers. Firms like Blue Horizons, New Crop Capital and Stray Dog Capital say they are building an “ alt-protein revolution.” Evidently, fake meat companies have blasted from the supermarket to Silicon Valley, transforming themselves into technology companies in the process. Beyond Meat launched its IPO in May, wildly surpassing expectations with its shares rising over 160 percent in the three months to August, and Forbes calling it “the hottest IPO on Wall Street this year.” Impossible Foods, makers of the Impossible Burger, raised $300 million in its E Series funding round earlier this year a nascent fake nugget company founded by a 19-year-old recently nabbed a $7 million funding round. In the meantime, ultra-realistic skeuomorphic plant-based “meat” is here with a vengeance. “It was a taste of the future of food.” While some argue that “cellular” or lab-grown meat is the real future-food, it’ll be a while before these products become commercially available. “What I was experiencing was more than a clever meat substitute,” he gushed. In a 2013 blog post, Bill Gates recounted eating a Beyond Meat “chicken” taco and being unable to tell the poultry-esque filling from its animal-based counterpart. ![]() “Meat 2.0” companies embrace meatless meat as an engineering problem, bringing it into the realm of the investible tech product Of that, around $13 billion was raised in 20 alone. ![]() The Good Food institute estimates that plant-based meat, egg and dairy companies in the United States raised over $16 billion in the past decade. This new batch is backed by big venture capital money and an accompanying appetite for unbridled growth. Unlike the fake meat products we grew up with, their patties and nuggets aren’t designed as niche items for the vegetarian crowd, but covetable products that even the biggest carnivores would line up for. Over the past few years, though, a strange new class of proteins has been brewing, popping up on our social feeds and favorite cafe menus: Meat 2.0, the Impossible, the Beyond, the “plant-based revolution.” These brands are obsessed with perfectly recreating the taste, texture and color of animal flesh for the mass meat-eating market. It’s a fine culinary life, easy actually, and rather unremarkable. We filled the meat-shaped holes on our plates with huge helpings of lentils, followed by the odd Gardenburger and Tofurkey sausage. Nonetheless, we both turned vegetarian in our mid-teens, and have remained that way ever since. She was single, talked about her cats a lot, and joked about how she’d be “eating carrots in the corner” on a school trip while students and other teachers chowed down on cold cuts. One of the first vegetarians we ever met was our fifth grade elementary school teacher.
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