When It Comes to Plant-Based Meat, We Are the Mice

Plant-based meat is just getting bigger and bigger, and is now a $7 billion-dollar market. 

The CEO of Beyond Meat, whose products substitute everything from meatballs to sausages, is projecting to underprice animal protein within five years. Plant-based sales have grown 27% of the past year according to the Good Food Institute.

“The real test for us is to make each of our platforms--beef, pork, and poultry--indistinguishable from animal protein,” said Ethan Brown in an interview last week with the Wall Street Journal, under the headline: “Beyond Meat CEO’s Holy Grail is a Perfect Fake.”

Brown called chicken, steak and bacon the “Holy Grail” of plant-based food tech innovation.

Other coverage of plant-based upstarts has been generally positive, upholding the narrative promoted by the new food tech companies about the benefits of tech-driven, plant-based diets for people and the planet.

It seems that when it comes to the new generation of food tech startups and meat alternatives, everyone has amnesia. There’s decades of experience with overly processed, technology-driven approaches to food and what happens when we allow big tech companies to come up with solutions to society’s biggest problems.

There are numerous studies showing links between processed foods and cancer, diabetes and other illnesses. Plant-based burgers have an average of 17 ingredients and as many as 27, according to this analysis by New Hope Network.

While not necessarily harmful, we shouldn’t blindly trust these plant-based meat companies and their ongoing experiments will have a beneficial impact on the environment and our nutrition. We’re also overlooking their relationships with regulators like the FDA, and not examining the full picture of how their products and new technologies will impact supply chains in the long run.

A year ago, while reporting this story for Fortune, I got a taste of how quickly their narrative and investment thesis behind Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods was winning over the mainstream.

It didn’t make sense to me then how their stated goal of eliminating animals from the food chain, as Impossible Foods has explicitly stated, will help the planet or miraculously improve our diets if the burgers are prepared in the same fast food kitchens using the same oils.

Since then, major deals with fast food chains and traditional meat producers like JBS have jumped on the plant-based bandwagon. Their plant-based products are more ubiquitous than ever. 

Still, I question whether this proliferation and projected increasing role of lab-derived, processed meat substitutes in American diets, is actually that great both for human health and the planet.

A book published last month called “Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat,” the author Larissa Zimberoff digs deeper into this narrative and why it has been so successfully winning over the public image of plant-based companies.

“We’re in the midst of a huge food experiment,” Zimberoff writes, referring to this new generation of tech companies as New Food.

“New Foods are replacing whole plants with processed plants and traditional proteins with analogue proteins,” she notes. “Which versions will be best for our bodies, our guts, our health? Are they as good on the inside?”

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the many ways in which our current meat supply chain is broken.

A big chunk of the new generation of meat alternative startups that have the biggest budgets and raised billions of dollars, are not necessarily addressing core issues exposed by the pandemic.

In the best-case scenario, we may be replacing meat with something better for the agriculture industry and the planet, but not necessarily for our diets.

“Maybe New Food can save the climate and address the blight of industrial agriculture, but I’m not so sure our health is as important to the people investing in it,” Zimberoff notes.

I agree with Zimberoff that the new food tech companies have taken on this campaign about telling everyone what food solutions to the climate problems should be and how we should do it.

Instead of our doctors, nutritionists, policy officials--anyone else who’s not selling us their version of bacon and burgers, or hopefully not on the companies’ payroll--we’re supposed to take this information at face value from highly biased sources.

“It seems like the FDA is sort of working for these companies, and they’re having closed-door meetings to talk about what these companies need to do,” Zimberoff says in an interview. “I don’t see the FDA as being a government agency that is doing its best for humans. Impossible Foods, for example, had its heme approved by the FDA based on Impossible Foods’ own findings and experts. It just doesn’t sit well with me.”

It’s not just Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, there is an entire plant-based industry and startups looking to leverage the nutrients of different proteins and vegetables to create that irresistible meat substitute.

Among many fascinating interviews, Zimberoff’s thoughts on Alan Hahn, CEO and founder of MycoTechnology, stood out to me.

“I appreciate that there are people like Hahn  investing the time and money to introduce healthier ingredients into our iffy supply chain,” she writes. “But I am skeptical of his highly processed mycelium powder that rides alongside the black box. I want ingredients that are known, through centuries of human testing, to be food.”

Still, she doesn’t believe there is anything to be investigated to date. And some small recent studies suggest that plant-based meat alternatives could be beneficial. 

But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking questions about the long-term benefits of plant-based meat offerings and their impact on our diet.

“The government should be mindful of how closely these agencies are working with and collaborating with New Food startups,” Zimberoff told me. “Unfortunately, I think we will all be test cases for some of these new foods, and nothing will be done to ensure our safety until something goes actually wrong.” 

The book is a good window into how sometimes good people with good intentions can lead to misguided, or incomplete, solutions.

Just remember this next time you hear a snazzy headline about the “perfect fake” new meat: in this great, still developing food experiment, we’re the mice.