Berman: Fake meat needs a good grilling
Burgers and summer go together like vegans and soy. This summer, however, there might be some newcomers on the menu at the neighborhood cookout: Fake meat.
Discs of microwaveable cardboard-tasting mushiness have been around to appease that one vegetarian guy at the party for decades. But recently, food companies have engineered a second wave of products to look, smell, feel — and most importantly, taste — more like meat.
So far, consumers seem to find the new stuff worth trying. A recent report finds 33 percent of American consumers plan to buy more plant-based food products this year. This growing popularity among omnivores has at least partially fueled a projected 8.4 percent annual growth within the global meat substitutes market through 2020.
But will the interest last? That depends on if people figure out what’s in the mystery meat.
Trends indicate that American consumers not only prefer “natural” products but are even willing to pay a premium for products containing recognizable ingredients.
And while it’s pretty clear where meat comes from, plant-based alternatives don’t exactly grow on trees.
Take the Beyond Burger for example, which contains a total of 22 ingredients. One of these ingredients, refined coconut oil, undergoes processing to bleach and deodorize the final product — that's what makes it “refined.”
An advisory from the American Heart Association recommends against coconut oil, saying it raises the levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol. Furthermore, refined coconut oil has a smoke point of 450 degrees and grills often reach higher temperatures — meaning there's a possibility the coconut oil could burn and become toxic.
The Impossible Burger is another meat mimic that’s taken off. Its claim to fame is a “bleeding” patty – meaning it leaks vegetable juices, which sizzle on the grill. For all intents and purposes it looks just as juicy as a sizzling beef patty.
Appearances can be deceptive. The ingredient responsible for the Impossible Burger’s signature “bleed” is soy leghemoglobin. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and not the delicious kind.
Soy leghemoglobin is found in the roots of soybean plants, but Impossible Foods manufactures their version with genetically engineered yeast in a laboratory. Soy leghemoglobin has not been previously consumed by humans and the FDA declined to recognize the ingredient as safe without further study.
Despite that, the product remains on the market because FDA approval is not technically required for most new ingredients.
The goal of these Silicon Valley organizations is disruption, but unlike developing an app, food offers less room to safely experiment with human health.
Not to be outdone by plant burgers, the talk of the tech crowd has been “lab-grown” meat produced from harvested cells instead of a whole animal. While the public can see how many plant burgers are made (in stainless steel factories), the same isn’t true of lab-grown meat. Companies have hidden their production practices behind a veil of trade secrecy. From what’s been revealed publicly, one way to grow meat in the lab uses the blood (serum) from cow fetuses.
Compare this with the traditional burger, packaged with a short and easy-to-remember ingredient list: beef.
Meat mimics also come with a side of irony. Green advocacy organizations with pages and pages of anti-GMO skepticism on their websites have been receptive of both clean meat and genetically modified fake meat technologies. For instance, Environmental Working Group cautions against GMO foods despite firm scientific consensus on their safety, while simultaneously advocating for the relatively unstudied lab-grown meat. One of the organization’s vice presidents is even speaking at a pro-cultured meat conference in September. Talk about confirmation bias.
The freedom we have in America is in large part due to us being part of an informed citizenry. The newcomers in the burger world deserve a good grilling. And if we decide to fall back to eating regular ol’ burgers and sausages, that’s hardly a bad outcome.