Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people eat hamburgers: They’ll still sizzle and bleed, they’ll taste great, but they won’t actually contain any meat. Today, it appears that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival has been delayed more than a little. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood has fallen over the past two yearsand a recent proof of headlines suggest that this latest wave of fake meat was just that: a passing fad.
A new report suggests that if the alt-protein industry has any hope of scaling, it will require robust funding from a number of different sources — including, notably, the public sector. The report compared plant-based meat imitations to electric vehiclesa powerful climate solution that benefited from government support, such as direct purchase subsidies.
But like the EV industry before italternative meat has a culture war problem to sort out before it can grow — with or without government investment.
Despite some obvious differences, there’s a big parallel between electric cars and alternative meat: They’re designed to be a one-to-one replacement for their predecessors. Buying an electric vehicle “doesn’t prompt consumers to make extensive behavioral changes,” such as ditching a car altogether, said Emma Ignaszewski, one of the report’s authors. Similarly, consumers may simply choose to buy hamburgers that are not made from animal protein, rather than hamburgers that are. “You can enjoy your burger, but it can be produced with much lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat,” says Ignaszewski, who is a senior associate director at the Good Food Institute, or GFI, a think tank that promotes alternative proteins .
Research has shown that animal farming is responsible for 11 to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The development of plant-based foods – meat substitutes that do not contain meat – can help reduce these emissions and lead to less deforestation and land degradation. One study found that a vegan diet produced about 75 percent less planet-warming gas emissions than meat-rich diets.
Ignaszweski admits that comparing alt-meat to EVs has its limitations. “The average American buys a car once every eight years,” she said, while “meat shoppers buy 60 packages at the grocery store every year. Over the course of a decade, that’s one decision point out of 600.”
But the broader point of the report, published by GFI, the Boston Consulting Group, and Synthesis Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in new food technologies, is that meatless meat could take off in the same way as EVs if more public dollars are in the industry invested. (The report touches on plant-based meat and seafood, as well as cultured or “lab-grown” meat, which produced directly from animal cellsand replace it use the fermentation process to enhance the nutritional value or flavor of plant ingredients.)
In 2022, the alternative protein industry received $635 million in government support worldwide. The Environmental Working Group, or EWG, found last year that since 2001 the US Department of Agriculture only $124 million for subsidizing alt proteins. By comparison, the USDA gave at least $59 billion in various subsidies to livestock operators from 1995 to 2023.
More public investment in plant-based meats will not only help drive research and development of new technologies and help scale manufacturing, according to GFI, it will also signal to private capital markets that the alternative protein space is worth taking seriously. to take.
“If the US is serious about technical solutions to address climate change, the food system is a very important piece of that puzzle,” Ignaszweski said.
Other experts agree, with caveats. David Zilberman, a longtime professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley, thinks it’s “a bit of an exaggeration” to compare meatless meat to EVs. For example, he cites the jobs created by EV manufacturing as one of the reasons why the two industries differ. But he agrees the sector needs more support. He described alternative proteins as “of great importance, especially in terms of food security, but most importantly in terms of climate change.” Greater investment will help drive the kind of innovation that will help alternative proteins achieve taste parity with conventional meat. “In the long run, if you could develop things that taste better, consumers will like them,” Zilberman said.
Still, for the U.S. to support alternative proteins in the same way that it helped spur adoption of EVs would require a political sea change. Fears of climate policy eliminating meat from the American diet loom large across the conservative movement. A 2023 study found that Republicans said they were less likely to vote for a hypothetical candidate who said, “It’s time we work together as a nation to reduce our reliance on meat and dairy and instead focus on solutions like plant-based foods and artificial meats.” In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz it warned memorably, “If Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.” He later explained it was a jokebut the message was immediately clear: Climate action means sacrificing precious ways of lifeespecially for men who considered eating meat a principle of masculinity. This fear has led to a backlash against alternative proteins: In May, Florida and Alabama banned the production and sale of lab-grown meat.
Creating an effective narrative to counter entrenched beliefs about meat versus plant-based foods will be key to the industry’s success, said Samantha Derrick, the founder of Plant Futures, an interdisciplinary program at UC Berkeley that aims to to train students for careers in alternative proteins, said. “I think, as well organized as Big Ag is, even though they have a lot of money and resources, there’s a lot of potential on the alt-protein side,” Derrick said. And she believes that the generation of entrepreneurs now entering the workforce can help develop a new, more compelling story.
“Ultimately, the information, the data, the research, the climate argument, everything is on our side,” Derrick said. “And that’s one thing Big Ag doesn’t have that we have.”
