The vegetarian 'meat' aimed at replacing the real thing

Meat-free foods that "bleed" like the real thing are becoming increasingly common. Could these vegetarian alternatives replace "traditional" burgers and sausages?

Concerns about the environmental and health impact of our diets has seen interest in vegetarian and vegan foods grow.

This has boosted everything from flexitarianism to vegan sausage rolls and campaigns like "Veganuary".

While Quorn and Linda McCartney once ruled the meat substitute aisles of our supermarkets, new companies are appearing with a radically different vision of "meat-free".

Vegetarian "meat" designed to mimic the look, smell and taste of the real thing are already available, while scientists are developing lab-grown meats

But with the arrival of these new dishes comes an increasingly animated debate about what can be called "meat", as well as how - and even if - it should be sold.

The first type of these new meat alternatives are plant-based products.

These are already available in restaurants, pubs and supermarkets, contributing to a growing market worth an estimated £4.6bn. Last week, the value of US firm Beyond Meat rose to nearly $3.8bn (£2.9bn) after its Wall Street debut.

The aim of plant-based "meat" is for it to be so similar to cook and eat as the real thing, that it is virtually indistinguishable.

It is made from plant proteins - usually wheat, pea or potato. Natural colourings like beetroot juice usually provide the "blood".

Another US firm, Impossible Foods, has developed a plant version of heme - which gives beef its colour and taste.

The second type of meat alternative is known as cultured or clean meat, which is produced using animal stem cells.

These cells are grown in a lab or bioreactor, usually with the help of a growth-enhancing substance taken from a calf foetus.

The process is arguably closer to a scientist growing replacement tissues and organs than the work of a cattle farmer.

Although not yet available in shops and restaurants, the techniques are being explored in a number of countries and could be on our plates in a matter of years.

A firm called Just hopes to have its lab-grown chicken on US shelves by the end of 2019.

These meat analogues are not aimed at vegetarians and vegans.

There are high hopes that both the plant-based and lab-grown meats will appeal to hardened meat-eaters.

US firm Impossible Foods has developed a plant version of heme - which gives beef its colour and taste

But getting these products on to our plates is not as straightforward as simply putting them into shops and restaurants.

Arguably, the biggest hurdle is getting permission to sell them.

Cultured meat firms must undergo a rigorous safety assessment.

In the EU, this process can take up to two years. If the European Food Safety Authority decides the product is safe to eat, a decision must be made about whether it can go to market - and how it should be labelled.

In the US, the timeframe is less certain and relies on approval from two separate departments: the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the collection and culturing of animal cells, and the US Department of Agriculture, which decides how cultured meat can be marketed.

Even with approval from regulators, there is still the need to win over the public.

For many consumers, the so-called "yuck" factor of lab-grown meat could be too strong for it to be considered an alternative to real meat - or something they even want to eat.

For others, the most important thing may be clear and transparent information on what they are eating and from where it has come.

In the US, there are demands for a more precise definition of "meat" before this new technology hits the shelves.

The term should only be used to describe "the tissue or flesh of animals that have been harvested in the traditional manner", the US Cattlemen's Association argues.

For producers of meat alternatives, the outcome of these debates could make or break their businesses.

It is thought that consumers are more likely to buy meat described as "clean" or "slaughter-free" than "lab-grown".

Naming is also important to the plant-based "meats", with opposition to the use of terms like "burger", "steak" or "sausage" to describe them growing.

The EU is to consider proposals to restrict these terms solely to describe edible animal products. It led to reports that this could mean veggie burgers and sausages might have to take on more descriptive names like "discs" and "tubes".

France has already chosen to ban the "misleading" labelling of vegetarian products, suggesting that labels including "veggie burger" and "vegan bacon" risk confusing people.

Producers and investors in plant-based and cultured meat hope it will rival the taste, cost and convenience of conventional meat.

Some think it could take the place of our most environmentally-damaging meats and help meet climate targets.

Conventional meat production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a leading driver of environmental damage. A shift in diets has been described by scientists as critical to tackling climate change.

Plant-based "meat" produces significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires far less land and water.

However, growing meat in a lab still requires lots of energy. A report from the Oxford Martin School suggested that in some circumstances - over the very long term, and not taking into account emissions from land-use change associated with livestock production - lab meat could result in more warming than meat from cattle.

Lab-grown meat is still only being produced in small quantities, meaning it is difficult to assess what large-scale production could look like.

Another issue is how a switch to meat alternatives would affect livestock farmers, some of whom argue that much of the land on which animals are farmed is not fertile enough for crop production.

For consumers, there are important questions.

Are they willing to rethink the role of animal farming in diets and in our culture?

And if "meat" comes from plants or animal cells is it still meat at all?

(Source: BBC)

If everyone ate beans instead of beef

With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals, writes James Hamblin in the Atlantic. Would you make the switch? Read on: 

Ecoanxiety is an emerging condition. Named in 2011, the American Psychological Association recently described it as the dread and helplessness that come with “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations.”

It’s not a formal diagnosis. Anxiety is traditionally defined by an outsized stress response to a given stimulus. In this case, the stimulus is real, as are the deleterious effects of stress on the body.

This sort of disposition toward ecological-based distress does not pair well with a president who has denied the reality of the basis for this anxiety. Donald Trump has called climate change a fabrication on the part of “the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He has also led the United States to become the only G20 country that will not honor the Paris Climate Accord, and who has appointed fossil-fuel advocates to lead the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency.

For people who experience climate-related anxiety, this all serves as a sort of exacerbation by presidential gaslight. The remedy for a condition like this is knowing what can be done to mitigate environmental degradation, from within in a country singularly committed to it.

Like what?

Helen Harwatt is a researcher trained in environmental nutrition, a field focused on developing food systems that balance human health and sustainability. She’s interested in policy, but realistic about how much progress can be expected under the aforementioned leadership. So she and colleagues have done research on maximizing the impacts of individuals. As with so many things in life and health, that tends to come down to food.

Recently Harwatt and a team of scientists from Oregon State University, Bard College, and Loma Linda University calculated just what would happen if every American made one dietary change: substituting beans for beef. They found that if everyone were willing and able to do that—hypothetically—the U.S. could still come close to meeting its 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals, pledged by President Barack Obama in 2009.

That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.

“I think there’s genuinely a lack of awareness about how much impact this sort of change can have,” Harwatt told me. There have been analyses in the past about the environmental impacts of veganism and vegetariansim, but this study is novel for the idea that a person’s dedication to the cause doesn’t have to be complete in order to matter. A relatively small, single-food substitution could be the most powerful change a person makes in terms of their lifetime environmental impact—more so than downsizing one’s car, or being vigilant about turning off light bulbs, and certainly more than quitting showering.

To understand why the climate impact of beef alone is so large, note that the image at the top of this story is a sea of soybeans in a silo in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The beans belong to a feed lot that holds 38,000 cattle, the growth and fattening of which means dispensing 900 metric tons of feed every day. Which is to say that these beans will be eaten by cows, and the cows will convert the beans to meat, and the humans will eat the meat. In the process, the cows will emit much greenhouse gas, and they will consume far more calories in beans than they will yield in meat, meaning far more clearcutting of forests to farm cattle feed than would be necessary if the beans above were simply eaten by people.

This inefficient process happens on a massive scale. Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of red meat, holds around 212 million cattle. (In June, the U.S. temporarily suspended imports of beef from Brazil due to abscesses, collections of pus, in the meat.) According to the United Nations, 33 percent of arable land on Earth is used to grow feed for livestock. Even more, 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of Earth is used for grazing livestock. In all, almost a third of the land on Earth is used to produce meat and animal products.

This means much less deforestation and land degradation if so many plant crops weren’t run through the digestive tracts of cattle. If Americans traded their beef for beans, the researchers found, that would free up 42 percent of U.S. crop land.

“The real beauty of this kind of thing is that climate impact doesn’t have to be policy-driven,” said Harwatt. “It can just be a positive, empowering thing for consumers to see that they can make a significant impact by doing something as simple as eating beans instead of beef.”

She and her colleagues conclude in the journal Climatic Change: “While not currently recognized as a climate policy option, the ‘beans for beef’ scenario offers significant climate change mitigation and other environmental benefits, illustrating the high potential of animal to plant food shifts.”

The beans for beef scenario is, it seems, upon us.

“I think it’s such an easy-to-grasp concept that it could be less challenging than a whole dietary shift,” said Harwatt. The words vegetarian and vegan have stifled some people’s thinking on what it means to eat well—to consume responsibly, conscientiously. Rather the beans for beef scenario is the dietary equivalent of effective altruism—focusing on where efforts will have the highest yield. “It’s kind of a worst-first approach, looking at the hottest spot in the food system in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, and what could that be substituted with without losing protein and calories in the food system? And at the same time, gaining health benefits.”

In addition to the well-documented health benefits of a plant-based diet, this case also brings empowerment, or at least reprieve. Regardless of a person’s degree of ecoanxiety, there is some recourse in knowing how far individuals can go to make up for a regressive federal administration simply by eating beans.

Those from the Hindu Right who oppose beef-eating ignore the practices of their own ancestors

India Dissents, an anthology edited by the poet Ashok Vajpeyi, is a collection of expressions of dissent spanning nearly three millennia. Beginning from writings Nasidiya Sukta, in the Rigveda, the volume examines the tradition of registering doubts and protest against the Indian state and its traditions and practices. It includes writings from: the Tamil poet Sundarar, who rebukes god for ignoring the devout public; the Sikh guru, Nanak, who writes against the divisive religious and caste systems; the Dalit poet Kalavve, who condemns caste oppression and patriarchy; the writer Ismat Chughtai, who mocks the trial against her on the charges of obscenity; the laywer Siddharth Narrain, who chides the Supreme Court for terming the LGBTQ community in India a “miniscule minority”; the writer Robin S Ngangom, who addresses state-sponsored terrorism and the militarisation of states such as Meghalaya, from where he hails; and the activist Soni Sori, who opposes the state action against Maoist rebels and the tribal residents in Chhattisgarh; among several others. The book emphasises that India—both in its ancient and present forms—has always included a robust culture of dissent and critique.

The following excerpt is by DN Jha, the text of which was part of his 2001 book The Myth of the Holy Cow. (When Jha’s book was first published, leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had called for it to be burned publicly.) 

In this extract, Jha writes about how various factions of the Hindu right—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in particular—deny or ignore ancient Indian history when they claim that cow-worship is integral to Hinduism: 

Mother cow is in many ways better than the mother who gave us birth. Our mother gives us milk for a couple of years and then expects us to serve her when we grow up. Mother cow expects from us nothing but grass and grain. Our mother often falls ill and expects service from us. Mother cow rarely falls ill. Our mother when she dies means expenses of burial or cremation. Mother cow is as useful dead as when alive.

These are the words of Mahatma Gandhi explaining the importance of the cow. His explanation, devoid of religious rigmarole, is quite simple: the cow is important because of its resource value in an agrarian society whose members derive a substantial part of their sustenance from its milk and other dairy products. But Gandhi contradicts himself and says elsewhere, “the central fact of Hinduism is cow protection… The cow protection ideal set up by Hinduism is essentially different from and transcends the dairy ideal of the West. The latter is based on economic values, the former…lays stress on the spiritual aspect, viz., the idea of penance and self-sacrifice for the martyred innocence which it embodies…”

This statement of Gandhi is significantly different from the former, in that it lays stress on his religious commitment to protect the cow. Most Hindus today are guided by a religious concern for cow protection. Therefore an average Indian, rooted in what appears to him as his traditional Hindu religious heritage, carries the load of the misconception that his ancestors, especially the Vedic Aryans, attached great importance to the cow on account of its inherent sacredness. The “sacred” cow has come to be considered a symbol of community identity of the Hindus whose cultural tradition is often imagined as threatened by Muslims, who are thought of as beef-eaters. The sanctity of the cow has, therefore, been announced with the flourish of trumpets and has been wrongly traced back to the Vedas, which are supposedly of divine origin and the fountainhead of all knowledge and wisdom. In other words, some sections of Indian society trace the concept of sacred cow to the very period when it was sacrificed and its flesh was eaten.

More importantly, the cow has tended to become a political instrument in the hands of rulers over time. The Mughal emperors Babar, Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb are said to have imposed a restricted ban on cow slaughter to accommodate Jaina or Brahmanical sensibilities and veneration of the cow. Similarly Shivaji, sometimes viewed as an incarnation of god who descended on earth for the deliverance of the cow and the Brahmana, is said to have proclaimed: “We are Hindus and the rightful lords of the realm. It is not proper for us to witness cow slaughter and the oppression of brahmans.”

But the cow became a tool of mass political mobilisation when the organised Hindu cow-protection movement, beginning with the Sikh Kuka (or Namdhari) sect in Punjab around 1870 and later strengthened by the foundation of the first Gorakshini Sabha in 1882 by Dayananda Sarasvati, made this animal a symbol of the unity of a wide ranging people, challenged the Muslim practice of its slaughter and provoked a series of serious communal riots in the 1880s and 1890s. Although attitudes to cow killing had hardened even earlier, there was undoubtedly a “dramatic intensification” of the cow protection movement when in 1888 the North-Western Provinces High Court decreed that a cow was not a sacred object.

Not surprisingly, cow slaughter very often became the pretext of Hindu–Muslim riots, especially those in Azamgarh district in the year 1893 when more than a hundred people were killed in different parts of the country. Similarly in 1912–13 violence rocked Ayodhya and a few years later, in 1917, Shahabad witnessed a disastrous communal conflagaration. The killing of cattle seems to have emerged again and again as a troublesome issue on the Indian political scene even in independent India despite legislation by several states prohibiting cow slaughter and the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution, which directs the Indian state to “…to take steps for…prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.” For instance, in 1966, nearly two decades after Independence, almost all communal political parties and organisations joined hands to mastermind a massive demonstration by several hundred thousand people in favour of a national ban on cow slaughter. This culminated in a violent rioting in front of the Indian Parliament and the death of at least eight persons and injury to many more. In April 1979, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, often called the spiritual heir to Mahatma Gandhi, went on a hunger strike to pressurise the central government to prohibit cow slaughter throughout the country and ended it after five days when he succeeded in getting the Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s vague assurance that his government would expedite anti-slaughter legislation.

After that the cow ceased to remain much of an issue in the Indian political arena for many years, though the management of cattle resources has been a matter of academic debate among sociologists, anthropologists, economists and different categories of policy farmers. The veneration of the cow has been converted into a symbol of communal identity of the Hindus and obscurantist and fundamentalist forces obdurately refuse to appreciate that the cow was not always all that sacred in the Vedic and subsequent Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical traditions—or that its flesh, along with other varieties of meat, was quite often a part of haute cuisine in early India.

Although the Shin, Muslims of Dardistan in Pakistan, look on the cow as other Muslims do the pig, avoid direct contact with cows, refuse to drink cow’s milk or use cow dung fuel and reject beef as food, self-styled custodians of nonexistent “monolithic” Hinduism assert that the eating of beef was first introduced in India by the followers of Islam who came from outside and are foreigners in this country, little realizing that their Vedic ancestors were also foreigners who ate the flesh of the cow and various other animals.

Fanaticism getting precedence over the fact, it is not surprising that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and their numerous outfits have a national ban on cow slaughter on their agenda. The [then] chief minister of Gujarat (Keshubhai Patel) announced some time ago, as a pre-election gimmick, the setting up of a separate department to preserve cow breeds and manage Hindu temples, and recently a Bajrang Dal leader has even threatened to enrol 30 lakh activists in the anti-cow slaughter movement during the Bakrid of 2002. So high-geared has been the propaganda about abstention from beef eating as a characteristic trait of “Hinduism” that when the RSS tried to claim that Sikhs were Hindus, there was vehement opposition from them and Sikh youth leader proposed, “Why not slaughter a cow and serve beef in a gurdwara langar?”

The communalists who have been raising a hullabaloo over the cow in the political arena do not realise that beef-eating remained a fairly common practice for a long time in India and that the arguments for its prevalence are based on the evidence drawn from our own scriptures and religious texts. The response of historical scholarship to the communal perception of Indian food culture therefore, has been sober and scholars have drawn attention to the textual evidence on the subject which, in fact, begins to be available in the oldest Indian religious text, Rigveda, supposedly of divine origin. HH Wilson, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, had asserted that the “sacrifice of the horse or of the cow, the gomedha or asvamedha, appears to have been common in the earliest periods of the Hindu ritual.”

The view that the practice of cow sacrifice and eating beef prevailed among the Indo-Aryans was, however, put forth most convincingly by Rajendra Lal Mitra in an article which first appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and subsequently formed a chapter of his book The Indo-Aryans, published in 1891. In 1894, William Crooke, a British civil servant, collected an impressive amount of ethnographic data on popular religious beliefs and practices and devoted an entire chapter to the respect shown to animals including the cow. Later, in 1912, he published an informative piece on the sanctity of the cow in India, but he also drew attention to the old practice of eating beef, and its survival in his own times. In 1927, LL Sundara Ram made a strong case for cow protection for which he sought justification from the scriptures of different religions including Hinduism. While he did not deny that the Vedic people ate beef, he blamed the Muslims for cow slaughter. In the early 1940s, PV Kane in his monumental five-volume History of Dharamasastra referred to some Vedic and early Dharmasastric passages that speak of cow slaughter and beef eating. HD Sankalia drew attention to literary as well as archaeological evidence of eating cattle flesh in ancient India.

Similarly, Laxman Shastri Joshi, a Sanskritist of unquestionable scholarship, drew attention to the Dharmasastra works that unequivocally support the prevalence of meat eating, including beef eating, in early India. Needless to say, the scholarship of all authorities mentioned above was unimpeachable, and none of them seems to have anything to do with any anti-Hindu ideology. Nor can they be described as Marxists, whom the Sangh Parivar and the saffronised journalists and publicists have charged of distorting history. HH Wilson, for example, was the first occupant of the Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1832 and was not as avowedly anti-Indian as many other imperialist scholars. Rajendra Lal Mitra, a product of the Bengal renaissance and a close associate of Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotindranath Tagore, made significant contribution to India’s intellectual life, and was described by Max Mueller as the “best living Indologist” of his time and by Rabindranath Tagore as the “most beloved child of the muse.” William Crooke was a well-known colonial ethnographer who wrote extensively on peasant life and popular religion without any marked prejudice against Hinduism. LL Sundara Ram, despite his somewhat anti-Muslim feeling, was inspired by humanitarian considerations. Mahamahopadhyaya PV Kane was a conservative Maharashtrian Brahmana and the only Sankritist to be honoured with the title of Bharat Ratna. HD Sankalia combined his unrivalled archaeological activity with a profound knowledge of Sanskrit.

Besides these scholars several other Indian Sanskritists and Indologists, not to mention a number of western scholars, have repeatedly drawn our attention to the textual evidence of beef and other types of animal flesh in early Indian diet. Curious though it may seem, the Sangh Parivar, which carries a heavy burden of “civilisation illiteracy,” has never turned its guns on them but against historians who have mostly relied on the research of the above-mentioned distinguished scholars.

(Source: The Caravan Magazine)