Once again, the legacy media are catching up to The BFD. For nearly three years, we’ve been cocking a journalistic eyebrow and puncturing the hype over “plant-based meat”. We’ve reported on the concerns of food scientists and environmentalists alike over what really are “Frankenfoods”.
Newshub is finally catching on.
The popularity of plant-based proteins, or “fake meat”, has increased in recent years as consumers look to eat fewer animal products. In fact, plant-based protein is projected to be a A$3 billion opportunity for Australia by 2030.
In fact, the popularity of fake meat is plummeting. Beyond Meat’s deals with McDonalds, KFC and Taco Bell appear to have badly flopped as the products disappear from menus and the company’s stock value plunges. After hitting a high in 2020, the company posted a quarterly loss of $100m in May 2022.
Put bluntly, once the novelty wore off, fake meat’s minimal impact on food sales withered away.
Its environmental claims don’t live up to the hype, either.
The plant-based burgers and sausages found on supermarket shelves are made by extracting the protein from plant foods, often pea, soy, wheat protein, and mushrooms.
But a myriad of additives are needed to make these products look and taste like traditional meat.
For example, chemically refined coconut oil and palm oil are often added to plant-based burgers to help mimic meat’s soft and juicy texture. Colouring agents, such as beetroot extracts, have been used in Beyond Meat’s “raw” burger to mimic the colour change that occurs when meat is cooked. And the additive soy leghemoglobin, produced by genetically engineered yeast, has been used to create the Impossible Foods “bleeding” burger.
Then there’s cell-based or “cultured” meat, which is grown in a lab from an animal cell, to create a glob of meat. Which sounds even less appealing to the average consumer, I expect, than the lab-manufactured horror of “plant-based meat”.
It’s just one of the great hypocrisies of the green movement that they fetishise “natural” and “organic”, yet at the same time promote the most heavily-processed, industrialised fake garbage, with a gargantuan carbon footprint, as somehow “saving the planet”.
The bottom line is most fake meats are classified as ultra-processed foods.
They have undergone extensive industrial processing and include substances of “no or rare culinary use”, which means you would not find them in your average kitchen cupboard.
Newshub
So, why the concerted agenda of foisting this junk on us? A large part of it is the intensive activism of the militant vegans. Professor Frank Mitloehner, from the University of California Davis’ Department of Animal Science, said the anti-animal food source lobby had deliberately honed in on climate to push its agenda.
“Where they once relied on the animal rights card, climate is proving more effective,” he said.
Nature perfected the process of turning plants into meat, millions of years ago. It’s called “livestock”.
Who are we to argue with nature?