For a while, the ultra-processed, over-brined slurry of extracts and concentrates, marketed as a healthier alternative, was everywhere.
Remember fake meat? For a while, the ultra-processed, over-brined slurry of extracts and concentrates marketed as a healthier alternative to the consumption of animal proteins was everywhere. Today, not so much.
“Sales of plant-based meats are in decline,” The Economist reported this week. Investors who once flocked to alternative meat producers are pulling back in response to reduced consumer demand. “Even as the cost of meat has soared,” the report added, “it remains cheaper than plant-based imitations” due, in part, to federal subsidies for meat producers.
But cost alone does not explain fake meat’s retreat from the market. Another factor, The Economist concedes, “is taste.”
“Some plant-based meat is still ‘awful,’ admits Mark Cuddigan, the boss of This, a British meat-free company,” the report continued. “One bad experience can put a curious consumer off for good.”
It’s refreshing to see a media outlet even contend with the degree to which the taste of these products (or lack thereof) influences consumption habits. For years, taste was an afterthought. When consumers were asked to give fake meat a try, it was more often framed as a moral imperative.
As I wrote in my last book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, the popular left-of-center discourse developed a bad habit over the last decade or so in which they appeared to regard husbandry, ranching, and the consumption of animal products as sinful.
In 2021, New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni described eating “fermentation-derived proteins made from microorganisms” not as a pleasurable experience for the senses but for the soul. “I felt I was doing good without sacrificing all that much,” he wrote, even though the sacrifice of flavor was a measurable loss.
“Rational morality tugs at us with the slenderest of threads, while meat pulls with the thick-twined chords of culture, tradition, pleasure, the flow of the crowd, and physical yearning,” the journalist Nathanael Johnson wrote of the agony he experienced amid his crusade to popularize veganism.
“I ate meat a number of times,” the author Jonathan Safran Foer ruefully confessed. Worse, the act “brought me comfort.” He agonized over it. “How could I argue for radical change, how could I raise my children as vegetarians, while eating meat for comfort?”
How indeed?
In left-of-center popular culture, meat consumption was framed as the activity of the negligent and heedless. As I wrote:
It is an affront to the Eden in which we were conceived. It is a callous pleasure that makes you into a burden your family and neighbors must bear. It is a display of wanton cruelty toward animals, especially when there are alternatives. This is the language of morality.
But even if vegetable products marketed as meat are losing their appeal, there is a savior on the horizon: cellular meat. “Investors may now be warier of plant-based meat, but some are placing bets instead on the cultivated variety, grown in a lab from the cells of animals,” the Economist’s report closed.
Who knows? Perhaps the average consumer will find that the experience of eating cultivated meat is just as pleasurable. But that product will struggle to overcome the same moralizing that plagued the fake meat industry.
“By uncoupling the pleasure of meat from suffering and death, cellular agriculture will force us to be more precise about the nature of the pleasures we crave,” the academics Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg wrote for the New Republic, in which meat-eating is described as “sadism.” With the advent of cellular meat, consumers will encounter a “choice between a moral right and a moral wrong that are otherwise indistinguishable.” In other words, if you stick with old-fashioned meat, you’re probably a bad person.
Rarely do the anti-meat evangelists contend with taste. When they do, it is often to dismiss their own dissatisfaction with the products they are consuming — from mushroom agar to bugs — preferring to emphasize the nourishment of their souls instead. That may be sufficiently satisfying for them, but consumers prefer quality. And if the cellular meat industry cannot find allies who highlight the need for the stuff to taste good, any alternative to meat, however promising, will go the way of the dodo.