How Will Our Children Eat?

Fake meat was going to be the hero food of our time. From the outset, people were interested in the novelty, in the “healthier” option, the likeness to beef – blood and all – but most importantly, the promise to save our planet. 

Last month, after Beyond Meat’s huge losses on Wall Street, experts are claiming that the plant-based meat bubble burst. Is the trend really over? 

I became interested in this over the past few weeks. My husband and I have two young children. We sometimes talk about our predictions for how their lives will turn out vastly different from our own. On the topic of how they will eat in the future, I believe they will be plantarians, looking back at our generation of meat-eating as ignorant and cruel. I think our children will view our BBQ feasts with the same disgust that Gen Z sees smoking. My husband believes that meat is so ingrained in our culture that it won’t be disappearing anytime soon, despite him himself quitting red meat.

For now, he’s not wrong. Meat consumption has been increasing since the pandemic and there’s a number of reasons plant-based meat alternatives are failing. They are expensive. They are viewed as unhealthy or processed. They are not particularly tasty. And they are political. The most recent argument that caught my attention was that a segment of Americans won’t buy products they see as “woke” and by buying fake meat they are admitting to climate change. 

Still, while Silicon Valley is cooling on alternate meat, governments around the world are  investing over a billion dollars on cellular agriculture (or lab-grown meat). One Australian company has even found a way to make Wooly Mammoth meatballs from its DNA.  To me personally, that sounds unappetizing. 

I wonder, is this whole attempt to mimic meat the problem? In my future view, our children will indulge in grains, legumes, fancified veggies, and – dare I say it – more cauliflower masquerading as steak. Fake meat might become the e-cigarette of the future, a miscalculated and unneeded middle-ground to true eradication.