Cultured meat might not be that environmentap friendly
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
The Chinese supermarkets can do it, but in normal supermarkets, everything meat-free is positioned as a luxury rich-people thing. Organic this, handmade that, marinated the other. Hovering at £6 or £8 a kilo. Meanwhile the shelves next to it are groaning under endless kilos of chicken from £2.50 (1kg of legs at Tesco, was £2.15 until recently).
My tin-foil hat theory here is that they don't want to knock the bottom out of the meat-free market because they're hoping to replace cheap meat with expensive synthetic meat and not let on that it's a false dichotomy.
But again, if one ate chicken once a month, one could afford the real thing, and if most of us did the same, there would enough to go around without having to resort to industrial meat production.
There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird.
And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu if it costs 3 times what chicken can cost them, unless they actually want to eat tofu specifically (which I do, but I also baulk at the supermarket price, since I can get it for under half the price in a Chinese supermarket and in a bigger pack).
Which is then a vicious cycle because people won't buy it to try, and won't learn how to cook it (which can take a little experimentation if you didn't grow up with it) because why would they?
Just whacking tofu solo into a pan and making it hot doesn't produce a result that I'd expect most people to go "yes, wow, you know, this is worth 3 times the cost of the chicken legs".
For a start, if you buy the Western supermarket stuff, it's often very spongy and you need to remove the water if you want to pan fry it. The Chinese supermarket stuff is much more homogeneous (you can make it spongy by freezing it if you want). So now you need to figure out that if you want it to go crispy, you need to press it. And maybe a cornflour dredge to make a nicer crust.
Frying directly also doesn't really work trivially with anything except extra-firm, it just turns into a scrambled mess (ok, so this one is cultural, in Chinese cooking you're generally supposed to maintain the shape). You can steam softer tofu, but then you still need to figure out how you like the sauce. You must also find a steamer big enough to fit the plate: attempting to extract tofu not on a plate from a steamer to a plate is a valuable and emotional learning experience on its own.
In general, tofu doesn't act the same way as meat: meat provides flavour to the dish, tofu absorbs flavours from the dish (and even this varies hugely between types). So if you just do a straight swap, even disregarding the mechanical differences, you will not get a very exciting result. So now you also need to adapt what you cook to fit tofu--this is often hard and you will fail if you're expecting to be able to make a roast tofu block taste like granny's roast chicken--or find new dishes that you like which use tofu.
Not to mention that for some dishes you may well need new ingredients that, as "world foods", are expensive or unavailable in normal supermarkets.
This all takes time, effort and not a little tofu to figure out. In the same way that my grandmother took a lot of chickens to hit on her signature!
Tofu is just an example. The same, broadly, goes for the other similar "alternatives" (in the Western-meat-avoider sense, they're just "food" to some): tempeh, seitan, paneer, gluten, whatever. Even fairly conventional "Western" things like halloumi and beans aren't simple drop-in replacements!
Quorn vegetarian mince is cheap, no hormones, antibiotics or fat. Real low-fat meat mince is £1 more per kg than Quorn mince. No soy either, it's mycoprotein.
Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?
Would you be against coffee and tea as well, or is the dose low enough to not worry about?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23141692_Phytoestro...
A more compelling "gotcha" would have been invoking something like broccoli, which is higher again, and actually higher than natto (fermented soybeans) per 100g.
And yet the Chinese supermarket 1km from Tesco can sell it at £2.40/kg, and at Tesco it starts at over £6. It's clearly possible.
As for Quorn, I used to eat tons of that as I had a vegetarian parent. It's "OK", but if we're doing anecdata, it does cause digestive problems for many people. As I'm not vegetarian, I don't feel the need to use meat replacements. If I'm eating something else it's because I want to.
As far as I can tell, non-exclusive consumption of tofu is unlikely to be a major issue in terms of health effects of phytoestrogens (at least compared to what I would say are my top health risks: sedentary job, then probably occasional cured meats and overall salt intake).
> Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?
Exactly my original point with a substitution of a different protein source.
Isoflavones (the one most common in soy) has not been shown to affect testosterone levels or fertility, while having lots of positive effects.
The estrogen activity of phytoestrogens is, as a bonus, very low.
1. https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
2. https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
I support all efforts to find alternatives. The article states:
>the environmental impact of near-term ACBM (animal cell-based meat) production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.
A future of affordable cultured meat is absolutely possible, humans are good enough at problem solving and environmental impact and price will go down.
Without invoking PETA, consider animal welfare before dismissing laboratory/engineered proteins as unnecessary.
What a shock.
But in any case I would always prefer something natural. I.e. not fake meat and not lab grown meat.
If we decided to indulge in real meat once or twice a month, I meant.
There are alternatives to meat, like bugs, but that is not what vegetarians do or preach.
They all say something along the lines "eat mostly legumes, whole grains, leafy green vegetables and other vegetables". It probably even tells you to cut down on beef and pork. Sweden's national food agency even has advice directed at vegans saying mostly the same things as it tells meaties, but adds "try to eat an iron source with all food (beans, nuts), supplement with b12 and use enriched milk replacements".
Yes, as I wrote we tend to eat too much meat in the west. But cutting down on meat consumption and eating mostly vegetables doesn't mean avoiding eating meat at all.
The problem is, I think, that people do not follow the guidelines of the food agencies anyway. If you follow the guidelines but on a vegan diet, making sure to supplement b12, you won't have to do any planning. A healthy dietary pattern looks the same if you don't eat meat. People most often just have to make sure they get enough calories.
What I will consider is something like mianjin, which is the gluten from wheat. Cheap, sustainable, protein-rich, and easily flavored to whatever food you want. Plus the leftover starches can be used to replicate other animal products like cheeses and bacon, albeit while being completely empty calories.
Around a quarter of the world eats insects each day.
I have actually eaten insects on more than one occasion (some kind of fried cricket, I think). They weren't especially tasty, but they also weren't bad. Just a fairly unexciting snack taste-wise. I'd say "high" game or strong cheese is far, far more of an acquired taste than they were.
Crustaceans are not insects, but insects basically derive from arthropod proto-crustaceans: fundamentally a prawn and a cricket are each roughly the same distance, phylogenetically speaking, from a cow (actually they have 6 legs, not 10, and most are air-breathers, so they're closer in some ways!). Indeed, they can both trigger shellfish allergies. Maybe we're just more used to "weird sea things" being food than "weird land things".
Putting aside the obvious aversion to insect morphologies, if they're being processed into some kind of protein meal, I don't really find that any more objectionable than mechanically-recovered meat slurry, which is a major component of lots of food. Which, to be fair, I do already, generally, avoid.
That said, I agree with you, those that advocate such a change are the last ones willing to do it (let's guess when meat will disappear from EU Parliament canteen).
Keep in mind that many people have ethical issues with killing animals for food. They can certainly switch to eating plants, but many won't. "fake meat" is the bridge they need to align their actions with their morals.
this does not gel well with the idea of having luxuries constantly - a thing that has been more and more prevalent as time gone by. People expect it now, and not being able to eat meat is a sign of poverty (when it isn't really for a long time in history).