Fake Meat: Good or Bad for You and the Planet?
Alt-meat markets its products as healthful for humans and the environment, but wait until you learn what’s in them and how they’re made
“Red meat used to be a symbol of high social class, but that’s changing,” said Dr. Frank Hu of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The more highly educated Americans are, the less red meat they eat.”
By 2012, a third of Americans had tried fake hamburger. By 2021, two out of five people were eating alt-meat daily or weekly in the belief that it improves their health and also helps to save the planet. That’s a lot of people and a lot of highly-processed substitute meat.
But the complex industrial food processes required to recreate meat texture and flavor are antithetical to nutrition and health. The way alt-meat is made also poses questions about its genuine environmental benefits. Alt-meat, by definition, is an ultra-processed food (UPF).
If you understand what’s in it and how it’s made, you might question whether it should be considered food at all.
How and why fake meat is made
For over a century, meat substitutes have been made and used for health, convenience, and taste benefits. The Minimalist Vegan says that vegans and vegetarians eat fake meat “because it’s familiar, convenient, and tastes good.”
The original fake meat is widely recognized as a late 19th Century creation of John Harvey Kellogg, the Seventh-Day Adventist founder of Kelloggs. “Nuttose” was a peanut-based meat alternative that Kellogg soon abandoned in favor of Corn Flakes and similar grain-based breakfast cereals.
In the early 1980s, Gardenburgers launched at an Oregon restaurant, made of leftover vegetables, beans, cheese, rice, and seasonings. The veggie patties weren’t intended to be an imitation of a hamburger, more like a meat alternative. By the mid-1990s, Quorn’s fungus-based products and Tofurky were launched. In 1999, Burger King began to sell Veggie Burgers in several markets and McDonald’s quickly adopted its own meatless burger (which didn’t last).
By 2012, a third of U.S. consumers reported they were eating fake meat occasionally. Most of us have eaten fake meat without realizing it, as a number of fast food outlets use texturized vegetable protein (TVP) in taco, burrito, and pizza toppings. Nearly every school lunchroom in the United States uses TVP in recipes. The USDA considers it a healthful alternative to meat and encourages its use in school meals. However, TVP doesn’t have the cachet of alt-meat and its sophisticated manufacturing processes, marketing, and packaging.
What’s in fake meat?
Today’s meat substitutes are made from soy, wheat, peas, and mycoprotein (fungus). Products like the Gardenburger, assembled from recognizable ingredients like chopped vegetables, beans, and rice, are outnumbered by alt-meat offerings that want to emulate animal foods, from spongy fried vegan “chicken” nuggets to burgers that “bleed” red substitute blood made from beet powder and pomegranate juice.
All substitute meat is made from plant-based ingredients. By the time the ingredients are processed and mixed, they bear no resemblance to their original form. Beyond Meat does a lot of “sourcing.” It “sources proteins, fats, minerals, flavors and colors, and carbohydrates” from “sources” including peas, beans, potatoes and brown rice. There’s no soy in Beyond Meat, but there is protein — from peas, mung beans, rice, and fava beans. The “fat” in Beyond Meat comes from cocoa butter, coconut oil, and expeller-pressed canola oil.
The list of stuff you don’t need to eat in all substitute meats is long.
The texture of alt-meat requires non-nutrients like potato starch and methylcellulose.
Methylcellulose comes from “bark, wood, or leaves of plants such as cotton,” according to BAKERPedia. It is made by heating cellulose (wood fiber) with caustic solutions like sodium hydroxide and then treating it with methyl chloride. Beyond Meat, similarly to other “enriched” products like children’s breakfast cereal, adds in calcium, iron, salt, and potassium chloride.
Finally, Beyond Meat boosts eye appeal and taste by using beet juice, apple extract, maize vinegar, carrot powder, maltodextrin, and an ingredient my husband Bruce, a former Big Food executive, has called “the all-purpose industrial food lubricant”: lecithin.
Beyond Meat’s factories are much higher-tech than the Philadelphia Oreo cookie plant where my husband worked a decade ago. But high-tech doesn’t always equal sanitary. A November 2022 report in the Los Angeles Times identified mold, listeria, and food safety problems at Beyond Meat’s Pennsylvania facility. A former employee documented foreign materials in the substitute meat, including metal, wood, plastic, and string.
Alt-meat: another sequel in a long-running series
In the 1960s and 1970s, the sugar industry paid for research that indicated saturated fat was responsible for heart disease. Low-fat and non-fat products didn’t exist before this push, and while these products have waxed and waned in popularity over the years, Statista reported that nearly 100 million Americans used low-fat or no-fat products in 2020.
Why did the sugar industry want to promote now-debunked research that dietary fat causes heart disease? So that sugar and other caloric sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup would be included in more processed foods as a tasty substitute for naturally-occurring fat.
After fat got a bad rep, nutritionists said that fiber was good for us. Fiber is healthy when consumed in its natural form from whole fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains. Although dietary fiber is best consumed in its natural form, manufacturers are allowed to include substances like inulin (chicory root extract), gum acacia, bamboo fiber, retrograded corn starch, and xylooligosaccharides in processed foods.
“The food industry has hijacked the advice to eat more fiber by putting isolated, highly processed fiber into what are essentially junk foods,” Bonnie Liebman from the Center for Science in the Public Interest told NPR.
Alt-meat’s story arc may be approaching its final episodes
Although significant numbers of consumers still choose alt-meat, by September 2022, Deloitte reported that alt-meat sales had stalled in 2021 and declined throughout 2022.
In November 2022, Charlie Hope D’Anieri, writing in The New Republic, said that “the modern meat supply chain is at the center of a cluster of global risks, increasing the likelihood of zoonotic pandemics, driving deforestation that destroys our last remaining carbon sinks, and weakening the power of our antibiotics.”
A few people, me included, have noticed that these global environmental risks result from Big Food and Big Ag practices in general, not just industrial pork, chicken, and beef production.
Moderately processed foods, from squishy white bread to saltine crackers, are widely viewed as unhealthy. Yet these products have fewer ingredients and none of the industrial and chemical processes required to transform peas, wood, and fungus into imitation hamburger, chicken, or steak.
The alt-meat industry recently announced that the USDA’s Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center plans to issue new guidelines saying that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) can be part of a healthy, nutritious diet of 2,000 calories a day. The sample menus from the USDA document are reminiscent of long-term care home menus replete with high-fructose corn syrup sweetened yogurt, liberal doses of canned mandarin orange, and plenty of processed smoked turkey loaf.
Research that isn’t funded by Big Food or Big Ag tells a different story. Ultra-processed foods are increasingly associated with metabolic disease, child and adult obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, and formerly rare cancers.
I know of no foods with longer ingredient lists or more elaborate manufacturing processes than alt-meats. Impossible Foods makes its imitation hamburger bleed red with heme, a form of iron made from “a yeast genetically engineered with the gene for soy leghemoglobin, which is derived from soy plants.”
Fake steak or imposter burgers aren’t better for your health, your nutrition, or the planet. Give them a pass and eat real plants instead.