Abstract
Industrial animal agriculture is a significant driver of climate change, habitat loss, and the ongoing extinction crisis, all of which will continue to accelerate as global demand for animal products grows. Plant-based alternatives to animal products, which have existed for over a thousand years, offer a potential solution to this problem, as the intersection of recent technological innovation and shifting capital investment trends have ushered in a new era of alternative proteins that are redefining food categories like meat, eggs, and milk. To better understand these evolving food forms, their attendant technologies, and the opportunities they afford for ameliorating the impacts of industrial animal farming, this article provides a genealogy of plant-based alternative proteins, with a particular focus on the current era and the role that design principles like biomimicry and skeuomorphism play in reproducing the organoleptic properties (the sensorial, experiential aspects) of animal products. Comparing the alternative protein market to other markets in which more sustainable foods and energy have failed to displace their environmentally destructive counterparts, it concludes by considering if whether creating novel new protein forms, rather than imitating conventional animal products, may afford a more promising path toward transformation of the food system.
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Notes
Although Covid-19 likely originated in a live animal food market in Wuhan, China, the devastating 1918 flu epidemic started with a spillover event from farmed pigs to humans, and viruses like the H5N1 flu strain found in farmed chickens, which has a mortality rate of 60–65%, could lead to a pandemic several magnitudes worse than Covid-19 should it ever develop the ability to be transmitted from human to human (Askew 2021).
Cattle raised for meat and milk produce the majority – approximately 65% – of livestock emissions. Pig farming is responsible for 9%, buffalo farming and chicken farming for 8% each, and sheep and goat farming for 6%. Other poultry farming, including ducks, turkeys, and geese, make up the rest (Gerber et al. 2013, 23–40). Several companies around the world are experimenting with large-scale insect farming as a relatively low-emission protein source, though data on its potential contribution to livestock emissions is still very limited. One life cycle assessment of cricket farming found that it emits half as much CO2 as chicken farming (Halloran et al. 2017).
For comparison, a 2016 study projected that if future global food consumption practices were to match the average diet in the United States, it would require more land than the entire surface of the earth to meet animal product demands (Alexander et al. 2016), while an earlier study estimated the adoption of an entirely plant-base global food system could lead to the reduction of land currently used for agriculture by approximately 70% (Stehfest 2009).
While widespread replacement of animal proteins by plant proteins could significantly reduce the negative environmental, ecological, and animal welfare impacts of the current global food system, it is important to note that the historic injustices in food accesses that are increasingly intensified under neoliberal capitalism cannot be ameliorated through current practices of corporatized food production. Creating a healthier, more just food system requires more than a transition away from animal-based food (see Sexton et al., 2022; Guthman 2022; Guthman and Biltekoff 2021).
The article does not address cultured meat (also referred to as lab-grown meat, in vitro meat, cultivated meat, cell-cultured meat, and clean meat), which is produced by culturing animal muscle cells into edible portions of animal flesh, as such it is molecularly identical to conventional animal meat. Cultured meat developers, who are still in the research and development phase, face significant technological challenges and — barring a major increase in government research investment — are unlikely to yield commercially available products that could compete in price with conventional meat products at market scale within the next decade (Abrell 2023; Fassler 2021; Humbird 2020; Vergeer et al. 2021).
However, York’s extensive research on the recurrence of the displacement paradox in multiple markets with high environmental costs does suggest that if we want to reduce the many harms of industrial animal agriculture, we cannot rely solely on “expanding the production of lower-impact sources of food to push out the most harmful sources; we must work to actively suppress production of the most environmentally harmful sources, such as beef and sheep meat” (York 2021b).
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This research was supported by a grant from the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at New York University. The author is grateful to Dale Jamieson for the suggestions that inspired this article and to David Wolfson for making invaluable introductions.
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Abrell, E.L. Reinventing the meal: a genealogy of plant-based alternative proteins. Agric Hum Values (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10496-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10496-6