The culinary world has been abuzz with talk of plant-based “meat” recently. The hype took off when Burger King announced its roll out of the Impossible Burger at several stores in the St. Louis area last month.
Add to that the first day trading of California-based Beyond Meat, which opened on the Nasdaq at $46, after pricing its shares at $25, and surged 163 percent in the best IPO so far in 2019, according to a report in the Santa Fe New Mexican.
While the “meat” created by Impossible Foods is plant-based, the company has introduced “heme” into its burgers. Heme is a protein from the roots of soy plants, which provides a meaty taste.
Although only 3.2 percent of Americans are vegetarian and 0.5 percent are vegan, it appears that non-vegetarians are snapping up the faux burgers due to the enhanced flavor and texture of the burgers.
Enter the new kid on the block. Cell-based meat, which is lab-created from….wait for it…..meat. That’s right. The meat is created from the muscle tissue harvested from living animals.
Why? The answer lies in the steady march forward of social engineering. The cell-based meat manufacturers are aiming for an audience of those carnivores who want to eat meat, but with no animal slaughter and a smaller environmental footprint, said the Santa Fe New Mexican report.
Predicting that lab-grown meat will replace 50 percent of the global meat consumption by the middle of this century, Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society, said that by the end of the century “all meat will be grown in factories,” according to a Washington Post article.
The first lab-grown burger was presented at a news conference in London in 2013, its tissue grown in a lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, at an estimated cost of $1.2 million per pound. Now the United States has at least nine cell-culturing companies, among 26 worldwide and with potentially more shadow companies gearing up in China.
This year Israeli-based company Aleph Farms said it had gotten the cost down to $100 per pound, and industry insiders say American companies are getting the cost to $50 per pound, said the Washington Post article.
As society edges closer to the reality of frankenmeat, the answer “the grocery store” will be a lot closer to the truth when asked where meat comes from.
