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Home » Diets that Work » Is fake meat getting too much like the real thing? – Getaka.co.in

Ive been thinking back to just a few years ago: it was a simpler time, when, at a nice family dinner, my conservative dad could reasonably scoff at the veggie option on the menu, and I, a worldly college sophomore, could reasonably look down my nose at the menus meat. It was an era of balance and harmony, when animal and plant proteins fit neatly into their own categories, and God looked down on it, and it was good.

Then along came the Impossible Burger, a veggie burger that bleeds, thanks to a crafty concoction of beet juice and other things. And when my college co-op ordered them in bulk, raw and frozen, my frantic attempt to cook one why was it still pink?! left chunks of plant goo hopelessly crusted on to a previously well-seasoned cast-iron pan.

So began an era of food-group-bending products that would lead us to todays screwy world, which includes meat grown in laboratories and full-muscle steaks made out of mushrooms. And, try as I might to understand that theres nothing creepier than mass animal slaughter and planetary devastation in the name of continuing to eat Big Macs all of this not-quite-meat business is really creeping me out.

Thinking about cultured meat or full-muscle mushroom steaks makes my calves tingle (weird, I know) and my throat constrict (rendering said meat unswallowable, probably) essentially how Id react to seeing real blood or exposed bone. Which is ironic, because theyre the only kinds of meat that dont involve those things.

Im not saying its logical. Im just saying I cant be the only one.

With this in mind, I decided to reach out to some experts people in the business of fake meat, people in the business of not-fake meat, and people in the business of eating meat to see if my reaction is normal (although Ill admit that I never really expected the queasy-calves thing to be).

Im certainly not the first to worry about this uncanny valley situation. Like the robot face thats just a little bit too close to the real thing for comfort, modern meat dupes might be disturbing precisely because theyre almost meat. Almost, but not quite.

The culinary biochemist Ali Bouzari captured my jitters about faux flesh in a video interview with Wired: This better behave exactly like a chicken nugget in every way, shape, and form, or Im going to freak out.

Some of the good folks behind cell-based meat (the artist formerly known as lab-grown meat) argue that their invention totally avoids the uncanny valley. If they take a cell from a prime, field-raised, happy, healthy chicken and culture it in the lab, the resulting flesh will taste like prime, field-raised, happy, healthy chicken, they explain. (And one can assume that if they take a cell from one of those sad chickens from the Tyson commercials and culture it for mass consumption, itll taste, well, sad?)

Its not just exactly like meat, they explain. It literally is meat. Its just grown in a big blob inside a humongous metal vat. How can that be creepy?!

Still, get them off script for a minute and even the most staunch defenders of cell-based meat admit that theres something strange about it.

Josh Tetrick, the founder of Just, Inc, which has recently added cell-based meat to its repertoire of plant-based (and chuckable!) liquid egg, has plenty of examples of people not quite knowing what to do with cultured meat. One woman, surprised by her first bite of Justs cell-based chicken, exclaimed: It tastes like chicken! (It is chicken, Tetrick said.)

When Just serves that chicken, as one does, surrounded by bread and mayonnaise and lettuce in the form of a sandwich, people unfailingly pick it apart to get at the meat itself like some sort of toddler Sherlock Holmes. Some vegetarians, who are purely in it for ethical reasons, refuse to eat the cell-based meat at all, Tetrick says, despite the fact that it ostensibly fits into their worldview. Its just too close to the real thing.

But thats all well and good with Tetrick: he doesnt really care if vegetarians eat his poser protein. His mission is to tackle the climate crisis, and people who already forgo meat arent going to make any less of a dent if theyre suddenly eating a whole bunch of chicken out of a vat. To make a difference, he needs to convert the carnivores.

Im sorry to rain on that parade, but according to a 2018 survey conducted by Surveygoo (its a thing), its actually the vegetarians and vegans who are hungry for a cell-based meat option. Among Americans in general, 40% said they would eat cell-based meat but half of vegetarians and over 60% of vegans were willing, which sounds like there may be more enthusiasm in the non-meat-eating community.

I get that: for a lot of vegans and vegetarians, it would be pretty sweet to eat meat that doesnt have all the ethical and climate baggage. For people who are already happy with the real thing, whats the point?

Granted, peoples thinking may be changing. In the two years since the survey was conducted, weve seen an explosion of diets that aim to pare down or eliminate meat consumption. 2019 was the year of the vegan. Meanwhile, the Impossible Burger made it to American mainstays like Red Robin and Burger King (and did remarkably well, other than that whole lawsuit thing). Colonel Sanders even went Beyond Chicken.

And now, a company called Meati is vying for the attention of Americas carnivores with its whole-muscle steak, cultured to mimic animal flesh from the fast-growing, fibrous root structure of a mushroom. Its founder, Tyler Huggins, hopes to roll out the product in steakhouses with chefs who built their careers on meat. And hes got a sales pitch that he thinks will appeal to his family and friends in rural Montana: Unlike Impossible and Beyond, which sacrifice health for flavor (though not any more than a beef burger does), Huggins says that Meati is healthier than the real thing.

While climate considerations or animal welfare concerns might not convince everyone, the prospect of a red-meat substitute that wont increase your risk of heart disease is like having your steak and eating it, too.

Huggins isnt convinced by my uncanny-valley hypothesis, either (though he did say his company is moving away from the whole-muscle lingo, which made my calves relax just a little). In fact, he said, its real meat thats creepy.

Theres fat in there, theres gristle in there, theres cartilage in there, theres all kinds of weird stuff, Huggins said. The more I start analyzing animal-based meat, it starts to weird me out more and more. Ours has the good things that people like about meat, but not the bad things.

Sigh. Of course these guys dont care about the uncanny valley. They literally live and work inside it! Theyre, like, five minutes away from starring in a disconcertingly agrarian Uncanny Valley Farms commercial! What would they know?

In search of a more objective opinion, I called my dad, the aforementioned conservative guy from rural Washington state who was known to feed me entire boxes of Hamburger Helper when I was a kid.

Id put anything in my mouth, he told me.

Noted. But he did admit: I might get creeped out the more I knew about it.

Good point, Dad. Americans are weirdly divorced from where our meat comes from. We buy it from grocery stores wrapped up like a fruitcake. We avoid animal-rights protesters carrying slaughterhouse footage on iPads like the plague.

If meat that falls into the uncanny valley forces us to start making conscious decisions about what, exactly, were putting in our mouths well, I guess Ill just have to get a stronger stomach.

This story originally appeared in Grist

Original post:
Is fake meat getting too much like the real thing? - Getaka.co.in

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Home » Diets that Work » Is fake meat getting too much like the real thing? – Getaka.co.in