Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people eat burgers: They would still sizzle and bleed, they'd taste great, but they wouldn't actually contain any meat. Today it seems that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival has been more than a little delayed. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have fallen over the last two years, and a recent bevy of headlines suggest that this latest wave of imitation meat was just that: a passing fad.
A new report suggests that if the alt protein industry has any hope of scaling, it will take robust funding from a number of different sources — including, crucially, the public sector. The report compares plant-based meat imitations to electric vehicles, a powerful climate solution that has benefited from government support, such as direct purchase subsidies.
But like the EV industry before it, alternative meat has a culture war problem to sort out before it can grow — with or without government investment.
Despite some obvious differences, there's a major parallel between electric cars and alternative meat: They're designed to be a one-to-one replacement for their predecessors. Buying an electric vehicle "doesn't require consumers to make extensive behavioral changes" like forgoing a car completely, said Emma Ignaszewski, one of the authors of the report. Similarly, consumers can simply choose to buy burgers that aren't made from animal protein rather than burgers that are. "You can enjoy your burger, but it can be produced with far lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat is," said Ignaszewski, who is a senior associate director at the Good Food Institute, or GFI, a think........