IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 67

making it

anecdotes about diners-and even professional food critics-believing they were eating real meat.
While researching this article I sampled Plenti, Match, and
Beyond Meat. I found the three to be quite different from one
another, and yet all were impressively meatlike [see "A Consumer
Guide to Fake Meat" at http://spectrum.ieee.org/fakemeat0613].
They're a big improvement over more traditional meat stand-ins,
such as those available in the United States and Canada under the
brand names Yves, Tofurky, and Boca. It's possible I would have
been fooled had they been sprung on me unawares (especially
if accompanied by a couple of glasses of wine).
Every now and then technology and social trends align to offer
something sublime as well as important-like making possible a
kinder and more enlightened paradigm for the food-processing
industry. The food conglomerates have taken a beating lately
as news articles have described their long-standing propensity
to churn out nutritionally bankrupt foodstuffs loaded with the
unholy trinity of salt, sugar, and fat. And yet, it's just possible
that the technology these companies wield could be put to uses
that are not only profitable but also beneficial to people's health.
Historically, healthy food has been a niche that the big food
companies were content to leave to small subsidiaries or scrappy
independents. But times are changing. Hundreds of millions
of aging baby boomers are reevaluating their diets after being
treated for cancer, heart disease, or other illnesses. And meat is a
big business-$160 billion in the United States in 2010, according
to the American Meat Institute. If emerging techniques allowed
a company to make meat substitutes that were good enough to
capture even a few percent of that market, it would still mean
the kind of business that a conglomerate could love.
"Say you swapped 5 percent of meat for vegetable protein,"
says Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of
Manitoba, in Canada. "Nobody would even notice. But it would
make a difference on this planet."

e at a h a m b u rg er a n d you ' v e j u s t u s ed a b ou t 2500 l I t e r s o f wat er,
or enough for 16 baths in an average tub. And for each kilogram
of beef consumed, as many as 35 kilograms of carbon-dioxideequivalent greenhouse gases are released-about the same as what
comes from a reasonably efficient car driving almost 275 kilometers.
Think of livestock as a means of converting vegetable protein
into animal protein. To make livestock grow fast, producers feed
them a diet rich in legumes and grain, usually soy, corn, and wheat-
all of which contain protein that people could otherwise be eating. For cows, the conversion process is particularly inefficient. In
Europe, where beef cows are fed a diet high in soy, it takes about
8 kilograms of soy protein to produce 1 kilogram of beef protein.
So it is eight times as efficient to get your protein from soy than

from beef. And that's before you account for the enormous water
and energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions, deforestation, and
the rest that come from raising so many animals.
Today, meat eating varies among developed nations, ranging
from about 45 kg per person per year in Japan (not including
seafood, which is particularly popular there) to about 125 kg per
person per year in the United States. Much of that meat is produced in "factory farms," in which tens of thousands of animals
are raised. The confined feedlots you find there are sometimes
awash in animal waste that often runs off into streams and rivers,
although it is not supposed to.
Factory farms have driven meat prices down to historically
low levels. In the United States, families spend an average of
9.8 percent of their disposable income
on food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "People spend
more on entertainment," Smil says.
"No country in human history has paid
so little for food as a percentage of dis109 339
posable income," he adds.
number of chickens
Though it has plateaued in develkilled every minute
oped countries, per capita consumption of meat is on the rise globally and is
expected to keep increasing for a couple
13 000 lIters
of decades more. Worldwide, meat proamount of water
it takes to produce
duction was 110 million metric tons in
1 kilogram of beef
1975. By the end of 2012, the Food and
Agriculture Organization estimates, it
had risen to 302 million. Meat consumption will keep increasing for the foreseeable future, driven by growth in both
population and disposable incomes in
302 mIllIon
countries like China. Thus meat prometrIc tons
amount of meat
duction could reach 465 million metric
consumed in 2012
tons in 2050, the FAO estimates, when
world population is predicted to exceed
9 billion (it is a little over 7 billion today).
Smil marshals a barrage of statistics to support his contention
that the world could indeed produce 465 million metric tons of
meat per year. But the strain on the world's freshwater supply,
environment, climate, and health-care systems would be noticeable, to put it mildly.
A satisfying meat alternative could do enormous good. "We need
sophisticated technology to achieve this," says M.A.J.S. "Tiny"
van Boekel, dean of education at Wageningen UR. "If you really
want to achieve sustainability, you have to work on technology.
People don't expect that. To some, sustainability is a cow in a
meadow and chickens running around. But that's not how we
are going to feed 9 billion people."
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jun 2013

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013