Despite a long love affair with red meat, more Americans than ever are turning toward plant-based imitators at restaurants and grocery stores. Not the hockey puck veggie burgers in the back of your freezer, mind you — these are plant-based patties engineered to mimic the taste of real meat.
But making vegetation seem like flesh has always been tough. To create something that satisfies carnivores, Silicon Valley decided you have to use the components of real meat-and that means heading to the laboratory. Whether consumers will readily devour burgers made out of cells cultivated in a bioreactor, though, is an open question.
As with most everything Americans buy, branding such cultured meat will be critical. That’s the takeaway from a study released last week by Faunalytics, an animal-advocacy group, and the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit alternative animal products industry group. “Lab-grown,” “in vitro” or “cultured meat” burgers are unlikely to fly out of the freezer case. But calling them “clean meat,” a term pushed by the nascent industry, may encourage new adopters.
There’s a growing movement to rein in the global industrial meat complex. Consumers in developing nations with more disposable income are increasingly turning to beef products, matching the perpetual U.S. appetite for a food whose mass production has had negative environmental and health consequences. But first, you have to sell it.