Let's stop arguing about fake meat

It isn't the only solution to climate change because there is no single solution

Aug 23, 2021

Jenny talking about plant-based transition — Talking about plant-based transition for a podcast…stay tuned!

Recently I wrote a story for Vox’s Future Perfect about what a meat-free future might look like. In this story, I reported on the people working to transition meat and dairy production away from animal agriculture and towards a more plant-based food economy. It’s a future that’s highly uncertain, as I said on social media and in the story itself. But no matter the uncertainty, this is what food system change and climate adaptation looks like right now.

If I had to sum up the state of transition, I’d say everyone is pretty much just trying to figure it out. There is a debt-saddled hog farmer who is working with an animal rights activist to learn how to grow and sell mushrooms, a regenerative farmer who used to grow corn for animal feed but now grows chickpeas, a founder of a plant-based dairy company who has been trying for over a year to find a dairy farmer to grow oats for plant-based butters and cheese and a plant-based nugget company redesigning the nugget assembly line to be more automated, to name just a handful of examples.

I think their stories — all of them — are worth telling even though we don’t know what will come next. Because right now, the story of climate adaptation is one of struggle and failure and hope and possibility. And it’s very complicated. Not because we don’t have solutions. We have plenty of solutions, all that we need and then some, it turns out. It’s complicated because there’s a lot of disagreement and we spend a whole lot of time arguing about what a plant-based burger can or can’t do when the reality is that’s just one little, teeny tiny piece of a much bigger pie. Or just one chess piece when we need to be looking at the whole board, to borrow an analogy made by Dr. Jonathan Foley.

The role of the plant-based food industry in all this is contentious. While the industry is still very small as compared to meat and dairy, these companies are growing. And with that growth comes an opportunity to source from US farmers, which in turn can shift food production, even if it’s just a little, even if it’s just a few farmers at a time. These companies also have an opportunity to offer better wages and safer conditions for factory workers, though I’m unaware of any major plant-based company committing to better wages and benefits in a big way. If I’ve got that wrong, please let me know.

The industry, with its burgers and nuggets, are not enough on their own to fully address climate change. Obviously. I don’t know any food-climate researcher who says, oh hey, Impossible Foods just launched a new vegan sausage? Well then, my work here is done.

Because no serious food-climate researcher is proposing just one single change to the food system. No serious food-climate researcher is saying that plant-based burgers or lab grown meat are all that we need. No serious food-climate researcher is telling people not to worry about systemic problems like the lack of meat industry regulation and to focus only on their personal carbon footprint. What most researchers have to say about fake meat is just this: if pea burgers and soy nuggets can help people reduce their meat intake, that’s great. That’s part — PART — of the change we need.

No, it’s not everything. Of course it’s not. Food system transition is more than just the occasional tasty vegan burger. But if that tasty vegan burger helps? That’s great.

So I’d like to shift the focus of this newsletter now. There’s a lot going on in the area of plant-based transition, and I want to tell you about it. I hope that you’re interested and paying attention and ready to talk and disagree. If you are, leave me a comment or reach out on social media.

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