Meat sucks.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved it. I still do. But recently, the love affair between meat and me has grown infinitely more complex. We’ve taken a break and gotten back together multiple times. And about eight months ago, I met another type of meat with far less baggage; one month ago, I entered into a full-on relationship with this new meat.
Still with me?
Back in March, I went to the headquarters of Beyond Meat in El Segundo, California, and tried the Beyond Burger, a plant-based patty that’s meant to mimic the most granular qualities of animal-based burgers. It was tasty. The week I visited, they rolled out the burger in a Colorado Whole Foods and it sold out almost instantly. Ever since, I’ve wondered how feasible it would be to truly swap out meat from an animal for the new crop of plant-based meats. That curiosity ushered along the decision to try it, for 30 days, and see what happened.
I grew up in an Italian and Greek kitchen — hello, copious amounts of olive oil and red meat. I really like steak, burgers, brisket, chops, all of it. Before I started my month-long experiment, I assessed that I was eating meat four or five days a week. Out of 21 meals in the week, I was eating meat in roughly 14. I estimated that I was eating slightly below the national average for individual meat consumption, which the USDA says is 270.7 pounds per year.
But like many people, I’m increasingly troubled by the numbers behind meat and the environmental footprint caused by eating it.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization asserts that industrial meat agriculture is responsible for 14.5 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. On a more granular level are the countless studies detailing the resource strains meat causes. And the fact that we’ll have to feed about 9 billion people by 2050 looms large as meat consumption trends show few signs of slowing.
I’ve been encouraged and motivated by the progress of next-wave meat providers, including Beyond Meat and a company called Impossible Foods. For months, I read about the tediously engineered patties. The New York Times and Outside magazine wrote about the roster of PhDs who created them; Bon Appétit taste-tested them. The two companies want to tackle America’s meat-hungry traditions, and Beyond Meat’s CEO has said that they aim to help cut global meat consumption in half by 2050.
Of course, they’re not the only ones: Veggie patties and tofurky from companies like Sweet Earth Natural Foods and Gardein are also evolving. But Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are the only ones using science to replicate the finite qualities of meat. They’re going after the meat eaters, confident that they can swing them toward a flexitarian approach to eating. Why not give them a chance?
A month later, I can say this: Cutting the amount of meat entering my body and trying to change a lifelong habit loop was difficult. Just from a textural standpoint, I quickly found myself craving the firmness of a chicken breast. I learned that most restaurants I frequent are black holes of meaty temptation with few filling alternatives. Still, there were benefits to my month of animal-free meat: I spent less money, had more energy, and felt plain healthier.
Most striking, though, was in my first week when I realized that the next-wave plant-based meats were much harder to find than I anticipated. I’d read that the Beyond and Impossible were expanding, raking in more investments dollars, reaching more consumers. My New York food bubble just hadn’t been tapped the same as Colorado or California. So I spent more time than usual commuting to buy food and sifting through grocery store frozen sections.
This is troubling, especially now: If we want any shot at meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, I thought food retailers would be more forward-thinking in making it easier for Americans to cut meat out of our diets. My experiment showed we’re just not there yet.
My first stop: Impossible Burgers at Momofuku Nishi
I started the month with Impossible Foods.
My boyfriend and I were flanked by two other couples at the communal tables of Momofuku Nishi, the first restaurant in America to put the Impossible Burger on its menu.
“This is the best Vietnamese coffee I’ve ever had,” said the woman to my left. We were both waiting for our $13 Impossible Burgers ($14 with cheese — milk-based, oddly enough), and she chatted with her husband about their apartment renovations.
“This is the kind of table I want, this kind of oak. I’m tired of the porcelain,” she said.
On our other side were two gentlemen who’d just returned from Europe.
“That Philippe Ramette collection, and those Paris concept stores — amazing,” one of them said. He wore thick-rimmed black glasses and a fedora.
The two men had just started eating their noodles when our burgers landed. Our table looked like the child of Wendy’s and Shake Shack had accidentally joined the play date of spoiled rich kids from the Bon Appétit test kitchen.
Momofuku Nishi clearly wants it this way: Here’s a classic American meal, simply prepared, with the cutting edge of food as its centerpiece. Guests have some fun with a burger inside a place of culinary privilege.
I cut the burger in half, and the juices oozed (coconut oil). The patty is caramelized, yielding a nostalgic crunch. It’s topped with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. It tasted great, mostly due to the savory, mayonnaise-based Nishi sauce. If you separate the meat, it doesn’t taste like much. But neither does an In-N-Out patty.
“Yep, tastes like a burger,” the woman said. I agreed. Score two for Impossible Foods.
As we left the restaurant, I told the waiter I’d be eating the burger for many a lunch and dinner in the coming weeks.
“Oh, we’re only serving the Impossible Burger at lunch now,” he said.
This set the tone for a first week full of eyebrow raising.
Eating out was a major problem. Nishi was my only option for alt-meat outside of my apartment. The dining scene is full of temptation, stocked with establishments that don’t give a shit about encouraging less meat consumption, because of dollars and the long, storied tradition of food. I didn’t spend the month filling every meal with Nishi or Beyond Meat; I recognized when I’d usually eat meat and swapped it with an alternative. At any restaurant outside Nishi, this meant ordering vegetarian.
Finding high-quality meatless meat at the grocery store isn’t easy, even in Brooklyn
I went to Trader Joe’s the next day to stock up on protein-rich beans and veggies. But I found myself staring at the meat fridge, and wanting to put something from it in my basket. I wondered if putting a banner on the meat case that told of the dire implications of big meat would make it easier for me to resist? Probably. I passed, but not without a pang of hunger as I did so.
I spent way less money than I usually do at Trader Joe’s — beans are cheaper than beef — and since I was stocked up on garbanzo beans, nuts, and a vegetable medley, I went out to find the next-wave products from Beyond Meat.
Beyond Meat has frozen meals, alt-chicken, patties, and alt-meat crumbles in more than 11,000 grocery stores around the country. But as CEO Ethan Brown told me, they’re in the “penalty box” in the vast majority of those locations, meaning they are housed next to vegetarian and vegan brands in the freezer section. Worse, I noticed they’re often on the bottom shelf.
Only in the past six months has the company won the battle to place the Beyond Burger in the refrigerated meat case where the sausages and ground meats live, and only at selected Whole Foods locations. Unfortunately, the burger wasn’t stocked at the Whole Foods near my apartment. Instead, I purchased an assortment of vegetarian beef crumbles, chicken strips, lemongrass chicken, and sweet potato chili frozen meals. The week’s worth of shopping topped out at $47 — $10 more than my regular shopping bill.
I needed to find the flagship Beyond Burger, so the next day I rode the subway 45 minutes to the Whole Foods in Williamsburg, the closest location where I could buy it. It was the store’s first day rolling out the patties in the New York City area. I stood alone in the refrigerated meat aisle, taking photos of the $5.49 pack of two patties that sat alongside the ground pork and Vermont sausage links. Plant-based meat in the meat case — this is a big step for the US.
Mid-Instagram story post, a young woman in tie-dye Converse and a Varvatos peacoat appeared to my right. She glanced at the Beyond patties but put the $14.99/pound ground buffalo in her wagon. Still, the Williamsburg Whole Foods sold out of Beyond Burgers that week.
Cooking with meatless meat: delicious — and filling
Back at home, the Beyond Burger succeeded in mimicking the experience of cooking any other kind of patty, whether turkey or beef, beginning to end. The patty is thicker than that of Impossible Foods, and it’s much more pungent. When it hits the hot oil, it “bleeds” beet juice just like beef would blood. After five or so minutes on each side, a nice caramelized exterior forms and it’s ready.
I spruced it up with lettuce, razor-thin tomato slices, Sriracha, ketchup, and pickles, and after the first bite I knew it passed for a burger: juicy, just enough crunch. Plus, the all-important interior texture was pretty close to the interwoven tendons of animal meat as it could get. (I think Impossible Burger might have the edge on interior texture, though.)
Afterward, I was full and didn’t wake up hungry the next morning (the story of my past efforts trying to go vegetarian). My only qualm with it was the aftertaste and pungency. It left an oily, but meat-flavored nonetheless, taste coating my tongue, and the fatty scent quickly became the dominant one in my kitchen.
“Behold the future of food,” I said to my cat.
Well, sort of. After cooking the burger, I got a notification on my phone that Tyson, the country’s largest meat processor, had invested an undisclosed amount for a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat. The extent to which this demonstrates a shift in big meat’s position on the future of food is up for debate, but it shows Tyson is paying attention to a market segment that’s expected to be worth $5.2 billion by 2020.
The Beyond Meat team has said that the Tyson investment will not impact the company’s mission, but the partnership will give Beyond access to greater production and distribution resources in the future. They need this. With every new launch at Whole Foods, they’re selling out. And they need to find ways to get better placement in stores right next to traditional meat.
Impossible Foods also hit a big milestone during my month-long experiment: The company expanded its distribution network, and it’s now selling the Impossible Burger in one New York restaurant and three California spots.
But after a few weeks, I got really sick of burgers
Moments of panic sprang up in my second and third week. At home, when I craved the protein and fats meat provides, Beyond Meat could satiate that hunger. But its beef crumble and chicken strips aren’t as strong as the burger in mimicking animal meat. The beef crumble can be difficult to mince down, and the chicken borders on a tofu texture when mixed in with a pasta or sautéed with veggies. The sheer diversity of meat was something I longed for. A post-meat world can’t subsist on burgers alone.
But I took solace in the fact that I was leading a much healthier month of eating. The Impossible and Beyond amalgamations of heme, pea protein, wheat protein, coconut oil, and other organic resources — no antibiotics or preservatives — had me sleeping better. My skin was less oily. I didn’t experience one food coma all month. This is because the burgers each carry around 20 grams of protein, 450 milligrams of sodium, and 15 to 20 grams of fat. By comparison, a Shake Shack burger has almost double the fat and sodium. The two burgers do diverge in the respect that Beyond has less than 50 percent of the saturated fat in the Impossible Burger as well as more iron and fiber.
Even with the health benefits, by week four I wanted nothing to do with a burger no matter the source. My vegetable side dishes grew larger, the salads more prevalent, and I’d dipped into the repository of more than 100 recipes on the Beyond Meat website with many a taco and stir fry.
It got harder to say no to the grilled chicken, glazed pork, or brisket ramen at restaurants. And brunch? Forget about it. I just didn’t go. I was trying to curb dairy, and I wasn’t confident in my ability to resist an eggs Benedict. I countered by trying to really spruce up my recipes at home — like beef with serrano chili sauce or beef-and-onion pierogis, which helped despite driving up my grocery bill.
This also drove down my socialization with friends and co-workers. Anytime I was invited to an Italian restaurant or even something simpler, like Chipotle, I felt conflicted. My friends love sharing food with one another, and I knew I’d have trouble resisting if someone offered me a taste of their spaghetti and meatballs or barbacoa bowl. So refraining from entering a space where I knew I’d eat some meat, at least until I felt more confident in my new habit, seemed best.
We’re in a mixed moment for meat
With the extra time, I did some digging into meat. Studying meat-strewn menus and fridges, looking at research on our country’s (lack of) motivation to ditch meat, reading Meathooked and watching Cowspiracy and Meat the Truth can all terrify anyone about the implications of the meatscape. I already knew that we don’t need meat to survive and be healthy. I saw that while many recognize the imminent dangers of meat, the majority of people lack motivation to make a real change in their lives.
And perhaps most disappointing is that the potential for cross-sectional efforts among government, food retailers, and grassroots organizations largely dwindle down to cosmetic change thanks to the meat lobby. (Just ask the Obamas.) Oh, and yes, I spent about an hour staring at George Steinmetz’s hypnotic photos of the industry to try to grasp the magnitude of the American food industry.
I took a lap through the meat fridges at Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and several other chains. As I studied the labels of various steaks and ground beef, I startled a woman standing next to me in Trader Joe’s when I unintentionally said too loudly, “That’s fucked up.”
I told her about the abysmal labeling standards for beef. From looking at the tiny font, I couldn’t say where the animal was from or know for sure how it was raised. This is because, late last year, Congress repealed country-of-origin labeling requirements for beef and pork. Now meatpackers need not identify where the animal came from.
The woman was uninterested in learning about Congress’s past year of activities, or inactivity, fueled by a gargantuan force called the North American Meat Institute, the lobbying group pushing for big meat. And maybe the meat aisle is not the best place to bring up the implications of meat. While education and information is key, time is better spent urging retailers to source more plant-based options and feature them in the same section as meat. Organizations like the Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return are already pushing the world’s largest food retailers to double down on the plant-based movement.
Still, if someone approached me with my hands on the ground beef or chicken breasts in Target and probed me on my choice, I’d put it down. Even before this month-long task, I would always cave when pressured on my meat choices and their implications. Such a conversation would start with mention of animal cruelty, antibiotics, carbon emissions, and the overconsumption of fat and protein made possible by putting meat front and center on the plate. I’d agree — there’s no refuting the argument — and then I’d put it down. Why isn’t that a conversation with myself on every trip to meat section? Habit, convenience, laziness, an unwillingness to change ... the list goes on.
How long until meatless meat can really compete with animal-based meat?
I sat in Madison Square Park a day after my encounter with the woman at Trader Joe’s thinking perhaps I did this experiment too early. Should I have waited until the clean meat wave (meat grown in labs using tissue samples from animals) arrives, a day when perhaps Beyond sells a plant-based steak and Impossible puts alt-chicken and short rib at restaurant chains in every major city?
But that kind of stubbornness only perpetuates the problem of meat. I waited months after the launch of the tech-made meat alternatives to dive in and try them. I figured companies would come out with more products over time and I’d take it seriously then. The time to take them seriously is now, though. They’ve broken free of the penalty box and should be in every person’s shopping cart. Because, in turn, buying and eating them shows that you take the issues posed by meat seriously for the first time, and you believe in the power of alternatives.
I figure I’ll do this again with reinvigorated interest when “clean meat” emerges, prepared to clap back against anyone who says the approach is tampering with nature in negative ways. I’ll also be keeping an eye out for the upcoming documentary Meat the Future, which chronicles the progress of Memphis Meats, the American company producing the first iteration of “clean meat,” and the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit promoting plant-based meat and clean meat in Washington, DC.
In the nearer future, we can expect Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods both in the meat case at grocery chains and at more restaurants across the country. A spokesperson from Impossible Foods told me, “The goal is to price the burger at or below the lowest-cost commercial ground beef, feature it not only at restaurants but grocery outlets worldwide.”
I went to Momofuku Nishi on my last day of the month. It was Election Day, and the line cooks stuck American flags in the burgers. I sat alone with much less interesting conversations around me than my first visit.
The waiter whom I’d seen and chatted with multiple times asked me how the month went. “Not too bad. Not too bad,” I said.
He asked, “Well, are you, like, a full vegan now?”
Maybe, I thought. The alternatives taste great — and they’re meant to be a starting point. There’s no cringing through the chew but rather an optimistically raised eyebrow and a nod of sufficiency. These products are, and will continue to be, engineered for us to love them, to enter our habit loops and be a savior for our climate. And I was happy to be complicit in the expanding wave of vegan and flexitarian pragmatism.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m certainly done with animal meat.”
“Me too,” he said.
Yes, the month sans meat convinced me to cut animal meat from my diet permanently. There will, of course, be holiday gatherings where I will relegate bites of meat as meager side dishes, and I’m okay with that. Above all else, I’m now more amenable to playing with my diet without animal-based meat. I’m excited to do it, in fact. I’m happy the past month turned me into an iteration of a modern flexitarian: I’ve shut off traditional meat’s spotlight, I’m cheering for the next wave, and I’m eager to ask all those unwilling to budge from eating industrially made meats two or three times a week, “Why that meat?” Because that meat sucks.
Nick Pachelli is a writer and producer chasing stories in food culture and sports. A 2016 Knight-Vice Innovation fellow, Nick lives in New York City. You can find him either on Twitter or running around a tennis court somewhere.
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