Illustration: Steph Lam
At the end of January, I found myself back in my doctor’s office with my recurrent claim of chronic tiredness. Despite spending the month on leave, my mind was shrouded in fog. A headache hummed constantly, threatening to rear into a migraine. By mid-afternoon, I felt ready for bed.
It was as I suspected: my ferritin levels were down. I have a history of low iron levels, as many menstruating people around the world do. If your count is low enough, you are eligible for an iron injection, but my doctor assured me I could address the deficiency by taking iron supplements and upping my intake of red meat.
I have been down this road many times. A decade ago a different doctor called me in to discuss similar blood test results. ‘Unfortunately we’re designed to be carnivores,’ he said. As far as I could remember, we had never discussed my diet or ethics in great detail, but from his rueful tone it was clear he thought I’d be opposed to the idea. More recently, a maître d’ in an upscale Canberra restaurant made a similar assumption. ‘Oh, you’re vego,’ he observed casually as he cleared away the remnants of the vegetable tart I had just demolished. When I asked what gave him this impression, he replied, ‘You just look like the sort.’
I find this more bewildering than flattering. I’m not vegetarian and never have been. I have definitely flirted with it, and periodically a heightened awareness of animal cruelty will lead me to cut back on meat as much as possible. But what can I say? I love lamb; it conjures up memories of childhood birthday dinners. (There is a story my mother likes to tell, of driving in the countryside when I was about three. ‘Oh look at the cute little lambs in the field!’ she cooed. ‘Lamb?’ I piped up from the backseat. ‘Yum yum!’) I also eat beef and chicken, which featured heavily in my childhood mealtimes, but avoid pork or game (which did not). I don’t eat internal organs or offal because their appearance nauseates me. Ditto with sea critters because of the smell and texture. There is no ethical basis for these choices; they are purely products of my personal tastes and unadventurous culinary upbringing.
My body’s ongoing battle with iron means I am unable to give up red meat completely. But I find this reality conflicts with my progressive social ideals.
Sporadic guilt trips aside, my body’s ongoing battle with iron means I am unable to give up red meat completely. But more and more, I find this reality conflicts with my progressive social ideals, particularly when it comes to demonstrating a commitment to combating climate change. It has been known for a long time that the methane emitted by ruminant livestock, especially cattle, traps twenty-five times more heat than carbon dioxide. With scientific predictions about the action required to limit global warming becoming increasingly drastic, our diets are emerging more clearly as a frontier in the climate fight. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)‘s 2019 Special Report on Climate Change and Land advised that between 2007 and 2016, agriculture, forestry and other land use activities accounted for 23 per cent of total net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. It advocated a global shift to a plant-based diet, as has the Lancet, which teamed up with the non-profit advocacy organisation EAT to devise guidelines for a Planetary Health Diet.
While veganism, and to a lesser extent vegetarianism, have been treated with disdain by the mainstream for a long time, abandoning meat on the grounds of environmental sustainability is becoming more popular. In April this year, the food lover’s website Epicurious announced it had stopped posting recipes requiring the use of beef, and in the same month the New York fine dining establishment Eleven Madison Park announced that it would be reopening as a completely vegan venture, which will make it the first three-Michelin starred restaurant in the world to do so. Chef Daniel Humm also advised that the restaurant will take a broader ethical turn, implementing a ‘circular ecosystem’ in which every dinner purchased will fund five meals to New Yorkers in need, provided by the company’s own food truck.
With scientific predictions about the action required to limit global warming becoming increasingly drastic, our diets are emerging more clearly as a frontier in the climate fight.
These moves have raised questions about the level of discomfort consumers are willing to endure in support of climate action. With meals at Eleven Madison Park continuing to be priced at over US$300 per head, it is hard to argue that any sacrifice or indeed ethical commitment is required from their diners in purchasing meat-free meals or in backing the restaurant’s charity venture. Food writer Korsha Wilson argued via Twitter that the move was just the ‘repackaging of fine dining to fit the more ‘conscious’ tastes of wealthy consumers after a year of social upheaval.’ She further commented:
What’s VERY interesting to me is the announcement’s use of virtue signal-y phrases like ‘community’ ‘higher purpose’ & ‘redefin(ing) luxury’. …What they’re offering to their guests, and what they’re tacking onto the act of fine dining, is an ethos of *giving back* but doing it through an extension of their own company, instead of partnering with an existing org that deals with food insecurity in NYC.
Epicurious was also cautious about being perceived as critical of the lifestyles of their privileged, though less elite, clientele. The company published a statement which sought to reassure subscribers that they were not ‘anti-beef’ but ‘pro-planet,’ nor did they have a ‘vendetta against cows—or the people who eat them.’ Rather, their ‘shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.’ The ABC’s 2020 series Fight for Planet A also called for consumer behaviour change in a gentle way to avoid alienating viewers. Rather than advocating a cold turkey switch to vegetarianism, the program recommended consumers switch from traditional meat to so-called ‘plant-based meat,’ made from crops such as soy and legumes, and artificially flavoured to taste like the real deal.
I have watched the rise of plant-based meat with interest over the last few years, ever since stumbling across a restaurant in my home city of Canberra entirely premised on serving faux meat dishes. I happened to be with vegetarian friends who were visiting from interstate, and was somewhat surprised when they decided to have dinner there. Wouldn’t the taste and texture of animal flesh (or near enough) be a turn-off, even if there was no actual killing involved? Apparently not.
Today, plant-based meat is well and truly taking off. In March this year, the independent think tank Food Frontier reported that the Australian plant-based meat industry increased by over 40 per cent during the 2019-20 financial year. Relying on data from Deloitte, the report also claimed the sector ‘grew from 10 to 19 brands over the financial year’ and ‘more than doubled in jobs’ while ‘nearly [doubling] its manufacturing revenue (from $35.2 million to nearly $69.9 million).’ Coles and Woolworths both sell plant-based ‘beef’ mince and a variety of ready-made meals with names such as ‘meat free chicken style tenders’, ‘plant-based roast pork’ and ‘plant-based roast duck’. Similar products are also gaining traction internationally, with UK supermarket chain Tesco and fast food chains including Burger King, McDonalds’s and Taco Bell all selling plant-based meat items alongside their more traditional menu items. In the US, startups are engaged in the burger equivalent of an arms race as they rush to develop the perfect plant-based patty that consumers can’t distinguish from its bovine counterpart.
By failing to unsettle our tastes, plant-based meat products divert our attention from the ways in which the imperative to consume is itself a factor contributing to climate change.
By encouraging people to reduce their meat consumption while also satisfying their taste for flesh, the plant-based meat industry could be a pathway to behaviour change, just as vaping has been said to assist smokers quit cigarettes (though the jury is still out on potential negative health effects of vaping). But by failing to unsettle our tastes, plant-based meat products prevent us from examining our complicity in the global food production system and divert our attention from the ways in which the imperative to consume is itself a factor contributing to climate change. Though they don’t come with the hefty price tag of Eleven Madison Park, I can’t help feeling that these products also involve a degree of virtue signalling. Switching to plant-based meat can be seen as a form of ‘slacktivism,’ allowing privileged consumers to feel virtuous while avoiding thinking deeply about climate change or food justice, or foregoing comforts to which they are accustomed. In fact, the environment is already bypassing consumers’ minds altogether. According to Food Frontier, the increase in consumption of plant-based meat in Australia is largely driven by health concerns (such as avoiding cardiovascular disease-causing animal fat), rather than by concerns about climate change. Where my health is concerned, traditional meat still wins the day. According to Nutrition Australia, women aged 19 to 50 require 18 milligrams of iron per day. In 100 grams of beef, there is 3.5 milligrams of iron. The Australian plant-based meat producer V2Foods advises that there is 2.8 milligram of iron in 100 grams of their plant-based mince. This may not sound like a significant difference, but it is compounded by the fact that the human body absorbs iron more readily and efficiently from animal sources.
The alignment of the plant-based meat market with capitalism’s logic of unfettered consumption is illustrated by the evolution in its branding. When they first hit the market, these products were called ‘fake meat’; now they are labelled as ‘plant-based,’ resulting in the somewhat contradictory sounding ‘plant-based sausage.’ In an interview with ABC RN Breakfast, a Food Frontier spokesman embarked on a laboured and circuitous explanation for this marketing about-face, saying it ‘opens it up to a broader number of consumers’ and ‘speaks to the content of the product not to who it is designed for and using terms like ‘sausage’ speaks to the utility of a product, so people know how it is intended to be used.’ In reality, this euphemistic manoeuvre is intended to prevent the public conflating meat avoidance with alternative lifestyles, luring shoppers into guilt-free buying while trading on their ethical concerns.
The entanglement of alternative meat products within start-up culture demonstrates these products are pathways to expand corporate profit and individual wealth creation, which will likely lead to an insidious consolidation of corporate power. In the US, for example, the plant-based burger producer Beyond Meat has a deal with McDonald’s which requires them to create plant-based products that are ‘craveable,’ a perfect fulfilment of the capitalist prerogative of market creation. Meanwhile, by their own admission, Burger King’s decision to start selling a soy burger has not resulted in meat eaters choosing it over beef burgers; rather, it has made the chain attractive to vegetarian patrons who had previously avoided it. Journalist Jenny Kleeman writes in her book Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, ‘[i]nstead of relinquishing our power to dominate animals by giving up meat, we are giving remote corporations more power to dominate us.’ Kleeman’s claim is perhaps most notable when it comes to the potential for intellectual property claims. Impossible Foods, one of the largest American producers of plant-based burgers, has already trademarked an artificial heme made from soy root fermented in yeast. While heme occurs naturally in meat, the artificial variety mimics the distinctive taste of cooked beef and allows the Impossible Burger to remain pink in the middle just like its animal-based predecessor, which the company regards as a market advantage.
Concerns about intellectual property and the privileging of corporate interests over food justice are also relevant when it comes to traditional meat’s other competitor: so-called ‘cellular meat’ that is grown in a laboratory using cells taken from animals. Since the world’s first laboratory-grown hamburger was unveiled in 2013, a range of cellular meat products including bluefin tuna flesh and chicken nuggets have been cultured, but none have so far proven commercially viable. Although Silicon Valley promises mass availability, such meats could equally become subject to artificial scarcity due to intellectual property claims. When profiled in the Atlantic, employees of Just Foods, a California-based company working to mass produce lab-grown chicken nuggets, refused to discuss their culture medium to protect trade secrets. This Silicon Valley approach to food production not only further distances consumers from the source of their food, but it also has the potential to reinforce consumption for its own sake—just because we potentially could eat synthetic panda meat does not mean we should.
The entanglement of alternative meat products within start-up culture demonstrates these products are pathways to expand corporate profit and individual wealth creation.
Simply swapping a beef burger for a plant-based one also fails to address another key component of climate change—food wastage. The IPCC report advised that 25–30 per cent of food produced globally is wasted, and that this accounted for 8–10 per cent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2016. According to food activist Eric Holt-Gimenez, the world produces 1.5 times the amount of food required to feed the world’s population. Food wastage and global hunger therefore need to be addressed together. In his book A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, Holt-Gimenez advocates a holistic approach to food activism that acknowledges capitalism as the root of the food system’s many problems, including global hunger, wastage and land degradation. Waste, he explains, is a by-product of overproduction, which is a hallmark of the capitalist drive to push prices down. Journalist Malcolm Knox illuminated exactly this problem in his 2016 exposè Supermarket Monsters, which surveyed the supply chain practices of Coles and Woolworths. A Tasmanian lettuce grower informed Knox that his contract with Woolworths caused major food wastage, as he had to be constantly ready to fill the largest order possible. Order volume varied constantly and, as is common practice with the major supermarkets, his contract prevented him from supplying to other operators, resulting in him destroying vast amounts of lettuce. Therefore, while reducing food waste means changing supply practices, moves by Coles and Woolworths to capitalise on the emerging plant-based meat market risk deterring consumer activism around their broader supply chain issues, thus maintaining wasteful practices.
Despite its comparatively mild admonition of viewers, I was inspired by Fight for Planet A to reassess my consumption of unsustainable animal products. Unable to relinquish red meat, I swapped cow’s milk for soy milk on my morning cereal, but have subsequently discovered this comes with its own sustainability dilemmas. As Holt-Gimenez discusses, many soy (and corn, and almond) farmers around the world have abandoned crop rotation in favour of monocropping to ensure consistent supply. Whereas crop rotation maintains soil quality, monocropping degrades land and results in the heavy use of both fertilisers and pesticides, which presents an opportunity for corporations with questionable ethical practices to further insert themselves into the global food system. Soy is also implicated in deforestation, particularly with an alarming level of logging in Argentinean native forests. Given that soy is a key ingredient in the burgers produced by the two main plant-based burger producers in the US, increase in global demand for these products and for soy milk would need to be matched by a commitment to address environmentally damaging farming practices. In an encouraging sign, there are discussions occurring among companies and governments internationally about addressing deforestation linked to soy production.
My digestive system has recently made it clear that it will no longer tolerate iron supplements in any form, which means I need red meat more than ever. The data about the impact of livestock farming on global warming horrifies me, but I can’t alter my body’s need for haemoglobin. Instead, I try to minimise food waste and be mindful of whose interests are privileged along the supply chain. While it is easy to judge or stereotype our carnivorous counterparts, we need to remember that addressing climate change requires a wholesale reckoning with every aspect of our consumer-driven lifestyle and its capitalist underpinnings. The distasteful truth is that plant-based meat products have emerged precisely because they are palatable to the capitalist elites—over-nourished consumers in developed countries, and the corporations and entrepreneurs that sell to them. The real answer lies, as Jenny Kleeman writes, in ‘harnessing our desires, rather than in mastering technology. Until we do, we will be even further removed from where our food comes from, and will feel even less responsible for it. We will be perpetuating the kind of thinking that caused the meat mess in the first place.’
