Beyond Impossible and OmniPork, cultured meat products work for environmentalists – but vegans and animal rights vegetarians can’t be converted

Environmental vegetarianism and veganism is gaining increasing traction around the world. According to Healthcareers.co, demand for meat-free food increased by 987 per cent in 2017, and in the 12 months leading to April 2019, the plant-based food sector grew by 11 per cent. The platform also reports that the breeding of livestock accounts for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – so with the effects of the climate change ever more evident on our natural world, it’s no wonder that people are looking for meat alternatives.

In 2009, Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University took an 18-month sabbatical during which he contemplated how to spend the rest of his career. He decided that the world’s largest environmental problem, and the problem where he could have the most impact, was the use of animals to produce food.

Brown recruited a small team of scientists to determine precisely why meat smells, handles, cooks and tastes like meat. He had a theory that the key to meat’s unique taste was its high abundance of heme, an iron-containing molecule in blood that carries oxygen and is found in all living organisms. The idea was if the team could generate large amounts of heme from plant sources, they could recreate the taste of animal meat. Brown and his team spent five years researching and developing the Impossible Burger, which launched in restaurants in 2016. Impossible Foods is also working on plant-based pork, chicken, fish and dairy products made without any animals.

Nick Halla, senior vice-president of Impossible Foods’ international division, puts the statistics into perspective. “If you think of a cow as a vessel to convert plants into proteins people like to eat, it is vastly inefficient as it only takes three per cent of plant-based proteins and nutrients and converts it into meat. The theory is if we go straight to the plant-based source we can be 30 times more efficient. We can use a lot less land, water and produce a lot less greenhouse emissions and elevate the pressures on biodiversity caused by the production of feed.”

In Hong Kong, the alternative movement sprang up with the launch of OmniPork by Green Monday, a foundation that advocates plant-based living and supports the global shift to a more sustainable food system.

“When we created OmniPork 2018 we were laser-focused on targeting the Asian community,” David Yeung, co-founder and CEO of Green Monday group said at a launch event in May. “When I sat down with my partners eight years ago, we decided to create a company that was non-profit but made sense as an investment. Our ultimate goal was to create a system that could truly move the needle [in reducing meat consumption],” he added.

While plant-based meat substitutes have encouraged the consumer market’s appetite for meat alternatives, the product isn’t without its challenges.