Plant-based Meat

Plant-based Meat

Subject – Agriculture

Context – Over the last five years, the plant-based food movement in India has gained a central place amongst the most decisive trends in the food industry

Concept –

• Using techniques like fermentation, extrusion and prolamin fraction the companies have created plant-based products that present just like their animal-based counterparts, mimicking both feel and texture.
• Some companies extract proteins directly from the plant source — one such example is a pea protein used by Beyond Meat.
  • Other companies extract plant DNA and multiply it using fermentation to create molecules like “heme” which has now become an essential component in attempts to achieve that “meaty” flavour profile.
• Plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy and eggs are significantly better for the environment, public health and animal welfare, and this makes them increasingly attractive to both traditional corporations and to start-ups.

Benefits of Plant-based alternatives –

• Plant-based alternatives have been found to require 47-99 per cent less land, 72-99 per cent less water, and emit 30-90 per cent fewer greenhouse gasses when compared with animal-derived products.
• Whole foods and plant-based diets have been found to reduce the incidence of major chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
• Plant-based alternatives circumvent the need for animal farming entirely, and thus score high on animal welfare.
• Considering the growing population, our present food system is extremely inefficient as we feed grains to cows, goats, and chickens and then eat the animals. So, in essence, for every 9 calories of food fed to a chicken, we get 1 calorie back.
• Heavy antibiotics use in livestock and poultry feed is leading to an increase in antibiotic resistance, which is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.

Difference between Plant-based and cultured meat

• Plant-based meats are made of plant-derived ingredients but are designed to look and taste like real meat.
• Cultured meat, on the other hand, is a fairly new concept that refers to meat grown in a lab from a small sample of cells taken from an anima.
• The procedure requires the extraction of stem cells from a donor animal, which then proliferate to produce animal tissue structures.

Important developments in the area

• Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are the biggest companies in this sector.
• The Indian company Good Dot in Mumbai makes everything from burgers to kheema pav from plant-based meat.
• The world’s first cell-based meat company, Memphis Meats has found investment support from visionaries such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
• Globally, the Netherlands, the U.S., Israel, Japan, and Singapore are developing both plant-based and clean meat.