Towering over a wooden podium in the Arkansas General Assembly earlier this month, Arkansas Representative David Hillman, a self-declared calf-roper, spoke of steak to pitch his latest bill.
“I want my ribeye steak to have been walking around on four feet at one time or another,” he said.
His proposal, making it illegal for meat substitute products to be labeled as meat, was swiftly adopted.
Photo: AFP
Across the US, tens of similar bills have been introduced — some unsuccessfully — as well as a half-dozen with opposing aims, as an out-of-sight battle heats up between friends and foes of plant-based meat.
One key issue at stake is whether the rise of alternative meat in the world’s largest beef and veal-producing nation could substantially reduce its planet-warming emissions.
Rearing animals is a major driver of climate change — accounting for nearly 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — while producing meat uses land and water less efficiently than growing crops, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said.
Increasingly, many environmentalists have been placing their hopes in greener alternatives for carnivores, including lab-grown meat.
Led by plant-based foods, which mimic the taste, texture and look of meat, the US alt-meat market is forecast to nearly double to US$2.5 billion by 2023, market research firm Euromonitor International said.
Lab-grown meat is not yet being sold.
The trend has put the country’s 500,000 meat industry workers on edge and prompted more than 20 meat-producing states, from Wyoming to Indiana and Nebraska, to look at adopting legislation similar to Hillman’s, said the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives.
In contrast, legislative bodies in states with enthusiastic backers of vegan diets — green groups, animal rights activists and health campaigners — have pushed bills encouraging plant-based food, first in California, followed by New York and Oregon, as well as the nation’s capital, Washington.
In California, which made history last year with a law guaranteeing “plant-based meals” for hospital patients, tutor and homemaker Genelle Palacio said that her support for a follow-up effort aimed at schools came from personal experience.
The bill for schools has a “reasonable chance” of making it past the committee examining it, said former California State Assembly minority leader Kristin Olsen, who was vice chairwoman of that committee.
Palacio, 40, recounted her wild goose chase for a vegan option in a southern California hospital in the summer of 2014, about two hours after she gave birth to her second son.
The mother of four was offered Oreo cookies, potato chips, a turkey sandwich, Pepsi and coffee, which she rebuffed.
“They sent me chicken broth next,” she told state lawmakers at a hearing in April last year.
“They said there’s no chicken in the soup,” she added, prompting laughter in the audience.
Her ordeal, which ended with a Chinese stir-fry her husband fetched from a nearby restaurant, ignited her quest to make plant-based options more widely accessible, including for her vegan children in their school cafeteria.
“My kids should be able to eat at their school just like their peers,” she said in a telephone interview.
New York City on Monday became the largest US school system to serve all-vegetarian food in public schools once a week as part of a global movement to cut down on meat-eating.
In the Palacio household, a “Beyond Burger” patty made from plants, including pea protein, has become a popular dinner dish for the children.
The product is sold in 13,000 grocery stores since California-based firm Beyond Meat, which is backed by Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates, launched it on the retail market in 2016. Two patties cost US$5.99 at one New York City supermarket.
In Nebraska, which has the nation’s second-highest heads of cattle after Texas, Nebraska Cattlemen executive vice president Pete McClymont described the worry among his 4,000 members at the rise in plant-based products like Beyond Burger, which looks just like ground beef.
On one day alone early this month, he received three e-mails from members asking him to soldier on in defense of real meat.
“This goes to their livelihood and what they do every day,” McClymont said. “You get tied to the land, you get tied to the animals and it’s just part of who you are.”
The state cattlemen’s association is among those that helped shape a state bill seeking to outlaw the marketing of meat alternatives as meat.
If alarm bells are ringing in cattle country, it is largely because farmers fear a repeat of what many consider a debacle over milk, said McClymont, a fourth-generation cattle farmer.
While cow milk remains staple in US homes, its sales have tumbled by nearly 19 percent since the market peaked four years ago, research firm Mintel Group Ltd said.
More than half of consumers, who now buy less dairy milk, consume more of the nondairy kind, including almond, coconut and soy, Mintel said in a report last year.
The popularity of those beverages has been partly attributed to their labeling as milk.
Similarly, if plant-based and lab-grown meats continue to be loosely identified as “meat,” they could make a dent in the US$110 billion US meat market, said Ernest Baskin, an assistant professor of food marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
“If you label something a meat, that means this is a substitute for a dinner or lunch opportunity where I would otherwise eat meat,” Baskin said.
Ultimately, an acquired taste for meat alternatives, rather than laws, will likely determine whether consumers call them meat, he added.
Arkansas politician Hillman disagreed.
“It’s led by the businesses,” he said.
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