Plant-based alternatives? We want meat!
A recipe for roasted Chinese pork belly
As of September, there were you, me, and 7,922,312,998 other people living on this planet (US Census Bureau figures). By 2050, that number will be close to 9 billion - 1,077,687,002 babies more.
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We will all need feeding.
But however we strive to encourage the consumption of plant-based food, and despite the intensifying pressure on water and land and increasing greenhouse-gas emissions that rearing it causes, the majority of people prefer to eat animal-derived protein.
Today’s $22 billion conventional dairy market is forecast to increase to $61.4 billion by 2029, just over 6 years from now. Worldwide, 333 million tons of meat were produced in 2020, a figure expected to double. As countries grow wealthier, meat consumption rises. Even as the global plant-base market is also projected to double by 2027 to $15.7 billion from its current worth, there’s considerable doubt that plant-based alternatives are seducing consumers in any significant numbers away from their conventional counterparts.
Meat consumption is growing faster than its replacement.
Another challenge is changing deeply ingrained shopping and eating habits. Among the many obstacles is the fact that apparently very few of us in the developed world can cook. So we shop accordingly.
HelloFresh is a Berlin-based company that delivers bags of precisely-weighed, chopped and separately packaged ingredients, ready to assemble into a meal according to instructions on a recipe card. In 2018, it commissioned a UK survey. It wanted to learn who cooks from scratch. Result: One quarter of Brits are able to put together only three tried-and-tested recipes. That’s right, three.
This does not constitute a promising market for the promotion of unfamiliar ‘replacement' ingredients, even if they are ready-to-cook.
HelloFresh is the largest global meal-kit provider, with 69 percent of the US market and operations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Europe, Scandinavia and Japan. This makes it a food business with serious influence, its audience 80 percent women between 30 and 50. Yet it doesn’t appear to support ‘alt’ foods. Its ‘Plant-based’ menus seem centred on produce, i.e. vegetables - excellent in themselves but not plant-based meat-alternatives. However, I couldn’t verify as their web site wouldn’t let me view the choices without giving my credit card details first. Perhaps you can clarify.
Our relationship with food is odd. Pasta Evangelists, a British hand-made fresh pasta company, has just commissioned a survey to discover our pasta-eating habits. These would likely appal an Italian: ketchup, mayo - and beds! - were involved (though Casanova might have approved of the latter).
Whether accomplished or minimal cooks, or idiosyncratic eaters, people are unlikely to shop their way out of our climate catastrophe unless affordable alternative ingredients deliver the taste and the texture and the nutrition of whatever they’re replacing.
One of the key components that plant replacements so far have not been able to provide is the umami of meat - the significant flavour contribution and unctuousness that comes from meat’s fat and fatty tissues. Manufacturers are struggling to replicate meat’s satisfying savoury taste plus its texture plus its nutritional value. They might succeed in one or two of the categories but so far they haven’t managed to reproduce all three effectively.
“We have a problem, “ confessed Nadav Berger, founder and managing director of food tech Investor PeakBridge VC. “Meat consumption is growing, and their replacements are not growing at the pace [required to] make a difference. We believe…those alternatives are not good enough.”
While we must reduce our meat consumption, I’m not convinced we should eliminate meat entirely. What is vital is to alter the way we raise our cattle, pigs, and chickens, and the way that we farm, away from intensive, monocultural ways of producing food. Free-ranging animals and fowl make their own contribution to the quality and welfare of the pasture they crop in.
After the war, a farming revolution launched the widespread use of ammonia fertilisers and herbicides, pesticides and fungicides which have assaulted nature, insects, birds, and our water, and diminished the nutrient value of our topsoil.
I’m not alone in this view. UK National Treasure, cook Delia Smith, who demystified cooking for so many of us, when recently awarded The Observer’s first Icon Award, said, “I’m going to say something controversial here. But I feel there’s something wrong with this increasingly fashionable idea that all meat is bad. It’d be too complicated to go into it. But, to just put it into one word, it’s all about soil…I have always loved vegetarian food and included lots of vegetarian recipes, but how I was brought up was you might have a Sunday roast, then you might have something made out of the leftovers. I did a book called Frugal Food in the 1980s when we were in a similar [political and economic] mess. Part of the message of that was, you know, if you’re going to eat meat, there is a whole animal there. And I tried to explain that cheaper cuts often had more flavour if you knew what to do with them. But again, a lot of that has gone out of the window.”
Rather than look to ‘cellular agriculture’, that other replacement solution, for our future meat, a return to small-scale, non-intensive farming would improve topsoil, accumulate biomass and prevent rainwater from sluicing valuable topsoil into streams and rivers.
And give people who care for the land a secure future. We’re told small farmers couldn’t possibly produce enough food to feed us. Yet according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, small-scale farmers raise roughly one third of our food. Would you not prefer to support local growers than depend upon one of the top 25 companies in the international food and drinks industry who, in the past year, generated $1.5 trillion in revenue with profits increasing to more than $155 billion, for stuff that comes out of machines?
Globally, the most popular foods are breakfast cereals, processed cakes and biscuits, crisps, sausage rolls, pies and pasties, tinned vegetables, cheese, microwave and ready meals. How many of these come straight (or via a dairy or a butcher) from a country field? Ask yourself who is pushing our move away from farmed foods and into technological food alternatives. Farmers? Or venture capitalists and tech oligarchs and the social media influencers they pay handsomely to excite us with their enthusiasm for contrived and processed products? Name me a celebrity chef you admire who is encouraging you to eat something from a package that only requires a pass through a microwave. If you don’t approve of eating four-legged or two-legged meat, do what most of the world does and has been doing for centuries: eat vegetables and pulses.
This is a simple and cheap recipe that shouldn’t overwhelm even the most nervous cook.
1.3kg/2lbs 8oz piece boned pork belly, skin on and scored
2 teaspoons Chinese five-spice powder
This gem is the trick to getting pork crackling to crackle: Set the pork belly over a rack over a roasting pan. Boil a kettle of water. Pour it all over the pork then pat it dry with paper towels. Get out your hairdryer and direct its hottest air up and down the skin until it dries and even begins to blister a little. Massage the pork all over with the five-spice powder and 1 teaspoon fine salt then leave, uncovered, in the fridge for at least 2 hours, and preferably overnight.
Turn your oven to its maximum setting. Lay the pork on the rack over a roasting tin, skin-side up. Roast for 20 minutes then turn the heat down to 180C/355F and roast 1½ hours more. Check that the skin isn’t blackening. If it is, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it. If by the end of cooking the skin isn’t crisp, turn up the heat to 220C/425F, and cook for 15-30 minutes until crisp or put it under a hot grill/broiler, watching it carefully. Leave to rest on a board for at least 10 minutes then serve with a dip of 2 inches of fresh ginger root grated into 4 tablespoons soy sauce, 1 tablespoon vinegar, and a finely chopped spring onion/scallion. A tablespoon of sweet chili sauce or Hoisin sauce can also be added - to your taste.
You can turn this into a feast if you steam some Chinese pancakes and set everything on the table with some shreds of the white of leeks and cucumber matchsticks to roll up with the meat into the pancake as you would Peking duck.
So much in this article with which I agree, particularly as regards farming methods. The only reason farming has become bad for the environment is the exponential growth of monocultural farming since WW2. A return to mixed farming would do the land and the planet a world of good. As for converting us all to vegetable-eaters ... just another form of monocultural production, I'm afraid! I do eat some vegan/vegetarian dishes, but from choice, as a pleasant occasional alternative to meat, not from some desire to 'save the planet' - a manifest waste of time, the planet can look after itself, it's humans we should be worrying about! And perhaps if the zealots were less righteous about the whole thing, more people would try plant-based meals.
Don't forget about seitan! It's been around for centuries and is the perfect meat replacement in filler terms although not great for coeliacs or actual protein. But I used to frequent a Chinese restaurant in Oxford that had two menus, one normal and one all mock meat from seitan and it was fabulous! I've tried all of the fake meats on the market and they're rubbish. The only one I like is called Incogmeato, and I only like them for the pun, not the flavour.