September 19, 2024

Khloe Ferniz 

10th Grade

Westminster High School 

Is plant-based meat healthier than real meat? What is the purpose of plant-based meat? To start, meat production is land-intensive, and using cattle and herds to produce it takes up significant water, land, and energy. These in turn put more greenhouse gasses and methane into the air, contributing to more climate change. This harms our Earth’s resources, whereas switching to a sustainable practice of plants would take up less energy, time, and water.

Plant-based meat is a vegan alternative to real meat. The consumers of plant meat enjoy meat but are looking want a food source that is sustainably produced and eco-friendly. 

How are the plants turned into meat? Although each company uses slightly different methods of producing them, when we dig deeper into their components, they have a few elements in common: vitamins, protein, fat, minerals, and water. Constructing plant-based meat requires three food groups: protein, plant oils, and a binding agent. Beans, edamame, and tofu are examples of protein. Plant oils such as corn oil, grapeseed oil, or cocoa butter, are used to represent the fat. There also needs to be a binding agent such as flour or water.

The first step is growing the main crops. Farmers will plant lentils and corn. After harvesting those crops, scientists will extract the proteins, fat, and fiber, as well as remove the shell of the beans and keep the edible parts. The product isn’t done just yet; scientists still need to add fat to the meat. Next, those edible parts are shredded in a machine called “extrudable fat technology”. It solidifies the following vegetable oil into a solid, sticky fat to mimic the fatty, white parts of meat. This fat is mixed with the mushy, shredded vegetable mix to replicate fatty, raw meat. Flavor is then added to the plants using soy hemoglobin and leghemoglobin. 

10,000 years ago, the Chinese used tofu as the first real plant meat because Buddhism prohibited the killing of animals. They fermented milk and used fermented soybean as the mixture.

How can we improve this in the future? It’s time-consuming to detect which vegetable species contain most of the protein, vitamins, minerals, and fats. We need to determine which crops are most suitable for efficient food production. A method of “throughput screening” retrieves samples to locate which plants contain the most protein. We also have issues with another method called, “

There are two companies, the “Impossible Burger” and “Beyond Burger”, which launched in 2016. Their plant-based meat recipes consist of peas, brown rice, and mung beans. Their products score 35% less fat than 80/20 ground beef and their production methods are less harmful to the Earth. 

The environmental benefits of switching to plant meat are: preserving water, mitigating land impact, and conserving greenhouse gases and energy. That being said, although plant-based meat production is more sustainable and safer for our Earth than regular meat production, it still requires expensive, high-tech processors.