I’ve been trying to keep up with the news on plant-based meat alternatives.   This isn’t easy.  There’s a lot going on.

Plant-based meat politics

• PepsiCo (!) and Beyond Meat have established The PLANeT Partnership to bring new plant-based protein offerings to market.  Big Soda marries Big Plant-Based?
• Lawsuit challenges FDA approval of additive that makes Impossible Burger ‘bleed’:  The Center for Food Safety is challenging the FDA’s approval of a color additive used to make Impossible Foods’ plant-based burger appear to “bleed” like real meat. The advocacy group claims that the FDA’s decision was not based on “convincing evidence” as required by regulation.  Continue Reading

Plant-based science news

• Plant Protein Meal Patterns May Compromise Bone Health
• Food Technology and Plant-Based Diets  
• Plant-Based Meat and Dairy Substitutes as Appropriate Alternatives to Animal-Based Products?

Plant-based business news

• Coldplay bassist launches plant-based protein range: A new range of plant-based protein products has been launched by Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman. Read more
• Europe’s largest plant-based factory to open in UK:  Plant-based food manufacturer Plant & Bean is to open Europe’s largest plant-based food factory in Boston, Lincolnshire and has revealed strategic partners including Griffith Foods and soy processor Gushen alongside this news. Read more
• Unilever unveils mission to make plant-based eating ‘the new normal’ Unilever is targeting annual sales of €1bn ($1.19bn) from plant-based meat and dairy alternatives within five to seven years as part of a broader plan to make plant-based options more accessible, affordable and appetizing, effectively becoming “the new normal.”… Read more
• Nestlé is launching a plant-based tuna product in Switzerland and eventually worldwide, called Sensational Vuna. The food maker’s first vegan seafood offering, Vuna is made from pea protein and packaged in a glass jar. Reuters reports.
• How the poultry industry can win against meat alternatives: The poultry industry is searching for innovative ways to tempt consumers away from plant-based meat alternatives or tissue cultured raised meat.
• Pea Protein: Sowing the seeds for plant-based perfection:  The alternative protein market is continuing to grow exponentially across the globe, thanks to the rising popularity of flexitarian diets and trends like Veganuary… Read more
• McDonald’s launched McPlant today
• Beyond Meat launched two new versions of its Beyond Burgers

Comment

This is a big industry with many questions about quality, degree of processing, and effects on the environment still to be settled.  And these are just the plant-based products.  Next week, I’ll post a collection of articles on the cell-based meat alternatives.  These are not yet on the market (except in Singapore) but also look like big business.  Stay tuned.

I’ve been writing about the forced move of the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) from Washington DC to Kansas City for quite some time now, most recently here.

I relied heavily on ERS analyses for my work.  The stated purpose of the move was to get the economists closer to farmers, but it was obvious from the start that the real reason was to destroy the agency’s ability to produce reports with results inconvenient for the Trump Administration.

Now others are weighing in, not least the USDA Inspector General.   Its recent report on USDA’s Research Integrity and Capacity, which notes losses in staffing and slower output. the IG says:

When asked about the reason for the decreased number of economic research reports publications, an ERS official noted that every division within ERS had sustained staffing losses since the agency’s relocation from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri. The official acknowledged that the decrease in the publication of economic research reports between FY 2018 and FY 2020 was the result of the staffing reduction, but did not know what the future impact of the staffing reduction would be. Additionally, we were unable to determine what the future impact of the staffing losses would be.

On staffing levels and experience:

• From 2018 through 2020, the number of economists with 10 or more years of Federal service fell from 98 to 53. There was an increase in economists with less than 1 year of Federal service from none to 21 over that same time.  [This means a tremendous loss of experienced economists; the new ones are just starting out]
• From 2018 through 2020, the number of GS-14 [senior]economists at ERS declined from 42 to 21. Similarly, during the same time period, the number of GS-13 economists at ERS declined from 45 to 19. Conversely, the number of GS-9 [junior-level] economists showed an increase from four to seven during this timeframe.

Employees with a:

• post-doctoral degree decreased by more than 33 percent,
• doctoral degree decreased by more than 38 percent,
• master’s or professional degree decreased by more than 20 percent, and
• bachelor’s degree decreased by more than 30 percent.

The American Economic Association also weighed in on this: Necessary Improvement in the U.S. Statistical Infrastructure: A Report to Inform the Biden-Harris Transition

9. The Department of Agriculture must restore the viability of the Economic Research Service (ERS)
ERS is one of the 13 official statistical agencies of the United States. Located since its origination in 1961 in Washington, D.C near federal agricultural policy makers, a majority of its staff positions
were relocated to Kansas City in 2018. Following the relocation, roughly 75-percent of the professional staff resigned or retired. More than two years after the relocation was announced, ERS
has severe staff shortages, particularly in its ranks of senior analysts and management, and is facing substantial staff recruitment challenges. As a consequence, the agency’s statistical programs have
been abridged and federal and state governments are suffering from inadequate agricultural statistics generally, but especially statistics to inform rural development, food assistance and
security, and agriculturally related natural resource conservation policies. While we do not have a specific recommendation for how the Department of Agriculture ameliorates these problems, we
believe it needs to act swiftly and decisively to assess and resolve the challenges it faces as a result of ERS’ decimation.

At issue, of course, is what to do about this now.  Move it back to DC and recruit back all those experts?  It’s worth a try!

Cell-based meat substitutes are not yet on the market in the United States, but they are of great interest, and here’s why.

Singapore has approved them:  Eat Just, Inc., a company that applies cutting-edge science and technology to create healthier, more sustainable foods, today announced that, after a rigorous consultation and review process, its cultured chicken has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites.

A Singapore restaurant is serving cell-based chicken nuggets:  At the debut, the restaurant served cultured chicken from the brand GOOD Meat, affiliated with Eat Just, a sustainable food startup based in the U.S. The event followed the regulatory approval of the product by Singapore…“I’m speechless,” an 11-year-old patron of the restaurant said in a press release. “It will save a lot of animals’ lives and it will be a lot more sustainable … It feels good to have chicken without feeling guilty.”  [Comment: Do we really need cell-based chicken nuggets?]

There is a lot of money riding on these products: A company in Israel has gotten the price down to $7.50 per “chicken breast,” and just got nearly $27 million in funding.  [Prices are going to have to go down a lot further before anyone other than the rich will buy them]

Another Isreali company is producing 3-D printed steaks: Aleph Farms, based in Israel, unveiled the first 3-D-printed ribeye steak, using a culture of live animal tissue and “broadening the scope of alt-meat in what is expected to be a rich area of expansion for food companies.”  This used “a culture of live animal tissue, in what could be a leap forward for lab-grown meat once it receives regulatory approval.”  [Do we need 3-D printed food?]  

The meat may be fake, but the proIfits are real

Meat imitation technologies can deliver staggering profits and act as a lever to transition from a destructive animal diet—but we must recognize that those two potentialities are necessarily in conflict….When the chips are down, fiduciary obligations will always privilege profit over the moral aspirations of these patent-clutching geniuses. In its present composition, the new-meat dream will let us down. Its affinity for and resemblance to agribusiness will ultimately prolong the hegemony of animal slaughter, not challenge it.

I’ve been collecting items about meat.  This is a good week to post them, starting with this.

The study:  Effects of Total Red Meat Intake on Glycemic Control and Inflammatory Biomarkers: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Lauren E O’Connor, Jung Eun Kim, Caroline M Clark, Wenbin Zhu, and Wayne W Campbell. . Adv Nutr 2021;12:115–127.

Conclusion:  “Total red meat consumption, for up to 16 weeks, does not affect changes in biomarkers of glycemic control or inflammation for adults free of, but at risk for, cardiometabolic disease.”

Funder (my emphasis): “This study was funded by The Pork Checkoff and Purdue University’s Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship (LEO). The funder had no role in the design or conduct of the study or the analysis or interpretation of data.

Author disclosures: LEO received honoraria and travel to present related research as a graduate student from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. During the time this research was conducted, WWC received funding for research grants, travel, or honoraria for scientific presentations or consulting services from the following organizations: National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Pork Board, National Dairy Council, North Dakota Beef Commission, Foundation for Meat and Poultry Research and Education, Barilla Group, New York Beef Council, and North American Meat Institute. All the other authors report no conflicts of interest.

Comment:  Red meat is under attack for its strong association with health problems, cancer in particular.  In the 24 studies this group looked at, selected out of nearly 1200, they found no bad effects.  This is a typical result for an industry-funded study conducted by investigators with industry ties.  It would be more reassuring if found by independent investigators.

Under the heading of “You can’t make up this stuff,” Kraft Foods, now part of Kraft/Heinz, has a Valentine’s Day surprise for you: pink, candy-flavored Mac and Cheese. 

Roses, anyone?  They, at least, don’t have calories (or artificial colors and flavors).

[Thanks to Esther Trakinski for this delicious example of food marketing in action].

The report, associated documents, and announcement video are on this Lancet website 

The USDA publishes estimates of how much foodborne illness costs Americans.  It does this for 15 pathogens, one at a time:

The Cost Estimates of Foodborne Illnesses data product provides detailed data about the costs of major foodborne illnesses in the United States, updating and extending previous ERS research. This data set includes the following:

• Detailed identification of specific disease outcomes for foodborne infections caused by 15 major pathogens in the United States
• Associated outpatient and inpatient expenditures on medical care
• Associated lost wages
• Estimates of individuals’ willingness to pay to reduce mortality resulting from these foodborne illnesses acquired in the United States.

If you click on the links below, you get an Excel spreadsheet.

I clicked on Salmonella (non-typhoidal); the estimate for its costs in 2018 is basically $4 billion ($4, 142,179.161).

It would be really nice if USDA’s Economic Research Service would add these all up for us, but it’s short staffed (remember the forced move of the agency to Kansas City that I complained about so much last year.

But foodborne illness costs a lot, in health care costs, lost work and productivity, and all the other bad things that happen when people get sick.

It’s best to do everything possible to prevent foodborne illness before it occurs.

Week killers do their job but also cause problems: illness among people exposed to them (especially farm workers), induction of resistance, and killing weeds in places they are not supposed to be.

Illnesses: The most well known is the non-Hodgkins lymphoma associated with use of glyphosate (Roundup).

Weed resistance: This chart from the University of Minnesota shows the number of species resistant to various kinds of herbicides from 1955 to 2020.  GMO crops resistant to glyphosate were first approved in 1994.

Herbicide drift:  This has been a  particular problem with the weed killer dicamba used with GMO corn and soybeans.  It has a particular problem: it drifts, and does so inconveniently over organically produced crops that are not weed resistant, thereby killing them and making organic farmers extremely unhappy but without recourse, apparently.

Now an investigative report from In These Times demonstrates how Monsanto and BASF, the makers of dicamba, knew perfectly well that it drifted and would cause extensive damage, but sold it anyway.

Exec­u­tives from Mon­san­to and BASF, a Ger­man chem­i­cal com­pa­ny that worked with Mon­san­to to launch the sys­tem, knew their dicam­ba weed killers would cause large-scale dam­age to fields across the Unit­ed States but decid­ed to push them on unsus­pect­ing farm­ers any­way, in a bid to cor­ner the soy­bean and cot­ton markets.

The investigation found:

• [Mon­san­to’s] own research showed dicam­ba mixed with oth­er her­bi­cides was more like­ly to cause dam­age. The com­pa­ny also pre­vent­ed inde­pen­dent sci­en­tists from con­duct­ing their own tests and declined to pay for stud­ies that would poten­tial­ly give them more infor­ma­tion about dicamba’s real-world impact.

• Although adver­tised as help­ing out cus­tomers, the com­pa­nies’ inves­ti­ga­tions of drift inci­dents were designed to lim­it their lia­bil­i­ty, find oth­er rea­sons for the dam­age and nev­er end with pay­outs to farm­ers. For exam­ple, BASF told pes­ti­cide appli­ca­tors that some­times it is not safe to spray even if fol­low­ing the label to the let­ter, plac­ing lia­bil­i­ty square­ly on the applicators.

As for recourse:

A fed­er­al court banned the her­bi­cide ear­li­er this year, but the EPA rein­stat­ed dicam­ba for five more years in October.

Ear­li­er this year, a fed­er­al jury sided with a Mis­souri peach farmer who sued the com­pa­nies for dri­ving his orchard out of busi­ness. The jury award­ed Bill Bad­er $15 mil­lion for his loss­es and $250 mil­lion in puni­tive dam­ages designed to pun­ish Bay­er. Bay­er and BASF are appeal­ing the ver­dict. The puni­tive dam­ages were lat­er reduced to $60 mil­lion.

This report is well worth reading for its detailed review of documents.  These demonstrate that Monsanto and BASF could not have cared less about the damage their herbicide might cause.  Monsanto has been purchased by Bayer, which defends its purchase to the hilt.

Bayer’s stock prices declined dramatically after the Monsanto purchase.  It’s hard to feel sorry for either company.