I listened to a radio show today about faux meat, meat created either from plant matter or from animal cells multiplied in a test tube, then in both cases processed to have the texture, appearance, and taste of meat. “Meat” includes chicken and fish. Current technology can only create simulations of ground meat, and not cheaply.
Faux meat has the potential of being a very big business, but this show was mostly about the problems of real meat, all of which may be solved by faux meat, someday. These include the health problems associated with overeating meat; cruel treatment of the animals raised for food on non-organic farms; dangerous working conditions for employees of abattoirs and meat-processing facilities; negative environmental effects associated with large livestock-raising operations; and the rise in demand for meat worldwide, which currently cannot be met.
Most of these problems could be solved today if we were all vegans or vegetarians, but humans want to eat meat. In the US, only 3.3% of adults fall into either of the above categories, and we are fairly typical. By far the largest portion of vegetarians in a country is in India, 40%.*
The US started a huge, uncontrolled experiment in the 1950s, when processed foods started to comprise a significant portion of our calories, and today we have the public unhealth one might expect. In 2016, according to a BMJ Open study quoted in the Atlantic, 57.9% of our calorie intake was from ultra-processed foods, which sound delicious:
Formulations of several ingredients which…include food substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular, flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and other additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of unprocessed or minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations or to disguise undesirable qualities of the final product.
But isn’t creating test-tube meat the ultimate ultra-process? An even grander experiment awaits.
Meanwhile, while researching this topic I found a National Geographic article which credited the rise of agriculture with creating orthodontics. Humans with a hunter-gatherer diet have long jawbones, but the preponderance who now prefer starches and cooked foods have developed shorter jaws that are too small to fit all our teeth without medical intervention. In this we differ from all other mammals, who have straight teeth.
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* From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country.
Culminating Triad 
Well, the Impossible Burger is kind of like a veggie burger with some other plant-based heme extract. So it’s not really processed in the sense that most processed food is processed. It’s not supposed to have any food additives at all. In that sense it’s less processed than, say, lasagna, which hardly anybody would think of as unhealthy processed food. Maybe they would think of it as unhealthy because of all the cheese, but not because it’s filled with chemicals.
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I heard that program too, and had the same thought– that this is taking “processed” food to new heights. Even though I eat faux meat in the form of veggie sausages, the products the radio guests were describing seemed extreme. Interesting about the teeth; that makes sense.
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