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The shares of a fake meat company beloved by global elites crashed a dramatic 19% on Wednesday, reeling from pitiful quarterly earnings reports and enduring resistance on the part of the public to replacing meat from western diets with bioengineered slop. Beyond Meat lost nearly a dollar per share on Wednesday, reporting a third-quarter net loss of $55 million. The company’s executives have consistently maintained that the western public is ready to replace real meat with its synthetic bioengineered plant-based products, which many nutritionists and medical experts question as potentially dangerous. Executives also admitted they expect a bevvy of marketing...

Plant-based meat substitutes taste and chew remarkably similar to real beef, and the 13 items listed on their nutrition labels—vitamins, fats and protein—make them seem essentially equivalent. But a Duke University research team's deeper examination of the nutritional content of plant-based meat alternatives, using a sophisticated tool of the science known as "metabolomics," shows they're as different as plants and animals. Meat-substitute manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make the plant-based product as meaty as possible, including adding leghemoglobin, an iron-carrying molecule from soy, and red beet, berries and carrot extracts to simulate bloodiness. The texture of near-meat is...

Impossible Foods has secured Child Nutrition Labels for its Impossible Burger products, which means they can now be part of school nutrition programs in the US. To obtain the CN Labels, USDA's Food and Nutrition Services had to evaluate the plant-based meat's product formulation, as well as the company's quality control procedures and manufacturing processes. Now that it has acquired CN Labels for its products, the company is launching K-12 pilot programs this month in partnership with several school districts. The Palo Alto Unified School District in California, the Aberdeen School District in Washington, the Deer Creek Public Schools in...

STORY AT-A-GLANCE Bill Gates owns a minimum of 242,000 acres of U.S. farmland in Washington, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, California and multiple other states Gates has a big vision for all that land, but unfortunately it doesn’t involve organic, biodynamic or regenerative farming methods, which are needed to heal ecosystems and produce truly sustainable, nourishing food for future generations Gates, along with Pat Brown, founder of imitation meat company Impossible Foods, supports GMOs, agricultural chemicals and technology as the future of farming Gates believes switching to synthetic beef is the solution to reducing methane emissions; Impossible Foods was co-funded by Google,...

Impossible Burgers' additive that makes plant-based food 'bleed' needs more FDA testing, claims suit that questions whether 'heme' is safe to eat

In unsurprising news, Taco Bell is adding plant-based meat to the menu, but the twist is that right now, it’s only available in the UK. The vegetarian substitute is made by Finnish company Gold & Green, and this news comes to us via The Beet. This plant-based taco meat is a blend of oats, pea protein, and fava bean protein, and can be swapped for any item on the Taco Bell menu that contains beef. Currently, there are 53 UK locations that serve the alternative protein, which, again, is 53 more than we have here in the States. Right now...

For cultured meat—which has gone by many names including lab-grown meat, clean meat, or slaughter-free meat—the question has not been “if” but “when.” The development of growing animal cells into edible meat has continued, only the timeline was uncertain. Back in 2016, an Israeli company called SuperMeat even took a guess, suggesting their lab-grown chicken would be available by July 2021. Turns out they weren’t far off, but they also weren’t the first ones to get there. This weekend, Eat Just—which until recently was best known for its plant-based Just Egg—will become the first company in the world to have...

It may look like Play-Doh. But it's actually a 3D-printed steak. It's made by the Israeli alternative-meat startup Redefine Meat, and the technology behind it is one of many contenders in today's sizzling-hot international race to capitalize on the growing faux-meat market. Redefine Meat isn't focusing on alternatives to ground beef or sausages, but whole-cut steaks — an area of the market that has yet to hit the mainstream. "There is an amazing industry of alternative meat that is focused on minced meat. And actually the meat industry is driven by the whole-muscle cuts," CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters. "Steaks, roast,...

More than four months after Missouri became the first U.S. state to regulate the term “meat” on product labels, Nebraska’s powerful farm groups are pushing for similar protection from veggie burgers, tofu dogs and other items that look and taste like real meat. Nebraska lawmakers will consider a bill this year defining meat as “any edible portion of any livestock or poultry, carcass, or part thereof” and excluding “lab-grown or insect or plant-based food products.” It would make it a crime to advertise or sell something “as meat that is not derived from poultry or livestock.” Similar measures aimed at...

I ate a field roast for dinner last night, because I am a vegetarian and those are the types of things we eat (carnivores often wonder). A field roast sort of tastes like meat and sort of looks like meat--but it's made of three vegetables and a grain, so not really. Still, no bunnies died in its making, except maybe when the underpaid field worker harvested all the carrots to make my roast. I thought the field roast was the ultimate in meat technology (note: fakin' bacon? Not good technology), until I came across this Wired News story about a...