Fake Meat Fight in Fake News

By Joe Scott
Updated on May 9, 2022
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by Adobestock/Kristina Blokhin
Some plant based meat companies, such as Impossible Foods, claim their products are more sustainable than the meat industry's, but comparing the two can be challenging.

When is a burger not a burger? Impossible Foods is the synthetic meat company producing what could be the most beef-like non-beef ever. The company claims that its burgers are healthier and better for the planet in terms of carbon emissions, deforestation, and water conservation. Digging into these claims is difficult, as the company seems to have grown large enough to provoke the meat industry into a public relations battle.

The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a PR firm started with money from Philip Morris to combat smoking bans, has been attacking synthetic meat through the website www.CleanFoodFacts.com. CCF isn’t open about its clients or funding, so it’d be conjecture to say that meat industry interests fund this campaign. The height of the campaign came in early 2020, when Clean Food Facts paid more than $5 million to run a Super Bowl ad. Since the ad, the Wikipedia pages for two chemicals found in synthetic meats (among other processed foods) became the site of information fights. On the flip side of this, Impossible Foods has its own PR arm, which was able to respond to the Super Bowl ad with a parody ad in under a week. Impossible offers many stats on carbon emission reductions for the consumer but has come under scrutiny for not being open about its own carbon emissions. And to combat anti-GMO activists, it ran a blog through www.Medium.com (now shifted to its own website) to promote its GMO ingredients.

The claims by Impossible Foods are murky, perhaps by design. At the bottom of Impossible’s footprint calculator web page, there’s a disclaimer: “Footprint calculations assume 1:1 displacement of the production of meat. … Individual purchases of Impossible products may vary in impact.” This might come with another disclaimer: “Not all production of meat is the same.”

The bottom line: Impossible Burgers are processed foods using chemical additives and soy protein, like a savory, crumbly protein bar. The company likely uses GMO ingredients, and it definitely uses a genetically modified yeast to manufacture its burger’s key ingredient, heme (the same molecule that carries oxygen in blood, also found in low concentrations in plants). In terms of carbon emissions, the evidence is clear that reducing beef production would lead to a reduction in emissions. For consumers wary of ultra-processed foods and weary of disinformation battles fought for market share, maybe a good old-fashioned bean burger is the best choice.


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