It’s busy again on Flora’s merry-go-round. Almost as busy as on the seventeenth century engraving. You know, that allegory of the tulip mania with Flora the flower goddess, a penny counting drunks and a lot of people who want to profit from the wind trade in tulips.
This time, however, there is no Flora on the wagon, but a fake butcher and all those other hip producers of meat substitutes are following in the footsteps. Because the sale of these types of products, as Rabobank research has shown, is drastically declining. The shelves are full of fake croquettes and Minced balls which are not allowed to be called meatballs in Brussels, but nobody buys them.
Just a pat on the chest moment. I already predicted this in an article (‘Why we feed ourselves on inferior supermarket food’) that I wrote in 2019 for HP/The Time. In Germany, Tönnies – one of the largest meat producers, which slaughtered 21 million pigs and cattle in 2017 and achieved a turnover of 6.9 billion euros – had banned all meat substitutes at the time. Tönnies pulled the plug on his vegetarian adventure. “I tried it twice,” CEO Clemens Tönnies said The world‘and twice I lost my lust’.
The consumer immediately tasted the difference
His company went back to slaughtering pigs. Clemens Tönnies said at the time: ‘There is no market for fake meat in Germany and it is also not tasty’. In this he was proved right by market research agency GfK, which reported in 2018 that turnover in meat substitutes in Germany fell sharply. Many consumers tried it once, but left it at that. That this would also happen in the Netherlands was only a matter of time.
Fake meat is a product that we have almost literally been pushed down our throats in recent years through the marketing and lobbying of companies such as Unilever and large supermarket chains. And the message was always crystal clear: meat is wrong, fake meat is good. Those who buy fake meat are environmentally conscious, climate-loving, animal-friendly and so on.
But the consumer did not go along with it: logical, because you don’t have to be a chef to taste the difference between a soy burger and a real burger. Consumers will not be sold tubers for lemons. And he also realizes that you are not going to save a rainforest with that soy burger.
Those are nice slogans for advertising boys and girls, but 90 percent of soy production worldwide goes to animal feed that then ends up on our plate in the form of a hamburger. Those few percent for meat replacement products really won’t make a difference.
And who still believes in the fairy tale that a mock steak is healthier because it is vegetarian? The World Health Organization (WHO) warned years ago that many vegetable substitutes, also known as ‘analoguesmentioned, fall under the ultra processed foods (UPFs). UPFs are highly processed foods that often have many added ingredients.
They are high in calories and often high in salt, saturated fat and sugars. According to the WHO, the proportion of dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals in these products is low compared to unprocessed (natural) products such as meat, dairy and some vegetable products.
Vegetarianism has lost its innocence
The WHO study shows that eating UPFs regularly can lead to negative effects on health. Think of overweight, obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Seen in this way, thanks to the UPFs, vegetarianism has lost its innocence. Vegetarian food once stood for honest and pure food, but now the vegetarian market has been colonized by producers of ultra processed foods And I always think about a vegetarian bitterbal: what’s in it?
Anyway. One after the other fake butcher has jumped on Flora’s crazy car in recent years and now that car is bouncing and crashing to a halt, a lot of bankruptcies will follow, because you can say very loudly that a fake burger is just as tasty as a real one civilian: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Then it won’t help if you put the fake meat next to the real product in the store, as Lidl is now doing as an experiment. The taste (in addition to the production costs) will affect the game changer become.
Cultured meat is the future
In that respect, I prefer to bet on cultured meat, which is ultimately a product made from animal cells. In three years’ time, Mosa Meat hopes to produce fifty kilograms of cultured meat per week in Maastricht. The price of this ecological burger must then drop to a level that is acceptable to the consumer. If the first cultured meat burger cost 200,000 euros in 2013, in a few years it will cost 9 euros.
Until then, I’d rather gnaw on a carrot than a vegetarian smoked sausage.
Oswin Schneeweisz is a journalist, columnist and podcast creator. He also wrote several books. www.oswinschneeweisz.nl
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2023-08-19 04:52:11
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