The Downsides of Faux Meat

It bothers me when vegans or vegetarians state that their dietary choices stem from an environmental concern, and then eat "faux meat" products that can be worse for the environment than real meat. Don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-vegan by any means. Vegan diets can be great, but faux meat products are not by any means sustainable.

Michael Pollan writes in Food Rules that if a food item has a barcode, it's probably not a wise choice. Faux meat products all have barcodes and fancy labels, which means they are a product of a company that is large enough to create fancy labels with barcodes. And most of those companies that create products with fancy labels and barcodes are owned by bigger companies or corporations. Organic and natural foods are a booming part of agribusiness. And foods that are a part of agribusiness usually are trucked in from far away locations, making the connection between the farmers and consumers very distant indeed. Barcoded products are food without a face.

The problem with food without a face is that it's extremely difficult to trace the ingredients to their source -- which often is a benefit to agribusinesses who customers might be turned off if they learned about the origins of their food. And faux meat products have a lot of ingredients that are hard for the average consumer to trace, such as vital wheat gluten, canola oil, and soy protein concentrate. Could anyone trace these ingredients to the particular farms where they originated? Probably not, since many of these ingredients come from commodity products that are processed in aggregated form after having come from grain elevators around the country.

But let's imagine what some probably sources might be. Soy, corn, and canola are among the top commodity crops that are genetically modified. Even if they aren't genetically modified, they are grown in monocultures, which are inherently unsustainable and detrimental to the environment (more on that in another post). Most of the soy, corn, canola, and wheat grown in the US is grown conventionally, which entails the use of commercial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides (the manufacture, marketing, sales, and distribution of which involve massive amounts of fossil fuels). Growing the monocultures themselves -- even if they are organic -- is incredibly fuel intensive and requires lots of irrigation, up to 70% of which evaporates, and the rest of which may become polluted due to the chemicals in the soil. After these monocultures of corn, soy, wheat, and canola are grown, they needed to be harvested, transported, and processed -- which is again very energy intensive.

It's hard to calculate just how much fossil fuel and water goes into growing, processing, and distributing faux meat products, but I can assure you it's a lot more than growing, processing, and distributing meat from humanely, locally raised animals -- especially if those animals are ruminants who eat vegetation that grows where they live.

When vegans claim that a soy burger is always a more ecologically-sound choice than a beef burger, it's just wrong. If the beef came from local grass-fed cattle, then the soy burger (based on monocultures and heavy processing and large-scale distribution) is by far more resource intensive.