Oy Vey It's A Food Newsletter - Vol 2, Issue 2
Today's top story: is Fake Meat Man, the world's worst superhero?
Oh hey!
I am one happy little vegan food systems geek because the Plant Futures Symposium is this weekend! Check out the event program here.
If you’re also attending (virtually or IRL) drop a comment below and let me know! I’d love to connect and share insights from the event.
What I’ve Read
8-bit Branding: How the MetaMarket is Changing Retail - For the past couple of years I have been seeing more digital food markets with varying levels of participation within the platform. MetaMarket allows you to design avatars and then virtually browse around an online market to check out various vendors and products. There are varying levels of participation but you have the option to leave your camera on and chat (or haggle) directly with the vendors, much like an IRL marketplace. I am definitely intrigued and see a lot of potential, especially for smaller and newer brands. MetaMarket also has a Shopify page where you can check out participating brands and I was excited to see Pricklee, one of my favorite CPG brands I met in Boston, there!
You can watch a video of the MetaMarket experience here.Hunger Matters - An incredible essay from Hannah Cai, MS, RD - a brilliant writer and fellow Tufts Alum. This essay is a narrative complement to The Clinician’s Response to Food Insecurity: A Practical Guide that Hannah recently published. RD friends and fellow food and nutrition professionals, I highly recommend you give this a read!
To Bees or Not To Bees: Natural & Synthetic Honey - Precision fermentation, not just for meat and dairy products! MeliBio, a food tech startup, recently secured new funding to scale their production of bee-free honey. Something I felt was missing from this article discussing honey varieties is the fact that a lot of honey on the market is not pure bee honey. As I mentioned in my essay A Sticky Debate: Is Bee Honey Vegan?, honey is the third-most faked food on the global market as it is often cut with corn syrup or other non-honey liquid sweetener.
Study Finds Climate Impact Labels on Sample Fast Food Menu Had Strong Effect on Food Selection - The study was an online randomized clinical trial that involved showing 5,049 participants a menu. There were 3 versions of the menu, the control group’s menu had no climate labeling. The sustainable choice was considered to be people who selected a food item from the menu that did not contain red meat, the “low-climate impact” options were vegetarian (Impossible foods got a shoutout), fish, or chicken. Participants with climate labeling were provided with definitions on the menu; they were told an item was or wasn’t environmentally sustainable based only upon greenhouse gas emissions and if they have a low/high contribution to climate change.
P.S. The full study was published open access aka no paywall, you can read it in full here!The Power of Students’ Voices in the Healthy School Meals for All Campaign - An interview with a high school student, Kristie To, who is advocating for free school meals programs. The interview touches on Kristie’s perspective on accessing California’s free school meals and the impact she’s noticed for herself and her peers. Powerful!
Restaurants dropping meat dishes as costs rise and Veganuary grows more popular - According to data from a market research company with a menu tracker, which surveys 150 restaurant chains, pubs, and bar operators, chain restaurants serving dishes made from animal meat have dropped 4 percentage points since Spring 2022. The reasons cited include trends in people reducing their animal meat consumption, trying Veganuary, and other personal initiatives as well as the costs. Keep in mind this is all UK-specific and only representative of chain operations.
Have we reached ‘peak meat’? Why one country is trying to limit its number of livestock - The country called out in the title is the Netherlands, which recently announced a massive plan to (potentially forcibly) buy out farms and major industrial polluters near protected nature reserves. This plan is to address the negative environmental impact of farming animals for meat and milk. I am glad that a solid chunk of the article calls out the U.S. for our scale of industrialized animal agriculture and use of resources. I’m definitely interested in seeing in practice what Dr. Hayek mentioned about combining “‘soft’ policies such as vegan-by-default menus” with other regulatory action combining the micro and macro scale. There are vegan advocacy programs that I am aware of to transition farmers away from farming animals and farming plants instead, but this is the first I have heard about a government intervention.
For Some Food Professionals, COIVD Has Cast a Long Shadow on Their Senses - First off, keep wearing your masks, testing before/after socializing or going to events, and stop making disabled and immunocompromised people exemptions from our world. I appreciate that this article gave a few people a chance to share about their experiences with long COVID and parosmia as well as talking about the structural issues like the lack of clarity in changes to the ADA and the fact that many food service workers don’t have health insurance.
Dollar stores are growing as food retailers in the US - Researchers from Tufts (including my former Stats professor whose final exam I may or may not have cried during) have published a paper discussing the role dollar stores play in the U.S. food system. According to the article, this is the first research to use nationally representative data to examine the role of dollar stores at a household level. It confirmed qualitative data (anecdotes and lived experience) that race and income impact people’s food choice and the nutrient quality of their dietary intake.
P.S. The full article was behind a paywall, so I was not able to read it in full.
P.P.S. If you’re interested in related research, here is a paper I contributed to that examines the nutritional quality of food retail landscapes in rural and semi-rural counties in Indiana.Lab-grown meat moves closer to American dinner plates - This article predicts that U.S. restaurants may begin serving lab-grown meat in restaurants in 2023 and grocery stores by 2028. This milestone hinges mainly upon regulatory approval, supply chain, scale of production, and consumer perceptions.
Q&Kay
Q: You posted something on your stories like "Is veganism for everyone" and I meant to go back and look at it but it disappeared before I could. Maybe you could talk about your thoughts on that? Unless that's already part of the newsletter, oops!
Kay: Thanks for the reminder to share this podcast (hoping this is what you were referring to)! I have been following Dr. Aviaja Lyberth-Hauptmann on Instagram for a while now for interesting microbiology content as well as information on Inuit foodways and Indigenous food sovereignty.
This was the first episode of Getting Curious that I’ve listened to, the title definitely caught my attention. I think Jonathan did a decent job shaping the conversation and setting up Dr. Lyberth-Hauptmann to dive deeper into certain questions or topics. I also appreciated that in both the episode note and intro, Jonathan offered a content warning about the discussion of hunting and fishing.
A fairly common question for vegans, occasionally asked in bad faith, is something along the lines of, “what do you think about Indigenous people who hunt and fish?”
Indigenous people around the world have been and continue to be stewards of the land and their native ecosystems. This is obviously not an area I am an authority on, but from all that I have learned, Indigenous groups do not commodify animals and resources the same way colonial systems do. Veganism as a social justice movement is necessary is, in my opinion, because we have strayed so far from intentionally engaging with our ecosystems by manufacturing distance between ourselves and the natural world. We are taught there are predators and prey, those at the top of the food chain and those below them, rather than learning about the unique functions of every being in the ecosystem. This artificial relationship to our surroundings (and the waste and destruction that come along with it) result from a very colonial mindset.
As someone as part of an ethno-religious group whose traditions and culture typically involve animal-based materials, foods, tools, etc I understand having to navigate between how I was raised and the vegan values I have chosen. As I have said many times before, I am vegan because of my Judaism. Veganism has deepened and enriched my spiritual practices and connection with my culture, I don’t feel as if I lose any of my Jewishness by being vegan. This may not be my sentiment if I was not part of the diaspora and had an option to live with my community, farther removed from the colonial, imperialist, and capitalist systems.
As Dr. Lyberth-Hauptmann described in the episode, arctic foodways and microbiomes are unique and access to food looks very different in that climate. I think it’s important to acknowledge that imposing veganism or a plant-based diet onto others is not my prerogative. There are a lot of reasons (means, access, ability, etc.) that may prohibit people from being fully vegan or plant-based; however, using Indigenous people or other marginalized or underresourced groups as a “gotcha” argument to deflect from practicing veganism or taking harm-reduction steps to protest the exploitation of animals in your own life if and when you do have the opportunity, is inexcusable. People and cultures aren’t props, their sovereignty should not be conditional based on how they do or do not align with our personal preferences.
Books that have taught me a lot about Indigenous land practices and interacting with the natural world are Braiding Sweetgrass and Red Earth, White Lies*. Please suggest other resources in the comments!
*Affiliate links - if you choose to purchase these books from my link I will receive a small commission, which supports my work!
Kvetch Sesh
Have anyone else’s social feeds been totally dominated by the “fake meat” debate after the publication of Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad by Deena Shanker for Bloomberg?
Anyway, my feeds have been absolutely swamped with all kinds of responses to the article. I collected as many as I could find so you can get a both-sides(ish) idea of how the discussion is going down within the food industry. The majority of responses I came across organically were critical but I did some research and found a few that favored the author and her reporting.
Deena Shanker shared this post on LinkedIn as a response to some of the feedback her article received. In the post she does link to some of her past reporting on industrial agriculture and the food industry.
Personally, I wish we could have left out the “fake” and “faux” descriptors. Meatless meats aren’t made in a toddler’s toy kitchen out of colorful plastic or play dough, they are not Plankton’s holographic meatloaf (yes, a SpongeBob reference). I understand using alternative descriptors, let’s just use ones that are actually descriptive; plant-based, bean burger, veggie burger, animal-free burger, vegan burger, etc. Your personal feelings or preferences don’t impact reality or laws of physics. Also, who really thinks “fake meat” is the superhero that was going to save us from it all? Calm down.
I have other thoughts, but Substack keeps telling me I’m over the size limit for emails so I’ll save the rest for another time and leave you with the responses I collected.
Have your own thoughts on the article or subject matter? Share in the comments!
Favorable Responses
Vegans: Stop shooting the messenger. A defense of Deena Shanker's Businessweek cover story on plant-based meat - Michele Simon
(This is more of a defense of the author than the subject matter, also note the bit of hypocrisy of this response; the author who is accusing people of attacking the messenger and acting disrespectfully then overgeneralizes vegans as being part of a “vegan echo chamber” and acting like, “spoiled children”.)
Impossible Foods hits back at media report with full-page New York Times ad - Ethan Jakob Craft, Ad Age
LinkedIn Post - Arthur Gallego, CPG Marketing Expert
LinkedIn Post - Adnan Durrani, Founder & CEO of Saffron Road Foods
LinkedIn Post - Jeremy Smith, President of Launchpad
Critical Responses
Our Response to Bloomberg’s Subjective, One-Sided Take That Plant-Based Meat is ‘Just Another Fad’ - Impossible Foods
(They also took out a large print ad in The New York Times to counter this article, see below)
Nope, plant-based meat alternatives are not dead! - Damian Felchlin, Founder of High Time Foods
Impossible Foods: “Bloomberg Was Supposed to Report the Facts” - Vegconomist
(Mostly just restating the Impossible Foods blog post)
Fake Meat or Fake News? A Response - Jennifer Stojkovic, Founder of Vegan Women Summit
Is the Plant-based Foods Sector Dead? Three Industry Experts Discuss - Elisabeth Alfano, CEO of VegTech
(With Irina Gerry & Jennifer Stojkovic as guests)
Twitter Threads
(they’re sources, too!)
Bruce Friedrich, Founder & President of the Good Food Institute
Dr. Matthew Hayek, Assistant Professor at NYU
I haven't read it yet, but just heard a recommendation for Spirits of our Whaling Ancestors: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295990460/spirits-of-our-whaling-ancestors/