Plant-based meat is a simple solution to climate woes – if more people would eat it
Lars Obendorfer says he was “badly insulted” after he first began offering vegan sausage at his stands, dubbed “Best Worscht in Town.” He even found himself mediating between customers arguing on social media about what to him was just another menu item.
“There was downright hostility between the meat eaters and the vegans,” he said. “And I just couldn’t understand it, and I said, ‘knock off the arguing.’”
That was six years ago.
Today, his vegan currywurst — a take on the classic German fast food consisting of pork sausage with ketchup and curry power — is no longer a novelty but a menu fixture at his 25 stands across Germany.
Of the 200,000 sausages he sells every year, 15% are plant-based.
“It actually tastes like a normal sausage,” customer Yasemin Dural said. “I even had doubts earlier that it might have been a meat sausage, but you really don’t notice it at all.”
Eating more plants and fewer animals is among the simplest, cheapest and most readily available ways for people to reduce their impact on the environment, climate scientists have long said. According to one University of Michigan study, if half of U.S. animal-based food was replaced with plant-based substitutes by 2030, the reduction in emissions for that year would be the equivalent of taking 47.5 million vehicles off the road.
“We are in a climate crisis, a climate emergency,” says Greg Keoleian, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan who co-authored the study. “We all need to play a role, and these products are one strategy to easily reduce your footprint.”
An explosion of new types of plant-based “meat” — the burgers, nuggets, sausages and other cuts that closely resemble meat but are made from soybeans and other plants — is attracting customers all over the world. Even in Germany, where cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt have given their names to iconic meat dishes, plant-based meat is becoming more popular.
This latest innovation in meat substitutes has already made meaningful strides. Between 2018 and 2022, global retail sales of plant-based meat and seafood more than doubled to $6 billion, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm.
Still, that’s dwarfed by global retail sales of packaged animal meat and seafood, which grew 29% in the same period to $302 billion. Plant-based meat and seafood makes up just 2% of the world’s global protein consumption. And sales have been uneven. While demand for plant-based meat is growing rapidly in some countries like Germany and Australia, sales have flattened in the U.S.
New recipes to the rescue?
Plant-based meat has been around for decades. Morningstar Farms, a division of Kellogg Co., introduced soy-based breakfast sausage in 1975. But the current boom began about 10 years ago, when startups like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat began selling burgers that more closely resembled meat and were aimed at carnivores, not just vegetarians and vegans. Beyond Meat’s burgers, made with pea protein, even “bleed” with the help of beet juice.
Those products quickly took hold in Germany, a country where meat-heavy dishes like schnitzel and bratwurst are a mainstay of diets but where widespread concern about climate and animal welfare have been driving big changes. Last year, Germans’ annual meat consumption fell to a 33-year low of 52 kilograms (114 pounds) per person. At the same time, plant-based meat sales rose 22%, according to Euromonitor, and they have tripled since 2018.
In Australia — where the average person ate around 120 kilograms (264 pounds) of animal meat in 2020, according to the United Nations, putting the country just behind the U.S. in terms of meat consumption — retail sales of plant-based meat have been growing, up 32% between 2020 and 2022.
Sam Lawrence, the vice president of policy for the Asia division of the Good Food Institute, a plantbased advocacy group, said Australia was initially behind Europe and the U.S. in the adoption of plant-based meat. But that’s changing fast, in part because of health concerns. In 2018, the country had only around eight plant-based meat companies, he said. Now there are more than 40, many with their sights on the vast Asian market.
But it is the U.S. that represents one of the biggest hopes for a solution: It is the largest market for meat substitutes. It is also one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases from animal agriculture, weighing in as the second-largest consumer of meat per capita behind Hong Kong, according to 2020 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Reversing that trend would have a significant impact on global meat consumption, and Tyler Huggins knows it.
Huggins is the co-founder and CEO of the plant-based food company Meati. He comes from a family of bison ranchers, and he still eats meat occasionally. But after studying damage to rangeland ecology with the U.S. Forest Service, he earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering with a focus on developing new kinds of plantbased meat.
Huggins says it’s imperative to wean Americans from their meatheavy diet because the country is already using most of its arable land.
“How are you going to continue to feed a growing population and an increased demand in meat?” Huggins said. “We have to get more efficient in the way we produce things.”
Colorado-based Meati makes chewy, fibrous steak filets and chicken cutlets from mushroom roots and a handful of other ingredients, like chickpea flour. Its chicken cutlet has fewer calories, less cholesterol and nearly as much protein as animal chicken.
Meati collects spores from mushroom roots, feeds them sugar and ferments them in stainless steel tanks full of water. Every 22 hours, the fermented mixture — which resembles applesauce — is drained from a 25,000-liter