Alternative meat could help the climate. Will anyone eat it?

Meat is often the star on our plates, but our love of animal-based foods is a problem for the climate. Depending on how you count it up, livestock accounts for somewhere between 10% and 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

A growing number of alternative foods seek to mimic or replace options that require raising and slaughtering animals. These include plant-based products and newly approved cultivated (or lab-grown) meats. An increasing number of companies are even raising microbes in the lab in the hopes that we’ll add them to the menu, as I covered in a story this week.

But as one of my colleagues always puts it when I tell him about some alternative food product, the key question is, will anyone eat it?

Food might just be one of the trickiest climate problems to solve. Technically, none of us has to be eating any of the highest-emissions foods—like beef—that are worst for the climate. But what we eat is deeply personal, and it’s often tied up with our culture and our social lives. Many people want hamburgers at a barbecue and nice steak dinners. 

The challenge of our food system’s climate impact is only getting more tricky: richer countries tend to eat more meat, and so as populations grow and the standard of living rises around the world, we’re going to see emissions from livestock production rise, too.

In an effort to combat that trend, alternative food products aim to deliver foods similar to the ones we know and love with less harmful effects on the climate. Plant-based options like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have exploded in recent years, finding their way into supermarkets and even onto the menus of major fast-food brands like Burger King.

The problem is, a lot of alternative products have been struggling lately. Unit sales of meat alternatives in the US were down by 26% between 2021 and 2023, and fewer households are buying plant-based alternative meat options, according to a report from the Good Food Institute. Consumers say that alternatives still aren’t up to par on taste and price, two key factors that determine what people decide to eat.

So companies are racing to invent better products. I’ve spent a lot of time covering cultivated (or lab-grown) meats. To make these products, animal cells are grown in the lab and processed into things like chicken nuggets. Two companies got approval to sell cultivated chicken in the US in 2023, and we’ve seen both offer their products in limited runs at high-end restaurants.