Is fake meat about to take over your table?

Several years ago, I read a story in Pacific Standard magazine under the headline “The Biography of a Plant-Based Burger.” The lead character was a burger, of course, but close on its heels was Patrick O. Brown, a “graying, bespectacled, 62-year-old Stanford University professor” who, after a sabbatical dedicated to “eliminating industrial meat production,” decided he would come up with a way to make plant-based meat. “Beef contains hemoglobin,” Jacobson wrote, “the secret catalyst that transforms flesh into yum.” Brown and his team eventually figured out how to get that yum without using any meat. Corie Brown, a former member of The Times’ Food and Business staffs, immersed herself in the “fast-expanding array of meat mimics — plant-based, cultured and fungi-based — that are quickly evolving as producers push to match the nutrition, taste, look, feel, smell and cost of conventional meat.” These sushi rolls feature plant-based tuna from San Francisco-based Kuleana. Alternative proteins “are an entrepreneurial approach” to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and dismantling industrial animal agriculture, Corie explains, and the people behind the new products are, typically, “dedicated vegans.” In the meantime, some of the globe’s largest purveyors of conventional meat are getting in on the act too.