Malnutrition and food insecurity are perennial issues in the small, landlocked nation, where more than half of the population live below the poverty line. The coronavirus, which has infected nearly 5,500 people and killed more than 170, has only exacerbated food shortages as many livelihoods have been curtailed by confinement measures. For mice hunter Bernard Simeon, from Malawi's central Ntcheu district, the pandemic has brought new complexities to his poverty-stricken life.
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One surprising result of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a spike in consumer demand for imitation meats. According to a Nielsen report, during the first nine weeks of the crisis in the United States, grocery store sales of faux-meat products increased 264 percent. The reasons included concerns about illness at meatpacking plants, the possible spread of disease from industrial livestock operations, and even fears about the animal origins of Covid-19 itself.
For some lab-grown meat is ‘scary science’, for others a genuine lever for change.
For the first time in a long time, I don’t smell like cow manure. Here in Oakland, California, 3,000 miles from my home on a farm in upstate New York, I’m walking into the Impossible Foods production facility, a massive polygon of beige rectangles that can squish out a million pounds of plant-based meat a month. I’m a farmer in training and butcher, which means this place threatens to render my entire field of work obsolete. There’s gotta be a punch line around here somewhere.
In bioreactors around the world, animal cells are proliferating, on their way to becoming meat and seafood that we might someday consume without killing any animals.
Van Mensvoort has produced an online interactive restaurant called Bistro In Vitro, a virtual restaurant playing with possibilities of lab-grown meat from entrée to main to dessert.
Grilling season is 365 days a year around here, and man, do we love a good steak! Just as soon as that ribeye hits the hot metal rack of our grill, magic begins to happen. Char marks soon appear, and the marbling begins to crackle and melt delicious flavor into this primal cut of meat.
We’re trying to eat less meat, right? If you aren’t personally, you have likely heard it from a friend who’s going “veg” or have noticed a sudden rise in “plant-based” labeling. Around a quarter of millennials are now vegan or vegetarian.
The interruptions of food supply chains following the closure of the Xingfadi market in Fengtai district – Beijing's biggest fresh produce, meat, and fish supplier – has left us all with a bad taste in our mouths. Okay, maybe not bad, but a strange taste for sure.
We can, if we can agree that it doesn’t need to come from the body of an animal. What is meat?
Hong Kong-based Mr Yeung is the founder of OmniPork, part of the environmentally focused venture Green Monday. OmniPork is a plant-based meat alternative that is now on the menu in many of Hong Kong's trendiest restaurants, hotels and bars.
