US: Plant-based meat needs government support to scale up, but a culture war stands in the way

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people eat burgers: They would still sizzle and bleed, they’d taste great, but they wouldn’t actually contain any meat. Today it seems that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival has been more than a little delayed. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have fallen over the last two years, and a recent bevy of headlines suggest that this latest wave of imitation meat was just that: a passing fad. A new report suggests that if the alt protein industry has any hope of scaling, it will take robust funding from a number of different sources — including, crucially, the public sector. The report compares plant-based meat imitations to electric vehicles, a powerful climate solution that has benefited from government support, such as direct purchase subsidies. But like the EV industry ...