Sounds like a contradiction in terms, I know. But Loryma, a German food tech company, has just announced it’s patented vegan, wheat-based artificial chicken skin. The idea is to help make plant-based chicken substitutes look and chew more like the real thing…
A faux chicken drumstick, complete with Loryma vegan, wheat-based, artificial skin.
My question is, “Why?”
There are obvious industry reasons for developing and so warmly welcoming this odd product. It can make plant-based chicken more inviting and palatable to folks who want to try it, but still really, really want the meat experience.
This is fundamentally the same aim as that of food industry researchers who seek to make plant-based meat substitutes more and more realistic, to attract meat lovers to their products. It’s not enough to taste like meat, or chew like ground meat. The stuff has to ooze fat and vegan ‘blood’ – and now, even have the appearance and texture of real steaks or chicken parts to entice those who prefer conventional meat.
The ultimate result is faux chicken parts, sized and shaped just like real ones, but boneless, and covered with Loryma’s new product.
What hath Loryma wrought?
Not a reference to the first telegraph message sent in the U.S., from Baltimore, MD to Washington, DC. Rather, a reference to the original quote, from the Book of Numbers in the King James Bible, an expression wonder and amazement at an act of God. And it seems as though Loryma was sort of playing God when it invented the plant-based chicken skin.
The stuff is described as, “a flowable oil-in-water emulsion (applied) to the shaped imitation meat by means of conventional coating technology, as used in wet panades. […] The contained functional mixture of wheat proteins, starches and gelling agent creates an elastic, irreversible, thin surface coating that reproduces chicken skin and becomes crispy during the final preparation. The coating also protects the meat alternative inside from drying out.”
Laudable, even noble goals, in the context of food processing.
But…
Should we not be going the other way, preparing consumers for a world in which the current, prevailing concepts of meat are history. In which we think of protein foods in terms of rice-and-beans, quinoa, and soy products? Should we not be experimenting with and popularizing new protein shapes, presentations and flavours rather than trying heroically – and at great expense – to mimic old school proteins?
True, industry observers admit stuff like faux meats and their spawn – including plant-based chicken skin – are merely transitional products, an attempt to get traditionalists to evolve before their natural time. Folks will definitely embrace plant-based foods when the traditional meats either vanish because they’re no longer sustainable to produce, or they price themselves out of the market. They’ll have no choice.
I think of the future in terms of two consumer groups: the young, up and coming generations millennial and later; and the older folks, roughly 50 and over. There’s already a growing divide between these two macro-demographics. The younger people are much more open, according top recent surveys, to trying new things including plant-based foods. The older folks are reacting the way older folks generally do, with skepticism, suspicion and in some cases downright animosity. And experience shows that, the older we get, the less likely we are to change our ways.
My take
The young will inherit the world and blithely go about trying to mold it in the shape they think is best. Meanwhile the old, most of those over 50 now, will being gone by 2050, when the other climate shoe is scheduled to drop, and so won’t be a major factor in how humanity adapts to a plant-based protein future.
And let’s not forget the large majority of folks in the world (in Asia and Africa, especially) who already consider soy products and beans and lentils, and rice and quinoa, and other veggie protein sources dietary staples. They don’t need convincing.
So, doesn’t it make sense to look to the future and cater to the blossoming younger generations, rather than the waning older ones? Concentrating on look- taste- and chew-alike meat substitutes seems to be massively counterproductive to me. The millions that have been ploughed into developing plant-based meats might be better employed in research on more-nutritious and higher-yielding plant proteins to help the 10 billion hungry people who’ll be demanding their supper by the middle of the century?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.