Solutions are the bread and butter of the tech sector, and Silicon Valley has led the way in making our everyday transactions faster, cheaper and more convenient. Recently, though, techies have set their sights on problems far more intractable, complex, and political than data and communications technology, namely the world of food and agriculture. And they have made this foray without genuinely engaging how past introductions of technology in food and agriculture have gone down. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in alternative protein innovation, based on biotechnologies aimed toward replacing animal products. They draw on the logic of “substitutionism,” a term that refers to a long term tendency to shift food production away from farms and into factories where food can be made more cheaply and less tied to natural processes. 

But it is not at all evident that alternative protein can deliver on its core promise of environmental improvement. 

Unpacking the Environmental Claims of alternative protein

Developers of alternative proteins are operating with somewhat distinct goals from past substitutionism. They want to keep their products cost competitive, but cheapness is not the aim. They definitely want to make their products good to eat—they devote a good deal of effort attempting to replicate the taste of animal proteins or to make those high-protein bars palatable—but that’s in service of what they claim is their primary aim: to make their products environmentally better than those derived from animals. 

Nevertheless, by virtue of the kind of techno-fix these developers are proposing, which revolves on replacing animal products rather than improving how animals live, making them “environmentally better” is tantamount to removing protein production entirely from rural production—or trying to. Think about the problems they want to solve. It is in rural settings where animals feed and fart, land and water become scarce, and waste goes.

It is as if bringing production into labs and factories somehow eradicates environmental damage. Consider this claim from a maker of a protein “so pure it is literally born out of thin air”: their processes allow them to “completely disconnect from agriculture.” In other words, for alternative protein producers “environmental improvement” means embracing the logic of substitutionism.

But it doesn’t work like that. Like all substitutionism, factory or lab production does not escape the need for material resources. Something doesn’t grow from nothing. For starters, you still need biological inputs either as the base ingredients or to feed the material that is supposed to replicate. While alternative protein entrepreneurs obliquely acknowledge this when they make claims of “plant-based,” they routinely obscure from where all those peas, soy, and mung beans will come and how they will be produced, should those simulacra largely replace animal proteins. 

Making these inputs into edible food then takes a lot of processing. Companies frequently refer to the “improved feed conversion ratios” of plant-based food. By that they mean that the amount of feed required for animals to produce the foods humans eat is far less efficient than were humans to eat the crops directly. This argument, first made in the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet, is compelling. 

But unlike what the author of that book, Frances Moore Lappé, advocated—to obtain protein from a diet of relatively whole grains, legumes, and pulses—alternative protein entrepreneurs ask you to eat highly processed derivatives of plants. For instance, the “pea protein isolates” that go into many simulacra are products of a complex process involving extraction at high heat and acidification. It is not as simple as cutting out the middle animal to shorten the path from plants to humans.

The point here is that such processing requires significant resource use, as bioreactors and factories substitute for rural infrastructures. Like greenhouses, these infrastructures utilize all manner of materials (e.g., metals, plastic), energy, and water. While reciting at length the environmental costs of feeding, housing, and disposing the waste of animals, alternative protein advocates are virtually silent about the resources used in building and housing bioreactors, feeding cells, and energizing and temperature controlling the bioreactors. 

If reliant on fossil fuels for energy, the energy requirements alone could contribute to greenhouse gas emissions rivaling those of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. But even the use of solar energy is highly resource-intensive and waste-producing. Were cellular meat, for example, produced at anywhere near the scale of conventional meat, these demands could easily outweigh any benefits, as an increasing number of Life Cycle Assessment (aka “cradle to grave”) comparative analyses of cellular meat versus conventional meat are showing.

To give you a more vivid picture, one candid person from a cellular meat company, speaking privately to me at a conference, estimated it would take a bioreactor the size of a blue whale to produce one burger per week for the entire San Francisco population. And San Francisco is a small city, with a population of just over eight hundred thousand.

Along the same lines, these bioreactors have to be situated in space. While promoters of alternative proteins continue to accentuate the land required for animal production, they make no mention of the space that would necessarily be required to house bioreactors were these production methods to be scaled up. It is not as if the land would be reverted to forests and prairies. I should also note that the feed conversion ratio arguments elide the complex ecological differences between crop and animal production. Animals can be pastured in ecological conditions where crops do not fare well; it is not as if taking the cows away would make land suitable for crops.