Plant Based Meat: Future Or Failure?

Recently, there has been a lot of hype about meatless meat alternatives. I’m sure you have seen A&W’s commercial about the beyond meat burger, or seen plant based meat in your local grocery store. But what is it really? Well, it is soy. Soy protein has many benefits for human health; it’s full of fiber and helps lower cholesterol. Soy is used in most meat alternatives, but, just where does all of the soy come from? It does not just grow out of the ground! Well…It sort of does. To grow soy, it takes 256 gallons of water to make one pound of soy. That is almost 4 bathtubs worth of water! It is not a very good crop for dry climates. That is a bummer for soy, because producing soy emits greenhouse gasses that heat up the planet, leading to increased droughts.The main cause of greenhouse gasses in the production of soy is the deforestation needed to create farmland. Deforestation that mostly occurs in Brazil, the soybeans main producer. Brazil is the home of one third of the planet’s rainforest, including about 60% of the Amazon rainforest, a habitat for many endangered species. It is hard to see how much more ethical plant based meat is over regular meat. If you think about it, you might as well eat leopard steak instead of plant based meat, because at the end of the day, animals were harmed in the making of your plant based burger.