Big Veganism is coming for you
The meat industry is bankrolling the movement
unherd.com
"Wageningen, an hour by car from Amsterdam, is the capital so-called “Food Valley”. Every which way you look, there are fields burgeoning with crops, giant glasshouses, and modernist glass-and-steel labs where more than 6,500 scientists are planning the future of food. It all seems lovely — starry-eyed researchers beavering away to end global hunger and halt climate change via a revolution in food technology — until you look closely at Food Valley’s strategic “Sustainable Protein System”, or examine the list of companies investing in the “Silicon Valley of Food”."
"The Sustainable Protein System is the promotion of “alt-proteins”, as opposed to the conventional proteins we might get from food, which come from farmed animals. Some of the alt-protein research in Food Valley is directed towards consuming insects (“entomophagy”); some is more focused on algae, fungi — or mycobacterial this, that and the other. But the big research bucks are flowing one way only, and that is to plant-based alternatives to meat.More than 60 agri-food multinationals have invested in Food Valley and centred their research operations there. They include Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Cargill, Kikkoman, and Dupont. Upfield, the giant plant-based group behind Flora and the Greek vegan cheese brand Violife, has constructed a €50 million Food Science Centre at Wageningen. This pales in comparison to Unilever’s €85 million Foods Innovation Centre, nicknamed “The Hive”, with its priority research area for “plant-based ingredients and meat alternatives”." |
