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Plus cheese and eggs, if you want to go all the way.
It was burrito night — I had some tortillas, salsa, guacamole and red onion in my refrigerator, but all our meat was still frozen, and I didn’t have any beans handy. So I did what any climate reporter with an interest in food systems would do and grabbed a pack of meatless “carne asada” I’d picked up out of curiosity and threw it into the mix. The end result was more “huh” than “wow,” but it held its own — with a little help from some hot sauce.
Growing, raising, processing and transporting food is responsible for roughly a quarter of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, nearly 60% of which comes from meat production, according to one estimation. If you're concerned about your personal carbon impact, eating less meat is probably on your to-do list. But what if you still like a carne asada burrito? Thankfully, there are plenty of companies working on satisfying your cravings, no animals involved.
There are lots of other food system concerns that won’t make it into this guide — things like agricultural livelihoods, water use, and animal well-being. But if you’re curious about how fake meats work, what they taste like, and their emissions impact, here’s what you’ll want to know.
Ben Kelley, owner and proprietor of Kelley Farms Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in Harpers Ferry, WV. Ben and his wife Sondra started Kelley Farms after going vegan themselves more than a decade ago. The cafe offers a mix of housemade and commercially available meat alternatives.
Ismael Montanez, the program manager at University of California Berkeley’s Alt Meat Lab, where he’s focused on food and sustainability broadly. He is co-founder and former CTO of plant-based lamb company Black Sheep Foods and eats both meat and plant-based replacements.
Andrea Cecchin, senior agriculture and carbon researcher at HowGood, a sustainability ratings company. Cecchin told me he and his family limit the amount of meat they eat but are focused on a wider plant based diet.
It’s a multi-trillion dollar question, frankly. While the worldwide food system is far more complex than individual consumer choices, shifts in demand for food products, especially among higher-income individuals, have created changes, such tripling the price of quinoa during a boom in its popularity in mid-2010s. The U.S. and China’s growing middle classes also drove a spike in pork demand, only to have that growth slow and reverse in the past few years over health concerns.
The plant-based meat alternatives currently available at your grocery store may be highly processed, but they’re different from the cultivated or “lab-grown” meat coming from a new batch of food companies that seek to “grow” meat from scratch on the cellular level. In theory, this would create direct replacements for things like steaks or fish without actually requiring us to raise actual animals. Almost all of these products are still in the research and development stage, however, and none are currently commercially available in the U.S.
Let’s not mince words: There is no such thing as carbon-neutral beef. How to reduce cattle’s climate impact is an area of active research, encompassing supplements and dietary changes, breeding programs to create animals that process food more efficiently, and even methane-sucking gas masks. There are also ranchers committed to using specific grazing techniques that encourage extra retention of soil carbon, thereby offsetting emissions from cows, but “the science is not there yet” on the scale of sequestration needed for fully carbon-neutral meat, Cecchin says. “Climate-friendly” or “low-carbon” meat labels have been criticized for a lack of data transparency and only represent a 10% reduction in beef emissions overall.
The process of making plant-based mock meats is basically the reverse of their animal version, Montanez explained. While meat is made by processing animals into specific cuts or parts, plant-based replacements use protein-packed flours and other ingredients to build the “meat” back up.
Almost all fake red meat products will have a smaller greenhouse gas impact than their animal versions, Cecchin explained. Compared to a beef burger, the alternatives “really bring down the carbon footprint — the amount of water we need to use, and the amount of land that we use” per unit of food. But for other products, the savings are less clear. Chicken, for instance, has a much lower footprint, meaning replacements have to compete against a “very efficient industry and a very efficient meat.”
Processing details are rarely public, making it difficult to declare other meat replacements automatic emissions winners. “It’s really company by company, and could even be year by year as processing efficiencies change,” Cecchin said, adding that he hopes more companies will show clear evidence of their total emissions, including being specific about what they are comparing against.
Fake animal products are also not the same nutritionally as actual animal products, in ways that can be positive or negative depending on your specific dietary needs. An allergy to soy or wheat gluten would immediately knock out a good portion of these options, and my carne asada came with a warning to anyone “sensitive” to fungi.
There are generally more carbs, less fat, and more fiber in substitutes compared to meat, but protein levels can vary widely, and sodium levels can be high (e.g. Impossible burgers have just as much fat and more salt than a 80% lean beef burger of the same size, though zero cholesterol). As with any processed or prepared food, a look at the nutritional label is well worth it.
The experts all enjoyed the big-name beef replacements — Cecchin even said he has chosen Impossible and Beyond patties over regular burgers while eating out. If you have a little more time, though, Kelley said to skip the fast food fake burgers and make them yourself. Making good tasting meat replacements isn’t all that different from cooking meat itself: spices, technique and how it integrates into a meal makes all the difference. This is the case whether he’s using Impossible beef on the restaurant griddle or hand-making a black bean and chickpea patty. “Just like a raw piece of chicken,” he said, “it's about how you cook it.”
Everyone I spoke to said most breaded chicken replacements match their animal versions pretty well — Montanez even called them “most consistently tasty” than their actual meat equivalents, which for him was enough to justify the slight additional cost. He said he thinks Impossible’s chicken nuggets are the “most convincing” — although he also cautioned that he doesn’t eat a lot of breaded meat products in the first place.
Morningstar Farms’ Chik Patty has been a go-to at-home lunch in my house for nearly three decades, primarily because of that consistency and ease of preparation. (The “buffalo” flavor is by far the best, in my opinion.) Kelley uses Gardein’s Chick’n on one of their most popular sandwiches at the restaurant — they’re a big fan of the company and product.
Don’t expect a lot of options for raw chicken alternatives, however. Montanez suspects the economics of competing with relatively cheap meat isn’t attractive to companies, especially when prepared breaded versions, both animal and plant-based, are already popular.
“Emulating the flavor of American chicken is relatively easy and shouldn't be seen as a significant achievement,” Montanez said. “What’s truly interesting is creating a versatile analog that can withstand the same cooking conditions as real chicken.”
Kelley’s favorite meat replacement is Beyond’s bratwurst sausage, made with pea protein and avocado oil. He uses it in a variety of meals at his cafe, as well as to grill up at home, sometimes adding it to pasta.
Steak and other meats that include marbled fats have been a particularly tricky nut to crack for fake meat producers because the traditional extrusion process makes it difficult to capture fat alongside protein. Montanez told me Juicy Marbles has developed a process capable of doing both, which it’s used to create filet and loin products.
Montanez’s favorite fake bacon is only available in a vegan deli in Berkeley, California, but generally both he and Kelley haven’t found full bacon strips that really match the experience of eating bacon. “There's no way to hold it after you cook it without it drying out,” Kelley said. Instead, he likes using soy [bacon] crumbles in various dishes, including in his potato salad.
The pepperoni and other fermented charcuterie from Prime Roots is “quite impressive, even from a meat eater’s perspective,” Montanez told me. The company starts its process with koji, a strain of fungus that has been part of Japanese cuisine for hundreds of years, including in the product of soy sauces and sake.
The deli slices Kelley uses in sandwiches like reubens or Italian hoagies are made with seitan or a mix of seitan and soy, from a variety of companies. But the Tofurky brand (not just turkey) is one of their favorites. “We are always testing new recipes of our own and using reliable and ethical companies that we grew up loving,” he said.
Kelley has yet to be convinced by most seafood replacements, he told me. “All the seafood is kind of just the same as the chicken replacements,” he said. Instead, he uses unripe jackfruit – a common meat replacement with a stringy texture – hearts of palm, and spices to replicate crab cakes. Having an exact match isn’t always a priority for Kelley, who’d rather highlight an ingredient that serves as a replacement rather than calling it by its faux name. His lobster roll replacement is made with hearts of palm, but it’s not “vegan lobster” on his menu, it’s a “hearts of palm” roll.
Texture is a “very difficult thing in seafood,” Montanez said. “I haven't seen anything myself where it is 100% convincing,” but he points out companies like Impact Food that are making plant-based sushi without extrusion or fermentation, currently available in some New York and California restaurants.
Montanez also called out vegan cheese as a category that struggles to match its original, citing texture, not flavor, as the sticking point, especially when it needs to work in a multitude of different recipes. “You might see a vegan cheese that’s okay applied in pieces,” he said, “but it's only as good if you put it in pizza oven temperatures.” An exception to the rule for him is Climax Foods’ blue cheese, which almost pulled off a Judgment of Paris-like upset in a food competition this year before being removed from the running.
Montanez identified Quorn as a brand that’s not trying to replicate meat exactly, but tastes good on its own. The British company has a wide range of no-meat products that feel like they could have a home in a Tesco, from a vegan Yorkshire ham to mini sausage rolls to “picnic eggs.”
Approaches to fake meat taste fall on a spectrum. On one end are companies that try to replicate as closely as possible the taste, texture, and smell of some specific meat product — say, a chicken nugget. (Your personal mileage may vary when it comes to replicas of more complicated meat cuts such as steaks or pork chops.) On the other end are brands that offer a functional, hopefully flavorful replacement for meat in a meal but otherwise aren’t trying to fool anyone.
The former approach involves more materials science and chemistry, Montanez told me. For example, Impossible makes a soy version of a key molecule in meat known as heme and combines it with a carefully calibrated proportion of sugars, fats, and water to induce the Maillard reaction, the process that makes meat brown and form a crust. It’s possible to create a similar meaty flavor profile without heme (Impossible has a patent on their version), but they have their own complications.
“It’s those sugars reacting with the proteins and creating these molecules that ultimately result in a meaty aroma or flavor,” Montanez said.
Kelley Farm’s menu is a good example of the wider ingredient possibilities of meat replacements beyond this approach. In addition to Impossible patties, Beyond brats, and Gardein’s Chick’n, the restaurant also serves deli meat replacements made with seitan (basically textured wheat gluten); folded eggs made from mung beans; BBQ pulled pork made from jackfruit, which mimics that stringy texture naturally (I’ve had both Kelley Farms’ barbeque sandwich and commercial jackfruit BBQ versions and would happily eat either again); and a burger patty that’s their own mix of chickpeas and black beans.
It’s also worth noting that there is a more literal approach to eating a plant-based diet that’s already the standard in many other countries — that is, rather than replacing meat products with fake meat products, just eat more plants. If you feel like you’re missing out on protein, beans, lentils, tofu, and certain grains like quinoa, farro or teff, have high amounts.
Highly engineered meat substitutes are often more expensive than the animal products they are replacing, so if you’re struggling with hunger, have specific dietary requirements, anxiety around food, or an eating disorder, concerns about emissions shouldn’t even enter the picture.
For that matter, just reorienting your approach to eating meat saves a lot of carbon on its own. Kelley told me he reaches for meat replacements when he’s craving something specific, while Cecchin prefers meat alternatives when he’s eating out.
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.