It’s hard to imagine a faux meat more infamous than the Tofurky. Its creation dates back to the 1990s, when a small Oregon-based tempeh maker made a fateful delivery to one of his clients, a husband and wife vegetarian catering team known for their delicious tofu roasts. The three decided to combine forces and devise something new: a tofu roast surrounded by “drumsticks” made of tempeh. Seth Tibbott, the tempeh maker, pushed for the cheeky name and, voila, the first commercialized Tofurky was born. While it didn’t taste much like meat, this notorious vegan dish has had an undeniable influence on the plant-based foods of today.
“Tofurky deserves credit for getting the ball rolling on meat alternatives as we think of them now,” says Jan Dutkiewicz. Dutkiewicz is a visiting fellow at Oxford University where he’s researching the future of food. He’s traced the path from Tofurky to today’s plant-based burgers and even tomorrow’s cultured meat in a new video produced by Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a fellow.
This well-known vegetarian roast wasn’t the first plant-based protein, of course, but it was definitely something new. “It gave a lot of people a first taste, literally and conceptually, of meat alternatives…[something different than] soy and tempeh and seitan and quorn—” not that there’s anything wrong with those old vegan stalwarts, of course. But with the Tofurky, says Dutkiewicz, “we can actually have a [meat] facsimile.” And not just any meat, either. Tofurky could conceivably serve as the centerpiece of the meal, at least for one day a year.
By 2000, according to a New Yorker profile by Jonathan Kauffman, the Tofurky had become a sensation, even if some of the attention it received was derisive. The Tofurky was the beginning of a shift, says Dutkiewicz. The company dared to take on something as “culturally central” as the turkey on Thanksgiving, and it did so with a humorous, “self-mocking” name that says “we’re just happy to have a seat at the table,” he says.
Tofu Turkey served for Thanksgiving dinner.
Decades later, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat took aim at a different kind of culturally central meat with its better-tasting plant-based burgers that were unlike anything the world has ever seen. “The burger is central to a certain kind of American identity,” Dutkiewicz says. It’s quintessential Americana and pure comfort food, the kind of meal that can be enjoyed on the cheap or in much fancier form at a high-end burger bar.
There are plenty of reasons to go after beef too, says Dutkiewicz. “Cows...are the most environmentally unfriendly animals to raise,” he says, “[with] massive requirements in terms of land use [and] water.” Cows and other ruminant animals are also associated with much higher greenhouse gas emissions than other animal proteins, making them a contributor to climate change.
Unlike the Tofurky, however, today’s plant-based burgers are engineered to taste more like meat. “The Tofurky was not a good facsimile,” says Dutkiewicz, “[and that’s because] you know you’re eating a Tofurky.” And traditional veggie burgers aren’t great facsimiles either. “A lot of burger alternatives are not very good,” he adds.
Plant based burger in a 3D illustration style.
Plenty of vegetarians and vegans disagree with that assessment, of course, with some even lamenting what seems to be the inevitable disappearance of the traditional veggie burger. But whatever you think of old school vegan patties, they weren’t winning over meat eaters, which is the primary motivation of today’s plant-based food industry.
If the aim is to get omnivores eating less beef, the replacement has to be able to compete with beef on taste, price and convenience, the primary drivers of consumption. “They’re trying to replicate [beef] as closely as possible and they’ve come really damn close,” says Dutkiewicz.
“They’ve also been unapologetic in their marketing,” he adds. “Not even Tofurkey said ‘we’re meat.’ Tofurkey said, we’re like this funny little ball that you can eat, whereas Beyond and Impossible have been unapologetic” in calling their products meat that happens to also be made from plants.
In addition to selling their product alongside meat at the grocery store and beef at Burger King, today’s plant-based companies “are also fighting [a] linguistic and discursive battle [against] the meat industry,” Dutkiewicz argues. The meat industry often calls these foods fake meat, but Dutkiewicz counters that nothing about meat requires a slaughtered animal.
That linguistic battle is also a legal one, with legislation pending in several states to restrict use of the word meat to only the kind that has been traditionally farmed and slaughtered. And these battles aren’t just aimed at companies like Beyond and Impossible, the ones who make meat from plant-based ingredients. “It's [also] clearly an opening salvo in what’s going to be the war over what cellular agricultural products get to be called,” Dutkiewicz says.
cultured meat conceptual rendering
Cellular agricultural products, otherwise known as cultured meat, are proteins that are grown from animal cells taken from a living animal rather than one that has been slaughtered and butchered. None of these proteins are on the market or even approved for commercialization by any government regulatory agencies, but the companies working on these foods are definitely getting closer to a release date.
When cultured proteins do hit the market in the next couple of years, they’ll probably first be offered at restaurants, and likely in ground form like a chicken nugget or a burger, probably mixed with plant-based proteins to improve the texture and lower the price. Once these meats become cheaper and more commonplace, however, cultured meat could usher in a new way of thinking about animal proteins.
If cultured proteins become the norm, what will dinner tables look like on holidays that have historically featured a whole cooked animal like Thanksgiving? That depends. Cultured meat scientists could conceivable grow an entire turkey roast with bones, says Dutkiewicz, but they probably wouldn’t bother. On the other hand, they might include a bone or two made out of something else.
Consider Bistro In Vitro, a project that brought together a team of chefs to imagine meat dishes made with cultured meat — including cultured meat sashimi presented like origami and a dish featuring the word “meat” knitted out of spools of ground hamburger. These dishes are all imagined, of course, but the idea is to get you thinking about what could someday be possible.
There’s a dish on the menu called “Bone Pickers,” for example, which features cultured meat grown onto a scaffolding of “bone,” a nod to what the chefs describe as the satisfying eating experience of gnawing at meat. The Thanksgiving dinner of the future might feature something similar, maybe a ceremonial wishbone or a turkey grown into the shape of a drumstick, or a fall leaf or a roast. Heck, there’s even a chance it could end up looking kind of like a Tofurky. In that case, please pass the tempeh.
