Author: NY Weekly Staff

If you live in Brooklyn, you already know it’s vegan-friendly. But as The Beat points out, vegan food used to only be found in select places in the heart of New York City. Luckily, sometimes good things bleed over from Manhattan, and vegan food was one of them. Today Brooklyn has an abundance of riches for vegans and vegetarians, with dozens of restaurants that offer awesome food at non-Manhattan prices. Places like Modern Love, V-Spot, and Terms of Endearment, to name just a few.

The Brooklyn hipster stereotype has been done to death, but it would be disingenuous not to give some of these progressive individuals credit for moving the vegan movement forward. And most of these vegans would probably tell you they gave up meat and dairy for a variety of reasons that can be boiled down to three categories: the environment, health, and animal welfare… Although not necessarily in that order. 

And these are the same three drivers that are pushing vegetarianism and veganism to new heights across the United States and the world, as evidenced by “vegan butcher shops,” and sausage recipes for cooking tasty dishes with high-tech vegan meat.

People across the planet have gotten the memo on how certain meats – especially processed meats – are just shy of toxic, and they’ve done the math and now agree that it’s impossible to have a “sustainable and cheap” meat industry. There’s no getting around massively polluting factory farms if you want a slab of chicken for just a couple of dollars. Finally, a lot of folks are also becoming more sympathetic to the once-radical idea that using animals for food isn’t something we need to do or should be doing anymore.

And so, we are now at an interesting crossroad period where some places are rapidly developing into vegan meccas, but plenty of other places are still struggling. And for the latter, it comes down to a fact that many vegans and vegetarians will likely agree with: the problem isn’t that meat tastes bad; it’s that it was formerly an animal.

You will hear some vegetarians and vegans tell you they’ve lost the taste for meat after being 100% veggie for X number of years. However, the majority of people still find the tastes and textures of meat desirable. After all, these are flavors hardwired into our evolutionary heritage. Our brains got a nice big boost of protein that acted as rocket fuel to turbocharge us from literally spending millions of years making not much more than near-identical stone axes to walking on the moon.

So, we’re in this conundrum where even the hardest-core hardcore meat lover is aware of the problems with their beloved food source, even if their main concern is only for their own health. But it’s tough to get past that primal love as, “It just tastes so darn good!” 

Two solutions are evolving to help solve the conflicting desires of some to protect the planet, be kinder to animals, and live healthier lives while at the same time enjoying the tastes and textures of meat, a food source that’s for many intrinsically linked with their culture or even their sense of identity. 

The first is what most call cultured meat. This would be meat grown in a lab, and reviews are mixed but generally positive. One writer recently chowed down on some cultured chicken after not eating meat for many years, and her verdict was that it tasted better than her memories of eating actual chickens.

Others find lab-grown meats a bit Frankenstein-ish, or they simply don’t want that greasy meat taste as – despite being grown in a lab – it still contains the same molecular structure as a chunk of a recently deceased animal.

The other option is one of the wide varieties of meat substitutes made with all-natural ingredients. Now some people are rolling their eyes and thinking of some veggie burger they tried and found to be a big plate of “meh.” Wait, however, until you get a taste of real high-tech future vegan meat. It’s been said before, but it’s fair: this is an entirely new species of meat substitute.

Made primarily by startups based out of Israel, high-tech vegan meat is now being produced with the aid of AI algorithms and 3D printers. These tech tools are being employed because they offer the only real solution for recreating the closest approximation to animal protein using only vegan ingredients.

To take one of the most coveted pieces of animal protein as an example, a beef steak is considered by many to be delicious due to its combination of flavors. It doesn’t have a single taste; it’s juicy in one spot, tougher in another, fatty, tender, flavorful, and has that unique mouthfeel. 

Trying to recreate that with some mixture of chickpeas and soy has so far proven less-than-effective, but with a 3D printer guided by artificial intelligence, you can extrude layers that have those qualities spread out across the vegan steak. One company calls its products “alternative meat” and explains that it also contains “alternative muscle” and “alternative fat.”

It’s been a couple of years since the first iterations of this high-tech vegan meat came out, and that means there’s been enough time for some peer review. The verdict? –Something approaching 90 plus percent similar to animal protein but lacking that final greasy element that you would find in cultured meat.

And these reviews aren’t from Greenpeace. Celebrity chefs, barbecue experts, and others not thought of as champions of veganism are also on board with this high-tech 3D-printed vegan meat. The challenge now is scaling up production to the point where it can hit price parity with animal protein – and this is reportedly set to happen very soon. 

This, of course, is the same challenge facing producers of lab-grown or cultured meat. It would be insane to expect a working family to swap over to eating vegan or lab-grown meat if the price was something approaching double that of animal meat, and the companies making and selling these alternatives are well aware of how important price points are. 

That said, you can produce the cheapest meat alternative on the planet, but if it doesn’t taste like meat or simply taste awesome, you’re still not going to find much of an audience. Happily, as noted above, people who know what they’re talking about are giving scores of nines and 10s to 3D-printed meat for flavor, texture, and meatiness.

But back to prices. If you were asked to bet on which of the two solutions – cultured meat or 3D printed meat – would become affordable faster, you’d probably want to bet on the latter as it’s a matter of ingredients, algorithms, and a 3D printer rather than complex cell growth in a lab.

In any case, vegans and vegetarians, as well as meat eaters, should be glad that there are these new tasty options slowly coming into the mainstream as they offer more choices, which is almost always a good thing. A flexitarian trying to reduce their meat intake will have the option of having a meat substitute for many meals, a vegan who doesn’t like meat has the option of cooking up a 3D printed vegan steak for dinner guests, and a vegetarian might be happy to get that extra burst of flavor while eating a vegan kebab. And, of course, the planet benefits from every animal that isn’t raised for food.

It’s already the best time in history to be a vegetarian or vegan in Brooklyn, and the good news is that it’s about to get a lot better.