But, as today's feature read points out, even though New Zealanders eat less meat than a decade ago, global demand for meat continues to rise.
What's easy to miss amid the hype about sophisticated urban food trends is that the rise of the middle class through Asia and Africa has seen appetites for red meat soar.
So while in New Zealand beef and lamb consumption has fallen, 38 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, in the past 10 years the trend doesn't spell doom for our $10 billion red meat industry.
In fact, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has forecast a 15 per cent rise in meat consumption between 2017 and 2027. It also predicts a 20 per cent increase in the global meat trade - the space in which New Zealand exporters operate.
The value of beef exports to China nearly doubled in the year ended April, according to StatsNZ.
This trend buys the industry breathing space but it should not breed complacency - particularly for those looking to the nation's long-term economic challenges.
If anything the rise of global demand adds to the challenge to produce meat more sustainably with less impact on the environment.
Not only do we need to do our bit to mitigate climate change we need to keep pushing our economy up the value chain
Is Red Meat Bad for You, or Good? An Objective Look.
The rise of Impossible Burgers simply means new competition for New Zealand meat producers.
Given the challenges that have been overcome in the industry it shouldn't alarm farmers.
Since the UK joined the European Common Market in 1973, taking with it a safety net of guaranteed export demand, the red meat sector has embraced change. After dealing with the initial shock - it has thrived.
There's no reason to assume our farmers won't adapt to new methods of production and new consumer trends.
That doesn't mean a wholesale switch from meat to plant farming.
It just means staying open to innovation, continuing to embrace technology - and not being afraid of change.
MEAT IS PRIMAL, or so some of us think: that humans have always eaten it; that it is the anchor of a meal, the central dish around which other foods revolve, like courtiers around a king; that only outliers have ever refused it. But today, those imagined outliers are multiplying. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the consumption of beef per capita worldwide has declined for 15 years. Nearly a fourth of Americans claimed to have eaten less meat in 2019, according to a Gallup poll. The recipe site Epicurious, which reaches an audience of 10 million, phased out beef as an ingredient in new recipes in 2020. Diners at some McDonald’s can now sate their lust for a Quarter Pounder with a vegan McPlant instead. Faux meat products are projected to reach $85 billion in sales by 2030, according to a recent study by UBS, and Tyson Foods, one of the biggest beef packers in the United States, has hedged its bets by introducing its own plant-based line.
Even in the stratosphere of the world’s most expensive restaurants, where multiple-course tasting menus often rely on the opulence of a marbled steak as their denouement, a few notable exceptions have abandoned meat within the past year, including the $440-per-person Geranium in Copenhagen (still serving seafood) and the $335-per-person Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan (save for the puzzling persistence of a tenderloin on its private dining room menu through this past December). Could this be the beginning of the end of meat — or at least red meat, with its aura of dominion and glory?
Those who believe humans are born carnivores might scoff. Indeed, archaeological evidence shows that we have been carnivores for longer than we have been fully human. As the French Polish Canadian science journalist Marta Zaraska recounts in “Meathooked” (2016), two million years ago, early hominids in the African savanna were regularly butchering whatever animals they could scavenge, from hedgehogs and warthogs to giraffes, rhinos and now-extinct elephant-anteater beasts.
Yet it wasn’t necessarily human nature to do so. Meat eating was an adaptation, since, as Zaraska points out, we lack the great yawning jaws and bladelike teeth that enable true predators to kill with a bite and then tear raw flesh straight off the bone. To get at that flesh, we had to learn to make weapons and tools, which required using our brains. These in turn grew, a development that some scientists attribute to the influx of calories from animal protein, suggesting that we are who we are — the cunning, cognitively complex humans of today, with our bounty of tens of billions of cortical neurons — because we eat meat. But others credit the discovery of fire and the introduction of cooking, which made it easier and quicker for us to digest meat and plants alike and thus allowed the gastrointestinal tract to shrink, freeing up energy to fuel a bigger brain.
Not in 100 years form now you will see people change their habbits.
