Select sources for Meat

Investing in alternative proteins now could help address malnutrition, a key driver of which is a lack of access to affordable, high-quality proteins.
Innovation Commission: Climate Change, Food Security, Agriculture

Alternative proteins will produce the same total calories as [conventional animal] proteins but do so using 640 million fewer hectares, thus freeing land for nature and making both biodiversity and deforestation targets easier to meet.
ClimateWorks Foundation and UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Globally, more than 700 million people are malnourished, and more than 3 billion cannot afford a healthy diet (UN FAO 2025). Alternative meats require fewer resources than conventional meats, so they can decrease global food prices, making nutritious food more affordable for everyone. They can also alleviate malnutrition and offer an inexpensive and nutritious option for direct feeding programs. Finally, alternative meats can preserve forests and biodiversity—including ocean biodiversity—while slashing air pollution, water pollution, and climate emissions. 

Innovation Case for COP28: Alternative Proteins, Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture (2023): Nobel Laureate in economics Michael Kremer’s commission at the University of Chicago finds that alternative proteins can: 1) relieve food insecurity by lowering food prices; 2) decrease climate emissions and foster climate resilience; and 3) alleviate malnutrition. (GFI 1-pager)

Alternative Proteins for Climate, Hunger, and Global Health (2024): A 90-minute event from COP29, co-hosted by CGIAR, FAO, and GFI. Speakers and panelists include CGIAR Executive Managing Director Ismahane Elouafi, UN Foundation Food and Climate Director Lasse Bruun, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition Climate and Nutrition Lead Sarah LaHaye, World Health Organization Climate and Health Program Officer Cristina Romanelli, Sir Andrew Steer, and more. 

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, UN FAO (2025): FAO’s annual flagship report underlines the fact that higher food prices are linked to hunger and malnutrition. Plus, more than 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Creating a Sustainable Food Future (2019): The ultimate guide to sustainable food systems, from the World Resources Institute, with support from the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and more.

Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, FAO (2006): This seminal report finds that animal agriculture is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” These environmental problems include “land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.” Since the report came out, meat production globally is up more than 100 million metric tons, from 266 million metric tons in 2006 to 370 million metric tons in 2023. 

Feeding Climate and Biodiversity Goals with Novel Plant-Based Meat and Milk, Nature Communications (2023): Researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis find that 50 percent adoption of plant-based meat and milk would almost fully halt deforestation and result in land use needs for agriculture declining by 653 million hectares, agricultural emissions declining by 31 percent (while producing far more food), water use declining by 10 percent, and more. The authors explain that these are very conservative numbers. (GFI 1-pager)

Global Innovation Needs Assessment: Protein Diversity, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and ClimateWorks Foundation (2021): This model from McKinsey economists finds that at 50 percent penetration, alternative proteins could mitigate 5 billion metric tons of emissions and add $1.1 trillion to the global economy. This would also decrease agricultural land needs by 640 million hectares (which would decrease food prices by 12 percent) while “reducing both deforestation risk and pastureland, thereby allowing for the restoration of natural ecosystems, including biodiverse and carbon-dense forest area.” (GFI 1-pager)

Decoupling Methane Emissions from Meat with Alternative Proteins, Climate Advisers (2023): This report finds that while agricultural methane mitigation warrants an all-of-the above strategy, “the single most powerful strategy to drive emissions down further is innovation in alternative proteins, products that aim to provide consumers the sensory experience and nutrition of animal meat using plants, fermentation, or cellular agriculture instead of live animals.” See also “Global Innovation Needs Assessment: Food System Methane” (ClimateWorks Foundation and Global Methane Hub) in chapter 9’s sources, below.

Stop Ghost Gear: The Most Deadly Form of Marine Plastic Debris, WWF (2020): At least 10 percent of marine litter is abandoned fishing gear, and “somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million tonnes of fishing gear gets left in the ocean every year… Ghost gear is the most deadly form of marine plastic debris.”

A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill. Some sophisticated interventions, like hip replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy, and care of preterm infants, would become far more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake.
Dr. Margaret Chan, former Director-General, World Health Organization

For more than 25 years, the World Health Organization has been warning the world about the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, and yet the world is going in the wrong direction on every single one of WHO’s recommendations on this global health scourge that threatens to render modern medicine obsolete. Because they do not require antibiotics, alternative meats can eliminate meat’s contribution to the problem, which is substantial. Similarly, the most likely cause of the next pandemic is modern meat production. Because they do not require live animals, alternative meats can eliminate meat’s contribution to pandemic risk.

What’s Cooking?, UN Environment Programme (2023): Lead author and former IPCC chair Sir Robert Watson joins 17 collaborators to find that alternative proteins have global health benefits that include decreased antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk, as well as decreased adverse environmental impacts. (GFI 1-pager) 

Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic Disease and How to Break the Chain of Transmission (2020): CGIAR, the UN Environment Programme, and the International Livestock Research Institute find that two of the seven major anthropogenic drivers of zoonotic disease emergence are increasing demand for animal protein and unsustainable intensification and industrialization of animal production. More animals means more potential disease vectors, and industrial animal farming involves vast numbers of genetically similar animals crammed into unsanitary conditions that suppress their immune systems. Alternative proteins eliminate these two risk factors and mitigate five of the others. 

Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, Maryn McKenna (2017): Big Chicken explores how antibiotics transformed chicken into an industrial commodity, and how this has caused a major public health crisis in the form of antibiotic resistance.

Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, Michael Greger (2006): Bird Flu investigates humanity’s role in the development of bird flu and explores how we can reduce the likelihood of future pandemics. The book earned accolades from former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, and the medical and pandemic risk establishment. 

Cultivated Meat as a Tool for Fighting Antimicrobial Resistance, Nature Food (2022): This piece explores how antibiotic use in conventional meat production drives resistance to medically important antibiotics and how cultivated meat can help in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

One of the clearest relationships in economics is the link between income and meat consumption. As the world has become more wealthy, it has—like clockwork—consumed more and more animal meat. Thus, every year since 1961, meat production has hit a new world record, with just three exceptions: 1996 (Mad Cow Disease), 2019 (African Swine Fever), and 2020 (Covid-19). Factor in seafood, and those three exceptions vanish. All predictions are that absent global shocks (e.g., a global recession, another pandemic, another mass animal disease), industrial meat and seafood consumption will hit new records every year through 2050. Alternative meats appear to be the one intervention that could change that. 

Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat, Marta Zaraska (2016): Meathooked explores humanity’s enduring relationship with meat, which will continue to be a part of society for years to come, despite its harms.

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2013): Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains the two systems of the mind that drive the way we think. System 1 involves fast, automatic thinking, while System 2 involves slow, rational thinking. Studies conducted by GFI and Mindlab find that for the vast majority of consumers, decisions about food are almost always Systems 1 – unconscious, associative, and automatic. The GFI and Mindlab study concluded that taste, familiarity, and tradition were the most important drivers of consumer choice.

On the Importance of Price and Taste for Food Choice, Bryant Research (2024): This piece explains that price and taste are the most critical factors influencing food choices. Unless they reach taste and price parity with conventional meat, alternative proteins will not be successful.

The Relative Importance of Primary Food Choice Factors Among Different Consumer Groups: A Latent Profile Analysis, Food Quality and Preference (2021): This analysis “contributes to the growing evidence that taste and price are the most important factors determining consumers’ food choice decisions.” Across different countries, taste is typically ranked as the most important factor.

Sometimes a new technology comes along, and it has the capability to transform how we view our world . . . If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.
Sergey Brin

In much the same way that we can grow a plant from a cutting or seed, we can grow meat from a sesame seed-sized amount of animal muscle or fat. This process can make the same meat that humanity loves, but with a fraction of the resources (land, water, fertilizer and so on) and also a fraction of the chemical residues (e.g., the drugs fed to farm animals; mercury and dioxins in seafood) and bacterial contamination. If science and industry can develop products that compete on price, consumer polls indicate significant consumer enthusiasm. More and more scientists and entrepreneurs are focused on turning science fiction into science fact. 

Clean Meat, Paul Shapiro (2018): Clean Meat is the definitive story of the global beginnings of cultivated meat.

State of the Industry: Cultivated Meat, Seafood, and Ingredients, Good Food Institute (2025): This report provides an overview of the commercial landscape and covers the latest consumer insights, investments, regulatory developments, and scientific progress in the cultivated meat and seafood industry. 

State of the Industry: Cultivated Meat, Seafood, and Ingredients, Good Food Institute (2025): Video recap of the above report.

Consumer Acceptance of Cultured Meat: An Updated Review (2018-2020), New Frontiers in Meat Science and Technology (2020): This review summarizes acceptance rates, personal and societal considerations, demographic predictors, and more, finding that a majority of consumers would try cultivated meat, with substantial markets existing across America, Europe, and Asia.

In the next few decades I believe that [cultivated] and plant-based meat will become the norm, and animals will no longer need to be killed en masse for food . . . Meat production has not changed in 10,000 years. It’s time that changed.
Richard Branson

For decades, veggie meats have been veggie first and meat… not at all. But some scientists are working to turn this equation on its head by producing meat from plants that is indistinguishable from animal meat. We have a long way to go on steak, but some companies are basically there with burgers, nuggets, and hot dogs—if you choose the right product (in blind sensory panels, more than half of meat lovers like the Impossible Foods burgers, nuggets, and hot dogs just as much as their animal-based counterparts). The meatiest current products have less fat and more protein and fiber than the burgers, nuggets, and dogs they are replacing. At scale, production efficiencies should allow these products to be produced less expensively than industrial animal meat.

Taste of the Industry 2025, NECTAR (2025): The world’s largest sensory analysis of plant-based meats provides data about 122 plant-based meat products collected through blind taste tests. A number of products are nearing taste parity, but most need significant R&D to improve flavor, texture, and appearance.

State of the Industry: Plant-Based Meat, Seafood, Eggs, Dairy, and Ingredients, Good Food Institute (2025): This report highlights commercial landscape updates, retail and foodservice sales data, consumer insights, technical advancements, investments, and regulatory developments in the evolving plant-based foods industry.

State of the Industry: Plant-Based Meat, Seafood, Eggs, Dairy, and Ingredients, Good Food Institute (2025): Video recap of the above report.

Nutrition comparison for eight of the plant-based meat products that taste most like animal-based meat

Dr. Michael Greger on Plant-Based vs. Conventional Meat, Good Food Institute (2025): Posing a provocative question — “Are alternative proteins the ultra-processed exception?” — Dr. Michael Greger shares data on the health impacts of plant-based meats compared to the foods they’re designed to replace.

Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change? The New Yorker (2019): Tad Friend’s brilliant profile of Stanford chemistry professor Pat Brown, one of the inspirations for the founding of GFI. Pat’s statement to Tad that figuring out how to make meat from plants is “the most important scientific problem in the world” is the origin of this chapter’s title.

Our job is to figure out what [customers] want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs

History is full of technologies once dismissed as absurd or impossible that quickly became ubiquitous: from cars and planes to home computers and online shopping. The world’s top experts couldn’t imagine flight, thought personal computers were a fad, and scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever want to shop online. That same inability of most people to imagine a transformed reality is leading many to doubt the prospects for alternative meats. But once key hurdles are cleared, plant-based and cultivated meat could follow that same trajectory—from inconceivable to ubiquitous.

Pessimists Archive describes itself as “a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends… Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.” Check it out, and be sure to subscribe to the pessimists archive e-news and follow them on X.

How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation, Gregory Nemet (2019): This history of solar innovation chronicles how the cost of solar energy plummeted from 1954 through 2019 (this has continued since). Nemet documents what worked and what didn’t in getting us to where we are today. Understanding solar’s trajectory can teach us how to support other low-carbon technologies, including alternative proteins, and how to speed up innovation.

The Clean Energy Revolution is Unstoppable, Wall Street Journal (March 2025): This article argues that the clean energy transition (driven by cost declines) is essentially irreversible.

US leadership in alternative proteins could produce significant economic benefits to US companies and workers, while also generating global benefit through the shared development of novel sustainable food technologies for a growing world.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies

From agriculture to pharmaceuticals to advanced tech, most successful innovation has succeeded through public-private partnership. Countries with the strongest agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors are those that invested heavily to ensure those industries would thrive, and the U.S. has done the same for advanced technologies, leading to global tech innovation domination. With the right industry-government partnerships, alt meats could drive economic growth, revitalize agriculture, and create good jobs across the systems of food production. The meat industry sees the potential, as do politicians from across ideologies, including—in the US—Republican and Democratic members of Congress and both Trump administrations. 

Global Innovation Needs Assessment: Reducing Methane Emissions in the Global Food System, ClimateWorks Foundation and the Global Methane Hub (2023): McKinsey economists examined all of the most promising agricultural methane interventions (livestock-based; food loss and waste; rice methane; and alternative proteins), and found that 98 percent of the economic benefits ($700 billion) and two-thirds of the job benefits (83 million jobs) accrue to alternative proteins. (GFI 1-pager)

The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato (2018): This book debunks the myth of a bureaucratic state versus a dynamic private sector, showing that high-risk investments by the state are necessary to spur private sector investment and drive technological progress.

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025): Abundance makes the case for DARPA-style funding across scientific innovation: empowering program managers to place bold bets that have historically driven major leaps forward. From the Amazon synopsis: “Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.” 

A Multi-Billion-Dollar Opportunity: Repurposing Agricultural Support to Transform Food Systems (2021): FAO, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) call for governments to rethink the way agriculture is subsidized and supported. The vast majority of the over half a trillion dollars of support to agricultural producers is either price distorting or harmful to nature and health.

The World Bank’s Support for Repurposing of Agrifood Public Policies and Programs, The World Bank (2024): This report presents the World Bank’s case for using existing public policies and programs for agrifood systems in a way that helps accelerate a sustainable agrifood systems transformation.

The Future Appetite for Alternative Proteins, The Center for Strategic & International Studies (2023): In this launch event for CSIS’s report on alternative proteins, CSIS and speakers from USDA, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Schmidt Futures, and more frame alternative proteins as a means of enhancing economic resilience and competitiveness.

Clean and Competitive: Opportunities for U.S. Manufacturing Leadership in the Global Low Carbon Economy, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (2021): Achieving net-zero emissions will drive a nearly complete retooling of global manufacturing, giving the United States a chance to rebuild domestic manufacturing while converting to clean production. ITIF argues that timely R&D and deployment policies targeted to specific industries, including biotech-based meat alternatives, could expand domestic investment and employment.

The rewards of investment in alternative protein research and development are clear: realizing a food system with greater ability to provide adequate nutrition for all while mitigating global threats and enhancing US strategic competitiveness.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies

Farming over the past 50 years has consolidated, with fewer and fewer farmers making more and more food. At the same time, our agricultural systems have never been more complex or more fragile. Alternative proteins could make the global food system more resilient, sustainable, and geopolitically stable. These products can help countries to become more food self-sufficient, create more robust and resilient food supply chains that are also less vulnerable to terrorism, and reclaim farmland for higher-value crops, regenerative agriculture, and ecosystem restoration—all of which could be a boon for farming and farm families. 

Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins, The Center for Strategic & International Studies (2023): CSIS calls for the U.S. government to fund science and scaling, comparing alternative proteins to biopharma and advanced chips for artificial intelligence in terms of national security and economic benefits. (GFI 1-pager)

A New Land Dividend: The Opportunity of Alternative Proteins in Europe, Green Alliance (2024): With supportive policy, a shift towards alternative proteins can 4x the amount of land available for regenerative agriculture and free up vast quantities of land for restoration, rewilding, and agroforestry – providing alternative income for farmers and ranchers. 

2024 State of Global Policy: Public Investment in Alternative Proteins to Feed a Growing World, Good Food Institute (2025): As GFI’s signature policy report explains, governments around the world are investing in R&D and commercialization for alternative proteins to ensure their countries’ food security, boost their economies, and protect their environments. Alternative proteins’ all-time cumulative commitment from governments totals $2.1 billion – a fraction of the investment governments have made into other green technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles.

China and Global Food Policy Report 2024: Building a Sustainable and Diversified Food Supply to Foster Agrifood Systems Transformation (2024): The authors (from two Chinese universities and two Chinese government agencies) explain that alternative proteins can help China reverse the country’s steady shift toward a greater reliance on imported food. They explain the value of China’s leadership for accelerating food transformation globally and call for significant funding focused on creating taste and price competitive plant-based and cultivated meat, a swift path to regulatory approval, and encouragement of private industry to lean in on alternative proteins.

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance

In less than a decade, cultivated meat went from nothing at all to more than 100 companies producing a range of meats, all over the world. In 2016, when I tried cultivated meat for the first time in Jack and Suzy Welch’s kitchen, Suzy and I had to split one nugget. Nine years later, 60 people—including members of Congress from both parties—dined on a multi-course meal that included two cultivated meat entrees. The science continues to progress, costs continue to fall, and global momentum continues to build. Alt meat ubiquity is far from inevitable, but the scientific challenges appear to be surrmoutnable—if we bring the will.

Creating a Vibrant Food Innovation Ecosystem: How Israel is Advancing Alternative Proteins Across Sectors (2024): The World Economic Forum, Israel Innovation Authority, and GFI Israel provide a case study on how Israel is creating a collaborative and dynamic alternative protein innovation ecosystem. We call for country-led approaches to create a robust innovation environment.

In Asia, Alternative Proteins Are the New Clean Energy, Nature (2024): The authors share how the Asia-Pacific region is leading on alternative protein development, investment, and scientific progress. They call for coordinated policy, investment, and regulatory strategy in Asian markets to accelerate adoption.

Slaughter-Free Meat Hits the Grocery Shelf, Nature Biotechnology (2024): In this editorial, the editors argue that governments should promote the development of cultivated meat to achieve sustainability goals and make products more accessible.

TEA of Cultivated Meat, CE Delft (2021): The world’s first industry-based techno-economic assessment that models a large-scale cultivated meat production facility in the year 2030 shows that cultivated meat can be cost-competitive with conventional meat. 

Driving Down Costs of Fermentation-Derived Ingredients, Good Food Institute and Hawkwood Biotech (2025): This techno-economic model shows that biomass proteins are closing the price gap with several incumbent proteins, with costs of production comparable to market prices for beef and pork.

Fifty Years Hence, Winston Churchill (1931): In his nearly century-old essay, Churchill declared, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

It’s very hard to achieve things you’re not trying to do.
Joseph Romm

We finally have the tools to produce meat with a fraction of the land and water required to produce conventional meat—and with a fraction of the contribution to air and water pollution, no need for antimicrobial drugs, and no contribution to pandemic risk. The countries and companies that pioneer these technologies will reap significant economic and food security benefits. 

Scientists are optimistic, but there is still a lot of work to do, if we’re going to turn the vision into reality. In Meat’s conclusion, I discuss the screaming need that the alt meats endeavor has for scientists, policymakers, academics, entrepreneurs, meat and food industry professionals, nonprofits, think tanks, journalists, philanthropists, and everyone in between. 

Let’s get to work – Sign up below to track your local alt protein ecosystem and find your niche! 

• The Good Food Institute (U.S.-focused, but also quite a bit that’s relevant globally)
• GFI India
• GFI Israel
• GFI APAC (form in the footer)
• GFI Japan
• GFI Brazil (form in the footer)
• GFI Europe