Plant-based meat: A substitute for natural meat

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• By Prathima HS

Plant-based meat is one of the on-going current trends in the food industry. Plant-based meat is a meat analogue for natural meat. It tries to mimic the natural animal meat by using plant proteins that are extracted from soybean, wheat gluten, tofu, lentils and tempeh. The plant-based meat is made as fibrous as natural animal meat by heating and cooling the plant proteins and also the texture, taste, odour and colour are brought matching to the animal meat by adding the natural additives, such as beet extract, leghaemoglobin, etc. The reason behind plant-based meat’s development is the emerging health, and nutritional reasons. Many people around the world are turning into vegetarians owing to health reasons, as the consumption of animal meat results in obesity and cardiovascular diseases in many. Therefore, plant-based meat can be an absolute solution for this. But wide engineered or processed nutrients and higher sodium levels are the limitations found in the plant-based meat. There are nearly 3,50,000 accepted plant species on earth and out of them, only 30,000 plants are edible. Hence, new and improved ingredients for plant-based meat products can be obtained from selective edible plants following intensive research. This will provide an opportunity to discover plant proteins and their desirable properties that are suitable for producing plant-based meat products. It is difficult to draw the conclusion that, plant-based meats are healthier but choosing them over regular meat occasionally might reduce meat-intake level.

Keywords: Plant-based, Meat analogue, Meat-free, Meat substitute, Plant protein

Image source:
Vegan meat pie by Pengo, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vegan_Meat_Pie_01_Pengo.jpg

Citation:
Prathima HS. Plant-based meat: A substitute for natural meat. The Torch. 2021. 2 (2).
Available from: https://www.styvalley.com/pub/magazines/torch/read/plant-based-meat-a-substitute-for-natural-meat/.

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