The fake meat industry is dying.

In August, Wired ran the headline, Fake Meat is Bleeding, but It’s Not Dead Yet after weak sales for plant-based meats surfaced.

Fake meat popularity grew rapidly after its debut, partly due to the gimmick of guilt-free burgers. However, as a market share of total food sales, it has remained a niche product. Niche might be a bit kind. Fringe is probably more accurate. It was always an odd sell, undercutting vegan and vegetarian ideology by chasing those who had turned their back on meat for ethical reasons but, on voting day, could be found loitering in the smoke of a democracy sausage BBQ – inhaling but not swallowing.

This decline should not be happening. Our moral overlords from the Church of Climate Change have been formalising their demands that we ‘eat ze bugs’ and plant-based-bacon to save the world. Perhaps in direct retaliation to the global green agenda, people are actively defying the unappetising Net Zero diet…

The tiny fake meat market share has not vanished entirely, shifting to plant-based replacements. Part of the problem relates to the artificial and over-processed nature of fake meats which are being marketed to a customer base that values ‘natural food’ as its core value system. It’s never been a good fit.

As the Wired article hints, ‘Genetically modified burgers that bleed!’ probably wasn’t the world’s best marketing initiative for squeamish vegans unless we’re talking about the boyfriends of vegan women who gave up steak for a shag.

Apparently ‘flexitarians’ were the original target market – the vegetarians who can’t resist biting into the odd cow much like the vaper who gets drunk once a week and smokes a pack of cigarettes.

Given that fake meat has been revealed as not particularly environmentally sustainable, not healthy, and not tasty – there’s not a lot left to win people over… As for brainwashing the next generation, Gen Z’s are typically Uber-Eating McDonald’s whilst smashing their keyboards in praise of Net Zero. Like rich kids who cheer on communism, it’s all talk. There is no profit in wishful thinking.

History shows that there are only two reasons a population gives up meat – either there’s some sort of catastrophic economic depression going on and people can’t afford to be carnivores, or the local religion tells them they’ll burn in the fires of eternity if they gnaw on a T-bone. Climate Change is trying to sell the latter, but the whole Global Boiling narrative is stumbling a tad as floods and cold weather drown out Christmas.

In an article from the BBC, a dentist is quoted saying of fake meat, ‘You don’t know what they are, you trust they’ve been investigated but when a burger oozes this red liquid which is meant to be blood, you want to know what it is.’

That’s a relatable concern. If my asparagus started bleeding, I’d have questions.

When a study got around to asking the vegans why they had drifted away from fake meat, nearly half blamed the taste followed by artificial additives and its overly processed nature. The last two are insurmountable problems for the product.

The Daily Mail gave an hilarious account of the fake meat experience, writing:

It was the smell that hit me first: the stale yet also sterile aroma of factory processing. The puce-coloured patties looked deeply unappetising – and as I fried one, it exuded a salty-sweet pool of oil, probably because it contained more fat than protein.

On the palate, the texture felt weird; a chewy substance that didn’t break down as real meat does. Instead it became watery in my mouth and left a horrible taste, as if I’d licked a barbecue rack that had over-wintered in the garden – or burnt some dog food. I couldn’t wait to get all traces of it out [of] my kitchen.

The problem with fake meat is similar to that of recycled water. Governments and marketing companies use the ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ line to sell it, but people instinctively know there’s something gross about drinking re-purposed sewage just as they know meat printed in a lab from bits of Frankenstein protein probably isn’t ideal for a predator sitting at the top of the evolutionary food chain.

If you’ve ever watched a near-naked vegan activist pour fake blood over themselves next to a burger joint with the sizzle of bacon saturating the air – you know who won the argument.

Like it or not, humans are a sharp-toothed species that spent millions of years perfecting the art of tool-making for the express purpose of catching, killing, and cooking animals. Sometimes we got a little confused and ate rival tribes but mostly we were after the animals. Then we grew smarter and invented farming to keep the food in paddocks. Much easier.

Suffice to say, if it tastes good – it came from a paddock.

If it tastes like licking a Petri dish – it’s a science experiment with a marketing department.

This Christmas, my ham, turkey, chicken, and duck are coming from a nearby paddock. The lobster and prawns are fresh off the surf… If that means docking a few points off my Carbon Credit Score, so be it.