protein

Meat is significantly more affordable in America than it is in Europe, where prices are, on average, twice as high, and Asia, where many people can barely afford to buy it at all, says the 2017 meat-price index, released by Caterwings, a UK-based business-to-business catering service.

The giant U.S. food processor Tyson Foods launched a $150-million venture-capital fund "to invest in high-tech products and services that could refresh its stable of products, which include chicken, hot dogs and hamburgers," reports the Wall Street Journal. One focus of the fund will be alternative forms of protein, a field that includes plant-based foods, insect-based protein products, meat grown from self-reproducing cells and meat from 3-D printers.

One of the biggest meatpackers in the world, Tyson Foods, "appears to be the first big meat company to invest in a business that, among other things, aims to reduce consumption of chicken, beef and pork by replacing it with plant proteins, says the New York Times. Tyson purchased a 5-percent share of Beyond Meat, based in California.

“A group of 40 investors managing $1.25 trillion in assets have launched a campaign to encourage 16 global food companies” to change to plant-based proteins in light of the “material” risks of industrial meat farming, says Reuters. Among the companies targeted were Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Unilever, Tesco, Walmart, Costco Wholesale Corporation and Whole Foods.

Insects have long been a source of protein in China, Japan, Mexico and tropical regions, but in the U.S. eating bugs has been easy to dismiss as little more than a fad. Not anymore. Over the last five years the edible-insect business has surged, and is now big enough that it has it’s own lobbying firm, reports Quartz.

The world is facing a 70-percent “crop gap” between the calories available in 2006 and the expected caloric demand in 2050, says a report out by the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Officials from Canada and the United States will launch the Protein Highway initiative this summer to brand six U.S. states and three Canadian provinces as the region with potential to become the world's biggest supplier of protein, says the Pierre (SD) Capital Journal.

If there are artisanal butchers, there ought to be tasty, locally made meat alternatives, writes Kristina Johnson at Civil Eats, pointing to surveys that show sizable interest in the products.

Science Daily says a field test conducted by the University of California-Davis "has demonstrated that elevated levels of carbon dioxide inhibit plants' assimilation of nitrate into proteins, indicating that the nutritional quality of food crops is at risk as climate change intensifies."