2019 has been an incredible year for a niche industry: alternative meats.
Impossible Foods announced partnerships with Burger King, Qdoba, and dozens of other restaurants and franchises. Their competitor Beyond Meat started selling at restaurants including Del Taco, Subway, and most recently KFC. Both companies started the year primarily selling burgers but have since launched new products — from Beyond’s ground beef to Impossible’s sausage to Beyond’s KFC chicken.
Many restaurants and food manufacturers had been waiting to see whether the popularity of plant-based meat was a fad. As consumer interest has grown, “companies have become more aware that this is here to stay” — and they’re placing their own orders. That generates more publicity, which makes more consumers interested in the products and convinces other companies that the trend is for real.
Plant-based meat is absolutely safe — but it’s not a health food. Plant-based means it’s of ingredients that come from plants, but that doesn’t mean you’re eating a salad — they are processed foods.
The bugaboo of “global warming” has been used as a marketing tactic to push plant based meat substitutes as a protein source, but could there be a different, more troubling reason?
According to an article in zerohedge, Global authorities are bracing for a worldwide protein shortage after a quarter of earth’s pigs have been wiped out”.
African Swine Fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the world, and this threatens to create a crippling global shortage of protein as we head into 2020.
This epidemic began in China last year, and it is now also running wild in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines. But this crisis is certainly not limited to Asia. According to the Washington Post, so far in 2019 there have also been outbreaks “in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.”
African Swine Fever is extremely contagious, there is no vaccine, and there is no cure. Once it starts spreading in a certain area, there isn’t much that can be done “other than culling herds and loading carcasses into hazardous waste sites”. Literally, we are talking about an unstoppable global plague that is an existential threat to our food supply. Of course, many of us don’t eat pork, but there will also be an immense strain on supplies of beef and chicken as those that eat pork are forced to turn to other alternatives. This is an exceedingly serious situation, and with each month it is just getting worse.
China is the epicenter for this crisis, and CNN is reporting that the Chinese herd has “shrunk by around 130 million” since this epidemic first began last year…
The damage that African swine fever has wrecked on China’s pig population is hard to overstate. The country is home to half of all the pigs on the planet, and its herd has shrunk by around 130 million since the outbreak began about 13 months ago, according to a CNN Business analysis of data from the Chinese agricultural ministry. Many farmers are reluctant to restock pigs after they are slaughtered, fearing they’ll catch the disease.
To put that in perspective, there are only about 70 million pigs in the United States.
Yes, that number is for the entire country.
So, the damage that has already been done in China is beyond cataclysmic, and this crisis is very far from over. This is a global plague unlike anything we have ever seen before.
More than one-quarter of Earth’s pigs have been wiped out by the virulent disease and this virus is still raging out of control.