Dr. Marco Springmann, an advocate for plant-based foods serves as a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute. He recently concluded a study on the environmental impact of various foods including red meat, milk, legume-based alternatives to meat. With respect to cell-cultured product he commented “For years this approach has been hailed as a dietary magic bullet which would retain all the pleasure of meat without the ethical environmental drawbacks.” Dr. Springman maintains that the entire concept of cell-cultured meat is a “costly fantasy”. He notes that technologies are unproven and that even with scale-of-production, and even if it has equivalent organoleptic qualities to conventional beef, pork and chicken, will not be competitive on price. He maintains that, “Rather than throwing more money at developing novel processed food products, it would be more beneficial to think about strategies to integrate unprocessed foods into diets”. This will require a meal perspective instead of concentrating on individual food items.
Dr. Springmann is evidently a vegetarian, converted to eating plant-based diets as a graduate student in the U.S. His dietary preferences were based on a fear of cardiovascular disease and developing cancer. He has advocated taxes on red meat and his studies suggest that western nations need to reduce consumption of red meat by 90 percent to have any effect on climate change.
He is less than complimentary over highly processed plant-based alternatives to conventional meat. He states, “Rather than replacing a burger with another burger, he suggests that meals should be prepared from legumes such as a bean chili or stir fry with tempeh.” He is an advocate of alternatives to milk, based on their low environmental impact. He acknowledges that substitutes such as almond milk provide only a quarter of the calories of cow’s milk but generate only 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emission of fluid milk.
Although a proponent of consuming plant-based meals, his approach is essentially analytical, considering the quantifiable inputs and environmental effects of supplying protein from plant and animal sources.