MarketScale Food & Beverage 01/15/2019: All of the Meat, None of the Animals

Imagine a future where people still eat meat but it no longer comes from meat. What would be the ramifications of that throughout the food and beverage industry? It’s one of the questions posed in this week’s episode of MarketScale’s Food & Beverage podcast. Zak Weston, Corporate Engagement Specialist for The Good Food Institute, joins the show this week to explain how this hypothetical is closer to reality than you might think.

Also on this week’s podcast is a conversation with Caroline Weeks, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist at Mayo Clinic Children’s Center. She joins the show to explain the latest trends in nutrition and how restaurants can fill their menus with healthy (and tasty!) items.

Manufacturing Healthy Deliciousness

If your phone can also take photos, answer questions, record audio, and play games, is it still a “phone”? What if your meat could have bad cholesterol replaced with good, have saturated fat replaced with unsaturated fat, and have fiber built in? Would it cease to be meat? On today’s podcast, I had a chat with Corporate Engagement Specialist for The Good Food Institute, Zak Weston. We discussed the physical benefits of the new trend in “clean meat”, the cultural benefits of addressing the worldwide hunger issue, and the fact that bacon could be good for you, very soon.

“The baseline reason why most meat is very destructive, from an environmental standpoint, is just that animals are very inefficient converters of plant matter that they consume to meat,” says Weston. “Take chicken, as an example. Chicken is one of the most efficient meats out there, but it still takes 9 calories of energy put into a chicken in the form of feed, to get 1 calorie of meat out. So, for all of the decades we’ve put into breeding chickens to be efficient feed converters, that’s still a tremendous amount of food waste.”

The Latest in Nutrition and How Restaurants Can Take Advantage

The new year leads many to reevaluate the food that they put into their bodies. This can make life hard for some restaurants, who see their business dip as patrons move towards the latest health trends. Caroline Weeks, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist at Mayo Clinic Children’s Center, joins this week’s episode of the podcast to talk about the latest trends in nutrition and explain how restaurants can capitalize rather than suffer from them.

“If you incorporate more color into your dish…it’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but you’re also packing the dish with good nutrients,” says Weeks. This advice is especially helpful during this time of the year when people are paying special attention to their nutrition.

In the ever-changing and fast paced world of dietary trends, Weeks explains the latest trends in health so you can keep your menu ahead of the curve. “You should always make your decisions based on evidence-based practice,” she says. “That’s why registered dietitians are employed to do what they do.”

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