Impossible solutions: Competing values in marketing alternative proteins for sustainable food systems
Section snippets
Introduction—Separating meat from animals
In the modern agri-food environment, there are many conflicting or competing values at the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. As the opening quote by Schlottmann and Sebo (2018) explains, determining which food systems are best is a complex and multifaceted matter. Creators of alternative proteins (APs) claim to provide solutions, so-called promissory narratives, to the messy and complex problems in our food system. Through these promissory narratives APs are said to offer
Marketization of APs and convention theory —novel foods in mainstream markets
Developers of APs seek to capture market shares at the expense of other commodities. Other researchers focused on APs argue that through both discursive and material interventions developers and proponents of APs “strive to enact new food realities, and in the process present animal agriculture as something to be escaped by technological means” (Jönsson et al., 2019, 81). While APs may strive to present specific promissory narratives, less attention has focused on how APs actually attach
Methods and data—companies promotion of APs through websites and tweets
Data for this paper is a content analysis of three U.S. based companies' websites and their twitter feeds. The three companies are Beyond Meat, Impossible™ Foods, and Memphis Meats. The three companies chosen were selected as exemplars of APs in the United States. Two of these companies, Impossible™ Foods and Beyond Meat, are leaders in plant-based meats that use biomimicry to create flavors and textures that imitate eating meat (Cameron and O'Neill, 2019a). The third, Memphis Meats,
Company websites—the dominance of civic, market, and industrial conventions
The content analysis of company websites overwhelmingly reveals that the environment and animal welfare (civic convention) are the main mission behind these AP companies. In the mission statement of Beyond Meat (Beyond Meat, 2019a, n.p.) they state “By shifting from animal, to plant-based meat, we are creating one savory solution that solves four growing issues attributed to livestock production: human health, climate change, constraints on natural resources and animal welfare.” A similar theme
Discussion—Advancing APs without changing consumers’ routines
While the websites of the three AP companies examined continue to focus on market conventions and offer their promissory narratives that fit largely within civic conventions, the twitter feeds demonstrate a significant expansion across all six conventions. There is a clear emphasis on market and industrial conventions, but also opinion and domestic conventions are prominent. Market conventions emphasize money and monetary exchange as defining value with buyers and sellers competing over scarce
Conclusions—Distributed responsibility?
AP companies resort to multiple justifications—market, industrial, opinion, and domestic conventions—in the marketization of these novel foods to be accepted as legitimate, useful, and/or signifying. In this sense, our results are similar to recent studies that have focused on food waste reduction campaigns among food retailers in the U.K. (Swaffield et al., 2018). Far from relying on a moral imperative to protect the environment, U.K. food retailers required a combination of market, opinion,
Credit author statement
Elizabeth Ransom is the sole author of this manuscript. She was responsible for conceptualization, methodology, analysis, and writing of the manuscript.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Nadine Arnold and the other editors of this special issue and three anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Also, thanks to my two research assistants, Jordan Grandy and Andrea Magana, for their work in coding of the three companies' websites and twitter feeds. Finally, thank you to my Rock Ethics Institute colleagues for providing feedback on a draft of this paper.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the
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