The home of the New York striploin is coming for your meat.
Food accounts for 20% of the Big Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions – parking it in third spot, greenhouse gas–wise, behind the city’s traffic jams and drafty old buildings. “But all food is not created equal,” said Mayor Eric Adams in a press release. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to the emissions crisis lies in meat and dairy products.”
Under former mayor Bill de Blasio, NYC committed to cutting the city government’s food-related emissions by 25% by 2030. This April, Adams raised that target to 33%. In doing so, he said, “We have to talk about beef” – a comment that The New York Times called “an unusually frank admission from a national political leader that Americans will have to eat differently if they want to rein in climate change.”
The beef industry tops environmentalists’ hit lists due to its high carbon footprint, links to deforestation and, of course, the everyday methane from the back end of cattle.
As Adams declared war on both carbon and beef, the (mostly) vegan mayor also announced that New York will start tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption. Adams is working with C40 Cities, a network of 96 cities collaborating on urgent climate action. Some 14 cities, including London, Paris, Montreal and Toronto, are already tracking the footprint of food, with the shared goal of producing a “planetary health diet” for all by 2030.
New York schools already serve vegan meals on “Plant Powered Fridays” (cheese sandwiches are available on request), and hospital patients now receive plant-centric foods as the default option at the city’s public hospitals. The city is urging the private, institutional and non-profit sectors to follow its lead through a "voluntary challenge" to reduce their food-based emissions by 25% by 2030.
Naturally, Adams’s announcement bent some people out of shape. “My personal purchasing choices are NOT up for approval by politicians, banks or anyone else,” said one anonymous correspondent at NYC news site Gothamist. “Pay with cash!”
But the plant-based cause is getting support from at least one everyday hero. Actor Robert Downey Jr., who plays Iron Man/Tony Stark in Marvel movies, is a vegan on a mission to find a no-compromise beef substitute. “If plant-based foods are going to make a real impact on sustainability, we need an approach that’s both delicious and nutritious,” he said in a statement last year. His philanthropic and venture capital arm, the California-based FootPrint Coalition, supports promising climate solutions, from building software to green hydrogen. Recently it invested in Chunk Foods, an Israeli start-up that ferments soy, wheat and micro-organisms to produce a 25-gram portion that has the colour, texture and apparently the taste of real steak. It's currently being piloted in New York restaurants.
The three-year-old company is using its recent US$15-million capital raise to build a production plant capable of making “millions of steaks per year,” says Chunk founder Amos Golan. But his “steaks” have already been tested in New York City restaurants. “There was unanimous praise,” claims a FootPrint executive. “The product hits all the marks.”