Four companies own nearly 80% of the plant-based meat market.
“Plant-based meat brands are hardly an alternative to the current system if they continue to entrench corporate power,” concludes the Food & Water Watch report. “It shows the futility of voting with your dollar,” Starbuck said.
It’s a concern echoed in the IPES-Food report, which says corporate control threatens to undermine gains from reducing reliance on animals by replicating some of the problems of the traditional meat industry, including mass-produced, monocultured ingredients and energy-consuming methods. Increases in meat alternatives could “reinforce the power relations that keep current systems in place, and fail to address the question of how systemic changes will be achieved,” notes the report.