What’s Left After The Messy Beginning

10 years ago, if you wanted to eliminate meat from your diet, you had very few options. You could obviously go with salads, nuts and crucifers, but if you wanted a more dense source of protein, you were out of luck. And I’m talking mostly about engineered protein-rich foods. Producers were just starting to understand how to make alternative “cheese” or “meat”. There was very little research and economic activity in this area. Their initial products were mostly simplistic trials, built on top of experimental tech. Also, expensive.

The other day I went into an “eco” super store here in Valencia and, once again, I was mesmerized by the abundance, quality and affordability of meatless, protein-rich products. By the way, I’m not evangelizing a meat-free diet with this post, although I’ve been a raw vegan way before it was cool (like more than 10 years ago). I am now on an omnivorous diet, if you’re wondering, (for at least 2 years) and this is working ok for me. I chose this specific food example simply because it’s easier to illustrate my point with it.

And my point is that every beginning is messy. Every new intent to change or improve something comes with a lot of trials and errors, with costly experiments and, generally speaking, with a lot of chaos. In this specific case, as the production processes were maturing, and as the market increased, the…