The CIA’s “plant forward” approach to meat replacement

As developing countries increase their meat consumption, some Americans are taking baby steps in the opposite direction. (Indeed, much has been made in recent years of the Millennial appetite for food served with a side of consciousness.) But American consumers on the whole, it seems, still have a ravenous appetite for dead animals. So it will likely be a long while before we get to where those developing countries found themselves not many years ago: thinking of meat more as a condiment than as a main dish.

To help get us there, the Culinary Institute of America has issued two sets of guidelines for chefs who are interested in making tasty dishes that use less meat. These “evidence-based documents”–Protein Flip and Protein Plays–are part of the CIA’s (not the spooks, the cooks) “Menus of Change” initiative, which the school runs in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (“Menus of Change” is also the name of the initiative’s annual summit–this year’s is coming up next month in New York.)

Essentially, the documents emphasize using plant-based proteins to replace some–not all–of the meat chefs generally use in their dishes. This isn’t an effort to get people to go vegetarian (at least, not necessarily), but to move away from meat as the central focus of nearly all our meals. Of the protein Americans consume, only 15% is plant-based. The rest comes from meat and milk.

One of the CIA’s tips: the “blended burger,” which combines meat and mushrooms or other vegetables to create a sandwich that (theoretically anyway) is as tasty to meat–lovers as a traditional burger.

This is all fine as far as it goes. But how big of an impact can it have in a country that appears to be changing its approach to food, while it simultaneously consumes three times as much meat as the global average?

A pretty big one, insists Greg Drescher, the CIA’s vice president of strategic initiatives and industry leadership. “Our work in this area is causing a lot of movement in our industry,” he says.

For instance, Compass USA, a unit of the giant British conglomerate Compass Group that serves schools and other institutions, has cut red meat purchases by 10 percent in a very short time since formally adopting the Menus of Change principles. And in February, the French-owned Sodexo USA announced it would stop serving all-beef hamburgers in 250 elementary and high schools nationwide, offering the “blended burger” instead. Combine Compass’ $14 billion North American business with the 7 million student meals Sodexo serves monthly, and that’s a whole lot of meat left on the table.

“The key to driving change in the $740 billion foodservice sector is to work with a variety of subsectors that are in the best position to incubate change,” Drescher says. Colleges and universities are at the top of that list.

Sure, selling college students on eating less meat and more veggies might be slightly easier than persuading the public as a whole, but it’s still a challenge, says Cheryl Garner, executive director of dining services at the University of California, Riverside. So far, the campus’s cafeterias are offering a couple of different iterations of the blended burger. But Garner, who sits on the Menus of Change executive committee, says more change is forthcoming. Students are regularly offered samples of a blended beef/mushroom burger and a turkey burger made with mushrooms and spinach. “Once they try it, they love it,” she says. “Even people who don’t like mushrooms–they don’t even know there are mushrooms in it.”