Fake-Meat Food Fight Plant-based proteins are being attacked on TikTok and Instagram. Is this a Big Meat psyops?

"FAKE MEAT PRODUCTS ARE THE EQUIVAlent to human pet food," an Australian wellness influencer named Jacqueline Pypers wrote on Instagram last fall.

- CLINT RAINEY

"When you look at Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat," she continued, calling out the industry leaders, they are "so processed that you are hard pressed in identifying the difference" between them and dog chow. The post ticked off the common ingredients, and she concluded, "I'd actually prefer the dog food." 

Her burn is part of a surge in online attacks blasting plant-based meats as ultraprocessed imitations. They're vilified not just as pet food but also for containing ingredients that purportedly double as "laxatives" and "slug pesticides." These critics-who appear across social media's clean eating, raw food, and carnivore communities; on Ag Twitter; and among rightwing media hosts-tend to arrive at the seemingly only logical conclusion: "Why eat meat with this many ingredients when ground beef has... one?"

Pypers, emailing from her home on Queensland's coast, explains that she "began questioning the ingredients of vegan faux meats" after she graduated from college with a health degree in 2019. That led her "down a deep rabbit hole of following the money trail and who was profiting most from this movement."

To the casual viewer, the posts feel like an organic social media meme trend. But upon closer examination, the arguments start looking similar. In fact, they echo attacks from 2019 and 2020 that were created and disseminated by a Washington, D.C., meat and restaurant industry operative named Rick Berman, with the help of others, including a University of California at Davis professor whose center was devised by and gets funding from meatpackers. Those original broadsides, which for about a year circulated as print ads and op-eds in some of the country's largest newspapers, also compared alt-meat to dog food-and worse.