Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people ate burgers: They’d still sizzle and bleed, they’d taste great, but they wouldn’t actually contain any meat. Now it seems that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival may be more than a little delayed. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have been declining for the past two years, and a recent spate of headlines suggests that this latest wave of imitation meats may be just that: a passing fad.

A new report suggests that if the alternative protein industry has any hope of scaling up, it will need robust funding from a number of different sources, including, crucially, the public sector. The report compares plant-based meat imitations to electric vehicles, a powerful climate solution that has benefited from government support such as direct purchase subsidies.

But like the EV industry before it, alternative meat must resolve a culture war before it can grow – with or without government investment.

Despite some obvious differences, there’s one key similarity between electric cars and alternative meats: They’re designed to be a one-for-one replacement for their predecessors. Buying an electric vehicle “doesn’t require extensive consumer behavior changes” like forgoing a car entirely, said Emma Ignaszewski, one of the report’s authors. Likewise, consumers can simply opt to buy burgers that aren’t made with animal protein instead of ones that are. “You can enjoy your burger, but it can be produced with far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat,” said Ignaszewski, who is a senior associate director at the Good Food Institute, or GFI, a think tank that promotes alternative proteins.

Research has shown that animal agriculture is responsible for 11 to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Developing plant-based foods—meat substitutes that don’t contain meat—could help reduce these emissions and lead to less deforestation and land degradation. One study found that a vegan diet produced about 75 percent fewer planet-warming gas emissions than meat-rich diets.

Ignaszweski acknowledges that comparing alternative meats to electric vehicles has its limitations. “The average American buys a car once every eight years,” she said, while “meat buyers buy 60 packages at the grocery store every year. Over the course of a decade, that’s one decision point versus 600.”

But the broader point of the report, published by GFI, the Boston Consulting Group and Synthesis Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in new food technologies, is that meatless meat could catch on in the same way that electric vehicles have, if more government money were poured into the industry. (The report covers plant-based meat and seafood, as well as cultured, or “lab-grown,” meat, which is produced directly from animal cells, and fermented foods, which use microbes to produce proteins, fats and nutrients.)

In 2022, the alternative protein industry received $635 million in government subsidies globally. The Environmental Working Group, or EWG, found last year that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent just $124 million subsidizing alternative proteins since 2001. By comparison, the USDA gave at least $59 billion in various subsidies to livestock producers from 1995 to 2023.

According to GFI, increased government investment in plant-based meat would not only stimulate research and development of new technologies and scale up production, but would also send a signal to private capital markets that the alternative protein market is worth taking seriously.

“If the US is serious about engineering solutions to address climate change, the food system is a very important piece of that puzzle,” Ignaszweski said.

Other experts agree, but with caveats. David Zilberman, a longtime professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, thinks it’s “a bit of a stretch” to compare meatless meat to electric vehicles. For example, he cites the jobs created by electric vehicle manufacturing as one reason the two industries differ. But he agrees that the sector desperately needs more support. He described alternative proteins as “hugely important, especially in terms of food security, but especially in terms of climate change.” More investment would help spur the kind of innovation that would help alternative proteins achieve taste parity with conventional meat. “In the long run, if you could develop things that taste better, consumers would like them,” Zilberman said.

Still, it would take a political shift for the U.S. to support alternative proteins in the same way it has helped spur adoption of electric vehicles. Fear of climate policies that would eliminate meat from the American diet hangs over the conservative movement like a dark cloud. A 2023 poll found that Republicans said they would be less likely to vote for a hypothetical candidate who said, “It’s time for us to work together as a nation to reduce our reliance on meat and dairy and instead focus on solutions like plant-based foods and artificial meats.” In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz memorably warned that “if Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue in the entire state of Texas.” He later explained it was a joke, but the message was clear: Climate action means sacrificing precious ways of life, especially for men who see eating meat as a tenet of masculinity. This fear has led to a backlash against alternative proteins: In May, Florida and Alabama banned the production and sale of lab-grown meat.

Creating an effective narrative that challenges ingrained beliefs about meat versus plant-based diets will be key to the industry’s success, said Samantha Derrick, the founder of Plant Futures, an interdisciplinary program at UC Berkeley that aims to train students for careers in alternative proteins. “I think no matter how organized Big Ag is, even though they have a lot of money and resources, there’s a lot of potential on the alternative protein side,” Derrick said. And she believes the generation of entrepreneurs now entering the workforce can help develop a new, more compelling narrative.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, the information, the data, the research, the climate argument, it’s all on our side,” Derrick said. “And that’s something that Big Ag doesn’t have, but we do.”