Fake Meat Might Feed Your Dog and Save the Planet

In America’s food-obsessed landscape, the quickest route to a new idea is to look for something already being done—and then make it vegan. Wild Earth Inc., a startup based in Berkeley, California, is doing that to pet food with lab-created proteins. Translated, that means fake meat for Fido.

The stakes are far from small potatoes. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own four-legged friends, a paw-dropping 184 million dogs and cats to be precise. To feed this mass of tail-wagging companions, we spend almost $30 billion annually. Pet food—predominantly animal-meat products—represents as much as 30 percent of all meat consumption in America.

According to a first-of-its-kind study on how that sweet blond lab on your kitchen floor impacts the environment, UCLA professor Gregory Okin writes that if American pets were to establish a sovereign nation, it would rank fifth in global meat consumption. This nation of pooches and kitties consumes about 19 percent as many calories as humans, but because their diets are higher in protein, their total animal-derived calorie intake amounts to about 33 percent that of humans.