No-meat bubble. Or the new offshore wind.

This month saw the latest addition to a growing body of research, and I use the term loosely, in support of meat alternatives as a way of reducing humankind’s destructive impact on the environment.

The addition’s authors claim, based on modelling (what else) that if we substitute half of the meat and dairy we consume, emissions from land use and agriculture emissions would decline by 31% from 2020 levels by 2050. Problem solved. Well, kind of.

Leaving aside any misgivings one might start having at the sight of the word “modelling”, the study, like many others before it, proposes meat alternatives as a way of us kicking our bad meat habit because that’s what it has come down to now.

In fairness, the authors recognise the nutritional benefits of meat consumption but are quick to highlight the drawbacks of overconsumption. To reduce overconsumption, they propose we go alternative. But what are the alternatives?

One, of course, is plant-based meat substitutes that I wrote about here. Tragically, plant-based meat substitutes haven’t been doing so great lately. In a recent note, TD Cowen said one of the two majors in the field, Beyond Meat, faced an existential threat.

The reason it is facing this threat is… its product. No, really. “Beyond Meat is losing market share in a declining refrigerated plant-based meat alternatives category. Management tried lowering prices to attract more consumers, but sales continued to fall,” the TD Securities division said in its note.

That’s unfortunate, especially since the trouble is not reserved to Beyond Meat, as Impossible Foods employees earlier this year saw the value of their shares in the company plummet by 89%. Talk on the street is that the plant-based meat substitutes market has reached the point of oversaturation.

But the makers of plant-based sludge-turned-solid are not the only ones vying for a share of the enormous global meat market. The rising stars on this market, apparently, are the makers of so-called cultivated meat. It’s just too bad they’ll probably collapse before they’ve even properly taken off.