FRENCH gourmets are well known for their exigencies over high quality meats and seafood. Restaurant chefs here are reputed for their refinements and never ending inventions. To a real connoisseur, a steak is no good if it is fried too crisp and does not bleed when knifed in the middle.

But a World Health Organization study on meat consumption made public last Monday has brought in a few shivers in the world of haute cuisine in France. The report says there are no exceptions among beef, mutton, lamb or chicken meats as they all contain elements that can cause cancer.

The news is catastrophic in a country where exceptional pains are taken to develop dishes with their own particular tastes and appetising perfumes. To take only one example, the foie gras is the result of raising a special variety of ducks in a very limited moving space and feeding them with highly rich edible elements. In a few months, heavy alimentation and lack of exercise turn the birds’ livers into oversized, soft material with a unique taste.

The anti-meat lobby on the other hand is promoting a new market for ‘meat without meat’ products that are basically developed from soya beans. Concoctions resembling minced meat steaks with the appearances and perfumes of beef or chicken are already being sold in limited quantities but their promoters say the business is likely to attain the figure of some five billion euros in the European Union countries by 2020.

Never far behind when it is a question of big business, a few American figures are already involved in the experiment. A US company called Memphis Meats has the backing of the Microsoft boss Bill Gates, the Virgin Media founder Richard Branson and the former General Motors head Jack Welch.

In a recent interview to Bloomberg TV, Branson said within the next 30 years there will exist no need to kill animals to obtain food as vegetable-based products will not only have the same tastes as beef, mutton or chicken meats but will be free from all cancer causing elements.

Memphis Meats by the way is investing some $22 million in a research that would help develop these varied qualities of ‘meat without meat’ in the next few years.

As far as France is concerned, the National Institute of Agronomical Research (Inra) bases its conclusions more on facts and figures than on moral or poetic conceptions: “In France 40 per cent of the meat sold by the butchers comes from cows that are still good food but are considered too old for milking. Then, if you talk about pollution, the industries manufacturing the artificial meats will be producing their own negative effects on the atmosphere, hence rendering the argument of a clean world without animal meat sound a bit illogical.”

The Inra report continues: “Finally, production of all types of artificial meats would play only a modest role in reducing the effects of greenhouse gases and nitrate pollution; it will also have a limited interest in reducing fossil energy consumption.”

The haute cuisine enthusiasts in France have their own reasons to believe that all talk of a world without meats is either hypocritical or pure nonsense.

Rezad Sharif, son of Algerian parents but born in Paris, educated in gastronomy and currently very successfully running a high standard restaurant in the Parisian suburb of Asnières, says: “Can you imagine people sitting here and devouring heaps of soya beans and drinking coca-cola instead of savouring the roast beef, fried chicken and fresh salmon dishes that I painstakingly prepare for them? They enjoy my food, sipping at the same time the high quality red, white and rosé wines or champagne that I spend a lot of time and energy procuring for them.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2017