Even though meat production is expected to double by 2050, an unlikely bunch is now investing in the tofurkeys, tofus and other meat substitutes of the world -- the techies of Silicon Valley.
Carmel DeAmicis, a reporter at the Pando Daily who covers startups, explained to HuffPost Live that tech investors are now looking into new sectors, like food, because of the increasing competition in Silicon Valley.
"They feel like there’s a lot of room there to try to transform practices," DeAmicis explained to host Alonya Minkovski. "Whether it’s making food that actually tastes like chicken and trying to grow that into a huge multi-national corporation, or there are also a lot of other companies out there getting a lot of investment money, and fake meat is not the only one."
In 2012, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone invested in the vegan startup Beyond Meat.
"These guys are coming at the meat analogue industry not as a novelty kind of thing or hippy dippy," Stone, a longtime vegan, said at the time. "They were coming at it from this big science, super practical, scalable angle. They were saying, 'We want to get into the multi-billion-dollar meat industry with a plant-based meat.'"
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation about whether fake meat is in danger of becoming Frankenfood: