It’s gettin’ deep out here, folks, and I’m not talking about the snow. I’m talking about the rhetoric that’s heating up around politics — the politics of meat and meat analogues.

Because while consumers have made it clear they see plant-based substitutes as an option in addition to meat, those products’ marketers seem hell-bent on making them choose one or the other.

The spark that started the most recent flame war was the full-page ad that the Center for Consumer Freedom took in The New York Times asking, “What’s hiding in your plant-based meat?” It focuses on the fact that analogues a heavily processed products, and calls out some of the items on a sample ingredient list: methylcellulose (in most analogues), titanium dioxide (Beyond Meat’s “chicken” ), tertiary butylhydroquinone (Morningstar Farms veggie “bacon”) and disodium inosinate (Boca Burgers, others).

It is not a new message for CCF, which has pointed a finger at analogues’ ingredient list for some time. Further, at the recent Good Food Conference several analogue proponents embraced the “processed” adjective, pointing out (correctly) that nearly all food is processed in some sense.

Nevertheless, the NYT ad went over like a skunk at a garden party. The analogue brand messengers started shooting.

“Nobody judges the safety and wholesomeness of a recipe by the number of ingredients. Their attention, as it should be, is not on the number but the choice of ingredients,” said Rachel Konrad, Impossible Foods’ chief communications officer.

Moreover, CCF is a “dark money” group, a “shadowy non-profit” that protects the involvement of lobbyist Richard Berman, according to an article on Eater, which also says, “Impossible thinks Berman’s involvement means the beef lobby is terrified for the future of their industry, and scrambling to save their buns.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. For one, CCF is no more or less of a “dark money” group than any other with industry lobbying ties. About 20% of funds donated to political campaigns originate with unnamed sources using loopholes in campaign financing laws. The growing pool of anonymous funders behind messaging is a threat, for sure, but don’t hang the “dark money” tag on one group when it’s the system that’s broken.

And Berman has represented individual meat companies and the industry for decades. His role in the public discourse is not some Hail Mary choice of an industry on the run.

To be sure, the scary-sounding chemicals on CCF’s CleanFoodFacts website are common in the food supply chain and were long ago declared GRAS, if sometimes with limits. But they’re fair game, considering that many analogue fans also are devotees of Michael Pollan, who in 2008 said, “Don’t buy products with more than five ingredients or any you can’t easily pronounce.”

Neither side in this exchange is advancing consumer understanding. What they are in danger of doing is alienating those they seek to influence. Most analogue buyers are meat-eaters, and shopping trips that include analogues are four times more likely to include meat. Consumers want both, and want to feel good about both.

Give the consumers what they want.

Git yer hip boots on!

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