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Abstract Eating less meat is associated with a healthier body and planet. Yet, we remain reluctant to switch to a plant-based diet, largely due to the sensory experience of plant-based meat. Food scientists characterize meat using a double compression test, which only probes one-dimensional behavior. Here we use tension, compression, and shear tests–combined with constitutive neural networks–to automatically discover the behavior of eight plant-based and animal meats across the entire three-dimensional spectrum. We find that plant-based sausage and hotdog, with stiffnesses of 95.9 ± 14.1 kPa and 38.7 ± 3.0 kPa, successfully mimic their animal counterparts, with 63.5 ± 45.7 kPa and 44.3 ± 13.2 kPa, while tofurky is twice as stiff, and tofu is twice as soft. Strikingly, a complementary food tasting survey produces in nearly identical stiffness rankings for all eight products (ρ= 0.833,p = 0.015). Probing the fully three-dimensional signature of meats is critical to understand subtle differences in texture that may result in a different perception of taste. Our data and code are freely available athttps://github.com/LivingMatterLab/CANN
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Mimicking Mechanics: A Comparison of Meat and Meat Analogs
The texture of meat is one of the most important features to mimic when developing meat analogs. Both protein source and processing method impact the texture of the final product. We can distinguish three types of mechanical tests to quantify the textural differences between meat and meat analogs: puncture type, rheological torsion tests, and classical mechanical tests of tension, compression, and bending. Here, we compile the shear force and stiffness values of whole and comminuted meats and meat analogs from the two most popular tests for meat, the Warner–Bratzler shear test and the double-compression texture profile analysis. Our results suggest that, with the right fine-tuning, today’s meat analogs are well capable of mimicking the mechanics of real meat. While Warner–Bratzler shear tests and texture profile analysis provide valuable information about the tenderness and sensory perception of meat, both tests suffer from a lack of standardization, which limits cross-study comparisons. Here, we provide guidelines to standardize meat testing and report meat stiffness as the single most informative mechanical parameter. Collecting big standardized data and sharing them with the community at large could empower researchers to harness the power of generative artificial intelligence to inform the systematic development of meat analogs with desired mechanical properties and functions, taste, and sensory perception.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2320933
- PAR ID:
- 10600992
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Foods
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 2304-8158
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3495
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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