The mechanical and sensory signature of plant-based and animal meat

Skyler R St Pierre; Ethan C Darwin; Divya Adil; Magaly C Aviles; Archer Date; Reese A Dunne; Yanav Lall; María Parra Vallecillo; Valerie A Perez Medina; Kevin Linka; Marc E Levenston; Ellen Kuhl

doi:10.1038/s41538-024-00330-6

The mechanical and sensory signature of plant-based and animal meat

NPJ Sci Food. 2024 Nov 15;8(1):94. doi: 10.1038/s41538-024-00330-6.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. sstpie@stanford.edu.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
³ Institute of Applied Mechanics, RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. ekuhl@stanford.edu.
⁵ Institute of Applied Mechanics, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany. ekuhl@stanford.edu.

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 at https://github.com/LivingMatterLab/CANN.