Abstract
There is a worldwide concern regarding the supply of protein source for both human food and animal feed. In this context, meat has a major impact on the environment and consumers and health professionals have been expressing growing concern over high meat consumption. In this respect, meat analogue products - defined as compounds structurally similar to meat, however, differing in composition - have been attracting ever-increasing attention and interest of the environment and health concerned consumers. Furthermore, the number of people identifying as vegetarian and vegan have been increasing as they look for more sustainable options due to a unique lifestyle. In this chapter, the main aspects of bottom-up and top-down strategies are presented and discussed. The literature describes different approaches to simulate animal meat, such as cell culturing, mycoprotein and spinning techniques (bottom-up strategies) extrusion, proteins and metal-cation-precipitated polysaccharides, freeze structuring and shear cells technology (top-down strategies). Meat analogues have to present typical sensory and nutritional properties of animal meat for both vegetarian and non-vegetarian consumers. Thus, food scientists ought to test texturization techniques, develop more industrialized meat analogue products, evaluate the scalability of production process and quality control of meat analogues, improving the existing technologies and developing new ones that meet consumer demands.
Keywords: Bottom-Up Strategy, Cell Culturing, Extrusion, Polysaccharides, Protein, Shear Cells Technology, Top-Down Strategy.
