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The sustained growth of global meat consumption incentivized the development of the meat substitute industry. However, long-term global commercialization of meat substitutes faces challenges that arise from technological innovation, limited consumer awareness, and an imperfect regulatory environment. Many important questions require urgent answers. This paper presents a review of issues affecting meat substitute manufacturing and marketing, and helps to bridge important gaps which appear in the literature. To date, global research on meat substitutes focuses mainly on technology enhancement, cost reduction, and commercialization with a few studies focused on a regulatory perspective. Furthermore, the studies on meat substitute effects on environmental pollution reduction, safety, and ethical risk perception are particularly important. A review of these trends leads to conclusions which anticipate the development of a much broader market for the meat substitute industry over the long term, the gradual discovery of solutions to technical obstacles, upgraded manufacturing, the persistent perception of ethical risk and its influence on consumer willingness to accept meat substitutes, and the urgent need for constructing an effective meat substitute regulatory system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the consumption price of aquatic products will affect demand and fishermen's income. The accurate prediction of consumer price index provides important information regarding the aquatic product market. Based on the non-linear and non-smooth characteristics of fishery product price series, this paper innovatively proposes a fishery product price forecasting model that is based on Variational Modal Decomposition and Improved bald eagle search algorithm optimized Long Short Term Memory Network (VMD-IBES-LSTM). Empirical analysis was conducted using fish price data from the Department of Marketing and Informatization of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. The proposed model in this study was subsequently compared with common forecasting models such as VMD-LSTM and SSA-LSTM. The research results show that the VMD-IBES-LSTM model that was constructed in this paper has good fitting results and high prediction accuracy, which can better explain the seasonality and trends of the change of China's aquatic product consumer price index, provide a scientific and effective method for relevant management departments and units to predict the aquatic product consumer price, and have a certain reference value for reasonably coping with the fluctuation of China's aquatic product market price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's growing population requires an adequate supply of protein to maintain food security, but animal protein production is limited by the finite resources of land, fresh water, and ocean capacity. Several meat substitutes offer protein alternatives that may improve food security in less-developed economies. However, perceptions of difference in the ethical risk associated with consumption of plant-based substitutes (PM) vs. cultured meat (CM) may affect purchases of these products. This study examined differences in ethical risk perception using online survey data gathered in 2020. An ordered logit technique yielded the probabilities of changes in ethical risk perception influenced by demographic attributes, views about the technology, and adequacy of industry regulations. The results show that consumers associated PM with low ethical risk. Educated consumers were more likely to agree that the ethical risks of CM are higher than PM and to regard PM products as safer than CM. Price sensitivity made consumers more likely to agree that the ethical risks related to CM are higher than those related to PM. Ingredient safety concerns increased the ethical risk perception of CM. Consumers perceiving the meat substitute classification to be unclear were more likely to assign a higher ethical risk to CM than PM. The perception of ethical risk associated with CM was greater than that associated with PM if meat substitute industry regulations were inadequate. The results suggest a need to provide verifiable information about each type of meat substitute as well as transparent and understandable standards and rules before these products can improve protein availability and food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]