Studies on Meat Alternatives with a Focus on Structuring Technologies

Developing meat alternatives has recently become a popular topic in the food and research communities. In this review, we summarized and focused on various structuring technologies to produce meat alternatives obtained from plants, cultured cells, and edible insects. Plant-based meats were mainly produced by soybeans and wheat, and the texture of meat alternatives obtained from plant sources was improved using extrusion, shear cell, and electrospinning technologies. Cultured meats were mainly produced by stem cell technology using 3D bioprinting, microcarriers, and scaffolds to form aligned tissues. Most edible insects were not only used as alternative protein sources using heating or freeze-drying processes; they also produced oils using supercritical extraction and solvent extraction processes producing meat alternatives. This review provides information about the current research on meat alternatives to improve their structures.