Characterization of the local mechanical texture of animal meat and meat replacements using multi-point indentation

Over consumption of animal meat is a large contributor to environmental change and should be reduced. This reduction can be achieved by replacing high environmental impact animal meat with an alternative produced from plant-based products or innovative in vitro techniques that have negligible environmental impact. However, the general public will likely consume only meat replacements that mimic the aesthetic qualities of animal meat, with a challenging parameter to tune being the local mechanical response which defines the food texture. In this work, we present a method to characterize the local mechanics of food by using multi-point indentation to spatially measure the local elastic modulus. The resulting heterogeneous mechanical maps are quantified using the established auto-correlation method Moran's I, which can be used to quantify the resemblance of food texture between samples. The presented technique holds the potential to correlate production parameters such as shear rate and chemical composition with perceived food texture.