The Impossible Burger: Staring Down the Barrel of a Meatless Future?

By Zack Boehm on July 6, 2016

Stanford-Professor-turned-foodtrepeneur Patrick Brown, along with a cadre of biochemist gastro-tinkerers at his startup Impossible Foods, have had a breakthrough. They call it “The Impossible Burger”. It’s a hamburger that tastes identical to the best premium burger-shop beef burger, that looks nigh on identical to a conventional hamburger, that behaves identically to a beef burger when cooked (because of some surprisingly intuitive biochemical wizardry, the thing actually bleeds), but that is made entirely out of raw plant product.

The Impossible Burger, via impossiblefoods.com

In a recent appearance on the Ezra Klein Show podcast, Brown explained that in order to start a meat substitute company whose constitutional ethic was an uncompromising commitment to rendering a perfectly meaty flavor, he had to ask a simple question: what actually makes meat taste like meat? With a background in research, Brown decided to subject this query to scientific methodology. He and his team systematically deconstructed the “meat” flavor into its constituent molecular parts, a variegated constellation of aromas and notes, and then carefully reconstituted that flavor using plant material. The result, according to the Impossible Foods website, is the first molecularly perfect beef simulacrum, a burger that “has the look, feel, smell, sizzle, and most important, taste of a great burger.”

While The Impossible Burger is a tremendous achievement for Brown and his team, and huge news for vegetarians with long-suppressed burger lust, it may also suggest a larger trend, an inflection point in the history of human’s industrialized food production.

There is, perhaps, no human behavior that is as relentlessly destructive to the global environment as our production and consumption of animal food products. The evidence to support that claim is overwhelming, and virtually no ecosystem is spared. More mechanized and efficient industrial fishing has led to a staggering depletion of salt and freshwater fish population. There are countless horror stories about the abhorrent treatment of poultry. Enormous swaths of land and resources are required for the upkeep of livestock. Climate scientists generally agree that industrial meat production is among, if not the single greatest cause of global climate change, and that no campaign to redress that changing climate has a reasonable chance of succeeding without addressing entrenched, massively deleterious methods of producing meat. The conventional ways of meat production have wrought unthinkable harm on our environment.

A cattle farm in Brazil, via revolve.media

That is something particularly difficult to admit for a reckless carnivore like me.

In that same podcast, Brown explained that his intention to create the perfect plant-based hamburger substitute was fueled by the belief that burger consumers, a loyal cohort who have never had any real reason to disavow beef, will only make the switch if the substitute is functionally indistinguishable from the original in taste, texture, and appearance. Where other ersatz beef products have had their own distinct flavors and have been marketed primarily towards vegetarians and vegans, Brown wanted to create a product that had a material shot of enticing avowed beef lovers to convert to a healthier and, importantly, more sustainable alternative.

via inhabitat.com

While we’re still in the nascent stages of the meat-substitute revolution, The Impossible Burger proves that tastiness and responsibility in production are not mutually exclusive ideas. If other canny food pioneers adopt Brown’s philosophy of flawless substitutes devised to compete directly against the original meat product itself, it isn’t outlandish to think that, in the not too distant future, sustainable alternatives will have deposed a majority of the animal products that humans around the world are so ravenous to consume. It may be difficult to imagine burgeoning start-ups challenging gargantuan, multinational corporate food company apparatuses in any significant way, but smart, ecologically responsible companies like Impossible Foods may be the only way to avert the literally catastrophic environmental consequences that our current modes of food production seem poised to wreak. The future looks bleak, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

When I first heard about The Impossible Burger, it elicited a heaping helping of the carnivore guilt that I usually feel after seeing a PETA add or eating an especially meaty meal with zealous vegetarian. I sometimes wonder, if substitute products like The Impossible Burger are indeed the future of food, how posterity will judge us meat eaters. History abounds with people behaving stupidly because they think there’s no other way. Burning witches, lobotomies, hair metal, bloodletting. The primary difference is that those were uniformly painful and traumatic, while eating a delicious burger borders on the religiously sublime. Future plant-based or lab-grown or 3D-printed burger eaters may look back and judge us as barbarians who degraded our environment in profound ways just for some fleeting umami gratification. I only hope that our production and consumption habits change dramatically enough that there is an ecologically healthy world upon which future generations can levy those judgements.

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