Inside the impossible burger: is the meat-free mega trend as good as we think?
Ibit into the Impossible Burger and was immediately filled with awe. I lifted my head to the bartender and, with my mouth full, croaked: “This is vegan?” I was just coming off two long days of hearings at the US Department of Agriculture, where the future of food was discussed in great detail but taste was scarcely mentioned. Now, sitting at my favorite New Jersey bar, eating something satisfying that nothing died for, was a relief.
The Impossible Burger debuted in 2016 at New York’s lauded Momofuku Nishi, but it’s no longer so exclusive. The vegan patty can now be found at restaurants nationwide, and even the fast-food hamburger chain White Castle carries it. At my local bar, it is the most popular menu item, but also the most expensive for them to offer. Each Impossible Burger patty costs them roughly $3; a hamburger would cost about $0.50 (the bar is vegetarian).
The technology that makes the patty “bleed” is copyrighted by the Bay Area company Impossible Foods, which claims its product is better for humans and the Earth than a beef burger.
But some believe we should be skeptical of these claims. The original formulation had no cholesterol, but more salt and saturated fat than a Five Guys beef patty. As for its environmental footprint, many have criticized the push to eat more soy, which the Impossible Burger contains,
since it is a soil-depleting mono-crop. (In case you’re wondering, the Impossible Burger is also not organic.)
Regardless, the burger is seen as a success story by other Silicon Valley companies eager to enter an environmentally friendly market about to explode. Last year, the nearly $30bn processed meat market grew by only 2%, while the $1.4bn meat alternatives market grew by 22%.
At the bar, I told my partner why I was eating this meal: I wanted to write about this new, engineered vision for our food – vegan meat replacements today, meat grown from cells tomorrow.
Cell-grown meat, I told him, would be spurred on by synthetic serums refined from the crude system currently used, where cells are bathed in fetal bovine serum. The serum, which promotes cell growth, is collected from the hearts of calf fetuses found in pregnant cattle gone to slaughter.
Would he eat meat grown that way? “Yeah I’d eat it. It’s science,” my companion said. “I eat science.”
A new ‘mega trend’
By many measures, farming is one of the most environmentally straining things humans do. Agriculture contributes more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than all “cars, trucks, trains and airplanes combined”, National Geographic reports. Deforestation for new farms, often carved out of forests and jungles, extinguishes biodiversity. And the waste collected by modern industrial animal farming contributes to ocean dead zones.
But with an additional 2 billion people projected to join us on Earth by 2050, farmers need to produce far more calories than we do now. The near-universal agreement among experts is that reducing the amount of meat you eat is the best way to reduce environmental harm.
In that context, people are seeking silver bullets for complex human diets. A group of Italian researchers recently looked at the diets of vegans, vegetarians and omnivores, and found even vegans who eat loads of processed foods can have an enormous environmental impact. (Fruitarians, interestingly, had an “extremely high environmental impact”.)
I had been considering this long list of moral considerations each time I ate, and feeling queasy about the implications.
I had attempted to eat only creatures who spent their lives foraging in the dappled sunlight of a western New Jersey farm headed by my friendly farmers’ market purveyor Scott, a wind-whipped and wiry butcher. I had stopped eating chicken a while back after simmering over news that a processing plant was polluting the historic Suwannee river in Florida, my home state. I had laid pork aside when I saw a video of a pig looking like my dog when she’s happy to see me.
But it never felt like enough. Avoiding factory farming felt like avoiding plastic – impossible even with the utmost diligence. I imagined a future where our time on Earth was marked by a geological rock formation made up of flecks of colored plastic and chicken bones.
I’m not the only one with those questions. While the rate of Americans following strict vegan and vegetarian diets has barely budged in 20 years (vegetarians are about 5% of the population, vegans about 3%) the figures are misleading. Younger consumers in the US and UK are increasingly exploring “flexitarian” diets, which include meatless days or meatless meals each week, driving a push for more meat alternatives.
“It’s a mega trend that clearly has gotten a foothold,” said Chris Kerr, a chief investment officer at New Crop Capital, a venture capital firm which invests exclusively in companies looking to disrupt the meat, eggs and dairy industry. “Everyone is paying attention to it.”
New Crop’s portfolio includes nearly every vegan and cell-based agriculture startup you’ve ever heard of (and some you haven’t). Kerr and investors like him are the financial force behind products already on the market, such as meltable cheese-less cheese made from tapioca flour and pea protein (Daiya Foods); soon to be on the market fish-less tuna made of extruded bean proteins (Good Catch); and cellbased, slaughter-free hamburgers on the horizon from Memphis Meats.
Vegan meat replacements and cellcultured meats share many of the same backers. Billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson both invested in the technology, as have agriculture giants such as Cargill and Tyson (the latter even rebranded itself as a “protein company”).
This has not gone unnoticed by livestock farmers, principally the US Cattlemen’s Association, which would like to bar these companies using words like “beef ” and “meat”.
“In recent years, there have been major investments in synthetic products and in products grown in laboratories using animal cells,” the US Cattleman’s petition reads. “Such products should not be permitted to be marketed as beef or as meat … The ‘beef’ and ‘meat’ labels should inform consumers that the products are derived from animals harvested in the traditional manner.”
Last summer, a state branch of the Cattlemen’s Association successfully convinced Missouri lawmakers to stipulate in state statute that “meat” must come from an animal carcass, and other states have shown signs of following suit. The law’s most immediate impact was on plant-based meat replacements, with beef lobbyists clearly eyeing cellcultured meat on the horizon. The law prompted a lawsuit from Tofurkey, the vegetarian turkey replacement, and from the newly formed Good Food Institute, the closest thing new plant-based protein startups have to an industry association.
“It’s Missouri and France,” said Paul Shapiro, CEO of the Better Meat Company, about places which have sought legal shelter from veganism. Better Meat Company makes wheat-based