I read somewhere that the food missed the most by former carnivores who’d converted to vegetarianism is bacon. I can see that. But I’m guessing that a good old burger would run a close second. It would for me, anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. I like meat. I like steak. And duck. Baby lamb chops. Veal piccata. Pork chops. Chicken. I really like chicken.
I like stuff made with meat: beef stew, chicken noodle soup, shepherd’s pie, chili, spaghetti Carbonara. BLT’s. Gus sandwiches. (A Gus was invented by me and my brother Tom when we were kids: bacon, lettuce, cheese, dill pickle and mayo. Yum!)
But I could become a vegetarian. I’m already about a 90% in-house vegetarian.
What I could never be is a vegan. No dairy? No eggs? No honey? Fuggedaboutit.
But vegetarian? Yeah.
There are plenty of good reasons to become a vegetarian. Health, for one. Then there’s the yuck factor about where most of our meat comes from. Sure, I look for the free range chicken and grass-fed beef. But those meat factories? The slaughterhouses? Just thinking about the yuck factor…
What I don’t tend to think about is the environmental implications of eating meat. All that meat consumption – and as wealth increases worldwide, there’s a lot more of it – ain’t all that good for Mother Earth. Greenhouse gases, water pollution. We should be eating less meat, not more.
For Patrick Brown, beef is the biggest culprit.
Animal agriculture eats up an astonishing 30 percent of the earth’s land. Brown says he’s tackling the problem with a burger that uses 95 percent less land and 75 percent less water than ground beef.(Source: Bloomberg).
And his company, Impossible Foods, is trying to do something about it. He’s come up with a “magic ingredient” that makes a veggie burger taste like a real burger.
The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants -- even fast-food stalwart White Castle. It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat…
“The way to solve this big global problem is not by ordering people to change their diets, it’s realizing that we’re using the wrong technology,” Brown said. “You can’t make meat that satisfies the craving that meat-lovers have without heme. It’s the magic ingredient.’
Ah, heme. (Is there anyone else out there of a certain age who’s thinking about Hemo the Magnificent, an animated film all about blood that educated us kiddos in the late 1950’s. I don’t believe that Hemo the Magnificent had anything to say about why we like those drippy, juicy, medium-rare burgers. I’m pretty sure it focused on the blood coursing through our veins. Guess by the time you get to a certain age, pretty much anything and everything can dredge up a reference to something from childhood. All I an say is, expect more of the same.)
The idea of a vegetarian burger that closely resembles a meaty-burger almost gets me to see if there’s a White Castle in Boston where I can get one. Almost, but not quite.
Anyway, I’m all for meatless-meat, and Impossible Burger’s impossible burger sounds more appetizing than that meat grown in a petri dish.
Couple of problems.
Impossible is looking for FDA approval, and the FDA says that plant-based heme is too new for them to sign off on it. Then there’s this:
The heme molecule is also involved in another controversy. Studies have shown that steak lovers are at risk of colon cancer while chicken breast junkies aren’t. Heme makes red meat red, so some researchers think it could be a culprit, said Robert Turesky, a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Oh, no. Will vegetarians have to turn to fake chicken McNuggets?
Brown disputes this, dismissing reports on the possibility that heme is a carcinogen as “garbage science.”
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of smart money backing Impossible Foods, including Bill Gates and Google Ventures.
Fake meat will be one of the year’s hottest food trends. An increasing number of flexitarians -- people not looking to eat meat at every meal -- are helping to drive interest, according to Rabobank. Sales of alternative proteins are dwarfed by the $49 billion red meat and chicken market, but they’re expected to grow about 17 percent a year to $863 million in 2021, according to a CoBank estimate.
Ah, flexitarian. Guess that’s what I am. Always nice to have another modifier…
Meanwhile, go Impossible Foods. Forget ‘where’s the beef?’ Looks like we’ll be asking ‘where’s the heme?’
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