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A Fresh Take On Fake Meat
JMarshall writes: Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley food start-up started by a Stanford professor who quit his job, just raised $108 million to pursue a plant-based burger that truly tastes like meat. This ACS article explains how Impossible Foods and other startups and researchers are tackling the tricky chemical and engineering challenge of making fake meat that tastes real. "Meat flavors and aromas come from thousands of volatile small molecules released by muscle and fat cell destruction. Flavor precursors start with an animal’s diet, which influences the molecular composition of its cells. After slaughter, enzymes in an animal’s muscle cells begin breaking down biomolecules into simpler amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. This means some flavor molecules develop even as the meat ages during its trip to the store. Other flavor and aroma components emerge from reactions between sugars, amino acids, or fatty acids as the meat is cooked."
In short, they're reinventing the Tofu burger.
Soylent Green?
I'm a vegetarian because I don't like meat. It's so frustrating to have a veggie burger like a Boca burger that tastes way too much like meat. I want to have something else, or I would eat a real burger. There's a lot of non-meat protein that tastes good. Why the fixation on making it taste like beef?
Ommmm
Our bodies evolved over millions of years to eat meat. The fact that your senses crave the smells, taste, and texture of meat means... your body wants meat. Now, we all know that you should eat it in moderation because of the problems of overeating. But meat in reasonable portions is naturally good for you.
All of this biochemical engineering to come up with a meat substitute is reminiscent of all the chemical companies trying to come up with artificial sweeteners. The end result is probably as bad for you or worse than the original.
Eat your meat. That way you can have your pudding.
I've been eating fake meat in various forms since the late seventies. It's mostly a matter of convenience, so I can partake in events like barbecues as a vegetarian. Fake meat patties and cutlets and so forth have various flavors and textures, none of which taste like real meat. (at least, as far as I can remember) But is it necessarily bad that they have their own taste? If the taste and texture are pleasing, (some are, and some are not) does it really matter if it tastes nutty or tofu-y and not meaty? I guess what I'm asking is, what problem are we trying to solve here?
I have a friend who is a vegetarian chef, and she says if you're trying to be vegetarian but only eat products that ape the food you don't eat anymore, what's the point?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They just don't taste like meat. It's like soymilk - if you go into it thinking it will taste like milk, you'll be disappointed. Just enjoy it for what it is!
Well this is nice, but people have been doing this since the 1960s.
How about a bread substitute that has 0 carbs? And almost no calories for that matter. Slay Type II diabetes by chopping out the bulk of calories eaten.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
>Plant based meat
I wonder how many m of land you require for this compared to what you'd need for chicken if you were to replace KFC with KFP....
Also, what about the essential amino acids we need to live?
Most of them are not percent in plants, oar on very little amounts.
Spirulina has high amounts of tryptophan (needed for serotonin and melatonin) per gram, but is much less dense than egg.
On a side note, probably I should make an account, I've been posting as AC for years...
I wonder how much "fake" meat they can come up with for $108 million. Because $108 million sure buys a lot of cattle and the land to keep them on. And a herd large enough to maintain its numbers and pay its own expenses. I know a lot of farmers who have started with far less...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why not just genetically engineer plants that grow meat, that way you get the best of both, flavor and saving the fuzzy animals. I look forward to sampling the bacon bush and porterhouse tree.
Disgusting.
I'm not vegetarian, but I have a lot of friends who are. They are always wanting to go to a local restaurant that specializes in fake meat dishes. I guess people who grow up eating meat still get cravings for it. I expect that this market will continue to grow.
Fake 'meat' made from ingredients such as quorn, soya or veg is no panacea, but after getting used to Quorn mince, minced beef now tastes a little, erm 'metallic', or at least strange in some way. For those who don't like the taste of liver, it's a little like that, though less extreme.
I don't want to have the taste of meat. Nor do I want the slightly cardboardy taste of current "veg meat" foods (though it is improving).
Instead, I want something which combines the best aspects of the flavours of both real meat and fake meat.
Only fake meat can even attempt to reach that solution, or at least can offer a far bigger variety of flavours than real meat could hope to offer.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
... to be good enough. Many people smother meat with condiments anyway, so as soon as someone hits "good enough" it will take off.
A self-contradicting — meaningless — term like "space helicopter", "low-sodium salt", or "gay marriage".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or is it the texture? I'm an omnivore who tends towards vegetarian most days, but when I find that I have a craving for meat, it's not the taste that matters, it's the texture. I have yet to find any non-meat meal that has the same sort of tearing/chewing goodness that a good meat dish has. I can satisfy umami cravings with other dishes, but there's something about that feeling that's hard to satisfy without the going for animal protein.
I can't find any info if this will be soybean based. If it's high in carbs, I can't eat it. If they make a veggie based meat that has nearly zero carbs, I'd be quite impressed and would consider adding it to my diet if the price isn't too high.
Yoga or any breathing exercise actually does make you a more effective coder.
You are all tofu.
The Food Conglomerate Lobbyists also rally against displaying how many teaspoons of sugar something has - as consumers would be able to make a somewhat educated decision then.
Example: I went to purchase a Dog Treat the other day from Costco, "Healthy Choice" something Milk Bones, ingredients: 1| Chicken, 2| Sugar...
What the fuck is sugar being added to dog treats for. And that is pretty much your choice for any packaged Human food too, if it doesn't have HFCS or the branded newly branded "Corn Sugar" (which I've also seen on other human products @ Costco), then it has added sugar to it -- as a filler and to make it more pleasing/addictive.
Do vegetarians seriously think that everybody is suddenly going to abandon eating meat when a fake meat alternative is created? In the West, we happen to live in a place where food is plentiful enough that vegetarians have the luxury of being vegetarians.
What matters is if it is nutritious, tastes good, and can be produced with less water, waste, and environmental impact.
Having been vegetarian for over 30 years I've no idea what real meat tastes like and can't compare anything to it.
Bugger off.
Find the tastiest cow in the world and clone it.
What is up with this cow posts on every news?
Does their fake meat have really complete protein (not missing or deficient in any essential amino acids) or is it just the typical vegetarian junk that's incomplete in one way or another? Taste is not important; nutrition is. If it's protein is not as complete as the meat they're trying to replace, then it's useless.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Sounds like you're a dumb reactionary. There are too many idiots like you here since the smart people left.
In soviet russia, cow posts you, kid.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
True spoiler alert: it's algae. The whole "people" thing? Just Hollywood screwing up a good SF story. As usual. No more than that.
Harry Harrison: Make Room, Make Room
Read it. I guarantee it will be a better experience than that ridiculous movie ever was.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, I agree. However, I also recognize that eating meat is a little hard on the animal that supplied it, at least the way we're doing it now, which is to say, we're killing them.
While I would welcome a veggie burger that actually tasted like meat, I'm feeling dubious that it actually does. Until it does, I put my charitable donations towards development of tech that may be able to (eventually) provide meat raised without a host animal. The tech is nascent, but they're working on it pretty hard. If it comes to pass, I will very happily partake. Because it's not meat I have a problem with. It's killing animals.
Not a bad idea to stop raising huge herds of animals, either. They're a pretty serious problem, environmentally speaking.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
How to fight desertification and reverse climate change
HINT: Bring back the cows to desert areas.
FYI: The problem in North America is that the grazing animals (Cows, etc) do not MOVE and Roam. Not merely that they exist are bred.
Why even try to mimic meat? It struck me the first time I walked into a grocery in an Adventist community - there were multiple aisles of highly processed vegetable/fungus/grain matter trying to resemble meat.
I mean, especially if you're living a totally meatless lifestyle, why even kowtow to the omnivore food culture?
For example, look at Middle Eastern cuisine. Sure, they have kabobs, etc, but things like Falafel, Faul, Hummus, Baba Ghanouj, Tabouleh and Dolmas are all fantastic, and none of them are trying to mimic a hunk of beef or chicken.
Same with Asian food. There are fantastic meatless dishes that don't try to resemble an animal part.
Why do we do it in the West? Marketing?
I can see the fnords!
For those of us that are waistline challenged!
If science fiction has taught me anything, after the scientists cannot get the burger to taste right and meet the shareholder's expectations, the secret ingredient will turn out to be people.
Somehow meat eaters feel that veggie food does not taste good. The truth is that for human being, meat is an acquired taste. I am mostly vegetarians but have eaten meat and it tasted pathetic. I hate going to gathering where they have pseudo vegetarian food, "veggie burger", "veggie hotdog". If you truly want to see variety of veggie food, you should go to India. Vegetarians don't even enter in a restaurant where they serve non-veg food and they are totally happy with their food.
But eating meat is an instinct inherited through evolution.
One of the things we also inherited through evolution was the ability to analyze our own instincts and ignore them as necessary in order to improve our outcomes. (Hell, even my dog can do that.)
That is one reason why many of us are able to live longer, healthier and overall more pleasant lives than our ancestors.
As a vegetarian and aspiring vegan, I champion this all the time.
(ObMOOOO.) Cows are usually vegetarian (not vegan, of course, but it's not exploitative for calves to drink cow's milk.)
Chickens aren't - their natural diet includes insects, but if your corpse were lying around and had time to rot a bit, they'd totally eat you too. Pigs and goats would probably wait until you're dead, but not much longer. Almost all fish eat other fish; it's only the really bottom end of their food chain that eat plants. Sheep don't have the same reputation that goats do about eating anything they can get, but I suspect their tastes are similar.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My experience as a vegetarian wandering around the Germanies on vacation is that if you leave out the beef and pork, and convince them you don't eat fish or chicken either, the cuisine is, if not light-weight exactly, at least light enough to lose weight while still not being hungry all the time. Sometimes you have to resort to beer being the protein course of your meal, but that's ok.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some archaeological work I read in the news recently has found evidence of cooking that's about 800,000 years old, and there's some suspicion that we may have been cooking for more like 2 million years (not sure if that's meat or vegetables, but cooking root vegetables makes a huge increase in the accessibility of nutrition which was important for our evolution.)
We've also got about 10-20,000 years of agriculture, which allowed humans to go from small bands of hunter-gatherers to large civilizations, and most of that's grain agriculture, not just herding.
But just because meat's tasty and we've got senses designed to tell us that it's tasty (or when it's spoiled), that doesn't mean we have to kill animals for food. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like a veggie burger that tasted like Real Dead Animals on occasion.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hu-fu
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, I called you a mutant. I'm one also, from the Northern/Western European version of the mutations that let adult humans digest lactose. (There are other groups of humans that also have that - the Masai in Kenya, for instance - and most of them evolved independently about 5000 years ago.) Most normal humans are lactose-intolerant as adults, so they get indigestion if they drink raw cow milk, though most of them can handle cheeses and some other sufficiently fermented milk products.
Theoretically I can drink milk; in practice I almost never do, unless it's got coffee or cocoa in it, or it's on cereal or something.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hello my Lactose Master Race brothers! Is this where the meeting is at?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What chemical shitstorm? The article says plant extracts. Not chemically created plant-like extract imitations. It's stuff from plants.
Did you read something else?
Or better, did you read?
I might be getting whooshed here, but a plant based diet is by no means safe. Not to mention the difficulty in getting a decent amino acid profile.
I grew up vegetarian (including eggs and dairy) - my parents and grandparents were big into it. Obviously the ethicism spin played a big part, but of course also the health part. It also included a fair amount of indoctrination: meat was eschewed like something unclean and gruesome, and "meat-eaters" were looked down upon.
(I still agree with the sentiment that one should try and eat in a way that optimizes your own health.) We were regularly fed fake meat ("plastic meat" we brothers called it). Made mainly from hydrolyzed soy protein. Which didn't gel with the "health" part for me, because... chemicals. (As a male treasuring my testosterone I also now avoid soy due to the phyto-oestrogen content.)
Non-vegetarian friends occasionally commented that the stuff was a fairly good approximation of the meat products they were used to. I suppose mainly because it came in the form of processed meat imitations, e.g. salami, sausage, crumbed nuggets, etc. which are already removed a few steps from the raw material. I could never understand why one would want to eat the fake thing if you abhor the real thing. It is not as if I didn't like vegetables - and would have been content, taste wise, to continue on a diet without the fake meat.
Anyhow, after a couple of decades of this, I developed some deficiencies that supplements didn't seem to fix (seems those refined minerals often lack "co-factors" - which are found in "natural" food - that help absorption and utilization). An endocrinologist suggested starting eating meat. Initially the fake meat experience did help me make the transition - a sort of gateway drug leading to the path of meat eating, hehe.
And no, didn't seem like my body couldn't handle the new introduction - no noticeable digestive differences. Health did improve as expected, and I finally got rid of that proverbial "vegetarian sweet tooth", as well as excess weight (and some attendant risks).
No, I don't consume massive amounts of red meat - a quantity about the size of my hand without fingers, per week, seems about right. The ethics part is problematic, but I think modern "well-meaning" man has taken things completely out of proportion. I regularly kill living things, intentionally and unintentionally: insects, bacteria, plants (some of which is consumed, intentionally or unintentionally). My body in turn will most probably be killed or at least be consumed after death by some other living being(s) - the whole circle of life thing. So I don't buy into that either, despite that part having become quite fashionable and even politically correct in recent years. Everybody has some measure of "similar to me" (don't eat) and "unlike me" (can be eaten), but there isn't always much scientific objectivity to it, so the line is drawn in different places for different people.
So you've got something like tofu - soy paste, doesn't taste like much. However fry it and you've got something that tastes fried and crunchy enough that you don't care that it's not meat but is probably worse for you than lean grilled meat.
I was at an event where there were enough vegetarians to make catering for them a problem so we just went full vegetarian - even the most dedicated carnivores in the bunch were happily munching through the onion pakoras until they were full with no complaints about the lack of meat. However living off deep fried stuff is only a short term thing - one way or another.
So IMHO if you've got no meat it's just worth going for something that tastes OK as it is instead of going for pretend meat that disappoints (I used to go hiking with soya chunks etc because meat wouldn't keep in hot conditions, but all efforts to make it appear to be like meat failed so I gave up on the imitation meat chunks and went the vege curry route).
People eat Quorn which is just about as artificial as you can get, yet it's in the vegetarian section because it's a factory grown fungus. Sometimes when prices get reduced I eat it too.
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics...
Cows certainly do roam over my land.
I was a vegetarian for over 20 years and many of my family still are. I've tried almost every fake-meat product of the last 30 years. Many of them are tasty; some of them are horrid. None of them taste like meat. The irony is most people who eat them are vegetarian and have no idea what meat tastes like so they try to convince you that it tastes "just like the real thing". Nope. I eat both. It doesn't.
Just don't eat anything. You'll die healthy, and soon.
Lem: Maybe the meat blob's not taking in enough nutrients. I guess I could try and give it a mouth. Ted: I'm gonna say no to the meat blob getting a mouth. Mostly because I don't want to hear what it has to say
That's a load of bull. Even cattle that end their lives in feedlots spent most of it on the range, and every herd roams over thousands of acres -- just like bison did before them. (Actually, there were about 20% more bison in North America than there are now cattle.) In the same ecological niche. Grasses evolved to be grazed. When grassland is not grazed, it deteriorates to weeds and eventually to unproductive hardpan desert (which is rather different from a healthy --and grazed-- desert).
If this weren't so, explain why ranchers would pay property taxes on millions of acres of uncroppable western America, and grazing fees on land that's not even worth the property tax to own it, since in a great deal of the American west it takes 10 or even 100 acres to support one cow/calf pair, and that ground can't raise a plant-based crop at all. (Crops are much more profitable than livestock, thus if rural land =can= be cropped -- it generally already *is*.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Savory is right; I've seen it in action with sheep in the desert. Where it was grazed by big commercial flocks several times a year, it was all native grass and flowers. When the sheep stopped coming, within three years it went to tumbleweeds and hardpan (despite being years with higher rainfall than average).
This might interest you as well:
The Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing
(U. of Arizona research publication)
https://journals.uair.arizona....
TL;DR: the more cattle graze the desert, the more tortoises there are -- because they don't eat plants; they eat dung.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Yoga or any breathing exercise actually does make you a more effective coder."
I imagine sex would too, but I guess this being Slashdot, yoga class may be as close as they will get.
Meeting's down at the ice cream place.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And once this "fake meat" is marketed and made cheap enough, sales of meat drop and environmental pressure and lack of sales (plus pressure from corporations that want an alternative product that takes less work and less money to produce with a shorter return on investment) drive its price higher and higher until only the rich get real meat, and the rest of us get the fake stuff, which doesn't REALLY taste like real meat, but the next generation will never know the difference anyway. Too bad the protein content isn't as high, but we can just eat more of it, get fatter, and shit more, and probably suffer mild forms of brain damage. Meanwhile, we'll thank corporations for making food more affordable for the masses, because .. look how expensive meat got!
And one day, somebody finds that the latest fake meat is made from something else ... someone solved the problem of not having enough graveyard space ... Soylent Green ... it even has a nice "bio friendly" name.