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."

Comments

I found another unicorn!

[__aaclcg7560]

In short, they're reinventing the Tofu burger.

Re:I found another unicorn!

[__aaclcg7560]

It's for people who want the THIS IS HEALTHY label on the box, who aren't going to check the ingredient list to verify that its healthy, and think what they're eating is healthy. IAfter all, the label can't be wrong.

Re:I found another unicorn!

[HornWumpus]

In other words, Almond 'Milk' drinkers.

Re:I found another unicorn!

[Darinbob]

But it doesn't have to taste like meat. That part is pointless I feel. If they don't want to eat meat than that's fine. Veggie burgers are good too (not the tofu junk) and even meat eaters like them. It's just that the need to make faux meat seems strange to me. It's not like they're coming off of a lifetime of heroin and need something like methodone to keep themselves clean.

I know when I visit the veggie line for lunch the worst things they have are the meat substitutes, like seitan or tempeh.

Re:I found another unicorn!

[Your.Master]

You're being unfair and unnecessarily polarizing. Just because you've met people who have both beliefs doesn't mean they always go together. People aren't always either right about everything or wrong about everything.

I'm not convinced there's any correlation at all, though there could be. As anecdotal evidence, at the time of writing there are four responses to my post. Two of them are explicitly meat eaters who are making the "chemicals are bad" argument and both precluding any possibility they are wrong. Clearly none of them are vegans.

I've also met lots of vegetarians and vegans, and literally none of them have irrational fears of chemicals in foods (they have rational fears of things that actually cause food poisoning and such). The only time I've seen those two beliefs together are in stereotypes.

In fact, the person I know who is most irrational about food is almost a complete carnivore. He's all-in on his keto diet. He lost like 150 lbs when he switched to basically only ever eating sausages, and from that he's drawn the conclusion that a co-worker of ours could cure her Multiple Sclerosis by cutting the grains and veggies out of her diet. Second place goes to a vegetarian who was pretty convinced that ancient humans never hunted for meat.

Re:dont want it to taste like meat

[DRJlaw]

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?

Because it's a veggie burger, not a veggie patty. They are expressly trying to simulate meat, because there are also people like me who quite like meat and quite dislike vegetables. I might move to a veggie burger but sure as hell am not going to move to a vegemite patty, a bean patty, or 90% of whatever ground-vegetable-matter-in-puck-form you're after.

Don't complain that a thing called a "burger" is trying to simulate a "real burger." Complain that they aren't making something some other thing that tastes way too much like a vegetable.

Re:Why not eat meat?

[oxbow lake]

Meat consumption today is problematic for two main reasons:

1. The current medical literature shows significantly lower incidence of diseases such as cancer and ischemic heart disease in populations eating a vegetarian diet. Beyond personal benefit, increasing public health is beneficial for any society that has any kind of publicly funded healthcare system.

2. Particularly in the United States, the mainstream agricultural system is unsustainable, environmentally damaging, and increasingly a threat to public health in terms of infectious disease and antibiotic resistance.

Additionally, as consumers many people find the disconnect between consumption of meat (buying the wrapped piece of meat in the supermarket) and the raising/slaughter of livestock morally disconcerting, even if they don't take fundamental issue with killing animals for food.

I was going to provide citations, but I'm too lazy and you can probably use PubMed as well as I can. Anyway my point is that eating meat might not actually be entirely good for you, and that the way meat is produced in the US is unfortunate.

Re:dont want it to taste like meat

[The Good Reverend]

There's also "I don't want to kill animals for the sake of my dinner". Meat in moderation isn't bad for you, but there are plenty of other reasons why a lot of us don't eat it.

Re:Why not eat meat?

[Locke2005]

Our bodies evolved over millions of years to crave the smell, taste, and texture of COOKED meat? Not sure where our ancestors found that in the wild...
I subscribe to an evolutionary theory of nutrition, which says that we do best if we eat what our ancestors ate for tens of thousands of years. We were designed to eat meat, but because we didn't have refrigeration, we didn't eat meat very often. Gorging on red meat a couple times a month should be fine; eating it for every meal, not so much.

Re:Why not eat meat?

[grimmjeeper]

Our ancestors were using fire to cook meat long before recorded history.

Re:Why not eat meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

medical literature shows significantly lower incidence of diseases such as cancer and ischemic heart disease in populations eating a vegetarian diet

Correlation is not causation. Those populations either have much poorer healthcare and die of other things, go undiagnosed, or they're young health nuts who don't have many unhealthy symptoms like smoking, lack of exercise, and overweight.

I just don't get the point of mimicing meat

[bughunter]

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?

Hey Mutant, most adult humans can't digest milk.

[billstewart]

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.