Impossible Burgers' Key, Bloody Ingredient Wins FDA Approval (cnbc.com)

The FDA has approved the key ingredient used in the vegetarian-friendly Impossible Burger. "The ingredient, soy leghemoglobin, releases a protein called heme that gives the meat substitute its distinctive blood-like color and taste," reports CNBC. The burger comes from a company aptly named Impossible Foods, which started raising millions of dollars in 2015 to pursue a plant-based burger that truly tastes like meat. From the report: In a letter to Impossible Foods released Monday, the FDA deemed soy leghemoglobin GRAS, or generally recognized as safe, in its most recent review. "Getting a no-questions letter goes above and beyond our strict compliance to all federal food-safety regulations," Impossible Foods founder and CEO Patrick O. Brown said in a statement. "We have prioritized safety and transparency from day one, and they will always be core elements of our company culture."

Comments

GRAS, We Pinky Swear

[mentil]

Reading TFA (I know), it turns out that new food ingredients don't actually require FDA approval, since food companies can simply state that their novel ingredient is safe, and then the FDA probably won't challenge that. ~10% of all food ingredients haven't been FDA tested/assessed, due to this self-approval loophole, and a concerned party is suing the FDA to close it.

Reading elsewhere on the net, the Impossible Burger tastes/looks/smells remarkably like a real hamburger. The Beyond Burger smells closer to real beef, but doesn't taste/feel as similar. If vegetable-based burgers can get this close, it makes me wonder if there'd be any market for lab-grown meat, which would presumably cost more to produce. Both veggie burgers seem to have the same amount of protein as beef burgers. One hitch: the impossible burger's heme is from GMO yeast, so the anti-GMO people will have a problem with that (probably a significant fraction of vegetarians).

Yes ewwwwww

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a vegetarian since birth, and come from a family of vegetarians (since grandparents on both sides "converted"). I've started to eat some red meat when I was 40, for health reasons.

I these days steer away from foodstuffs that are heavily processed (vegetable and animal sourced). My diet consists of mostly vegetable matter as it comes off the plant and animal protein as it came off or out of the animal/bird - preferably pasture fed.

As a male, I also avoid soy.

I'm not convinced that one can make something with a concoction of chemicals that is even closely as healthy to put inside your body than it is to just get it how nature has made it for millennia and our bodies are finely tuned to utilize through generations of selection?

I actually agree with other vegetarian posters: the likeness to meat of fake meat is actually a detractor, not a good selling point. If you make a choice to eat vegetables, you want your food to taste like that.

We need more of this ...

[Qbertino]

... to get the meat junkies off their fix. The eco-balance of meat is truely abysmal. Like just a few notches short of plutonium or something. If we could switch to a substitute without anybody noticing, that would be awesome and also finally get anti-biotics out of meat production and back into healthcare, where they belong. That would also get agriculture back into sane waters.

Re:We need more of this ...

[guruevi]

Humans are omnivores, we evolved bigger brains because we learned to process meat and eventually started cooking it. Farming eventually allowed us to turn small plots of fast-growing but ultimately inedible crops into high protein/carb meat instead of working large swathes of land for little food value in plant material.

Some farming practices are indeed abysmal and we eat way too much meat right now, but totally removing it is impossible, unhealthy and would upset nature's balance more. Totally removing meat would require much more farm land to be devoted to edible crops to the point it may actually be impossible.

Being a vegetarian, in the end, is a luxury, not a necessity and only rich people can truly afford it.

30 Years...and counting

[buravirgil]

Meat's not Murder, as much as I enjoy Morrisey; It's slaughter. And I admire meat-eaters who address sustainable farms to address factory farming and respect any perspective to appeal to HOW animals are raised and rendered after I had read Diet for a Small Planet (https://www.smallplanet.org/diet-for-a-small-planet) and Robbins' book (the Baskin/Robbins heir who was conned by Madoff) in 1990. I went lacto-ovo vegan and made soy "milk", and my own gluten (ashamed I couldn't master tempeh cultures) and supplemented my diet with nutritional yeast for B complex vitamins and explored every meat substitute available and can claim I was spared seasonal flus for years. Fifteen years later, friends half a generation younger, mocked my preferences to seek out substitutes with the same texture and "mouth feel" as akin to wearing a fake fur. It was my first experience with shifts in generational perspective, I think. (The second is a pervasive belief microwave appliances are dangerous.) Anyway, Morning Star brand was some of the best commercially available (and affordable) product (but used egg whites for texture) and leveraged by the growing market of baby-boomers reduction of cholesterol consumption: Tinfoil Advisory-- Morning Star's "Prime" product was the best I had ever experienced and disappeared from the market for over two decades because (I believe) it was TOO Good. At about this time, Oprah took on the Beef trade associations and was summarily silenced on the subject, the only topic from which I believe she has EVER backed away. Supply/Demand arguments have been the reason given for the 3-4X cost of livestock for three decades. Qorn was prevented from North American shelves for over a decade for reasons ignored when it came to Frito-Lay's potato chip products...end of Advisory...

In 2010, I returned to being an omnivore, but I miss the days of chasing down "mouth feel" substitutes because the science is interesting, and the business angles are very intriguing. Textured vegetable protein (a fantastic substitute in Chile adopted by Hormel a loooong time ago) is the best example of an affordable substitute and industrially compressed gluten that simulated a roast beef that I experienced in Oakland and LA's Whole foods deli sections is the most expensive (5X that of steak), but truly a delicacy.

In 1990, Robbins' claimed that, without government subsidized water rights, a dollar hamburger in the US would cost $6. I don't know if that's factual because there aren't many sources or studies to cross reference, but such an estimate goes a long way in explaining why the market is, in my humble opinion, so controlled.

Re:30 Years...and counting

[Solandri]

In 1990, Robbins' claimed that, without government subsidized water rights, a dollar hamburger in the US would cost $6. I don't know if that's factual because there aren't many sources or studies to cross reference, but such an estimate goes a long way in explaining why the market is, in my humble opinion, so controlled.

The market is controlled because of the foot shortages we experienced after the Dust Bowl which exacerbated the Great Depression. That's when the government realized, holy crap it's really possible for a modern developed country to not produce enough food to feed itself. Consequently, we enacted all sorts of subsidies to insure there's always an oversupply of food. It's why we pay farmers not to plant anything - so if another dust bowl should wipe out a large chunk of the country's farmland, we have plenty of reserve farmland ready and available to immediately go back into production.

The consequence of all these subsidies is overproduction. That leads to the market price dropping to unsustainable levels (farmers cannot sell their crops for enough to cover their expenses). That's where the other government subsidies come in. The government buys all these crops at a fixed price, thus allowing the farmers to stay in business. The government then acts as a monopoly source and resells the food at a higher price to distributors like supermarkets. That lets them recoup most of the subsidy (but not all - the discrepancy is minimized when the crops are bought at market price; and since the crops are not bought at market price the subsidy always ends up being greater than zero).

But the supply of food exceeds the demand. So the government is still left with more food than it can hope to sell. Rather than let the excess rot in grain silos, it has to come up with other ways to use it. Some of it becomes foreign aid sent to other countries. High fructose corn syrup is another byproduct of this food oversupply. As is ethanol to mix with gasoline. But a large portion of it becomes cheap grain to feed to cattle, since Americans love beef. This is food that was going to rot in grain silos if not used, so the money spent growing it and subsidizing it is a sunk cost and unrecoverable, and thus shouldn't be a factor in how you decide to use it. Any money you can recoup from selling it is a positive.

In other words, if the subsidies really did raise the price of a dollar hamburger to $6, ending subsidized meat production wouldn't mean we're saving $5. Since meat production is actually a money source to offset a sunk cost (selling grain that was going to otherwise rot), ending it would actually increase the cost of these food programs to the government. If the cattle industry wasn't buying all that excess grain, the government would have to pay the entire cost of subsidizing that overproduction. So the extra $5 in cost per hamburger would get distributed over all the grain and corn that's sold to supermarkets. And you'd see the price of grains and vegetables increase to pay for the subsidy that the meat industry is no longer paying to help offset.

Why am I an omnivore ?

[Salgak1]

Take a look in the mirror, and smile. The Incisors and Canines in your mouth evolved primarily for eating meat, and the premolars and molars evolved for grinding vegetable matter. I go with what my biology is optimized for.

I will add that almost every animal source is edible, and the vast majority of plant life is either inedible or actually toxic in some way. I stick with what works. . .

Re: Why am I an omnivore ?

[phantomfive]

I thought that too, but the other day I say a Neanderthal skull in a museum. The teeth look like a mouth full of molars, ready to eat plants, and yet further analysis shows they also ate meat. We've evolved as omnivores, capable of thriving with a wide variety of different diets.

Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years...

[Salgak1]

I grew up on a farm. Doesn't bother me one bit. In fact, I've slaughtered pigs that I later helped eat. And have hunted deer, and ate them as well. You do not want deer eating up your entire truck garden. . .

Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years...

[skam240]

"(not seeing the slaughter also helps, I think if a few more kids saw an animal being killed it would make a big difference)"

Maybe yes and maybe no. Once upon a time meat didn't come all nicely packaged from the supermarket. You or some one you knew went out and killed an animal and dragged its still bleeding body back home to be skinned and then cooked.

I also doubt many of the 4-H (and like program) kids that raise animals for slaughter become vegetarians or vegans as these programs wouldn't last very long if that were the case.

Then again, people are kept so distant from their food production nowadays that all of a sudden seeing an animal slaughtered after a lifetime of getting ones meat wrapped in plastic might shock a lot of people into not eating meat.

Re:Protein called heme

[hey!]

I think when they say leghemoglobin "releases" heme, they aren't referring to its physiological function, but the result of denaturing during cooking, which is an unnatural process.

As you cook muscle, the myoglobin denatures exposing the iron in heme to oxidation, which turns the meat from red to brown. This oxidized heme plays a role in the development of other complex flavor molecules in coordination with other classes of compounds like lipids. For example the higher myoglobin content in wild duck breast meat gives it a liver-like flavor.