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

Posted by BeauHD on from the I-can't-believe-it's-not-meat dept.

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."

29 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. As a vegetarian since 15 years... by carlhaagen · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...I can't say that I've ever missed that specific meat-like taste (even less so the color) in any of the many meat facsimiles I've tried. I suppose the reason why one becomes a vegetarian plays a big role in this.

    1. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by ET3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that such products are aimed more at meat eaters than long time vegetarians. I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered, so offering something which tastes the same (and has similar or better nutritional values and isn't more expensive) would allow them to switch out of eating meat.

    2. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered

      Speak for yourself. I eat meat exclusively so I can contribute to controlling the population of delicious animals.

      If you just leave them be, they'll roam around eating all the plants until there aren't any left. Meanwhile carnivorous animals will have a near-endless food source readily available and undefended by humans, which will cause their population to grow exponentially. Soon we'll have to start hunting these dangerous animals lest they decide beef is too common and would much prefer some long pig for lunch. Then we'll end up with a pile of lion corpses that nobody wants, which will attract a shitload of pesky insects, potentially the sort that carry diseases, which will spread far and wide, spreading the next plague. Humanity will be wiped out in a matter of months, all because some people refused to eat their steaks.

      Vegetarianism is just terrorism playing the long game.

    3. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by mukinrestak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately, all the substitutes that are made to mimic meat well are currently far pricier than actual meat. I tried a sample of a Beyond Burger a while back and it was pretty good, but on the shelf it was like 4 times the price of actual ground beef. That ain't gonna work too well. A plant based burger should cost LESS than the real thing.

    4. Re: As a vegetarian since 15 years... by dcw3 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Do you tweet your meat in public?

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    5. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think that such products are aimed more at meat eaters than long time vegetarians. I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered

      No, they do it because that's how they were raised. People's "tastes" form at a young age.

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

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      No sig today...
    6. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by skam240 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "(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.

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    7. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by gnick · · Score: 3, Funny

      It is kinda like, for lack of a better comparison, slavery.

      It's like changing your own oil. People who grow up around their parents doing oil changes see them as normal, and people who are insulated but benefit from it see it as too alien. In general, people who grow up with frequent contact with home oil changes do not mind them. For people for who only encounter them a few times, it is otherwise not a part of their world and they have trouble with it.

      I can think of a couple of acceptable car analogies.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    8. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by gnick · · Score: 3, Funny

      I didn't realize how conditioned I was to only eating meat that doesn't look like the thing that it came from.

      Speak for yourself. When I go out for a steak I demand that they bring me the head of the cow it came from so that I can stare into its cold, dead eyes and remind it who runs this planet.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    9. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Informative

      Once upon a time killing your livestock was only for special occasions or when there was no other food left.

      Umm, no.

      As an example, cows and bulls are born in about equal numbers. But you only need one bull for all your cows. So the extra bulls get slaughtered every year.

      Hell, the "one bull" gets slaughtered every few years since inbreeding is a bad thing. Once all the cows are his daughters, he's history.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    10. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by gnick · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why is a cow's life worth more than a cute bunny's?

      Souls are distributed using a complicated algorithm that considers size, cuteness, flavor, and ability to act human. Humans get 1 full soul. Crickets get only a small fraction of a soul, making them fine to smash. Cows are much larger and cuter than crickets, but they're strongly penalized for being delicious and forfeit almost their entire soul. A bunny's life is actually worth MORE than a cow's based on cuteness and relative flavor. Dogs are a curious case in that American dogs have a larger portion of a soul than Korean dogs based on environment. It's not an entirely fair system, but it's what we've got.

      Clearly we should be going for the least amount of deaths per human...

      Start whaling?

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    11. Re: As a vegetarian since 15 years... by hamburger+lady · · Score: 4, Funny

      i hope so. otherwise he canâ(TM)t have any pudding. how can you have any pudding if you donâ(TM)t tweet your meat?!

      --

      ---
      Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
    12. Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Killing food isn't natural? Seriously? Nothing in nature kills to eat?

      GTFO with that bullshit. I swear, some people have their head so far up in the clouds they can't even see reality anymore.

  2. Eww? by Rei · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's weird... after having been vegetarian for 17 years, the concept of making a vegetarian burger taste more like meat only strikes feelings of "eww, gross" in me. And I imagine that's a pretty common reaction.

    But I guess it's good for non-vegetarians and maybe people who are newly vegetarian.

    On the upside, I imagine this product is a good source of iron, since heme iron is well absorbed.

    --
    "Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
    1. Re:Eww? by CambodiaSam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not a vegetarian but have greatly reduced my meat intake over the years. I had the opportunity to try an Impossible Burger recently and I can confirm that it's freakishly like animal meat. Not 100% indistinguishable but so damn close that I was amazed. The guy at the restaurant warned me that many vegetarians don't like it because it's so close. He wasn't lying. If there is a safe option to help people eat less meat, that's probably good for health, the environment, and a number of other factors right? It's like a gateway veg. Just like bacon is the gateway meat.

  3. GRAS, We Pinky Swear by mentil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  4. Still waiting.... by Tokolosh · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why do we never see reports that steak is being processed to taste like tofu?

    --
    Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
  5. We need more of this ... by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:We need more of this ... by guruevi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:We need more of this ... by skam240 · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Totally removing meat would require much more farm land to be devoted to edible crops to the point it may actually be impossible."

      That statement couldn't be more wrong. All the food those animals eat has to be grown somewhere and much of the food they eat does not become the muscle fiber we eat, it either serves other purposes for the animal or gets expelled in their poop. On top of that, there's the space the animals need to live in and this space goes up the more ethically you want your meat raised.

      This makes meat production an incredibly inefficient means of general food production. If we didn't eat meat we would use significantly less farm land in total.

      From/; http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...

      "Food, especially livestock, also takes up a lot of room – a source of both greenhouse gas emissions due to land conversion and of biodiversity loss. Of the world’s approximately five billion hectares (12 billion acres) of agricultural land, 68% is used for livestock."

      Don't get me wrong in any of this, I eat meat. I just couldn't let something some obviously wrong go by without saying something.

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  6. Protein called heme by vossman77 · · Score: 4, Informative

    soy leghemoglobin, releases a protein called heme that gives the meat substitute its distinctive blood-like color and taste

    Oh my god, so much wrong with this sentence:

    • leghemoglobin is the protein
    • heme is an organic molecule
    • leghemoglobin does not RELEASE heme, it holds the molecule inside
    • when the heme molecule in the protein binds oxygen it provides the red color.

    source: I am a biochemistry lecturer and wikipedia

    1. Re:Protein called heme by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
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  7. 30 Years...and counting by buravirgil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:30 Years...and counting by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  8. Why am I an omnivore ? by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. . .

    1. Re:Why am I an omnivore ? by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Informative

      Take a look in the mirror, and smile. The Incisors and Canines in your mouth evolved primarily for eating meat,

      Nope. Gorillas have massive canines but they never eat meat.

      Incisors? They work for plants, too. Biting apples is much easier with incisors than molars.

      The puny little canines that humans still have? Throwbacks to when we used to fight like gorillas. No use at all for hunting/killing.

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    2. Re:Why am I an omnivore ? by aevan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe...

    3. Re:Why am I an omnivore ? by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Nope. Gorillas have massive canines but they never eat meat.

      They also don't have apolipoprotein E2-E4, which developed after our common ancestors split, and is a big factor in how much meat we can eat.

  9. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion