The Impossible Burger

The Strange Science of the Impossible Burger, marketed as the vegan burger that “bleeds”… and apparently tastes close to meat. Via Wired:

There are other veggie burgers on the market, of course, but Impossible Foods wants to sell consumers a real meat analog—one that requires a very different kind of engineering than your Boca or black bean burgers. So WIRED wants to take you on the deepest dive yet into the science behind the Impossible Burger.

Biting into an Impossible Burger is to bite into a future in which humanity has to somehow feed an exploding population and not further imperil the planet with ever more livestock. Because livestock, and cows in particular, go through unfathomable amounts of food and water (up to 11,000 gallons a year per cow) and take up vast stretches of land. And their gastrointestinal methane emissions aren’t doing the fight against global warming any favors either (cattle gas makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide).

This is the inside story of the engineering of the Impossible Burger, the fake meat on a mission to change the world with one part soy plant, one part genetically engineered yeast—and one part activism. As it happens, though, you can’t raise hell in the food supply without first raising a few eyebrows.

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