Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If your meat has blood coming out of it, you need a new butcher.
Is menstrual blood actually blood? That's not a question with a definitive answer; it is obviously different from the normal kind of blood you'd find in blood vessels, but it's also fundamentally similar. "Blood" is not an elemental or even homogeneous substance, so it can be hard to say that something isn't blood.
But most people who refer to something as "blood" have never given it a minute's thought. If you cut meat and get a thick red liquid, of course that's blood. Where else would blood come from?
That fluid is very different from the thin, watery, red-tinged, translucent liquid that might be found in muscle tissue.
This is like saying that tea is exactly the same as water, minus the tea. I'm not sure what your point is.
No kidding, that is precisely what I'm arguing about.
>And it is blood, minus some of the components.
I still don't understand your point. It is _not_ blood. Water is the same thing as chicken noodle soup, minus some components. Water is not the same thing as chicken noodle soup.
I don't think it's controversial to presume that most people understand
If you want to say that you personally see a huge distinction here, that's fine. But you are claiming to describe what most people think, and I think you are wrong.
I've learned a lot about the body over the years. I found it interesting to know that there isn't really some clear cut, black and white distinction between various fluids in the body. They actually have substantial overlap and interplay.
It's just something I found interesting and most people seem to not know it.
Have a great day. If that doesn't clear this up, then it's really not worth arguing further.
It does make me wonder, why soy? Corn and rice hemoglobins, unlike soy hemoglobin, are basically ubiquitous in our diet as far as I know. I suppose soy hemoglobin may be more meat-like or easier to produce.
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/plantphysiol/115/3/1259....
Jan 2018 cost per ton: Soy: 405 Corn: 155 Rice: 442
Well! There goes that idea! Is the US corn subsidy the reason it’s so much cheaper?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation#Plants_th...
We don’t know what we don’t know. And impossible doesn’t know why there would be side effects. Or they do and you’ll not know.
Buy grass fed organic meat and eat less of it. We already eat too much.
I can understand vegetarian cultures surviving, since they can acquire essential nutrients through the animal products found in diary, but would be intrigued to find a vegan (plant-based only) culture. Was there perhaps one in the distant past or ?
The Jain's diet is largely plant-based. It allows for dairy, but only in the case that the cows aren't hurt as part of the process.
Eat meat or don’t (I do), but don’t kid yourself about some historical or dietary imperitive, and don’t ignore a couple of million years of our and our ancestors’ omnivorous history. It’s also unwise to argue from a historical precedent that has little or no relevance unless you’re cranking out kids in your teens, hunting and gathering, and dying young. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy removing ourselves from the demanding lives of our distant ancestors, and plenty of them ate mostly plants and thrived. Remember gladiators? https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.htm...
Yeah, eating meat is a choice we make, and only one some of us are lucky to be able to make. History is full of us eating meat, and full of us (especially the poor in all ages) eating mostly or exclusively grain, pulses, and vegetables with some diary I’d they were lucky.
We've been playing god with our food supply since forever (salting meats to preserve them [salt is bad for you! right?], agriculture, the list goes on...)
Except for the fact that it is too expensive for most to afford, meaning only the upper class can eat the stuff and feel good about it; also it produces much more methane per pound of meat than the corn-fed and hormone-injected equivalent; and finally it requires MUCH more space -- space that could be used for more sustainable agriculture like soy farms or chicken factories.
Environmentally and economically it seems like America should be engineering it's meat. Ethically, this is a different story, especially with the torturing of animals that often accompanies this meat engineering process.
The reason that I personally stand behind the development of meat alternatives like the impossible, and cultured meat, is that these are attempts to continue increasing the environmental and economic viability of meat while simultneously eliminating the ethical issues completely.
Yes the alternative meat field is young and not effective right now, but that's no reason to abandon all hope that cheap sustainable meat-like sustenance is possible. Impossible should be lauded and encouraged to improve their product. Their very name is a clue that what they are trying to do is not easy, but I think if successful, it could pay off big for society.
The place I eat mine from cooks it just right. Yum.
Perhaps they have failed so far (according to your taste test), but the goal is valid. If someone can find a way to make a product near-indistinguishable from meat without raising and killing animals, it would be a massive victory for the environment (meat production is CO2-intensive), for the cause of bringing decent food to poor people, and for reducing animal suffering.
It may be one of the most underrated technological efforts happening right now IMO.
There is a market for this, just because you aren't in the target market doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Neither fantasy is reflecting reality, but that's secondary. Mock plant-based beef is good middle-ground.
I am not worried about people's perceptions of lab grown meat. Such perceptions change quickly if a product is good. They also shouldn't think of green pastures when they see meat. They should think of the hellish life most of the animals had.
I feel like your position is analogous to saying, "I think it's better to focus on nuclear fusion. Why waste time working on renewables?" Of course we'd like to power everything with fusion, but it's not there yet economically or technologically. So in the mean time, it's probably a good idea to also fund intermediate solutions.
> Either eat real veggies or eat real meat.
Could you explain this stance? Precisely what do you find objectionable about other people choosing to eat plant-based foods that happen to imitate meat?
Edit: I see your position against the meat substitutes is primarily health-based. Almost certainly it would be harmful to one's health to consume foods such as the impossible burger frequently, but you should consider that the products that it's trying to replace aren't necessarily any healthier.
My objection against imitation meat is the same I have against sugary breakfast cereals. They make people believe that they are doing something healthy but in reality they are eating highly processed food that has purely been created for taste and not for nutrition.
Would you be willing to elaborate on the culture change point? Do you think that too few people are concerned about animal welfare to choose the impossible burger over ground beef even if it's competitive price-wise?
So far the Impossible Burger is very expensive and even if it were cheaper it's still not good enough make most people move over from beef. It's a cute novelty item and should be treated as such. On the other hand if lab grown meat ever becomes viable that would be a real game changer in my view.
I am starting to sound like a zealot which I really am not usually...
I'm all for reducing animal suffering (especially from CAFOs) but replacing meat with plants isn't necessarily a victory for the environment.
Widespread factory farming agriculture has destroyed entire ecosystems. Ever flown over the midwest? You see miles and miles of plots of the same crops repeated over and over... monocultures with very little of the original grassland remaining. Agriculture has accomplished the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.
"70% of all water from rivers and underground reserves is being spread onto ... irrigated land that grows one-third of the world’s food", according to _When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century_ by Fred Pearce. In some regions up to 90% of the water from the environment is used for irrigation.
The green revolution as we know it is only possible due to fossil fuels, the Haber-Bosch process breaking down oil to create nitrogen fertilizer. With industrial farming, all in all an acre of corn requires about fifty gallons of oil according to _The Omnivores Dilemma_ by Michael Pollan. How much fossil fuel does a typical acre of wheat or soy consume? How sustainable is it compared to pastured meat, which thrives on the renewable resource of grassland?
Bringing decent food to poor people is also a noble goal, but is fraught with a moral hazard. Many developed nations have agricultural subsidies, including the US at $1.173 billion for wheat and $610 million for soybeans as of the 2004 USDA report. The billions of dollars in subsidies causes an oversupply, and the developed nations are all too willing to dump onto other countries, putting local farmers out of business and advancing an imperialist dependency. Lierre Keith, vegan for 20 years (now ex-vegan), in her book _The Vegetarian Myth_ says it best:
> Why should people in Cambodia be dependent on the US for their basic sustenance? It condemns them to participating in a market economy where they will have to dedicate their labor and local resources to produce raw materials, like timber and metal ore, or cheap consumer goods like sneakers or computer chips, for rich nations. With the pennies they get in return, they will then have to buy food from the same rich nations or their progeny, the grain cartels. This is a destructive, inhumane, and oppressive arrangement. I have to believe that the political vegetarians haven’t thought it through.
Joel Salatin, legendary proprietor of Polyface Farms, considers himself a "grass farmer". He maintains the grassland, which the cattle graze on and perform several important functions. Not only does grazing stimulate root growth, but the cow digests cellulose (or technically, the bacteria in her rumen ferment it) and emits fertilizer, feeding the plants ever hungry for more nitrogen and predigested nutrients. Grass uniquely grows from its base instead of its tips, so the cows eating and grazing on grass doesn't kill the plant, but rather the opposite.
Contrast with other plants with thorns or spines or chemical deterrents (such as coffee, caffeine originally a pesticide generated by the plant to deter predators, now cultivated by humans as a stimulant) or anti-nutrients or toxins. Grass has none of these. Lierre Keith explains in her usually floral prose how grasses want to be grazed, metaphorically: the grass created the cows (a similar point can be made about human domestication and lactose tolerance gene).
Of course, concentrated animal feed operations additionally feed cattle with grains. Grains are a recent invention on the evolutionary timescale: they didn't exist until humans domesticated annual grasses about 12,000 years ago, whereas the progenitors of the domestic cow, the aurochs, were around more than 2 million years ago. Cattle aren't adapted for grain, upsetting the delicate balance bacterial balance of their rumen, causing sickness. Poultry fed too much grain will develop fatty liver. So why do it?
Grains are cheap, very cheap. An ideal commodity, storable and portable. A dense organic form of energy, most likely converted from fossil fuel fertilizer thanks to Fritz Haber. And they cause explosive growth in animals, dramatically increasing both meat and milk production. The economic incentives are there.
That doesn't mean it is a good idea, or is sustainable or ecologically wise or nutritionally healthy.
Fortunately, grassfed grass-finished pastured beef is getting easier and easier to find. Thousands of years ago, used to be the only kind there was, now we are coming back full circle.
> Start with Africa seven million years ago, because that’s where human life began. The climate, the creation of our ancestors—our beloved kin of bacteria, fungi, and plants—eased from wet to dry. The trees gave way to grasses and a tide of savannas rippled across the world. Cradled in the grasses were large herbivores. Twenty-five million years ago, in the exuberance of evolution, a few plants tried growing from their bases instead of their tips. Grazing would not kill these plants; quite the opposite. It would encourage them by stimulating root growth. All plants want nitrogen and predigested nutrients, and ruminants could provide those to the grasses as they grazed. This is why, unlike other plants, grasses contain no toxins or chemical repellents, no mechanical deterrents like thorns or spines to discourage animals. Grasses want to be grazed. It was grass that created cows; human “domestication” was, in comparison, just the tiniest tug on the bovine genome, and cows tugged back with the lactose tolerance gene.
- Lierre Keith, _The Vegetarian Myth_: Chapter 4, Nutritional Vegetarians, pg. 139
Put another way, the grass depends on the cows as much as the cows depend on the grass. A symbiotic interdependence.
If the implied argument is to instead of eating animals that eat plants, to eat their plants directly, in the spirit of "refuting the central point" in Paul Graham's hierarchy, I responded in depth to @maxxxxx elsewhere in this thread who made the same point, but long story short humans cannot digest the grass which cows (naturally) eat. I definitely wouldn't advocate for grain-feeding, it is indefensible, but even grain-finished cows eat grass. Through the marvel of the rumen, indigestible (to us) cellulose is turned into delicious meat, milk, and (to grass) fertilizer.
Pastured grassfed beef does not depend on industrial agriculture/grain farming (corn, wheat, soy, etc.), and is in fact directly opposed to it. Instead of disrupting ecosystems by planting rows and rows of monocultures, grasslands of clover, millet, bluegrass, plantain timothy, sweet grass, fescue, etc. are sustainably nurtured by ruminants. Working with nature, instead of against it.
Most farm animals don't live on green pastures but get their food from the big monocultures you are writing about. It would be much more efficient to eat the plants straight instead of feeding them to animals to get their meat.
Either you haven't thought your points through or the facts you are working with are wrong.
The problem is although plants have nutrients, most of them are inaccessible to the human digestion system.
Cellulose = indigestible fiber, yet forms the bulk of the structural component of green plants. C6H10O5, a polysaccharide which would be very valuable if we could use it. The most abundant organic polymer on earth. But we can't eat grass; or we can try, it is non-toxic but no nutrients to speak of will be acquired from chewing and swallowing it.
Grasslands cover about 30% of the earth's surface (more before the rise of agriculture), an abundant resource which cannot be ignored. So how can we derive nutrition from it?
Ruminants have found an answer: bacteria. More specifically, 200 trillion bacteria, 4 billion protozoans, millions of yeast and fungi present in the rumen of a cow, the first of the cow's two stomachs. The cow can't directly digest grass either, but the contents of her rumen can do it for her, then she absorbs the output.
This large complicated digestive system however is very expensive. Is there a more efficient mechanism of acquiring nutrients? Fortunately, early primates discovered a way. "Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains" (Harvard Gazette, 2008). Encephalization, the 3rd stage that led humans to civilization (1st: terrestriality, going down from the trees, 2nd: bipedalism), trading off a larger brain for a smaller gut:
> But growing brain size presented a metabolic problem. A gram of brain tissue takes 20 times more energy to grow and maintain than a gram of tissue from the kidney, heart, or liver, she said. Gut tissue is metabolically expensive too — so as brains grew gut sizes shrank.
> It’s likely that meat eating “made it possible for humans to evolve a larger brain size,” said Aiello. Early human ancestors probably consumed more animal foods — termites and small mammals – than the 2 percent of carnivorous caloric intake associated with chimpanzees.
There are quite a few essential nutrients not present in plants. Of those that are, they are often less bioavailable or are found along side anti-nutrients. I'll mention just one: docosahexaenoic acid, an essential omega-3 fatty acid important for normal brain function. Has been with us for a while, Michael A. Crawford calls it "nutritional armor in evolution", and curiously it is photosensitive; photoreceptor cells contains high levels of DHA.
The human body can make DHA itself (being an essential nutrient after all, you would hope so), by converting from ALA, but this process is inefficient so vegetarians often have lower levels of DHA than meat-eaters. Apparently it is also found in microalgaes so some vegetarians supplement. But what else are they missing? What are they missing that we don't even know about yet?
An example of an anti-nutrient in plants: phytic acid in legumes, interfering with the absorption of iron, zinc, and calcium. Some plant foods do contain iron, but it is less easily absorbed than the type of iron only found in meat: heme-iron. This makes vegetarians especially women more prone to anemia. I've even heard of women who stopped having their periods after a vegan diet for many years, which promptly resumed when eating meat. Other animals with larger stomachs are more equipped at processing these substances in plants than humans.
Granted there are other mechanisms for unlocking the nutrients caged away in plants. The Aztecs invented grinding corn soaked in limewater, now known as nixtamalization, to increase nutritional value (converting bound niacin to free nicin, helping prevent pellagra) and decrease mycotoxins. But having ruminants eat grass, which humans then in turn eat in the form of meat and milk, is a very efficient and effective process.
This process repeats itself in other systems: for example, small crustaceans/plankton eaten by feeder fish like herrings, eaten by larger fish like salmon, eaten by mammals like bears. The "Food Chain".
The table here indicates that beef yields 2.2 g/m^2 of protein, soybeans 40 g/m^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...
Perhaps animal protein should get a quality factor bonus over vegetable protein. But even if it's twice as good as vegetable protein, that's still a much lower yield of effective-protein-per-acre. Is it enough for everyone?
If people should be eating 60 grams of animal protein per day[1], and beef yields 2.2 grams/m^2/year, that's
60 * 365 / 2.2 = 9954 m^2 per person, or almost exactly one hectare.
0.9954 ha * 7.4 billion people = 74 million km^2 of pasture land required. According to the FAO, as of 2011 the world's total land used for agriculture was 49 million km^2.
It looks like feeding everyone from beef grazing on grassland would require claiming significantly more of the planet's surface for agriculture. That makes intuitive sense too -- if grazing animals produced as much food per unit area as fertilized and irrigated plants tended with machines, farmers wouldn't have bought the fertilizers, irrigation, or machines in the first place.
[1] You might set this number higher, since in other comments you have supported a low-carb, high-meat diet.
I agree the bleeding bit seems pretty gimmicky, but if it helps convince non-vegetarians to give it shot it might make sense.
Otherwise, I rather disagree with your post. It's certainly one of the better veggie burgers that, to me, tastes quite a bit like real meat. The Beyond Burger, which is in the same niche as the Impossible Burger, actually tastes too much like meat for my mother (vegetarian for far longer than me) to enjoy. I don't think I'd confuse either of those for real meat, but it does hit a lot of the same notes which is more than I can say for any other veggie burger I have tried.
A friend who really enjoys his meat tried the Impossible Burger and found it almost identical to some non-burger meat. I think it was some sort of pate from an animal I don't think many Americans usually eat.
I suspect you haven't tried many of the standard grocery store veggie burgers. Like so many vegetarian and vegan products, despite their branding they are really more for making a new dish that's similar to the meat version. I think if they branded themselves more as alternatives rather than exact replacements they would be far more acceptable to people.
Only recently, with products like the Imposible and Beyond Burger, have we started to see products that are really starting to push into the realm of direct replacements. I don't think it's fair to call them just average veggie burgers.
Anyway, there are 3 purposes I can think of:
(1) Looks. The myoglobin substitute, leghemoglobin, that they put in the Impossible Burger will make it look more like real meat, which will visually appeal to people who like meat.
(2) Flavor. Myoglobin also affects flavor, so again a more realistic imitation of meat. (Incidentally, apparently myoglobin content is the main difference between dark and light meat chicken. Myoglobin stores oxygen, so muscles that get used more need to contain more of it. Since chickens walk way more than they fly, chicken breasts have little myglobin whereas chicken legs and thighs have more.)
(3) Nutrition. Myoglobin contains iron. People always talk about vegetarians getting enough protein, but iron might actually be a bigger challenge. And heme iron (as found in meat's myoglobin and in Impossible's leghemoglobin) is easier to absorb than non-heme iron (as generally found in plants).
There is a lot of waste in the meat industry in the US and Canada. Many countries all over the world eat all the animal but in the US and Canada you never or rarely see people demanding a serving of offal, liver, kidneys, tongue, eyes, brain. If a hamburger could be made out of vegetables then I bet most people wouldn't care what it was made of.
I had read about their effort to produce heme in the lab. This article [1] is interesting as it identifies that Impossible Foods has engineered the methylotrophic yeast, Pichia Pastoris [2], to produce Soy Leghemoglobin Protein.
1. http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/3FNzWrRdPanXheUdTigx/full
I haven't tried the Impossible Burger. Does it solve this problem?
Until then, I'm not touching it. There are plenty of other tasty meat substitutes out there with more tried-and-true ingredients.
Personally, I'm going to keep eating meat, but I'm kind of old-fashioned
Maybe HN has jumped ship and I need to simply move on.
Being concerned about the quality of what you consume is likely to be correlated with being skeptical about meat substitutes made in a lab. I suspect the whole project of incorporating a little inherent contradiction.
If you tell me meat is not good for my health, or the planet, and I'm convinced, then I'm going to reason that I should probably just minimize my meat consumption and eat things based on age-old recipes, not be a fanatic about meatless purity or seek out weird meat substitutes.
This may not be an obvious point of view if you see avoiding meat as primarily an animal rights issue and associate it with technological progress.
Leeches actually are valid medical science. There just were not better alternatives at the time, and they sometimes can still be used today.
web.uconn.edu uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: web2.uconn.edu, phonebook.uconn.edu, testsite.uconn.edu
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN"There are more than 10,000 chemicals added directly or indirectly to foods in the US and food makers use an estimated 1,000 without notifying the FDA. In a policy statement as recent as Monday, July 23, the American Academy of Pediatrics noted that of the nearly 4,000 additives inventoried by the FDA, only about 263 had reproductive toxicology data, and developmental toxicology data was only available for two of the additives."
Better make sure those "tried and true" substitutes don't use any of those...
This is precisely why I, for one, have recently chosen to begin eating real meat after 10+ years of veganism. Who wants to be a lab rat in some food scientist's experiment? How many of the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) substances will turn out to be anything but?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his books including _Antifragile_ how he doesn't eat any fruit that doesn't have an ancient Greek or Hebrew name, and doesn't drink any liquid that hasn't been in existence for 1,000+ years. Those which pass through this great filter have survived the test of time.
Humans have eaten bovines before history, cattle being domesticated around 8000 BCE but even earlier, about four million years ago Australopithecus, an ancient predecessor to genus Homo, ate meat. Their contemporaries, Hominin, did not and were outcompeted by the meat-eating Australopithecus (Scientific American: Early Meat-Eating Human Ancestors Thrived While Vegetarian Hominin Died Out, 2012).
Eating meat, and beef especially, is in our DNA. Soy hemoglobin "leghemoglobin" is not. I know which one I'll choose.
Also bear in my mind the way which our ancestors ate meat is very different to how we do it, and there is much evidence that red meat consumption is bad for your health in the modern context with our long lifespans.
To be honest, it is very confusing to try and work out what constitutes a healthy diet these days.
Impossible burger’s patty is on par with a McDonald’s quarter pounder. Which is a reasonable accomplishment. It’s acceptable and enjoyable as a cheap burger. But it is not gonna fool anyone who really enjoys a good burger.
Which would be fine if people would stop overhyping it.
This is a good point, one reason many people (including me) have been eating more meat lately is to reduce their carbohydrate consumption after research has found many of the negative effects of a high-carbohydrate diet.
The Impossible Burger's complete ingredient list, from their website:
Water, Textured Wheat Protein, Coconut Oil, Potato Protein, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Leghemoglobin (Soy), Yeast Extract, Salt, Konjac Gum, Xanthan Gum, Soy Protein Isolate, Vitamin E, Vitamin C, Thiamin (Vitamin B1), Zinc, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12 Contains: Soy, Wheat
The very first ingredient besides water is "wheat", a grain known for numerous side effects, one of the only foods with its own disease (celic disease, gluten sensitivity), high levels of anti-nutrients (phytic acid, inhibiting mineral absorption). Granted, it is the "protein" part of wheat, but from the nutritional facts on the Impossible Burger's zendesk support site we can see it has 5 grams total carbohydrate, total sugars <1g, including added sugars <1 g.
Five grams may not sound like much, but it all adds up. The general recommendation for inducing ketosis if you're into that is less than 20 grams (ignoring the recent "Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study" study which scandalously considered 200 grams "low carb"). A hamburger bun has about 23 grams, so eating one of these burger patties in a hamburger with a bun and/or other condiments will easily kick one out of the low-carbohydrate diet classification, if that's one's goal.
For comparison, on a personal note, today I've eaten zero carbs at least by my measurements (supposedly real meat has "some" carbs, but I haven't found any measurable quantity anywhere, data sources commonly list it as 0g - but would be interested in more precise data if anyone has it). Not an untypical day for me. 0% carbs, 60% fat, 40% protein (this high protein:fat ratio is unusual for me, due to the lean meat I unfortunately was stuck with this time, but I usually strive to eat much higher fat content. Always lowering the carbohydrates.) As primarily a meat-eater, or at least an eater of animal products, it is much easier to strive for the low-carbohydrate way of eating.
There are excellent vegetarian culinary traditions in the world. India stands out as a country with amazing regional vegetarian cuisines that celebrate their ingredients and don't pretend to be something they are not. In the United States, vegetarians eat fake meat.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_cuisine#Ingredients
There's a lot to be said for food that's "true to itself", but burgers are really good, perhaps especially to people who have grown up enjoying them and like to continue doing so. That doesn't seem in bad taste to me.
India stands out as a country with amazing regional vegetarian cuisines that celebrate their ingredients and don't pretend to be something they are not. In the United States, vegetarians eat fake meat.
Pretty baseless assertion. In my experience, most of them don't eat much of it but some like it sometimes.
It’s so reliant on company money that it can’t do its duty to protect the people it is supposed to protect.
The problem isn’t the FDA it’s the government cutting its budget. In such an obvious way that they want business to be able to do what they want. It’s gotten worse under Trump.