The Impossible Burger patty looks like any other: slightly rare on the inside and seared on the surface. It even has the exact same smell, taste, and texture as a regular burger. But here’s the catch—it’s entirely plant-based.
The Impossible Burger is more than just a burger, it’s a way to combat climate change. Beef is one of the most environmentally-damaging meats, as cows use up an enormous amount of land and water, and produces significant methane emissions.
Reducing meat intake in general is scientifically-proven to reduce carbon emissions. From an animal welfare perspective, lower demand for meat can lead to less animal slaughter.
What makes meat, meat?
This is the main question that researchers at Impossible Foods are trying to answer. Scientists at Impossible Burger want the sensory experience of eating an Impossible Burger to be identical to eating a normal hamburger. So, they try to manipulate the main senses involved in eating: sight, smell, taste, and feel.
A very common complaint about veggie burgers is that they don’t have the same texture as meat. How food feels in your mouth—chewy, soft, moist, etc.—is all determined by proteins. In order to make an Impossible Burger have the same texture as a regular burger, scientists investigated the properties of proteins in beef and looked for plant proteins with those same properties. Impossible Foods used to use wheat protein for texture, but switched to soy and potato protein in April 2019 to make the burger gluten-free.
The burger patty even cooks like a regular burger. Animal fat is substituted for coconut and sunflower oil, which makes the patty sizzle and sear when it’s cooking.
When it comes to controlling the way a patty smells, flavor scientists first analyze the smell of meat. Beef patties are broken down to the molecular level, and the scent of the aromatic molecules are recorded. A specific combination of these molecules creates the smell and flavor of meat, which can be replicated to make fake meat. The secret ingredient to all this? Heme.
What is heme?
Heme is the magic ingredient to the Impossible Burger. It’s a complex molecule that carries oxygen in your blood, but it’s also the molecule that makes meat smell and taste the way it does. In animals, heme is carried by hemoglobin in blood, but it is also found naturally in plants.
Impossible Foods sources its heme from soy leghemoglobin, found in the root nodules of soy plants. However, to source large quantities of leghemoglobin from these plants is impractical, so Impossible Foods found an alternative method of obtaining heme: genetic engineering.
The DNA that codes for leghemoglobin is extracted from soy nodules and transferred to yeast, forming a genetically-modified yeast cell. These yeast cells will then undergo fermentation to produce leghemoglobin en masse. The question as to whether the Impossible Burger contains a GMO is up for debate: the yeast cells have definitely been genetically-modified, but the heme it produces are chemically identical to natural heme.
How does it taste?
It’s much more convincing than lentil and bean veggie burgers, without a doubt. When I tried an Impossible Burger for the first time, I could not believe it was not meat. Had I not known that I was eating an Impossible Burger, I definitely would have believed it was a regular burger. In some ways, I prefer the Impossible Burger to the standard burger. It tastes just as good and is guilt-free.
The future of alternative meat
Large fast food chains like Burger King and Red Robin have already started to introduce Impossible Burgers into their menus. You can also now buy raw Impossible Burger patties at grocery stores. When Beyond Burger, a competitor of Impossible Foods, went public in May its stocks shot up by 840%, which goes to show how revolutionary alternative meat may be.
The concept of in vitro meat—meat cultured in a petri dish—is also gaining popularity. While in vitro meat hasn’t been commercialized yet, it is certainly something to expect in the near future.
If you haven’t tried an Impossible Burger yet, I highly recommend it. It’s tasty, environmentally-friendly, and gave me hope that I could survive as a vegetarian.