What Happens When Veggie Burgers Taste Like Beef?

Making fun of vegan/veggie food has always been a walk in the park. Vegans eat tofu for breakfast instead of eggs, massage kale for lunch, make sausages from something called vital wheat gluten – the list goes on. And their burgers? You can actually see the carrots that make up some of those frozen, pre-cooked veggie burgers. Some of them even have a green hue.

“So, do you only eat grass?”

Maybe! My “burger” IS a sickening shade of green…

For years, meat eaters were easily able to dismiss vegans as anemic, rabbit food eating extremists. Fair enough.

What happens when these same vegan mockers are served a vegan burger that tastes just like a summer BBQ was meant to taste? Made blood red rare, with juices dripping, the texture just right, they won’t even be able to tell the difference.

We won’t have to wait long to see how they’ll react – Impossible Foods is trickling out their ground-breaking plant-based burger this summer, 2016. Most recently raising $108 million in funding from the likes of Bill Gates, this company has produced a vegan burger that looks like this:

 

As previously discussed, Aaron Rogers, famous NFL quarterback, has tried them and has loved them. So have famous chefs like David Chang. Not to mention America’s MC, Questlove (yes lawd).

Those are some red-blooded American men right there and they love a plant-based burger.

Likely there will be some serious negative campaigning on the part of the meat industry and maybe meat eaters will get in their heads about it and declare, “It’s just too weird – give me beef.” But if this thing tastes like the real deal, produced at a fraction of the resources required to produce beef burgers (not to mention sparing the cattle…), will our efficiency-rewarding economy drive the sales beyond that of beef?

It will also be curious to see how vegans and vegetarians react. For many, the taste of beef is strongly tied to a disgust for the practice of slaughtering cattle. If some vegans and vegetarians previously enjoyed a good burger (?), they might welcome the opportunity to sit side-by-side with their non-veggie loved ones over a checkered tablecloth, biting into a juicy burger – a feeling of normalcy in an otherwise tempeh and chickpea-filled existence.

But the greatly reduced strain on natural resources that Impossible Foods promises is its greatest promise. Let’s hope by impossibly imitating one of the most American foods there is, they use our love of culture and community to save the environment.

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Notes:

• Here’s a great piece that delves deeper into the Impossible Foods story.
• The Wall Street Journal recently gained access to the facilities of Impossible Foods – here’s what they found.
• Impossible Foods’ website.