Science

MEET THE IMPOSSIBLE BURGER

The future of food looks (and bleeds) like meat.
  • 01
    Impossible Foods is taking on the multi-billion-dollar meat industry with its newest creation—which looks, feels, tastes, and smells like ground beef. It even bleeds like a medium-rare burger.
  • 02
    This patty is all plant, though—a feat of genetic engineering.
  • 03
    The sensory magic of a traditional burger is in part due to the protein myoglobin, which contains a compound called heme; when you cook a piece of meat, the myoglobin opens up and the heme comes out. That catalyzes a bunch of reactions, many of which create the volatile compounds that give the meat that compelling smell and flavor.
  • 04
    Why can't your usual veggie burger get that meaty taste right? There's no heme at home. Impossible Foods’ secret weapon is a protein called leghemoglobin, found in the root of the soy plant. It helps ferry oxygen around—and more importantly, it contains that sweet, sweet heme.
  • 05
    Since the scientists would need an outlandish amount of soy roots to get the right amount of heme, they engineered a yeast to do the job instead. Basically, they invented a tiny heme machine, and its meat-free heme forms the foundation of a stunning not-beef burger.
  • 06
    Impossible’s scientists isolate and recreate meat-like components with the help of this machine. After cooking a sample, all of the released aromas bind to a piece of fiber, which the machine then uses to identify the compounds responsible for those aromas. Then they can check just how closely the Impossible Burger compares to the real thing.
  • 07
    There’s a similar process for simulating the texture of meat: Impossible’s scientists characterize and identify beef’s specific proteins, then look for plant proteins that share those same properties. In order to do that they need to be able to take a whole plant and separate it into each of its components.
  • 08
    The Impossible Burger’s main ingredients include the heme, wheat and potato proteins for texture, and coconut as a stand-in for fat. Mix it all up and it starts to look more and more like a beef patty.
  • 09
    The result is a meatless burger that’s so convincing, it may as well be meat. And it tastes pretty good—a lot better than meat eaters think it will. But why does a veggie burger need to bleed? Because these are designed to convert meat eaters, not vegetarians and vegans.
  • 10
    While humans eat plenty of soy, they don’t eat the bean’s roots, where the leghemoglobin is found. Leghemoglobin is structurally similar to proteins that we consume all the time, and Impossible says it’s had experts confirm its meatless meat is safe. After the company asked the FDA for an independent review, the agency didn’t deem leghemoglobin *un*safe, but it also didn’t recognize it as safe. (Impossible can still sell the burger, and plans to re-petition the FDA.)
  • 11
    In the meantime, Impossible is scaling up its production from 300,000 pounds a month to more than triple that, in a bid to completely replace animals as a technology for food production. After all, meat production is inefficient and environmentally destructive; as our population expands, we’re going to need more sustainable foods to meet the demand.

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Matt Simon was a senior staff writer covering biology, robotics, and the environment. He’s the author, most recently, of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. ... Read more
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