Where's the beef?

I first wrote about it six years ago, almost to the date.  There was no way that I could not appreciate the moment.  I was confident that it was going to be a big part of the future.

Later, I talked about it with students, even had them read news reports and commentaries. I talked about it with people whenever the topic came up.  A couple of times, I even bought it from the store and tried it at home.  I was sure that I came across as a madman, but I never wavered; so confident I was about it being the future.

What is it that I am referring to?

Meat that is not really meat.

I wrote six years ago:

It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals.  All the old definitions on what foods can or cannot be consumed will have to be redefined.

And then Burger King introduced the Impossible Whopper--"100% Whopper, 0% beef."

The news today is that after the test marketing, Burger King is going nationwide with the Impossible Whopper.

The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations for the next month as it tests the potential demand for the meaty-tasting meatless patty.

When such a powerful company adopts the beefless beef, hey, we are well beyond the tipping point.  It, ahem, beefs up the market:

Burger King wasn’t the first chain to see the value in adding Impossible Burgers to the menu. Roughly a year ago, White Castle became the first major fast food chain to offer an Impossible Slider on its menu. The burgers can also be found at more upscale fast-casual restaurant chains like Bareburger, Applebee’s, Red Robin, and Five Napkin Burger joints.

Burger King going full-speed on meatless meat has its own downside:

For months, many restaurants across the country have been unable to stock the soy-based patties, which taste remarkably beefy. Impossible Foods, their Redwood City maker, couldn’t keep up with rising demand — and even restaurants that had previously served the burgers couldn’t get them. The reason, just possibly, was that the company had promised to supply Impossible Whoppers to 7,300 Burger King locations by the end of the year.
“It disappeared off our shelves and then showed up at Burger King across the street,” said Christian Gainsley, owner of the Bernal Heights restaurant Outer Orbit. “It felt like a betrayal.”

Success is a wonderful thing!

Impossible Foods’ recent wins come as its chief rival, Beyond Meat, is raking in piles of cash as a publicly traded company and building up a sizable war chest to conduct research and development for new products.
Impossible Foods has raised nearly $700 million to date as a private company. Its backers include  Khosla Ventures,  Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project.

These alt-meat products are derived from plants.  And then there is the other approach--growing meat in labs from animal cells, and R&D there has been on an accelerating path.

Why are these important?  For two reasons. One, the ethics of killing animals.  Second, the impact on the environment--our meat consumption is not sustainable in its current structure.

Livestock raised for food already contribute about 15% of the world’s global greenhouse-gas emissions. (You may have heard that if cows were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest emitter.) A quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used to graze them, and a third of all cropland is used to grow food for them. A growing population will make things worse. It’s estimated that with the population expected to rise to 10 billion, humans will eat 70% more meat by 2050. Greenhouse gases from food production will rise by as much as 92%.
In January a commission of 37 scientists reported in The Lancet that meat’s damaging effects not only on the environment but also on our health make it “a global risk to people and the planet.” In October 2018 a study in Nature found that we will need to change our diets significantly if we’re not to irreparably wreck our planet’s natural resources.

If you are like me, it has been decades since you went to the Burger King, correct? Well, head on there, and check out the Impossible Whopper and be a part of the future!