I dumped meat a few weeks ago, and it was not an easy breakup. Some of my most treasured moments have involved a deck, a beer, and a cheeseburger. But the more I learned, the more I understood that the relationship wasn’t good for either of us.
I gave up meat not because my willpower suddenly rose beyond its default Lebowski setting, but because a box arrived at my door and made it easy.
It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat.
And it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Ethan Brown, the company’s 43-year-old CEO, told me when I rang him up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk. More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It’s the ultimate performance burger.”
The Beast Burger will have its coming-out party in select Whole Foods in January.
But, it’ll have to catch Impossible Foods, founded by Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown, which in October revealed a raw “ground beef” featuring bioengineered “plant blood” designed to approximate hemoglobin. Impossible Foods expects to have its meat going head-to-head with ground beef next year.
Considering the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem, and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing.
Read full, original article: The Top-Secret Food That Will Change the Way You Eat
