Impossible Burgers' Key, Bloody Ingredient Wins FDA Approval (cnbc.com) 445
The FDA has approved the key ingredient used in the vegetarian-friendly Impossible Burger. "The ingredient, soy leghemoglobin, releases a protein called heme that gives the meat substitute its distinctive blood-like color and taste," reports CNBC. The burger comes from a company aptly named Impossible Foods, which started raising millions of dollars in 2015 to pursue a plant-based burger that truly tastes like meat. From the report: In a letter to Impossible Foods released Monday, the FDA deemed soy leghemoglobin GRAS, or generally recognized as safe, in its most recent review. "Getting a no-questions letter goes above and beyond our strict compliance to all federal food-safety regulations," Impossible Foods founder and CEO Patrick O. Brown said in a statement. "We have prioritized safety and transparency from day one, and they will always be core elements of our company culture."
As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that such products are aimed more at meat eaters than long time vegetarians. I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered, so offering something which tastes the same (and has similar or better nutritional values and isn't more expensive) would allow them to switch out of eating meat.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Funny)
I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered
Speak for yourself. I eat meat exclusively so I can contribute to controlling the population of delicious animals.
If you just leave them be, they'll roam around eating all the plants until there aren't any left. Meanwhile carnivorous animals will have a near-endless food source readily available and undefended by humans, which will cause their population to grow exponentially. Soon we'll have to start hunting these dangerous animals lest they decide beef is too common and would much prefer some long pig for lunch. Then we'll end up with a pile of lion corpses that nobody wants, which will attract a shitload of pesky insects, potentially the sort that carry diseases, which will spread far and wide, spreading the next plague. Humanity will be wiped out in a matter of months, all because some people refused to eat their steaks.
Vegetarianism is just terrorism playing the long game.
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Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, all the substitutes that are made to mimic meat well are currently far pricier than actual meat. I tried a sample of a Beyond Burger a while back and it was pretty good, but on the shelf it was like 4 times the price of actual ground beef. That ain't gonna work too well. A plant based burger should cost LESS than the real thing.
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Because right now the Impossible is an early adopter product. As usage spreads, it will get cheaper.
The market for this is not vegans, because they are religiously opposed to engineered plants. It's for vegetarians and anyone who wants to reduce his part of the "carnal footprint" made by cattle farming. As time goes on, it will become a low-cost substitute for ground beef.
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They mostly just want to reduce animal suffering.
For pretty much all the meat in the supermarket, the alternative to slaughter is never being born. Not many pet cows. Maybe these animal lovers think nonexistence is preferable to the lives these animals are offered, but those are the current alternatives. Bred for food or not bred at all. Trying to improve these animals' conditions is noble.
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The other thought is that according to the "Least Harm Principle" a massive switch to vegan diet for society would result in far more deaths of small furry animals being run through harvester machinery than current deaths of large herbivores in slaughterhouses: https://www.morehouse.edu/facs... [morehouse.edu]
Why is a cow's life worth more than a cute bunny's? Clearly we should be going for the least amount of deaths per human, which would mean finding a balanced omnivorous diet.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Funny)
Why is a cow's life worth more than a cute bunny's?
Souls are distributed using a complicated algorithm that considers size, cuteness, flavor, and ability to act human. Humans get 1 full soul. Crickets get only a small fraction of a soul, making them fine to smash. Cows are much larger and cuter than crickets, but they're strongly penalized for being delicious and forfeit almost their entire soul. A bunny's life is actually worth MORE than a cow's based on cuteness and relative flavor. Dogs are a curious case in that American dogs have a larger portion of a soul than Korean dogs based on environment. It's not an entirely fair system, but it's what we've got.
Clearly we should be going for the least amount of deaths per human...
Start whaling?
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A bunny's life is actually worth MORE than a cow's based on cuteness and relative flavor.
I can only assume you are a city dweller? In a lot of rural areas, rabbits are a plague and it's open season to kill as many of them as you can. The phrase 'breed like a rabbit' actually comes from the fact rabbits (strange huh?). I would put them on the bottom of the list right near mosquitoes and flies.
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I would which would have less of a carbon footprint, mass market lab burgers or mass market plant burgers?
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Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that such products are aimed more at meat eaters than long time vegetarians. I'd say that most meat eaters do it because they like the taste rather than because they want animals slaughtered
No, they do it because that's how they were raised. People's "tastes" form at a young age.
(not seeing the slaughter also helps, I think if a few more kids saw an animal being killed it would make a big difference)
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>"No, they do it because that's how they were raised. People's "tastes" form at a young age."
Sorry, but your theory is wrong. I was not raised a vegetarian and agree with the OP. Now if you said for SOME people it depends on how they were raised, I would agree with you.
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Nobody said "all".
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I grew up on a farm. Doesn't bother me one bit. In fact, I've slaughtered pigs that I later helped eat. And have hunted deer, and ate them as well. You do not want deer eating up your entire truck garden. . .
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It is kinda like, for lack of a better comparison, slavery. People who grow up around slave labor see it as normal, and people who are insulated but benefit from it see it as too abstract but useful to worry, but people who live in countries that do not have it but travel to one that does and witness i
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It is kinda like, for lack of a better comparison, slavery.
I think that's quite a good comparison.
Being accustomed something doesn't make it natural or good.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Insightful)
Killing food isn't natural? Seriously? Nothing in nature kills to eat?
GTFO with that bullshit. I swear, some people have their head so far up in the clouds they can't even see reality anymore.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Funny)
It is kinda like, for lack of a better comparison, slavery.
It's like changing your own oil. People who grow up around their parents doing oil changes see them as normal, and people who are insulated but benefit from it see it as too alien. In general, people who grow up with frequent contact with home oil changes do not mind them. For people for who only encounter them a few times, it is otherwise not a part of their world and they have trouble with it.
I can think of a couple of acceptable car analogies.
Re: As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:2)
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No, they do it because that's how they were raised. People's "tastes" form at a young age.
Tastes change. When I was young I used to love shrimp, can't stand seafood now. Same for things like chocolate milk. When I was in college I started really liking onion.
Although, my sister-in-law is vegetarian and her 4 year old girls will regularly pass up pizza for salad. I've joked that I've been tempted to Family and Child Services several times.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Interesting)
"(not seeing the slaughter also helps, I think if a few more kids saw an animal being killed it would make a big difference)"
Maybe yes and maybe no. Once upon a time meat didn't come all nicely packaged from the supermarket. You or some one you knew went out and killed an animal and dragged its still bleeding body back home to be skinned and then cooked.
I also doubt many of the 4-H (and like program) kids that raise animals for slaughter become vegetarians or vegans as these programs wouldn't last very long if that were the case.
Then again, people are kept so distant from their food production nowadays that all of a sudden seeing an animal slaughtered after a lifetime of getting ones meat wrapped in plastic might shock a lot of people into not eating meat.
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Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no.
As an example, cows and bulls are born in about equal numbers. But you only need one bull for all your cows. So the extra bulls get slaughtered every year.
Hell, the "one bull" gets slaughtered every few years since inbreeding is a bad thing. Once all the cows are his daughters, he's history.
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In Japan they eat battered, fried fish with the tail intact. Shrimp as well. It's called tempura.
I didn't realize how conditioned I was to only eating meat that doesn't look like the thing that it came from. I can now just about manage tempura, but not whole shrimp. Anything with a face... Ugh, no.
Makes no sense, it's just one of those ingrained norms I can't get past.
Re:As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:4, Funny)
I didn't realize how conditioned I was to only eating meat that doesn't look like the thing that it came from.
Speak for yourself. When I go out for a steak I demand that they bring me the head of the cow it came from so that I can stare into its cold, dead eyes and remind it who runs this planet.
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(not seeing the slaughter also helps, I think if a few more kids saw an animal being killed it would make a big difference)
True. Exposure reduces, while mystery reinforces aversions.
Growing up next to a farm, I understood the end of life (and helped start of life), and growing up fishing with my father and having to slay my own catch has undoubtedly made it easier for me to eat fish.
All schools should have farm and abattoir field days, in my opinion. Taking life and eating the bodies is something our species does, and is knowledge passed on since we left the jungle for the steppes.
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Absolutely. I certainly hope no one eats meat specifically because they want more animals to be slaughtered. We eat meat because we like the taste (and texture and other properties). If that can be replicated in a reasonable way using a vegetarian method instead, I'm 100% for that and certainly wouldn't mind ordering it regularly.
Minced meat like hamburgers is a good first effort to tackle, because it's much easier than replicating all the features of a steak. Make vegetarian lasagna or bolognese with curre
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I have a feeling this is going to be a wanna-be vegetarian's version of a gateway drug. :D
Oh, and sidenote...I'm tired of vegans who gloat about being able to eat Oreos.
"Excuse me, how does this help your cause even one bit?"
Mmm bacon. Bacon isn't meat, I used to say (Score:2)
Yep, bacon is the gateway drug.
My first ~ year as a vegetarian, I liked to point out that bacon is crispy. Meat isn't crispy. If you cook some meat and leave it sitting out on the counter all day, it'll spoil in a few hours. You can cook bacon and leave it out for days, weeks even if you cover it to keep the dust and flies off. Therefore bacon must not be meat, I can eat it, I said. :)
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I came to post the same thing. I find it fascinating that so many people fail to understand that there are many people who don't like the TASTE or even the SMELL of meat, not just the concept. I won't eat "fake" meat anymore than real meat. I am not trying to "save the earth" or "purify my soul" or such nonsense.
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That's just awesome for you. Unfortunately there are people who do like the smell and taste of meat. And their only chance to get this so far was to raise and kill an animal for that meat. Now, unless they really like the idea of killing an animal for meat and that's their reason to eat meat, this is a great alternative for them.
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I don't care about raising and killing, I worry about the cost. Essentially the energy wasted to raise an animal that you then only get to use a fraction of hurts my capitalist heart when you could get the same from some dirt cheap soy with a bit of flavoring.
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Essentially the energy wasted to raise an animal that you then only get to use a fraction of
People like to make a big deal about how ancient, "primitive" cultures used every part of an animal, but the fact is that we do the same. We don't landfill anything. The bones are ground up for bone meal, or burned to make pigment. The fats are used in other food products, or in cosmetics, or even converted into biodiesel. (Better to make green diesel, though, since it has a much lower gel point.) Even the hide and hair are rendered [slate.com]. Your imaginary food animals where only a small part of the animal is used
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Everyone has different dietary needs and requirements, as everyone processes nutrients a little differently. I always find it funny with how much passion people put behind other peoples diets.
Some people are good with processing vegetable protein, and their nutritional needs crave the taste that vegetable provide.
Other people have a harder time processing vegetable protein, and craves meat to cover the nutritional need.
That said, we have too much food in general, so for those who crave meat, will actually
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Same here. I'm ever so slowly trying to do the same thing. I make this vegetarian roast that's a great meat substitute. And have continually tried to tweet it so it's more like meat. But nothing matches the sheer audacity of eating fast food every so often.
Re: As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you tweet your meat in public?
Re: As a vegetarian since 15 years... (Score:5, Funny)
i hope so. otherwise he canâ(TM)t have any pudding. how can you have any pudding if you donâ(TM)t tweet your meat?!
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As someone trying to eat more vegetarian for health and environmental reasons, i'd appreciate it. Personally I eat vegetarian most days of the week, but still love e.g. steaks, burgers, and sushi, and still eat meat on Saturdays as a treat.
Only eating meat on Sundays is almost 100% of the reduction that's actually needed in the world.
In-between? There's so many genuinely tasty vegetable dishes it's untrue. I don't know why people insist on so much meat.
(Yeah, we know, you can have those as a side-dish to accompany your dead animals - win-win, right? FFS)
Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look in the mirror, and smile. The Incisors and Canines in your mouth evolved primarily for eating meat, and the premolars and molars evolved for grinding vegetable matter. I go with what my biology is optimized for.
I will add that almost every animal source is edible, and the vast majority of plant life is either inedible or actually toxic in some way. I stick with what works. . .
Re: Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look in the mirror, and smile. The Incisors and Canines in your mouth evolved primarily for eating meat,
Nope. Gorillas have massive canines but they never eat meat.
Incisors? They work for plants, too. Biting apples is much easier with incisors than molars.
The puny little canines that humans still have? Throwbacks to when we used to fight like gorillas. No use at all for hunting/killing.
Re:Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"There's plenty of opportunities" for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. "I don't really think they're eating meat."
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I think we should wait until they actually film a gorilla hunting other monkeys before deciding.
Either way, it's obvious that gorillas don't have their canines for the same reason lions do.
Re:Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. Gorillas have massive canines but they never eat meat.
They also don't have apolipoprotein E2-E4, which developed after our common ancestors split, and is a big factor in how much meat we can eat.
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We have a mouth full of small and wimpy teeth, optimized for eating cooked food and hunting with tools. I do agree that we are omnivores, but comparing our teeth to other animals isn't very useful to prove that.
Re: Why am I an omnivore ? (Score:2)
The Incisors and Canines in your mouth evolved primarily for eating meat,
The thing is, though, that if you were quoting from the last hundred plus years of anthropological observation and concensus, you'd be repeating that stuff and not just some gibberish that laypeople repeat to one another in the echo chamber because it sounds right.
Hint: that stuff you said? It wasn't that other stuff. ;)
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Eww? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's weird... after having been vegetarian for 17 years, the concept of making a vegetarian burger taste more like meat only strikes feelings of "eww, gross" in me. And I imagine that's a pretty common reaction.
But I guess it's good for non-vegetarians and maybe people who are newly vegetarian.
On the upside, I imagine this product is a good source of iron, since heme iron is well absorbed.
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Re:Eww? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Likewise I had one recently, and I have to say, it wasn't the best burger I've ever had. It was far from the worst, however. And that's saying something.
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I'm not a vegetarian.
But I like eating good vegetarian dishes. I'm basically the salad king ... not sure if cheese already is forbidden for vegetarians, the line between vegan and vegetarian is not clear for me.
But I loath vegetarian food, that tries to mimic meat. Tofu is tofu, and good tofu is like a good cheese. Bastarding it into meet is a crime in my opinion. Same with that new attempt.
Can't be so hard to eat a real Falafel instead of having a pseudo meat burger.
But alas ... americans ...
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most cheeses are not vegetarian, because the rennet used comes from one of the stomachs of calves.
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That's like saying tomatoes driven in a car with leather seats are not vegetarian.
The amount of enzymes from rennet in actual cheese is measured in micrograms per kilogram.
I.e. Unless one is eating kilograms of one particular cheese per meal, we're talking about parts per billion of "animal matter" per portion of cheese.
At that range, eating any food prepared or handled by humans makes one a cannibal.
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I kinda doubt the food is aimed at hard-core vegans.
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The biggest thing about the Impossible Burger is that it shows you can make a burger that tastes like a burger, without using beef. The target market is not vegetarians/vegans, as I presume they're already well-satisfied with portobello mushrooms and chickpea patties, or similar alternatives. They have plenty of veg* choices that play on their ingredients' own strengths, instead of trying to imitate meat.
For the people who like the taste of burgers, but would prefer not to contribute to factory farming prac
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That was my first thought, I thought vegetarians would avoid it. But I run a science club at a university, and my Indian and Pakistani students who were raised vegetarian cannot get enough of the new meat. WE have a club outing every semester and I have to limit the number of spots. Maybe it is because they are more into the ecology and biotechnology aspects of it.
GRAS, We Pinky Swear (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading TFA (I know), it turns out that new food ingredients don't actually require FDA approval, since food companies can simply state that their novel ingredient is safe, and then the FDA probably won't challenge that. ~10% of all food ingredients haven't been FDA tested/assessed, due to this self-approval loophole, and a concerned party is suing the FDA to close it.
Reading elsewhere on the net, the Impossible Burger tastes/looks/smells remarkably like a real hamburger. The Beyond Burger smells closer to real beef, but doesn't taste/feel as similar. If vegetable-based burgers can get this close, it makes me wonder if there'd be any market for lab-grown meat, which would presumably cost more to produce. Both veggie burgers seem to have the same amount of protein as beef burgers. One hitch: the impossible burger's heme is from GMO yeast, so the anti-GMO people will have a problem with that (probably a significant fraction of vegetarians).
Texture (Score:2)
It took companies a couple of decades to perfect the texture of ground beef which, all things considered, isn't too far off from ground up beans or mushrooms in emulsified plant-based fat, probably oil. The secret of the impossible burger is getting the emulsifier right.
Getting the texture of unprocessed meat, which is closely packed muscle fiber interspersed with fat, is probably impossible using plant-based structures.
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Reading TFA (I know), it turns out that new food ingredients don't actually require FDA approval, since food companies can simply state that their novel ingredient is safe, and then the FDA probably won't challenge that. ~10% of all food ingredients haven't been FDA tested/assessed, due to this self-approval loophole, and a concerned party is suing the FDA to close it.
Seems to me if that were the case it would be the other way around. As in, if it doesn't legally require testing and you can self declare something as safe then only about 10% of it would be properly tested/approved.
Still waiting.... (Score:5, Funny)
Why do we never see reports that steak is being processed to taste like tofu?
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That's no challenge, just come and try the steak at my local.
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Cook it for more than 2 minutes on each side and it starts resembling the taste of tofu.
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Isn't that called lard?
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Yes ewwwwww (Score:2, Interesting)
I these days steer away from foodstuffs that are heavily processed (vegetable and animal sourced). My diet consists of mostly vegetable matter as it comes off the plant and animal protein as it came off or out of the animal/bird - preferably pasture fed.
As a male, I also avoid soy.
I'm not convinced that one can make s
Approval? (Score:3)
From the letter it actually looks like the FDA said that they see no reason not to take the manufacturers word for it that it's safe, not that they have actually concluded for themselves that it is safe. I don't know if that counts as "approval", but I think the distinction is important.
Based on the information that Impossible Foods provided, as well as other information available to FDA, we have no questions at this time regarding Impossible Foods’ conclusion that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under its intended conditions of use to optimize flavor in ground beef analogue products intended to be cooked. This letter is not an affirmation that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under 21 CFR 170.35.
We need more of this ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... to get the meat junkies off their fix. The eco-balance of meat is truely abysmal. Like just a few notches short of plutonium or something. If we could switch to a substitute without anybody noticing, that would be awesome and also finally get anti-biotics out of meat production and back into healthcare, where they belong. That would also get agriculture back into sane waters.
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Humans are omnivores, we evolved bigger brains because we learned to process meat and eventually started cooking it. Farming eventually allowed us to turn small plots of fast-growing but ultimately inedible crops into high protein/carb meat instead of working large swathes of land for little food value in plant material.
Some farming practices are indeed abysmal and we eat way too much meat right now, but totally removing it is impossible, unhealthy and would upset nature's balance more. Totally removing mea
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No. Not even close, no. In fact, 100% opposite wrong.
Totally removing meat would require much more farm land to be devoted to edible crops to the point it may actually be impossible.
It takes more farmland to raise cattle for consumption than it would plants. That is, the cows eat more plants than we do -- acting as middlemen in the food production process. The actual land use for farming, if animals as food were eliminated, would go DOWN.
Plant foods such as rice, beans, potatoes, leafy greens, grains, and cruciferous vegetables are significantly cheaper than meat products. The only expensive part is trying to create something that so
Re:We need more of this ... (Score:4, Informative)
"Totally removing meat would require much more farm land to be devoted to edible crops to the point it may actually be impossible."
That statement couldn't be more wrong. All the food those animals eat has to be grown somewhere and much of the food they eat does not become the muscle fiber we eat, it either serves other purposes for the animal or gets expelled in their poop. On top of that, there's the space the animals need to live in and this space goes up the more ethically you want your meat raised.
This makes meat production an incredibly inefficient means of general food production. If we didn't eat meat we would use significantly less farm land in total.
From/; http://www.bbc.com/future/stor... [bbc.com]
"Food, especially livestock, also takes up a lot of room – a source of both greenhouse gas emissions due to land conversion and of biodiversity loss. Of the world’s approximately five billion hectares (12 billion acres) of agricultural land, 68% is used for livestock."
Don't get me wrong in any of this, I eat meat. I just couldn't let something some obviously wrong go by without saying something.
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I object to the term "meat junkies", as I don't think anyone is actually addicted to meat.
For me, I like the taste of a burger. If I can get the same taste without meat, that's great! That's what the impossible burger promises, and I would love to give it a go.
Eat meat ffs (Score:3, Informative)
Great. Call me in 30 years (Score:2)
If this stuff is still believed to be safe in 3 decades of actual use, then I'll give it a go or at least evaluate the dangers.
Protein called heme (Score:5, Informative)
Oh my god, so much wrong with this sentence:
source: I am a biochemistry lecturer and wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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I should also say that while leghemoglobin [wikipedia.org], is different from human hemoglobin [wikipedia.org] or myoglobin [wikipedia.org], all have heme that binds oxygen and turns red.
Re:Protein called heme (Score:4, Interesting)
I think when they say leghemoglobin "releases" heme, they aren't referring to its physiological function, but the result of denaturing during cooking, which is an unnatural process.
As you cook muscle, the myoglobin denatures exposing the iron in heme to oxidation, which turns the meat from red to brown. This oxidized heme plays a role in the development of other complex flavor molecules in coordination with other classes of compounds like lipids. For example the higher myoglobin content in wild duck breast meat gives it a liver-like flavor.
Name Change? (Score:2)
What?...they didn't want to call it Soylent Red, or Frankenburger?
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Well,
frankenburger is not taken yet, but "frankfurter wuerstchen" is!
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Frankenburger [wikipedia.org] wouldn't be too much off, considering that we already have the Hamburger [wikipedia.org].
Fun fact while we're at edible towns. The town of Vienna [wikipedia.org] is called in German "Wien". Which, yes, makes the people living there "Wiener [wikipedia.org]".
Trying to scare us with Soylent Green? Please, we've been eating each other around here for millennia!
Re:Name Change? Try "Freakenburger." (Score:2)
30 Years...and counting (Score:5, Interesting)
Meat's not Murder, as much as I enjoy Morrisey; It's slaughter. And I admire meat-eaters who address sustainable farms to address factory farming and respect any perspective to appeal to HOW animals are raised and rendered after I had read Diet for a Small Planet (https://www.smallplanet.org/diet-for-a-small-planet) and Robbins' book (the Baskin/Robbins heir who was conned by Madoff) in 1990. I went lacto-ovo vegan and made soy "milk", and my own gluten (ashamed I couldn't master tempeh cultures) and supplemented my diet with nutritional yeast for B complex vitamins and explored every meat substitute available and can claim I was spared seasonal flus for years. Fifteen years later, friends half a generation younger, mocked my preferences to seek out substitutes with the same texture and "mouth feel" as akin to wearing a fake fur. It was my first experience with shifts in generational perspective, I think. (The second is a pervasive belief microwave appliances are dangerous.) Anyway, Morning Star brand was some of the best commercially available (and affordable) product (but used egg whites for texture) and leveraged by the growing market of baby-boomers reduction of cholesterol consumption: Tinfoil Advisory-- Morning Star's "Prime" product was the best I had ever experienced and disappeared from the market for over two decades because (I believe) it was TOO Good. At about this time, Oprah took on the Beef trade associations and was summarily silenced on the subject, the only topic from which I believe she has EVER backed away. Supply/Demand arguments have been the reason given for the 3-4X cost of livestock for three decades. Qorn was prevented from North American shelves for over a decade for reasons ignored when it came to Frito-Lay's potato chip products...end of Advisory...
In 2010, I returned to being an omnivore, but I miss the days of chasing down "mouth feel" substitutes because the science is interesting, and the business angles are very intriguing. Textured vegetable protein (a fantastic substitute in Chile adopted by Hormel a loooong time ago) is the best example of an affordable substitute and industrially compressed gluten that simulated a roast beef that I experienced in Oakland and LA's Whole foods deli sections is the most expensive (5X that of steak), but truly a delicacy.
In 1990, Robbins' claimed that, without government subsidized water rights, a dollar hamburger in the US would cost $6. I don't know if that's factual because there aren't many sources or studies to cross reference, but such an estimate goes a long way in explaining why the market is, in my humble opinion, so controlled.
Re:30 Years...and counting (Score:4, Interesting)
The market is controlled because of the foot shortages we experienced after the Dust Bowl [wikipedia.org] which exacerbated the Great Depression. That's when the government realized, holy crap it's really possible for a modern developed country to not produce enough food to feed itself. Consequently, we enacted all sorts of subsidies to insure there's always an oversupply of food. It's why we pay farmers not to plant anything - so if another dust bowl should wipe out a large chunk of the country's farmland, we have plenty of reserve farmland ready and available to immediately go back into production.
The consequence of all these subsidies is overproduction. That leads to the market price dropping to unsustainable levels (farmers cannot sell their crops for enough to cover their expenses). That's where the other government subsidies come in. The government buys all these crops at a fixed price, thus allowing the farmers to stay in business. The government then acts as a monopoly source and resells the food at a higher price to distributors like supermarkets. That lets them recoup most of the subsidy (but not all - the discrepancy is minimized when the crops are bought at market price; and since the crops are not bought at market price the subsidy always ends up being greater than zero).
But the supply of food exceeds the demand. So the government is still left with more food than it can hope to sell. Rather than let the excess rot in grain silos, it has to come up with other ways to use it. Some of it becomes foreign aid sent to other countries. High fructose corn syrup is another byproduct of this food oversupply. As is ethanol to mix with gasoline. But a large portion of it becomes cheap grain to feed to cattle, since Americans love beef. This is food that was going to rot in grain silos if not used, so the money spent growing it and subsidizing it is a sunk cost [wikipedia.org] and unrecoverable, and thus shouldn't be a factor in how you decide to use it. Any money you can recoup from selling it is a positive.
In other words, if the subsidies really did raise the price of a dollar hamburger to $6, ending subsidized meat production wouldn't mean we're saving $5. Since meat production is actually a money source to offset a sunk cost (selling grain that was going to otherwise rot), ending it would actually increase the cost of these food programs to the government. If the cattle industry wasn't buying all that excess grain, the government would have to pay the entire cost of subsidizing that overproduction. So the extra $5 in cost per hamburger would get distributed over all the grain and corn that's sold to supermarkets. And you'd see the price of grains and vegetables increase to pay for the subsidy that the meat industry is no longer paying to help offset.
Why is there so much focus on Soy? (Score:2)
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If I were you I would probably still not try it (too risky), but I doubt you would have any allergic reaction. The soy plant is not involved in the process. They took the protein DNA sequence from soy and inserted it into yeast, so really it is a yeast product not soy. Other ingredients include coconut and potato.
Much like human insulin is produced by yeast, but we do not have to worry about the blood type of the insulin sequence that came from human.
Hmmm (Score:2)
I enjoy a vegetarian meal but I've never understood the search for a meat substitute. When I want meat I eat it, when I want vegetarian I eat that way. There are plenty of vegetarian dishes that I would choose to eat purely because of the taste. I personally think the idea of a gene moded wholly artificial key ingredient sort of defeats the purpose of a vegetarian, or raw diet I wonder if it would qualify as Halal or Kosher ? I think of Soylent : Green when I consider stuff like this...
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Strange that no one of the die hard vegetarians knows that ...
No idea why you americans keep spreading that myth. First of all the vitamin in question is not "B" but "B12".
Then: there are plenty of vegan foods that have plenty of B vitamins of any type, like 11 or 12. E.g. mushrooms, Sauerkraut, fermented Soy, like Tofu, Algae, even black tea comes to mind, everything containing yeast, e.g. beer! Who had guessed that, beer contains vitamin B! Carrots and other "root vegetables".
Sorry, that you only can get
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Yeast does not produce B12. Fermenting also does not produce B12. B12 is produced by a specific bacteria.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Sorry, terrible advice. And you seem to be conflating B12 and D (which is from sunshine). I don't understand why you'd avoid B12 in the summer. One thing in veganism is certain: those who make the bold step of skipping B12 supplements become ill, and change their tone a few years later and are fine once taking a regular supplement.
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Yes, instead we can clear rainforest to grow plants for ethanol! Because biofuels are so good for the environment!
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You're just jealous that I get to fondle some nice tits!
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The estrogen should take care of that too, your chest will look like it's been waxed 10 minutes ago.