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Science

Impossible Foods is Launching Plant-Based Pork and Sausage (inputmag.com) 159

What's next after you've successfully imitated the look, taste and smell of real beef? For Impossible Foods, the choice is obvious: move on to pork and sausage. From a report: Like the faux burger that was introduced in 2016, how the meatless pork tastes obviously depends on the chef's abilities. But at Kumi in Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay, there was something for everyone, and apparently, the Input team was among the "first people in the world to try it." So naturally, we ate enough to make ourselves sick (OK maybe just Cheyenne). We had Bahn mi, meatballs, noodles, spring rolls (swoon), and shumai -- and it was all absolutely bomb. Again, credits to the chef, but a lot of this is Impossible, too. In each case, the texture was spot on and absorbed flavor much like the real meat would. As someone who isn't a vegetarian, one of the things I loved the most about the Impossible Burger is that the texture of Impossible's plant-based ingredient is akin to that of real meat. And the same goes for the Impossible Pork. We tried the Impossible Pork in a variety of different dishes and, let me tell you, every single one of them was delicious. The flavor is tasty, the texture is as crispy and slightly rough as traditional pork, and all I kept thinking was how insane it is that Impossible can make this happen.
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Impossible Foods is Launching Plant-Based Pork and Sausage

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  • Frankenfood (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:28AM (#59595416)

    Even if its not meat, talk about completely and totally overprocessed food. I don't see how mystery "not-meat" solves anything in the world. Just eat your vegetables, grains and fruits like a normal person, that is not in the form of a processed "meat" patty.

    • Re:Frankenfood (Score:5, Informative)

      by fat man's underwear ( 5713342 ) <tardeaulardeau@protonmail.com> on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:34AM (#59595434)

      Besides it's quite easy to make a tasty "burger patty" with wild rice, onions, egg, panko, and some spices, cook the rice, mix in the rest, maybe some spices too, make a patty and fry in a bit of oil.

      • Re: Frankenfood (Score:4, Insightful)

        by OpinOnion ( 4473025 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:39AM (#59595452)
        Sure, but if I work till 6:00 p.m. and I don't feel like doing all that it's nice to have some of those patties and a little bit of bread so I can just make a meal and literally a few minutes. And I can make a meal for a whole bunch of people in just a few minutes. It's not a good thing to eat everyday, but it's not a bad thing to have in your freezer ready to go. Also I think you're down playing how difficult it is to get a patty like you can buy from Morningstar at Walmart that really holds together and I slow enough moisture content so it actually fries a little bit. Yeah, it's easy to make bean patties, but it's not much fun trying to squeeze the moisture out of the bean patties so they pry up the same way. Your way is more sustainable, but for sustainability I would just take the means and put them in a burrito wrap or a taco shell instead of trying to make a burger patty out of them. So much easier and finished product isn't really that much different. Wraps and taco shells also last much longer than bread so for a way to eat beets a lot I think those are better choices.
      • Could you post a link to a recipe you would recommend for this? Sounds interesting and I'd like to try it.

        Not that I am giving up real beef burgers ...

      • Besides it's quite easy to make a tasty "burger patty" with wild rice, onions, egg, panko, and some spices

        Sure, but vegans don't eat eggs.

        Take away the egg, and you just have a pile of mush.

    • Re:Frankenfood (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:46AM (#59595488)
      Exactly, whats the point in not eating meat if you are just going to process the abosolute shit out of some plant based products (what plant/s?) to then pretend it's meat? No one processes meat to pretend it's veg. That'd just be gross and weird.
      • Exactly, whats the point in not eating meat if you are just going to process the abosolute shit out of some plant based products (what plant/s?) to then pretend it's meat?

        This I agree with; it's pure logic untainted with false notions. The other stuff you wrote, however...

      • Gross and weird, yep. But Arby's is doing it anyway:

        https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/business/arbys-fake-carrot.html [nytimes.com]

      • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        That'd just be gross and weird.

        It's all a matter of what your acclimated to. Someone coming from a society where Impossible whatevers were traditional would find butchering a live animal to be gross and weird. Hell, most people in our own society would find it gross and weird, if they were ever forced to actually watch the process.

      • by sosume ( 680416 )

        > No one processes meat to pretend it's veg. That'd just be gross and weird.

        Now that would be an art project i'd be interested in to see.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Exactly, whats the point in not eating meat if you are just going to process the abosolute shit out of some plant based products (what plant/s?) to then pretend it's meat? No one processes meat to pretend it's veg. That'd just be gross and weird.

        Meat production is highly inefficient. The most efficiency we have involves chickens, and cows are among the least efficient. This is pretty much any way you take it - water consumed, land area, feed amount (how much feed it takes to make 1 unit mass of meat), etc.

        T

      • This isn't the first time this is happening.

        In the 1960s there was a condemnatory push against breast feeding, with many reputed experts saying that synthetic formulas were "obviously" better than sucking on a teat "like any animal". I include that quote only to suggest what I think was the real motivation behind the push.
        (Of course later, we'd find that - what? - we had no idea how astonishingly complex breast milk is, how it changes over the course of a single day, over the baby's developmental cycle, ev

      • Oh, that's simple.
        Imagine you A) think zealous vegetarians are a fucking cancer, B) think zealous paleos are a fucking cancer, and C) would like to do your part to reduce the growing lopsidedness of the CH4/CO2 ratio in the gaseous portion of the extant carbon cycle.
      • Absent some health concerns like allergy or low iron diets, generally meat is avoided for ethical reasons.

        The level of processing and/or synthetic chemicals in food tends to be irrelevant to the reason not to eat meat.

      • Gross, weird and hilarious! Invite some vegetarian friends for dinner and once it is over you ask them if they liked the broccoli. Then you reveal it was pork-broccoli and ask if they'd consider abandoning vegetarianism now that meat can taste almost like real veggies...

        You'd probably loose a few friends but it would be so worth it.

    • Hold on there... this is just like "pork and sausage" and "real burger" and "absorbs flavor like real meat".
      Perfect combo with real red flavor Kool-Aid. And who said Ameristan live like pigs with no real cuisine?

      Seriously, can anybody ask why the example dishes all have as little meat texture as possible?
      I'm not even sure what association I'm supposed to infer from "noodles". No BBQ ribs. No steaks.
      This smells like check box marketting to internally conflicted vegetarians who harbor sinful lusts.

      But hey, ju

      • This smells like check box marketting to internally conflicted vegetarians who harbor sinful lusts.

        Well said.

      • by chill ( 34294 )

        And who said Ameristan live like pigs with no real cuisine?

        The French, I think. Probably the Italians, too.

      • by jythie ( 914043 )
        Because the thing they are trying to tackle is really complicated and thus they are starting with the use cases that are easiest to recreate? It is also smart from both a business and ecological perspective since those are food types that are among the most heavily consumed and consumed through chain restaurants that can be negotiated with as business entities. You are not going to easily convert the foodies, but average consumers who are just looking at price, taste, and convenience, things like burgers
        • It is also smart from both a business and ecological perspective since those are food types that are among the most heavily consumed and consumed through chain restaurants that can be negotiated with as business entities.

          Well you're pretty much 100% wrong here.

          These are the most heavily consumed and served by chains because they're the cheapest. They're the cheapest because they're byproducts of the meat we really want to eat.

          Almost nobody except high end restaurants are taking tenderloin or ribeye and grinding them up into burgers. Pretty much nobody is taking a pork loin or shortribs and turning them into sausage. That crap that gets ground up for us to eat is crap that we wouldn't want to eat otherwise.

          Replacing the chea

          • Driving down the price of hamburger also drives up the price of better meat though, since the sale of the scraps helps subsidize the whole cow.
            It's never as simple as A goes up, B goes down.
    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Most of the time, yes, but sometimes you'd want to blend in at a barbecue party, or try an traditional recipe from somewhere in the world, or ... what lots of people did recently: eat traditional Christmas food.
      Where I live, Christmas food includes meatballs and glazed ham. Good vegan meatballs is doable (and is not "overprocessed" thank you very much, we are not talking about margarine) but a good vegan substitute for cooked ham is difficult to find.
      Tofu with a tint of pink and a hint of smoke isn't really

    • Well, for one thing, non-meat like this isn't vulnerable to huge illness breakouts, unlike actual animals. https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]

      I don't think it's a panacea, but dealing with that number of animals and their waste and trying to keep them in humane conditions is difficult. This is especially true with cows. I like a good steak as much as anyone, but I wouldn't be sad if all my ground beef were replaced with something like this. Raising a cow and using up all the resources it takes just to make a

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        Well, for one thing, non-meat like this isn't vulnerable to huge illness breakouts

        I'll remember this the next time they recall my lettuce. [cdc.gov]

        • The scale here is a little different. (That said, I'd avoid lettuce anyway. What a bullshit vegetable. It's basically just green water that someone gets to charge you $2 for. It doesn't taste like anything, it's miserably low in nutrients and as an added bonus, it seems to be contaminated with e-coli from time to time. Pass.)

    • Just call it "astronaut food", you'll sell more. Say its like what the people in "The Expanse" are eating. ;-)

      Just don't mention they call it "kibble", what we might call "pet food" today.
  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:39AM (#59595448)
    Anyone looked for long-term health effects of exclusively consuming this imitation meat? We know vegan diet is very dangerous (e.g. zing absorption, B12 deficiency, anemia, thyroid issues). Are Impossible Foods ready for inevitable lawsuits as people start consuming their food?
    • exclusively consuming this imitation meat?

      This is the problem and you actually hit on it without even knowing you hit on it.

      We know vegan diet is very dangerous

      Yes, any diet where you switch from a multitude to a homogeneity of single type is not a well balanced one. Exclusively eating nothing but pork will be just as bad as eating nothing but brussels sprouts. The difference may be in what you eventually develop but eat nothing but [insert a single type of food] as the sole source of food, and illness is sure to follow.

      Are Impossible Foods ready for inevitable lawsuits as people start consuming their food?

      That I believe in the legal sense falls into the category of "

      • The food is marginally healthier than a burger because a small amount of the protein being used is sourced from soy. It's like 30%ish of the total mass. That other 70% is just as bad for you as regular hamburger. The point isn't to produce a healthy product, it's to produce an environmentally less impactful product.

        Un-fermented soy is not a healthy food to eat. The soy part is probably the most unhealthy part of the product.

        A "regular hamburger" may be one of several things: 1) a CAFO cheap meat fed with corn and soy or 2) a pasture-raised cattle meat raised in a natural environment on a sustainable ranch? If you don't know the difference then you don't know what you are talking about.

      • They eat nothing but meat and fat. At least traditionally. Simply due to the fact that that was all there was.
        They ate all of it though. Not just the muscles.

        Which makes sense, since obviously a closely related species does contain the same components that our bodies do and need.

        Distantly related species, like plants ... not so much.
        Plants that we canâ(TM)t even digest without processing, like grains... definitely not.
        And mere hyperprocessed extracts that are closer to a low-quality protein shake than

  • by mlibby ( 142509 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:42AM (#59595464) Homepage

    My wife is horribly allergic to a bunch of things, all of them plants and none of them meat. So, instead, could we possibly get pork-based corn, pork-based wheat, pork-based oats, pork-based coconut, pork-based peanuts, and pork-based tree nuts? Thanks.

    • How about shrimp-based peanuts?
  • ...even MORE salt!

  • Or "meat".
    Even "sausage" is, at best, misleading.

    It should, by law, be named by the correct description:

    Textured denatured gluten (substitute?) mass* with artificial flavoring. Spray-painted to look like food.

    * Warning: May cause nutrient deficiencies due to misleading nutrient contents and allergies due to protein denaturing.

    Note that, like most people, I'm in no way a fan of meat factories. I'm just, again like most people, not a fan of detached-from-nature city dweller delusion in denial of omnivores and

  • Pork products saved Paul Manafort from a longer prison sentence.
  • How about actually imitating meat properly. The Impossible Foods is clearly not meat, it doesn't taste like it, it doesn't have the texture, it doesn't cook or brown the same way. The closest thing you can compare it to is a boiled "burger" patty from McDonalds.

  • Plant-based pork? Only if the pig was fed veggies.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @01:29PM (#59595990) Journal
    Yesterday there was a news story denouncing the 'keto' diet as 'unsustainable' and 'unhealthy'. Where's the 'expert' to tell us that 'strict vegetarian' diets are 'unsustainable' and 'unhealthy'?
    Humans are omnivores. We've been evoving into omnivores for at least a million years. You can't just 'decide' to be a strict vegetarian without wrecking yourself in the long term. Get over it.
    • You can't just 'decide' to be a strict vegetarian without wrecking yourself in the long term.

      This is false. Entire cultures are vegetarian, and have been for thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      • Then those cultures evolved differently over thousands of years. We are not THEM. You think I haven't researched this stuff for my own purposes? I'm an amateur athlete for fuck's sake what I eat is highly important and relevant to my ability to perform athletically. It's not viable, it's not sustainable, and the vast majority of people will end up malnourished because of it.
        Don't want to kill animals? Be a pescatarian, or just include dairy and eggs. Fish are stupid. Cows don't mind being milked. Not all e
    • I follow the Dalai Lama's advice; I only eat meat every other day, so I can truthfully claim I've been a vegetarian for half my life!
  • I'm waiting for them to develop beef/pork-based vegetables.

  • Two years from now, it was revealed that the Impossible Food meat products were just meat from China.
  • not going to try this. I tried the beef and it was tasteless. I prefer the real thing. give me a nice, fatty pork steak from the grill and I am happy.

  • Watch that estrogen intake.
  • If no pigs were killed to make it, it's not "pork"!
  • Internet access needs to be public utility, like power and water. This public/private stuff rarely works efficiently (ie: the private company needs to make a profit).

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