Beyond Meat
I LOVE meat. I love the smell of it cooking, the sound of the sizzle. I love the fat dropping onto the coals beneath a barbecue, the deep-pink “give” of a medium-rare steak, the smoke, the blood. I particularly love eating burgers in the US, where the act of griddling meat is an art form that has been perfected into juicy, salty, fatty heaven.
So, let’s just say I wasn’t straining at the leash when asked to go and try a new vegan burger while in Texas. I was in the home of the barbecue, after all, where steaks are as big as your head. The thought of choosing a veggie burger made me feel weak.
Not for much longer, perhaps. I wasn’t off to sample a bog-standard bean burger, but to try an Impossible Burger, one of a new brand of plant-based meat analogues created using the latest in biochemistry and technology. These aren’t your standard meat substitutes such as tofu, Quorn and soya mince; nor are they the much-hyped but still experimental meats grown in the lab from stem cells (see “Growth industry”). They are plant products processed to look, smell, taste and feel like meat. And they are aimed squarely at diehard meat-eaters like me.
That could be useful, because I am painfully aware that I should reduce how much meat I consume. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock graze on a quarter of our planet’s ice-free land while another huge swathe is used to grow fodder. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with the industry are vast, around 15 per cent …
