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Impossible Foods Gets FDA Approval To Sell Fake Meat In Grocery Stores (engadget.com) 158

Posted by BeauHD from the can't-believe-it's-not-meat dept.
Impossible Foods has been granted approval by the FDA to sell its plant-based meat in U.S. grocery stores this fall. "After expressing some initial doubts, the agency formally ruled that soy leghemoglobin -- the additive in Impossible Burgers that gives it a meat-like flavor and makes it 'bleed' -- is safe for consumers to eat," reports Engadget. "If no objections are raised, the FDA rule change becomes effective on September 4th." From the report: Currently, consumers can only purchase Impossible Foods' fake meat at the many restaurants it has partnerships with -- including Burger King, Qdoba and Claim Jumper. Bringing Impossible Burgers to supermarket aisles will be sure to increase its mainstream relevance and expose it to a wide market. It also ensures that Impossible Foods keeps up with its competitor Beyond Meat, which already sells its products in grocery stores. High demand this summer even lead to Beyond Meat's product being out of stock at select Whole Foods store. Impossible Foods faced shortages of its own this year, and has since doubled employment at its Oakland facility and teamed up with a food production company, OSI Group, to increase supplies. The company also recently inked a deal with Burger King to bring the meatless patties to every restaurant in the country.
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Impossible Foods Gets FDA Approval To Sell Fake Meat In Grocery Stores More

Impossible Foods Gets FDA Approval To Sell Fake Meat In Grocery Stores

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  • Twisted (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )

    There's nothing wrong with eating meat. It's healthy and natural and human beings evolved to do it.

    But, in my opinion, there's something seriously fucked up about spending this kind of effort to make vegetables bleed as though they were dead animals.

    • First off, it's not blood, it's myoglobin. Visually it makes things look more savory which is the first step to making you want to eat somethingI don't really get the hate against these burgers. I'm a meat eater and never had one. But if it tastes good enough I don't see the harm in throwing it into the mix every now and then, just like I'll do a salad.

    • Re: Twisted (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There's nothing wrong with eating meat and there's nothing wrong with having good vegetarian options too.

      In fact sometimes I like fish or chicken burgers too.

      What is messed up is that these companies have IPOs and ridiculous share prices which makes the whole industry look like hypocrites.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )
      Over millions of years of evolution, you're evolved to want to eat those bleeding dead animals. What's wrong to scratch that itch by tricking your senses with some vegetables in disguise?

      I'm as big a carnivore as you'll find, but if the flavor and experience is near-identical, I'd happily choose to a veggieburger that didn't require animal suffering... It fills a void that the traditional hockeypuck-veggiepatty couldn't.
    • Your body is designed to like meat, since it saves it from having to produce some of the proteins it needs from scratch. But growing meat is energy- and water-intensive. If they can figure out a way to produce plants which can substitute for meat (both in protein and in satisfying one's craving), but costs less and uses less energy and water, then I don't see a problem with it. And unlike vegetarians who insist on not eating meat, meat eaters generally don't have a problem with eating vegetables.

    • Re: Twisted (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      God gave to animals claws, teeth and great strength and agility, so that they might eat. God gave to man a magnitudes larger brain than other species and said, but don't you go eat the animals just because you're now about a million times smarter as they. I want you on a strict diet of grains and pulses and fruit. Except from two trees you must not eat, for if you do you will surely die!
      Sure thing, said Adam. We will only eat beans and rice and quinoa-amaranth tortillas until the lack of b12 turns us into d

      • God gave to animals claws, teeth and great strength and agility, so that they might eat. God gave to man a magnitudes larger brain than other species

        No she didn't. Because she, your god, does not exist and never did until conjured into existence by some terrified cave-dweller gibbering beside a fire as the Sturm-und-Blitz raged beyond the cave mouth.

        until they decided to end their lives with green tomatoes and uncooked potatoes.

        That can't be true. Adam and Eve (as well as sister-fucker Cain) were for certai

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zalbik ( 308903 )

      Natural? Sure

      Evolved to do it? Yep

      Healthy?
      Please cite references

      Red meat is known to be unhealthy. This is not a question of preference, anecdote, ethics, or personal opinion. This is scientific fact proven by thousands of studies.

      Now, that being said....the occasional steak isn't going to do you any harm, so I'm all in favor.

      Describing meat (particularly red and processed meat) as "healthy" is only slightly less accurate than when doctors used to describe smoking as healthy.

  • Thanks for testing this stuff, folks, but soy? No.

    I want real cultured meat, grown in my counter top incubator.

    • If they make it more and more meat-like (blood-like goop, oils or fats for flavor) are you buying anything healthwise?

      What was the point of it again?

      • About 30% less calories than ground beef, and a lot more environmentally friendly. Plus less likely to grow/transmit pathogens, since it can be made in a sterilized factory environment, and doesn't come from an animal known for shitting on fellow herd members who stand too close.

        The problem is that we don't grow cows for hamburger. We grow them for steaks, because that's where the money is. Hamburger is how we monetize the trash meat which isn't good enough to be a steak. When Impossible or Beyond can reaso

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Are you certain that it's more environmentally friendly? I suspect this depends on how the beeves were raised. Grass-fed beef usually uses land that isn't worth much for any other purpose, and doesn't emit that much methane. Of course, you also don't get the marbling fat, so it won't be "top grade" by FDA standards. (I, however, prefer it.)

          Also, not all ground beef is equally fat, so the calories/pound vary a lot. (I happen to prefer extremely low fat ... which, admittedly, is more expensive.) So you

        • and doesn't come from an animal known for shitting on fellow herd members who stand too close.

          That's not a problem if you adhere to European slaughterhouse and butchery standards.

          But if your meat comes from somewhere run on American standards, yeah, I guess you do have to worry about getting cow shit in your outh. That's American's problem though. They seem to like it.

          as far as I can tell, they're just going to drive down the price of hamburger until it's not profitable. Then dog food will get cheaper, I g

  • well, except for the price. How much does a pound of this cost? No whole foods around here...

    I usually buy my protean for under $,90 a pound (chicken thighs, pork shoulder...)

    I'll go up to $2 or $2.50 a pound for 80/20 ground beef, bacon, or chicken breasts but that's about it.

    • well, except for the price.

      Well cattle is heavily subsidized (financially and environmentally). If we were to remove these subsidies then this fake meat would already be cheaper.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        That cattle are financially subsidized is news to the ranchers I know in my area in Canada. They'd love to know how to cash in on this supposed subsidy. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this. Cattle markets have dramatic good and bad cycles. Beef prices are driven by increasing consumer demand internationally. You can argue whether that's a good thing or bad.

        And I'm not sure what you mean about environmentally subsidized.

      • Soybean farmers [thegazette.com] get the lion's share of farm subsidies. If we remove subsidies, this highly processed plant stuff will be even more expensive than real meat.

        • Your link does not support your assertion. It is speaking about a one time subsidy to deal with a specific and very recent economic situation. I don't know if you're right or not, but your poor choice of "evidence" makes me lean towards the latter.

          • Soy gets 4X the subsidies of livestock [ewg.org] (which includes more than just beef). You want to remove the beef subsidy? Great - let's remove the soy subsidy, too! And then the price differential between this plant mash and beef will grow even more...

            • That's a much better link. It also disproves your original assertion; in fact it is corn that gets "the lions share". Good to see my rule of thumb hasn't failed me.

              • See original claim - GP was saying that if we killed beef subsidies, then soy-based products would be cheaper. Between the two items under discussion - soy and beef - soy clearly gets the lion's share of subsidies. Cutting subsidies on both will easily INCREASE the relative price of plant-mash-as-meat-substitute relative to beef.

                • That's a strange way to use the phrase "lions share", but OK, I got ya. Yes, you're right that soy gets more subsidy dollars than beef, in total. However, you're both grossly oversimplifying the situation. It's fair for you to point out that he's focusing on beef subsidies while ignoring soy subsidies. However you yourself are making an error by looking at the total dollar figures without considering production volume. The US produces a lot more soy than beef.

                  Any serious comparison would have to look a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          An earlier post denied that "Impossible burgers" contained a significant amount of soy. So you might want to check your assumptions.

      • Re:I guess I don't have any real problems with thi (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @05:01AM (#59033482)
        Not really. The "subsidy" for cattle feed is a sunk cost - money that we would've spent anyway even if cattle didn't exist. So eliminating cattle wouldn't eliminate the cost of the subsidy, meaning the subsidy is not really attributable to cattle.

        The whole thing stems from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl which wiped out a large fraction of the country's farmland. For the first time, food shortages became a real thing. The government vowed never to let that happen again, so we now subsidize crop production. That's why we pay some farmers not to plant anything - so their land is ready and available to plant crops should drought or blight or some other disaster befall other farmland that's in use. Without this subsidy, those farmers would quit and sell their land, and we'd lose that reserve food production capacity in case of a natural disaster.

        Most of the subsidies are to encourage overproduction. Left to market forces, farmers would try to produce only as much food as the country needs. But that means sometimes they'd produce a little too much, sometimes not enough. The government wants there to always be more than enough food, so it subsidizes crops to cause farmers to overproduce. Instead of letting the market set the price, the government guarantees farmers that it'll buy crops at a certain price. The government then sells those crops to the market for less than what it paid - hence it becomes a subsidy for farmers.

        But because the price farmers are receiving is higher than the market price, they overproduce - they grow more crops than the country needs (barring some disaster which wipes out part of the crop). Supply exceeds demand, so even after the government sells everything there's still food left over. Some of this excess food becomes foreign aid. In the mid-20th century, some chemists figured out a way to convert some of this excess corn into high fructose corn syrup, which could be used as a substitute for imported cane sugar. And in the 1970s someone came up with the idea of using some of the excess corn to make ethanol, as a substitute for gasoline to reduce our dependence on imported oil. And some of the crops becomes cheap feed for cattle, because Americans love beef.

        But because all this is excess crops left over from our programs to insure overproduction, the subsidy money spent on the crops is a sunk cost. It's already been spent and there's no way to recover it - we have to pay it regardless of what we do with those excess crops. (Not true anymore for ethanol - it got spun off into a separate program, so we're now growing corn specifically to make ethanol.) So eliminating cattle wouldn't reduce how much we pay in crop subsidies. All it would do is leave us with a bunch of extra crops each year that we'd have to find another use for. So it's fallacious to attribute the crop subsidy cost to cattle production. (There is a "subsidy" in unnaturally low fees for grazing rights on public lands. Lobbying by cattle ranchers and miners have managed to freeze the fees for land use rights at around 1900 levels, resulting in ridiculously low costs. But it's pretty minor compared to food subsidies.)

  • Impossible Wheat (Score:5, Funny)

    by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Friday August 02, 2019 @08:24PM (#59032290)

    Most folks are too fat because they eat too many carbohydrates . . . like white bread.

    My new startup will be selling artificial "bread" made of animal protein.

    Can't go wrong with that!

    Cut the carbs, cut the carbs!

    • Hmm, diabetics will love you for this!

      Bread that doesn't require carb counting and insulin is a winner in my book....

    • it's the junk food. High stress jobs lead people to snack. You don't get enough sleep, you're always pushed to be more productive for the same or less pay. You take on extra work and hours to get ahead because your wages don't keep pace with inflation. You get tired, so you snack for a pick me up.

      Low Carb diets work for a bit because they force you to get the junk food out of your diet. I did something similar by cutting out Beef, Chicken and Pork. That pretty much kept me away from fast food which in t

      • Re:It's not the carbs (Score:4, Insightful)

        by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday August 02, 2019 @10:07PM (#59032690)

        junk foods are high carb. it is the carbs causing obesity for most Americans. Fat and protein rich diet is better, with some complex carbs.

        • What about rice in asia? Thats a carb..

          • left brown (with germ and bran) has fiber and complex carbs with protein.

            Too much white rice causes all the problems that other lighter carbs do. My Chinese mother in law eats mountains of the stuff and is fat and her sister has same issue along with diabetes. They should eat more fish and veggies and less white rice.

            • I don't think you understand calories and would prefer to blame things on carbs. There is nothing harmful about glucose, the brain needs it to survive.

              • I don't think you understand how type of carb and resulting level of blood sugar levels causes insulin resistance, slowed metabolism, obesity and diabetes. This is known fact.

                You could eat fat and protein with no carbs and the body would make glucose for the brain from it. Meanwhile blood sugar would stay low. Body fat melts away in most people who get rid of the simple carbs.

                • It always amazing me how far gone keto users are for basic physics. If you eat more than you need, the excess is stored as fat.
                  That doesn't matter if its from fat, protein or carbs.
                  You will never be able to find a single reputable study using doubly labeled water that says if you eat past your TDEE of fat and protein alone that you will lose weight. Give it up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      You jest, but there are pizzas/wraps/etc. at my local grocery store that use chicken instead of grains for the crust/tortilla. Realgood Foods. [realgoodfoods.com]

    • "Most folks are too fat because they eat too many calories" -- FTFY.

      The trick of eating more fat/protein and fewer carbs works for a lot of people but it's important to not distract from the actual root cause. You can get fat on anything. You can also lose weight while eating anything (just not too much of it.) Also: somehow billions of east asians manage to avoid obesity whist eating huge amounts of white rice, which as I recall has a higher glycemic index than white bread.

      • They want anything to blame but themselves for overeating. Food energy is only from three things so we'll spin the wheel of blame until the landwhales are satisfied.

    • Cut the carbs, cut the carbs!

      Rice is a carb. Consumed in vast quantity in asia, which report the lowest obesity levels. Care to explain?

  • why even news? (Score:3)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday August 02, 2019 @10:10PM (#59032706)

    why is something made out of soy and potato proteins, aka food, getting passed by FDA such a surprise? such a thing doesn't even need FDA approval in my opinion.

    Now, whether I'd give up yummy beef from dead bovine for this is another question, but I don't see the big deal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      I suspect that Impossible Foods asked the FDA for a ruling before they raised the ire of Big Beef. Having sales suspended might harm them more than if they put their rollout on hold, although I suspect the risk of ceding the market to Beyond Meat would be a bigger risk.

    • Re:why even news? (Score:4, Informative)

      by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @12:35AM (#59033050)

      why is something made out of soy and potato proteins, aka food, getting passed by FDA such a surprise? such a thing doesn't even need FDA approval in my opinion.

      Now, whether I'd give up yummy beef from dead bovine for this is another question, but I don't see the big deal.

      Even though the component sources are all "food", It's all put together through genetic engineering (DNA for soy leghomoglobin, inserted yeast through GMO, and cultivated). Before you can introduce GMO foods like that into the human foodchain, the FDA likes to have a look and make sure it is what you say it is, without any nefarious hitchhikers. Also: there's a difference between selling food to a restaurant which presumably follows food safety guidelines vs. selling directly to consumers where there is zero control over the products and its preparation. Something could be safe cooked and dangerous uncooked.

      Just because components are used in other foods doesn't mean you can just combine everything -- e.g. Dasani had a huge problem in the UK a few years back when it was revealed that they were bottling UK tap water, adding calcium chloride and bromide for flavor, and oxidizing it... Which had the unfortunate side-effect of turning the bromide (safe) into bromate (a carciogenic) in the process. Oops.

      There's a reason for organizations like the FDA to verify that products are indeed safe for human consumption, especially when companies are going out of their way to do something new -- there may be unintended consequences.

      • There's more to it than the GMO component. The soy leghemoglobin was isolated from root noot nodules. They're not present in any other part of the plant (the root nodules produces them to help symbiotic bacteria fix nitrogen into biologically available sources, a process that apparently requires access to oxygen as well, hence the evolution of this plant hemoglobin.) People don't typically eat legume root nodules (I believe they're rather... woody), and even if they did I'm not sure how big the dose would b
    • Because the leghemoglobin used to give it a beefier flavor (also resulting in the beeflike "bleeding" TFS mentions) is derived from soy root nodules. It's actually rather interesting; the root nodules are what's responsible for soy's (and other legume's) "green manure" nitrogen fixation properties--it's there for the sake of symbiotic bacteria that take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a form that the plant can use as fertilizer. Apparently this process requires oxygen, and the leghemoglobin the roo

  • Here's what really happened (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    After expressing some initial doubts, the agency formally ruled that the payoff was large enough they could ignore the complaints. That is until children started being born with three heads and one leg.

  • My only hope when we eventfully move toward meatless meat is that it's less expensive than meat meat. So far all I've seen is much more expensive. Maybe is was the cheap soy meat substitutes of the 1970's that make me think that way. That was back before marketers were able to convince people to buy their water in tiny bottles.

  • Why not go both ways? I'd be willing to try this thing!

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]

  • Soylent Green anyone?

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