Impossible Burgers Are Coming To US Schools (engadget.com) 86
Impossible Foods has secured Child Nutrition Labels for its Impossible Burger products, which means they can now be part of school nutrition programs in the US. Engadget reports: To obtain the CN Labels, USDA's Food and Nutrition Services had to evaluate the plant-based meat's product formulation, as well as the company's quality control procedures and manufacturing processes. Now that it has acquired CN Labels for its products, the company is launching K-12 pilot programs this month in partnership with several school districts. The Palo Alto Unified School District in California, the Aberdeen School District in Washington, the Deer Creek Public Schools in Edmond, Oklahoma and the Union City Public Schools in Union City, Oklahoma will be using Impossible's faux meat in a variety of dishes for their menu. Those dishes include tacos, frito pies and spaghetti with Impossible meat sauce. Other school districts can easily obtain Impossible products from suppliers to add them to their menus, as well.
Can't be worse than what they get now (Score:5, Funny)
It's school food - so this might actually be an improvement.
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Either way, they'll pay for it
https://southpark.cc.com/video... [cc.com]
This is great! Next: Get them to eat bugs... (Score:1)
Eating edible insects just makes sense from a sustainability and nutritional standpoint. Producing protein from bugs requires a fraction of the resources compared to other sources of protein.
Re:This is great! Next: Get them to eat bugs... (Score:4, Informative)
Fine. YOU eat ground up bugs and feed it to your kids.
I want no part of this.
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Re:Can't be worse than what they get now (Score:5, Funny)
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No, giving kids Adderall to treat ADHD is how we get more school shootings. Adderall is, afterall, a prescription form of amphetamines.
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Adderall has never been causally linked.
Having GUNS is a direct link. Want to solve the problem? Take away the guns.
Reminds me of Texas prisons and Vita Pro (Score:1, Insightful)
This reminds of Texas prisons, where because of a contract, Vita Pro was substituted for meat in all prisons in the state. Then it was found that were were some underhanded schemes going on, and it was dumped.
School kids don't get as many rights as prisoners (prisoners don't have "lunch debt"), I'm sure some private company is going to make it big when this happens, and unlike prisons where there are minimum standards, there isn't much one can do to protest this.
As a kid remembering what hamburgers were like (Score:3)
Re:As a kid remembering what hamburgers were like (Score:4, Interesting)
Different school district (Score:2)
It might also be different in small rural schools where you don't have industrialized food being brought in because you don't have big companies gunning for contracts. Not sure as I've been a city kid my entire life.
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Its odd how Americans are normally so individualist and enterprising, but just assume that school-provided lunches are the only way.
Here in Australia, we normally send our kids to school with a lunch-box. It up to the parents what goes in, but some schools periodically promote healthy eating.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
We still have a serious childhood obesity problem, but at 8% it is half the rate of white American kids, assuming the classification methods are similar.
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Re: Can't be worse than what they get now (Score:3, Interesting)
Jokes on them. I was homeschooled.
Nah, the kind of shit I did experience during my periods in public schools made it clear they are a political racket. private schools are more of a racket with a bit less politics and more elitism. Homeschooling is undervalued but clearly most families cannot do it. The greatest weakness is keeping up your kids social skills but clubs can solve this.
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Yes, the US is a third-world, failed-state shithole.
The US could certainly afford to do better with public health and welfare.
Why blame the state in this case? Some of our schools in bad areas have breakfast programs, mostly aimed at aboriginal children who are not fed at home.
It also helps to raise the poor attendance numbers. It is not lack of money (the welfare system is far more generous here) but alcohol and substance abuse problems at home. And plain ignorance about nutrition, despite education efforts. Or they just don't care. Fortunately there a
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It's school food - so this might actually be an improvement.
Depends on the school. My local schools, and those in the surrounding cities, have actual cooks in the kitchen that cook decent meals for lunch. It's the outsourced pre-packaged just reheat it and plop it on the, usually styrofoam, tray shit most school districts have switched to that's actually shit food and not at all healthy for our kids.
Bleech. (Score:2, Funny)
Well at least it will be better than that pink slime.
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You must be new around here. These days, truth is a crime, and false narratives are modded up to help propagate propaganda further.
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Re: Bleech. (Score:1)
Because it is literally worse than pink slime?
At least pink sime contains what formerly used to be proteins.
Unless they artificially added other proteins, and vitamin b12, which would make it even more artificial.
Frankly, at that point, eating a stack of wet toilet paper would probably be more healthy.
Gross (Score:2)
I tried one. It was not good. Poor kids.
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And I tried two and couldn't really tell them apart from regular beef.
WhY? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't believe any kids are asking for this.
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Re: WhY? (Score:1)
Why though? All it will do is drag out overpopulation.
With their anxiety disorders and retro-invalidating consent, they won't be able to reproduce anyway. Giving them soyboy sperm, ultrafeminism and stupidity due to messed up estrogen and vitamim B12 deficiency will not improve that.
There's very little meat (Score:2)
in these gym mats.
But lots of vitamin R in the malk.
Re: There's very little meat (Score:1)
You mean vitamin P (for profit)?
There's a nasty surprise in those burgers... (Score:4, Insightful)
[1] There's always the picture of the guy who has had a Big Mac every day for lunch, starting with the first day they were made available - he's as thin as a rail.
Re: There's a nasty surprise in those burgers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely there is less corn syrup in a highly processed veggie burger than a ding dong. It's not reasonable to find one thing wrong and assume an equivalence of severity.
Re: There's a nasty surprise in those burgers... (Score:2)
Toilet paper is "plant-based"!
Hell, coal is "plant-based"!
If you add "-based", it means nothing anymore, as it can mean literally anything.
If we really needed to, we could make "plant-based" nuclear fuel from bananas.
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Why are the schools giving kids burgers anyway?
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Because it's an American staple.
Because the U.S. Government subsidizes both the cattle industry and school food, and makes it easy for them to do business with each other.
Re:There's a nasty surprise in those burgers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lumping together everything we do with food to "processing" is bad. Some processes make food better, some make them worse. Think about what specific things that actually covers: boiling, roasting, frying, poaching, blanching, mincing, steeping, smoking, marinating, fermenting, pickling, curing...
A lot of food is inedible or poisonous without processing - or will be, in short order. Some forms of processing can be bad for us because they add things we like that aren't good for us (like the taste of smoke), or because they remove things that are good for us which we aren't too fond of (like when we remove a bitter compound but useful nutrients along with it), but the act of processing itself is a very crude measure of that.
Similar fatty, though no cholesterol (Score:5, Insightful)
Final recommendation was to eat it in moderation, not more often than a McDonalds style burger which you should ideally not eat often either.br I eat an impossible burger from time to time. It is quite tasty, and actually near impossible to taste that it is not meat. It can taste wise easily compete with a McDonalds burger but not with a gourmet restaurant style burger. I like most about it that it seems easier to digest, I do not have the feel of a lump in the stomach after finishing it. Actually my friends have the same impression.
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It's been fairly well proven that cholesterol in your diet does not affect blood cholesterol levels.
Re: Similar fatty, though no cholesterol (Score:1)
Which cholesterol? HDL or LDL?
One accumulates in your blood vessels until you get a stroke or heart attack. The other one cleans up such accumulations.
In eggs, for example, they cancel each other out.
Re: Similar fatty, though no cholesterol (Score:5, Informative)
Dietary cholesterol is a minor source of serum cholesterol, from https://health.clevelandclinic... [clevelandclinic.org]:
> About 85% of the cholesterol in the circulation is manufactured by the body in the liver. It isn’t coming directly from the cholesterol that you eat, according to Dr. Nissen.
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Nope. High cholesterol levels are a sign of heart disease, and apparently caused by it. You've got the cause and effect reversed. Lowering your cholesterol levels doesn't do a damn thing for your life expectancy, because you still have the heart disease.
Re:Similar fatty, though no cholesterol (Score:4, Insightful)
It's essentially junk food for vegans. Nothing wrong with that, everyone should have the ability to eat something unhealthy if they want!
Just about everything though needs to fix the sodium problem. Most mass produced food adds either extra salt or sugar, otherwise they don't sell well. And even when making stuff from scratch, the recipes often suggest adding salt.
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...mass produced food adds either extra salt or sugar,
Lots of salt _and_ sugar in most of the food I ate in US (as a visitor, it's mostly restaurants that I experienced). Tastes great, in a shallow kind of way.
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Yeah, I feel the same way? It's delicious, but boy howdy, don't eat too much of it if your digestive system can't handle large amounts of fat.
I've had a duodenal switch gastric bypass, and while I loved the burger, it thought it was running a Formula One race to the finish line.
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they found it different but fat-wise not exactly better than a traditional mass market burger patty.
And? I thought we were past the point where we just lumped everything together as "fat" and declared it unhealthy. Which type of fat? Which type of cholesterol?
Final recommendation was to eat it in moderation, not more often than a McDonalds style burger
What McDonalds? An American McDonalds, a European one where medium is large and there's no supersize option, or a Japanese one where small is large and there's no supersize option, and no double quarter pounders on the menu?
I do not have the feel of a lump in the stomach after finishing it.
If you get this feeling eating normal meat you're doing something wrong. Consider the aforementioned portion control if you ever
High pressure (Score:2)
Follow the money (Score:3, Insightful)
Impossible sloppy joe? (Score:3)
this stuff is bad for you (Score:2)
What's the point. (Score:2)
Re: What's the point. (Score:1)
It's much much *much* unhealthier, actually!
At least the meat was supposedly pure, even with all the anti-depressants and antibioiics and grinding. It was not ground to the level of pink slime aka sausage or chicken nuggets.
These here are very much possible patties of hyper-processed, artificially textured, artificially flavored and artificially colored slime.
Sadly, our lists of ingredients and nutrition tables completely ignore the last 50 years of research, and never tell you how processed it is, even tho
Sad, tired cows (Score:2)
So cows are getting anti-depressant meds?
And wouldn't the ingredients of chicken nuggets include white-slime fine-ground chicken?
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Re:What's the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun falls on grass growing in soil. Ruminant eats grass and process it into nutrient dense meat. Humans (with digestive tracts which are too small for anything other than mainly meat, having long since traded our guts for brain size) eat the ruminants. Meanwhile, ruminants poop and pee on the soil, returning most of the nutrients for soil health back to the soil. And predators keep the ruminants bunched up and moving from one area to the next, so nothing is overgrazed nor missed. Much of the land can grow grass but not crops.
Humans "evolve" some smarts and decide this process isn't "natural" and start messing with every aspect. You know, even crops need fertiliser of some sort because gosh, soil health matters. After thousands of years, humans start to figure it out again that gosh, ruminants really do have a crucial role to play in soil health. Indian vegetarian Hindus quietly ignore the millions of meat eating Muslims whose animals contribute to soil health for the veggies.
Modern bioengineering industries and companies quietly forget that all that plant protein has to, gasp, come from plants which will need GMO and all sorts of inputs to make them grow in ever worse soil conditions. They go to the UN, and VCs, and sell the idea that plant based means saving the world and attract investors with the promise that they'll get the UN to get countries to outlaw livestock and meat and we'll all be forced to buy patented technologies. Everyone is happy until they aren't. Weirdly people's health continues to worsen.
Yes it is another day on planet stupid. If the environment is a real concern, stop having children. It is all about overpopulation in the end, and this has been said for hundreds of years. Pre-industrial population was about one billion. When the Club of Rome made their model on the limits to growth in 1968, we were then at 3.5 billion. We've since more than doubled. It is never going to be about "reduce, recycle, conserve" blah blah as we'll continue to outbreed the savings.
And for god's sake stop trying to engineer the answer with more and more biotech which is messing more and more with the natural systems. The problem is not too many cows it is too many people trying to mess with the planet's natural systems. Even cows aren't being given their natural diets most of the time.
Hope that was a mildly amusing rant.
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Cows don't have a natural diet because we bred them. There is no such thing as a natural diet for a cow because a cow is not natural.
The Americas had no need of a cow. North America had the Bison. We all but exterminated them... to make room for cows. South America had its own meat animals. They've been destroying their natural lands... to make room for cows. They plant "improved pasture" that nourishes cows but another animal in the field will die of malnutrition.
I like eating cows but they're just unsusta
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You'll get very little argument from me. Too many cows *is* a big problem in terms of greenhouse gas release, but certainly not the only problem of that scale. And at the root of all these problems is overpopulation and inefficient distribution of resources (the amount of food waste including meat from 5-star hotels is astounding).
Even though I eat a fair bit of beef I try to offset my personal environmental impact by not ever having children (they're just too expensive and parenthood does not appeal to
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its so you can have the taste of a burger without hurting animals.
A school nutrition program? That's a laugh. (Score:3)
It has been repeatedly admitted by the industries that make them that plant-based burgers have no appreciable health benefit over meat-based burgers. To put it bluntly, they are just as unhealthy as meat prepared the same way.
There may be ethical reasons to choose to eat plant-based meat substitutes, or someone might have other personal reasons for preferring to not eat meat. That's perfectly okay.
But anyone pushing them as some sort of "nutritional" alternative to beef is a joke.
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It has been repeatedly admitted by the industries that make them that plant-based burgers have no appreciable health benefit over meat-based burgers.
Of course not, because ultimately we still don't know what is healthy and what isn't. However it is clear that all the things we measure in food are different between an impossible meat burger and regular beef burger. Higher in sodium, equal to higher in various forms of fat, lower in various forms of cholesterol. Lower in calorie count than a medium-rare cooked burger, but equal when you burn the meat to a crisp (whereas the impossible burger remains largely unchanged in the cooking process). The impossibl
School food is chosen by price (Score:2)
Schools buy food on price alone. Unless impossible are selling cheaper than everything else schools won't be interested
Re: School food is chosen by price (Score:1)
Well, there's nothing cheaper than soy and aimilar beans.
And weirdly, we live in a world, where highly processed crap is somehow cheaper than the same thing but unprocessed, because once demand was high enough, the volume lowered the price or something.
(Seriously, why is a bag of sugar so much cheaper than the plants it is made from?? That's fucked up!)
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Simple - sugar is a preservative, plants spoil (Score:2)
(Seriously, why is a bag of sugar so much cheaper than the plants it is made from?? That's fucked up!)
That's really chemistry and biology. That's why we have jam...fresh strawberries spoil FAST. Strawberry jam lasts for years. Fresh sugarcane spoils and is heavy. Dehydrated extract can be stored for infinitely and shipped cheaply anywhere. Also, EVERYONE needs sugar. Few actually use the plants it comes from.
Food that's processed can be shipped farther and stored longer. Spoilage and weight are 2 of the biggest costs for any food. That's why farmer are are constantly struggling yet food is so exp
Hello no! (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not feeding that hyper-processed crap to any children!
It's literally more processed than chicken nuggets on toast!
And processed crap is what's actually making us sick. Especially high-shitty-carb (-> obesity, cardiovascular diseases, stupidity) crap. But wait, now it's with more high-soy (->estrogen) crap.
Do we really need to wait another 50 years before the profit industry admits they ruined humanity yet again?
I dont get it (Score:3)
LOL (Score:2)
It tastes OK, passable, but soy is bad for you (Score:2)
Tastes like shit, is worse for you than meat, and more expensive. I hope the virtue signal makes it worth it.
You got the first part wrong, but the rest is spot on. It doesn't taste like shit. It's passable. It doesn't taste better, but the difference is pretty subtle.
What I agree with is it's not good for you. Too much soy is bad for you. There are all sorts of side effects, including some concerning hormone imbalances. I can personally feel it and I'm not allergic to soy.
I've eaten a whopper and it's fine. I don't feel better, I don't feel worse. I've eaten an impossible whopper a few times. It ta
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If you don't like the Impossible Burger for the soy you could switch to the Beyond Meat version which uses pea protein instead.
Brilliant (Score:2)